Because It's There: The Experience - Day 6 - The Jungle

11/24/16 (Thanksgiving), “The Jungle”
Sauraha, Nepal (Chitwan National Park)

Today, like yesterday, consisted of an epic journey to an equally epic destination.  Chitwan National Park is not exactly the kind of place that draws large crowds of tourists, but its remote location only adds to its allure.  Reader, today, I woke up to a view of Mount Everest and ended the day riding an elephant through the jungle.  When the reckoning comes, this trip will be entitled to all sorts of superlatives, and, if the next three days go as well as the trip has gone so far, with all of its ups and downs, I see no reason why it will not rank in the top five of all time.

As I recount the events of today and last night, it should become clear why such a ranking will be merited.  The sun has set, and night has come to the jungle.  The sounds and sights are exactly as I would expect to find deep in a jungle.  While I joked that my time in Kathmandu was off the screen of Doctor Strange, today could most certainly be considered “The Jungle Book: The Experience”.  However, more on that later.

I would first like to focus on that parenthetical word in the dateline.  Today is Thanksgiving, and it marks, I believe, the first time I have not spent Thanksgiving with my family.  I will not be spending Christmas with my family, either, and I think that that also marks a first.  When I was told that I could take the three days before Thanksgiving off as comp time for overtime I had put in at the beginning of the year, combined with us having Thanksgiving Thursday and Friday off, I could not turn that down.

The wheels were turning in my head, and I saw a way to use this 9-day trip to say “England Complete”, “Nepal Complete”, and “Qatar Complete”.  It was not long before I figured out the logistics of it and then got in contact with various operators in Nepal to work out the details.  This is what I do.  It is second nature to me.  I do not need to organize some group tour.  In fact, I would hate that.  All I had to do was figure where I wanted to go and contact specifically with the hoteliers and then work out the transportation between those venues.  The hoteliers even provided much of the transportation as part of package.  That said, as I will describe later, that proved to make today’s journey much more difficult, though it was also a saving grace.

Grace.  As I have said, today is Thanksgiving, but it does not feel that way.  I will not be having any feasts today.  I will not be watching the parade or football.  Here it is just any other day, and that is how it feels.  The one tradition I am still observing, though, is smoking my Christmas Pipe.  I am now smoking my 2012 Christmas Pipe, the same pipe I smoked in Taipei and Quebec on New Year’s Day, the same pipe I smoked also on New Year’s Day aboard the Corinthian when I first bonded with Vanessa, the one person from that trip with whom I still regularly communicate.  While this cannot compare with those nights, it will has been a day to remember.  First, let’s start with the beginning.

After I closed last night, I went down for dinner, my photos still uploading, which prevented me from publishing.  I sat by the fire until dinner was served, and it was much the same as lunch.  Again, everything hot.  First the soup and bread, then chicken cutlets with potatoes and the same vegetables as lunch.  Needing a much higher caloric intake in such conditions, I again was starving, and ate all of it, including seconds on the chicken.  That was followed by flan and coffee.

After dinner, I sat by the fire again and published my entry.  The place had cleared out, so I went back to get my Ardor and smoked that by the fire.  It was not yet 8 PM, but I wanted to go to bed, so I did.  One thing I did not mention yesterday was how brutal the effects of the cold and elevation were.  It was the kind of cold that you couldn’t escape, not even indoors.



The elevation gave me some pretty bad symptoms.  One of the symptoms is an inability to sleep, which hit me hard in Kathmandu before I realized what it was.  Last night, though it was worse.  I should have gotten over ten hours of sleep, but I think I got less than three.  The room was freezing, which made it worse, and I had a splitting headache.  Until I looked up the symptoms this morning, I thought it was just a combination of the headache and the cold that kept me up, and I attributed the headache to a more traditional illness, which I feared might ruin my trip if it got worse, so that, of course, made me even more anxious.

Almost as soon as I got in bed, and I looked outside.  I saw stars.  I walked outside and looked up.  I saw more stars than I had ever seen in my life.  I saw more stars than I thought were possible to see at once.  There were so many stars that I could still see the mountains off in the distance reflecting the starlight.  The picture does not do it justice.  I went back to bed and had trouble sleeping, waking up constantly throughout the night, my headache making it all the more difficult to get back to sleep.

Eventually, it was time to get out of bed.  I went to breakfast at 7 AM, and my chopper to take me back to Lukla was due at 7:30 AM.  My LUA-KTM flight was supposed to be at 8:30 AM, and I would connect on a 10:30 AM flight to BTR, which is where Chitwan is located.  If everything went according to schedule, it would two well-time connections, and an arrival at my hotel in Chitwan before noon.  Reader, to put it delicately, let’s just say that Nepal does not quite have the same Western ideas of punctuality.  I was done with breakfast at 7:15 AM, more toast, eggs, bacon, porridge, and, of course coffee.  None of this helped with my elevation sickness, which felt like the worst hangover I had ever had.  The agent at reception told me to come back at 7:45 AM for my chopper, which I did.

We walked to the helipad, but the chopper was not there, just two empty rudimentary helipads.  Reader, this is where the fun began.  I will be rounding all times to the nearest five minutes for simplicity sake, but, at times, every minute counted.  The chopper did not arrive until 8:05 AM, which meant I would not get to Lukla until 8:15 AM, and I knew it was a bit of a walk from the helipad to the airstrip, and I still needed to check my bag.  I did not see how I could make an 8:30 AM flight.

Once we landed at Lukla, the hotel’s agent stationed there began unloading and loading supplies and gear for the hotel.  I did not have these minutes to spare.  After he was done, he took me back to the lodge and asked me if I wanted coffee.  No, I just wanted to get to the flight, which I now feared I had missed.  He explained to me that there were delays, that the first flight had already left, that the second flight was cancelled, and that I would be on the third flight, which would leave at 9:30 AM.  If I landed at KTM at 10:00 AM, I did not see how I could possibly make the 10:30 AM connection to BTR.  I explained all of this to him, and he started to make some phone calls.

Reader, while for the next half hour I thought that this agent was the villain of the story, he actually turned out to be the hero.  I saw a Tara Air plane landing, and I went to find him.  It was now 8:30 AM, and I needed to be on that flight.  It took off just as we arrived at the airport.  I was angry at him for tarrying and wanted to know what happened.  However, he was otherwise occupied and kept disappearing.  To make it worse, he had my ticket.  I would be getting nowhere without that ticket.  Further, Raymond was waiting for me at KTM, and we had no way of communicating.  I needed to tell him to wait for me at the hotel in Chitwan if I didn’t make the flight.

The ticket agent then appeared at the Tara Air counter, followed closely by the hotel’s agent, who explained my situation.  She repeated what I had said earlier, that I was on the third flight out, which would now not be until 9:45 AM.  My only chance to make the KTM-BTR flight was if that was similarly delayed.  Otherwise, I was looking at a very expensive taxi ride or the afternoon flight, which would ruin the day.  The hotel agent then handed me my ticket and disappeared again, only to reappear with two airport bigwigs.  Some angry words were exchanged, but it seemed nothing could be done.

After talking to two other passengers who were similarly waiting, my suspicions from yesterday were confirmed.  They prioritize the bookings for organized tour groups and then subsequently put the people who book through the airline’s website on later flights.  That was really shitty.  However, it seemed that my hotel did carry some weight at this airport, and the hotel’s agent had actually been attempting to throw all of that weight around to my benefit.

When the second flight arrived at 9:05 AM, the airport bigwig came rushing up, grabbed my bag, tagged it, had a boarding pass written up right away, and whisked me straight to the airplane.  When we got to security, they didn’t even screen me.  They just asked me one question.  “Where are you from?”  “New York.”  That seemed to exempt me from a security screening.  I was on the plane at 9:10 AM.  We took off literally a minute later.

When we landed at KTM at 9:45 AM, I told the flight attendant about my connection, and she arranged for the VIP treatment once more.  They handed me my suitcase straight from the plan, and a private van drove me to the terminal, rather than having to wait for the bus.  Someone then escorted me straight to the ticket counter, again, my luggage was tagged right away and my boarding pass written up immediately.  I was escorted to security again, though I did get a perfunctory screening this time.

At 10 AM, I found Raymond in the departures hall, perfect for our 10:30 AM flight.  The irony of all this?  I’m sure my reader can guess.  Well, after all of this rushing and panicking, the KTM-BTR flight was, of course, delayed by an hour.  On that note, I will pause to grab a cigar, my Christmas Pipe being long done.

Okay, so that brought us until 10 AM, and it is now 7 PM, but this half of the entry will be much briefer.  We had some time to relax before our now-delayed flight, which we utilized by drinking espresso and telling each other what he had done in the day we missed each other in Nepal.  Around 10:30 AM, they called our flight, and we took the bus to our plane.  This would be Raymond’s first domestic flight, or so he told me, though I now realize he had actually flown from Rio to Sao Paolo, but it is certainly the smallest plane he has ever flown.

When we got to the plane, I saw a single piece of luggage out, and it looked exactly like my suitcase.  After a delay, they finally released us to board the plane, and I told Raymond to grab us two seats together at the front, while I sorted out the suitcase.  After much confusion, I realized that it was not my suitcase, so I went to meet Raymond on the tiny plane.

It was so small that, even with a two-seater to ourselves, and my annexing half of the aisle, we were still on top of each other.  Fortunately it would be a short flight.  A very short flight.  We took off at 11:35 AM and landed in BTR at 11:53 AM.  After all of that, we were finally there.  An agent from the hotel was there to greet us and take us to the hotel.



For the next two nights, I did something very clever.  We will be staying here in Chitwan NP tonight, and tomorrow we will be staying in Lumbini, both World Heritage Sites.  In trying to pick hotels for the two sites, I saw that there was hotel group with locations at each site.  I also realized that flying from BTR-KTM-BWA would be a nuisance, to say the least, but it was possible to drive from Chitwan to Lumbini.  If I might be so immodest, I am extremely proud of this clever idea.  I emailed the manager of the hotel chain and asked if he could provide everything for me: a night at the Chitwan property, two activities in Chitwan NP, a car from Chitwan to Lumbini, and a night at the Lumbini property.  He quoted me an extremely fair price for all of that, and I gladly agreed.  I had prepaid everything in advance, and it was all ready when we landed at BTR.

As we drove to the hotel, we passed through the small towns, and Raymond was loving the experience.  To me, it was a mix of various locations I had seen around the world, but it certainly had its own feel.  We arrived at the hotel and went to change into clothes more suitable for the jungle than the mountain before heading down to lunch, which was much the same as dinner last night.

We sat outside, and I smoked a Graycliff with lunch.  It was now almost 2 PM, and we had our afternoon activities at the park scheduled to begin at 3 PM.  We would be going on an elephant ride than seeing the sunset from the inscription spot.  It does not get more epic than that.  We had brought pipes and cigars, not quite knowing the schedule.  The elephant ride began at 3:30 PM, and then we would go to the inscription spot for sunset afterwards, so I suggested to Raymond we smoke our pipes on the elephant and then smoke the H. Upmanns at sunset.

Reader, I shit you not.  This is exactly what we did.  Once we crossed the river on the elephant, the driver said we could smoke, so we lit up our pipes, my new Ardor for me.  I should mention that I did not plan my pockets properly, and I was at serious risk of losing my water bottle or phone or passport (or all three.  I had my passport in my side pocket, which I had to rearrange so that it wouldn’t fall out.  I held the water bottle tightly between my legs, and I very carefully held my phone in my hands.  It was not easy to light the pipe like this, but I did it, and it was epic.  Preempting me, Raymond referred to character from The Jungle Book whose name had escaped me, “We’re riding Mogli.”

We soon found a rhino by the watering hole, which was so Official, as that is part of the reason for this site’s inscription.  After the ride, we had race to the inscription spot to get there by sunset.  We got some beers and lit up our H. Upmanns, only to be told that the inscription spot was regulated, which meant not no alcohol, so we had to have the bar hold the beers for our return.

We found the spot, and we took our ceremonial picture, including the guide from the hotel in the picture.  It was so Official.  Raymond and I relaxed by the beach with our cigars and beers for a bit during twilight.  Then we got our souvenirs before heading back to the hotel.  They said that there was a cultural program in the village, but, not wanting a repeat of Atlanta and also wanting to write my entry before dinner, I took a pass.  Raymond wanted to go, but he passed out as soon as he got back to the hotel.

He woke up in time for the cultural program but would have to skip dinner in exchange.  Meanwhile, I sat down outside, where I lit up my 2012 Christmas pipe (followed by a Nub) and proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close so that I can wait for my photos to finish uploading and then publish after dinner, just like I did last night.