Sat - Arrived|
- I had to steel myself against all the touts as soon as I got off the bus. They were aggressive so I just replied "fuck off" and headed down the road as if I knew where as I was going. I bought some bananas and asked her where to get the bus. Unbelievablely lucky I was standing next it. - Lakeside Pokhara was a bit of a shock. Warm and sunny a complete tourist strip so at first I liked it as it has much more of a buzz than "10 tourist town" Bandipur.
(.... so of course after a short time I was beginning to hate the place.)
I quickly found somewhere to stay and walked the tourist strip called Lakeside, but actually set 50m back from the lake. Used internet which is all 4 times the normal price, and the speed got too slow.
- The problem Pokhara is setup to tap the big tourist market, but the problem is there are not enough tourists.
- so the restaurants/ shops are mostly empty and the staff/owners always in a bad mood and there are a higher number of touts hassling the same tourists more frequently.
- all the shops are more expensive than normal.
- It has mosquitoes
- A cartel have fixed internet prices high, but there are still speed problems.
| Sunday - the 6th worst bicycle in the world|
- To find some internet café which isn't 4 times the normal price and to explore I hired the 6th worst bicycle in the world. I know it's the 6th worst cos I rejected the first 5. The process took a bloody hour, the brakes were locked or the chain kept scraping against the derailleur etc. The one I ended up with was OK if you just used the middle 3 back gears, but later on the pedal kept falling off.
- First town Ethnographic museum then to tribe museum which the police stopped me going into ..cos there was a politians party going on.
- Then to a couple of good view temples. Then the town shopping area, University Natural History Museum, River Park for a few of the river.
To me The River Seti is the most amazing thing ..as it's in a deep gorge 50 feet down cutting right through the city and sometimes only 30cm wide.
- At the University a group of students were trying to talk to me, but it was rather more like hassling me , then the chain came off. They wouldn't wait for me to get the padlock out of my bag, which I can use to hook the chain back on without touching it, but grabbed in with their hands. Then they insisted on testdriving it. They only fooled around for 3 minutes, but when I got it back off them one pedal was hanging off. So over the next 1.5 hours it kept falling off and I kept replacing it.
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Nepal's Most Popular university Course : Tyre Burning
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- Nepali Students - In the UK the governments scored cheap points by renaming polytechnics "Universities", but in Nepal that's been taken even further .. a 6th form college is called a university.
- And the most popular University course in Nepal is : Tyre burning ! : students are very politically active, which is OK, but they seem to take the easy route of destruction rather than do the more difficult contructive things... any dispute happens then it's take to the streets block them with burning tyres and try to close the town down by threaten shopkeepers who dare to open .. the newspaper reported one person died when students had set fire to a bus cos in ran during a strike.
.. Well that's a top way way of improving life in Nepal ..building more hospitals and schools .. no .."let's shut down business for a day" that is sure to make everyone richer ... NOT
- Well you could put the YCL and UML boys on giant treadmill and generate electricity and keep them out of trouble.
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Thursday - exploration
- Nepal's top tourist town by a beautiful lake ..pity they don’t give a toss about the local rivers
- Easy place to hang out ..write .. go for the huge £1 breakfast then go and do some internet work ... providing there’s electricity
- except when I do find a safe-ish internet café and check my bank account I see it's in the red ! .. How the hell did that happen ? this should be impossible as I have no overdraft facility and it therefore it has always rejected to let me go into the red before.
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Too much foreign Aid and the Nepali Orphan business
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- I met a nice American Christian couple who are so excited to adopt a Nepali child.
- As ever I see things differently - The best place for a Nepali child is with it's own birth parents or secondly with a Nepali family .. not with, a foreign culture, a foreign language, a foreign religion and a foreign climate.
- It's own parents probably just need a bit of help to overcome mental or alcohol problems. - Here it's a tourist resort full of orphanages, but the children have been fetched from 100s of Kilometres away. It's like you take a Polish child and transport it to an orphanage in tourist resort like St Tropez.
| Thu - Nepal fails in Biogas|
- On the same day the Kingston Canada women , telling me about Nepal 15 years ago being full of biogas projects that never came off Radio DW reports the happy happy biogas situation in Vietnam or Cambodia. Of course today Nepal is way short of electricity.
- I noticed that when I walked around the countryside all the small bos said "hello, give me 10 rupiah", I imagined what they will grow up to be like ..especially if they become politicians
| day off yesterday to walk around "the himalaya view" lake
- I expected to get some shortcuts by taking a bus on someparts, but there were no buses. So I realised a "bandh", one day general strike had been called. Students i.e youths above 16 who don't work are split between the Marxist Party and the Maoist Party. Apparently one of the Marxist students said he didn't like the Maoists hair cut and the Maoist said the "well your haircut looks a bit gay". blah blah .. so one group had set up some burning tyres in the street declared a strike day with the normal threat of burnings any motorcycle, car, bus or shop who broke the strike ... as of course this will help solve their problems and improve the economy.
- The English doctor I met here told me How the bandh kills people : On a bandh day they get far less patients incuding emergency patients. Some people die cos they cannot transport to the hospital cos there are no buses/taxis around. If they get to the hospital half the doctors aren't there cos they can't get transport. The next day people die cos the doctors are overwhelmed and can't give proper treatment.
.. I'd also picked the only cloudy day in weeks so the views were crap and then I had to walk 6Km back.
- The doctor also told me TB is a big problem in Nepal, in UK we can't get TB cos we are all vaccinated against it.
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IDEA : Nepal United youth Team NUTs |
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- with all these unemployed students hanging around why no give something useful to do ? Someone needs to be prepared to deal with eartquakes/flooding and to help build up infrastructure. So make youth up into teams and pay them a small wage and charge them back for food. Give them some disaster training and after that have then travel around the country supplying labour to urgent projects.
... I suppose you make an agreement with unions so that they are not stealing regular workers jobs.
- And you'd have make it Non-racial and non-political so everyone can join.
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No Special Atmosphere in Pokhara|
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- I've had enough of Pokhara, neither the hotels or cafes have any special atmosphere to justify hanging around I'll head for the Terai lowlands starting with Tansen.
- There has been some good science in the podcasts see the opinion blog
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