Back in Launceston …..

Marilyn and I both came back from Nepal with the notorious stomach bug. Marilyn had hers for a few days before we left but mine burst upon the scene on the second-last day. It’s inevitable, I suppose, that travelers to countries like Nepal will get some level of stomach problems.

It’s been a week since we left and we’re both pretty well back to normal.

I’ve been giving some thought to the trip, trying to put it into some context. Some of our initial thoughts about Nepal are not particularly positive. Perhaps it was a mistake to take us to the three sites at the beginning of the trip which were so confronting. The number of beggars at the Monkey Temple and Durbar Square was very distressing and the sight and smell of burning bodies at Pashputinath was very challenging to our Western sensibilities. We also found the dirtiness and shabbiness of Kathmandu hard to accept. We saw locals dropping rubbish in the street without any sense of responsibility nor pride in their environment. The rivers are appalling and seem to be treated as rubbish tips. Even in some of their high-level tourist attractions rubbish had accumulated.


Of course, there were some wonderful highlights during the remainder of our trip: the lovely town of Pokhara, the spectacular Annapurna Range, the beautiful rivers, and the Chitwan National Park. However, our last memory of Nepal was also negative: the inadequate and sub-standard international airport. Clearly, it is not set up to deal with reasonably large numbers of departing passengers and, if the government’s hope of doubling their number of tourists in 2011 is to be reached, something will have to be done about the infrastructure.


When we arrived at the airport, there were hundreds of people milling around outside. We had to fight through that crowd before we even made it into the airport building and then it was a matter of following the lines of other departing passengers, with no real understanding of what the procedure was. At each checkpoint, we received a rubber stamp from an official in pseudo-military uniform, complete with beret. When we reached the boarding gate, it seemed we had missed one stamp so Marilyn had to go back to the Immigration and bully her way to the front of the line so that our cards could be stamped.

It was a total schemozzle and our anxiety about possibly missing the plane was wasted. They were still boarding passengers an hour after the scheduled take-off time. These were obviously the less assertive ones who just went with the flow and were held up. Some I recognized as being close to us in the line at the beginning but clearly not as adept at making their way forward.


So, we had a less-than-perfect beginning and a best-forgotten ending. Overall, was it worth it? Oh, yes! It was worth every anxious moment, every negative second, every dodgy meal, every bumpy road. To stand at the foot of Nilgiri, and look up and up to the clouds at the top; to walk along an ancient mountain trail and see the town of Marpha; to sit on the back of an elephant and experience the sight of a prehistoric animal like the rhinoceros, with a baby, no less; to sit in the back seat of a Twin Otter flying between two of the world’s highest peaks and land on a too-short runway; and to fly alongside Everest and see the Khumbu glacier which I read about as a starry-eyed kid, are memories I’ll cherish forever.

We experienced perfect weather during our stay. Our flight around Everest was on the clearest day for weeks, our flights to and from Jomsom were not affected by cloud or mist and every sight-seeing day was in bright sunshine. We saw a rhinoceros on our elephant ride, even though none had been seen for days. We used to joke that we were enjoying our good fortune because Kumari, the living child-goddess had made an appearance on the day we visited Durbar Square.
Whatever the reason, we know that many of the good experiences we had could have been so different.

So, here we are back in Launceston. Marilyn had arranged that she would be going in to hospital to have a knee replacement just a couple of days after we arrived so she is there now, after a successful operation on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, I’m staying with Jamie and twiddling my thumbs until Marilyn is released and we can get on with the next stage of our retirement journey. The caravan is still in storage and, as soon as I have a date for Marilyn’s discharge, I will get it set up and put on-site somewhere.

She has allowed herself just five weeks for recovery and has promised her father we will spend Christmas with him in Mudgee. Until then, we have no plans and will see how circumstances unfold.