This was Ellie's and my last night in Thamel before we left town for Chitwan National Park and Pokhara for vacation/our new work assignment. Harrison, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, is also living in Chapagaon and working as a volunteer in Nepal for a couple of months. We've knocked out a couple of amazing morning runs in the last week: the first was a couple of miles out to the Santaneshor Temple that sits atop a hill with 300 steps to the top and the second was to the medieval-looking village of Godavari where there is a giant golden Buddha in the forest.
I have a hilarious video clip of this jungle walk in Chitwan National Park with our guide and his warnings about rhinos. I'll try to get it posted when I'm back in Kathmandu and have faster internet. You'll have to click on these photos to make them larger, I uploaded them in the small size in order to save time. It's really funny how tall I am in Nepal compared to most Nepali women. I'm trying to make myself shorter in this photo to fit in. We met this Nepali girl who was also on vacation and staying at our bungalow in Chitwan. She was really excited to get a picture with us and our guide. She also thought I was from Sweden. :)
We had an incredible early morning of canoeing in a dug-out wooden canoe down the river. We spotted several crocodiles napping in the river as we paddled by. That made it a bit more adventurous :)
This is perhaps one of my greatest memories in Nepal...taking a bath in the river with one of the elephants. We were drenched with trunkfuls of river water.
You can't really tell in this picture, but the elephant let me climb up his trunk and lifted me onto his head. So amazing to get to play with the elephants in the water.
We met a couple of medical students from Germany our first night in Pokhara, Alex and Jannine. They were also volunteers in a small village in Nepal for about 5 weeks.
This was taken right after we landed from paragliding today. Hopefully I'll get some more of the actual sky shots posted in the next day or so.
Sorry for a bit of a hiatus in the blog, the internet hasn't been very handy to access and runs extremely slow in this isolated region of Nepal. However, the lack of internet has not detracted at all from what I would have to call some of the most amazing vistas and experiences of my lifetime. Today four of us from the US, Germany, and Austria jumped in a microbus bound for the insane pinnacle of Sarangkot that serves as quite possibly one of the most dramatic launching pads for paragliding in the world. Sarangkot boasts the most incredible views of the Himal that I have ever seen. The idea of launching off a sheer face while dangling from a parachute in the shadow of the Himal makes you feel pretty insignificant real fast. The clouds rolled in right about the time that we took off and obscured our views a bit, but the thermals were phenomenal. I can't even predict how many meters of lift we got this afternoon, but I've definitely never been that high even with Dad's powered parachute. We circled over Lake Phewa (Phewa Tal) for about half an hour and zipped past cliffside villages. At the very end of the flight, my pilot asked me if I wanted to do some acrobatics. I thought about it for less than a second and immediately agreed to some wing-overs and 360s over the lake. I can't even describe the amount of force on my body as we swung in steep pendulums and then whipped into a tight spiral down to the ground. I completely lost my voice and couldn't even scream out of sheer exhilaration. It was incredible! As soon as we got back to the office, I signed up for cross-country and acrobatic paragliding tomorrow morning, hopefully while the views are still spectacular and before the afternoon clouds move in.
We had an incredible early morning of canoeing in a dug-out wooden canoe down the river. We spotted several crocodiles napping in the river as we paddled by. That made it a bit more adventurous :)
This is perhaps one of my greatest memories in Nepal...taking a bath in the river with one of the elephants. We were drenched with trunkfuls of river water.
You can't really tell in this picture, but the elephant let me climb up his trunk and lifted me onto his head. So amazing to get to play with the elephants in the water.
We met a couple of medical students from Germany our first night in Pokhara, Alex and Jannine. They were also volunteers in a small village in Nepal for about 5 weeks.
This was taken right after we landed from paragliding today. Hopefully I'll get some more of the actual sky shots posted in the next day or so.
Sorry for a bit of a hiatus in the blog, the internet hasn't been very handy to access and runs extremely slow in this isolated region of Nepal. However, the lack of internet has not detracted at all from what I would have to call some of the most amazing vistas and experiences of my lifetime. Today four of us from the US, Germany, and Austria jumped in a microbus bound for the insane pinnacle of Sarangkot that serves as quite possibly one of the most dramatic launching pads for paragliding in the world. Sarangkot boasts the most incredible views of the Himal that I have ever seen. The idea of launching off a sheer face while dangling from a parachute in the shadow of the Himal makes you feel pretty insignificant real fast. The clouds rolled in right about the time that we took off and obscured our views a bit, but the thermals were phenomenal. I can't even predict how many meters of lift we got this afternoon, but I've definitely never been that high even with Dad's powered parachute. We circled over Lake Phewa (Phewa Tal) for about half an hour and zipped past cliffside villages. At the very end of the flight, my pilot asked me if I wanted to do some acrobatics. I thought about it for less than a second and immediately agreed to some wing-overs and 360s over the lake. I can't even describe the amount of force on my body as we swung in steep pendulums and then whipped into a tight spiral down to the ground. I completely lost my voice and couldn't even scream out of sheer exhilaration. It was incredible! As soon as we got back to the office, I signed up for cross-country and acrobatic paragliding tomorrow morning, hopefully while the views are still spectacular and before the afternoon clouds move in.
