Anticipation Of The Sublime

April 27, 2020

Anticipation Of The Sublime

People often dream of the sublime, places that are so exotic to their personal experiences. I had the pleasure of having many wonderful friends from Nepal during my college experience. Hanging out with these wonderful people put Nepal on the top of my list of places to visit. In 2020 it finally happened.

What do you think of when you hear the word Nepal? "I'm going to Kathmandu...", Bob Seger singing that classic song. Or is it Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summiting Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) for the first time on May 29, 1953? Maybe you don't know much about this exotic destination.

Nepal is situated in a very interesting place in the world. It's a "yam between two boulders", as the 18th century conqueror Prithvi Narayan Shah stated. It is bordered by China to the north where the mighty Himalaya range butts up to the Tibetan Plateau, while the eastern, western and southern borders have India as their neighbor.

There are many climate zones that make up Nepal. They range from tropical where you will find jungles and hot climates to alpine and above including eight of the ten highest peaks in the world. There are also at least 129 different languages and dialects spoken in Nepal, it's all about location.

A Naga Buddha statue in the back alleys of Kathmandu. ©Rock N Knit

During my time in college I studied Travel and Tourism and Geography during my undergrad days and Educational Leadership in grad school. During both of these experiences I met Nepali friends. I would hang out with these guys and always make sure to hit up the Nepal Night or Nepal Fusion event on campus.

These events are very fun and entertaining with a healthy dose of cultural experiences and of course the food! When you attend these cultural nights you experience traditional dances, music and skits to name a few. It's pretty amazing that a couple of my buddies have since become Nepali rock stars. Monkey Temple is my friend Sareen's band and Albatross is my friend Shirish's. These guy really rock! On our first day in Nepal we caught Monkey Temple live!

HERE'S THE LINK TO THE RECORDING ON ARCHIVE.ORG

So after getting these cultural interactions in small doses one has to be open to the real experience. We had been contemplating going to Nepal for a few years and finally took the leap. It all started with buying tickets, once you have tickets in hand it's on! We bought our tickets and started planning. By this point I had accumulated a few second hand books on the country and the internet has unlimited resources of course.

We started with a rough idea of where and what we wanted to see and do. Nepal is not a very large country at about 500 miles long and 120 miles wide but the road system is very busy so traveling anywhere must be put into the equation with at least a day between destinations. That and the fact that there are 29 million people squeezed into that area makes the limited roads very busy.

We decided that during our journey we wanted to definitely see cultural sites, wildlife, the big cities and of course go tea house trekking. So we plotted our journey accordingly. We decided to start in Kathmandu and get acclimated for a few days and then journey on from there. After that our journey would take us to Chitwan National Park to go see some amazing wildlife. From there we would travel further west to Siddharhanagar and go to Lumbini, the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. Eventually we would head to Pokhara to go trekking in the Annapurna Himal, then back to Kathmandu to hang out with more friends and see more of the city.

What a great initial plan we thought. We would leave on March 7th and travel to Kathmandu via Chicago and Istanbul to arrive on the 9th. On the way back our journey was to stop in Istanbul with a 20 hour layover, then to San Francisco for another 20 to our final destination, Belgrade, Montana where we started.

Here's the beginning of our journey.