Tuesday, October 13: On to Nepal

This day was basically a travel day. We left Bogra in the morning and drove to Dhaka. It was interesting to drive back to Dhaka when it was daylight the whole time and we were not jet lagged. Below are some of the interesting things we saw along the way.

Water buffalo on the way to the market in Dhaka.

If you're going to tow another vehicle, just tie the bumpers together. But don't forget to have someone in the vehicle being towed.

The cars in Banlgadesh ran of compressed natural gas (CNG). Here we are filling up. All of the large trucks were diesel.

When we got to Dhaka, we had just enough time to eat lunch and drop off some luggage at the MCC guest house there before we had to go to the airport. Our flight to Nepal was on Biman Airlines which does not have the best reputation. Unfortunately, we did not have another option unless we wanted to fly to India and then to Nepal. From flight from Dhaka to Kathmandu is less than 1.5 hours, so we decided that we'd take our chances with Biman.

The official tourist slogan of Bangladesh. Notice that "tourist" is not plural. Don't feel like you need to hurry to visit Bangladesh before the tourism rush. If you come in your lifetime, you will probably beat it.

Fortunately, everything went smoothly on the flight, and we made it to Kathmandu pretty much on time. We also got our flight glimpses of the Himalayas on the plane. I'm not sure if we saw Mt. Everest at any time, but all the mountains are impressive.

Our first glimpse of the Himalayas from the plane.

When we arrived in Kathmandu, we were met at the airport by Krishna. He is a travel agent that was recommended to Phillip. He took us to our hotel, and later we went to his office to make arrangements for the next several days. We stayed in the Thamel area of Kathmandu. It is the main tourist area. It was nice to not be the only white people around anymore. Being stared at all the time is uncomfortable. The tourists in Nepal were largely European. We did meet several other Americans. Nepal is similar to Bangladesh in that it also somewhat chaotic and the traffic is also best described at controlled chaos, but it also seemed to be more developed. I don't know if this is because we were only in the tourist areas or if the whole country is that way.

Thamel

The rest of our day was spent on the Internet, eating supper, and walking around Thamel. There are a lot of shops in Thamel, but they are basically only about eight different shops. There are Internet shops, little grocery stores, bookstores, tea shops, trekking shops, t-shirt shops, silk/pashmina shops, and shops selling things like Buddhist and Hindu figurines. Almost none of the shops were original at all. The other thing that was common in Thamel were street vendors. People would come up to you all the time trying to sell you things. One of the more frequent occurrences was someone walking up to you and saying quietly "smoke, smoke." After a couple of times we realized that they were trying to sell us marijuana. It is illegal in Nepal, but it is still very easy to buy if you want. By the end of our time in Nepal, I was ready to go just to get away from all of the pushy people trying to selling you something.