22 June 2009 — Comments are off for this post.

Nepal Part 2 – Hacking Kathmandu

Catching cabs at the airport in Kathmandu is an interesting experience. Catch a cab from just about anywhere in the city and you can get to the airport for around 200 Rupes. Get out of that cab and into another one and they want to charge you 500 Rupes to go back. It's an interesting sort of negotiation where if the driver doesn't agree with your price they'll just drive off while you're in mid-sentence. It's pretty damn amusing, actually. So long as you're not in a hurry.

We managed to find a cab, and survived the ride to Franz and Melissa's house. James had a phone call about the same time we were arriving, and hadn't been able to to out to the airport. So the thee siblings, Dara, Melissa and James were all together for the first time in eight months. It was a brief but happy reunion from which we headed down to Thamel - the tourist district - to get some lunch, pick up the trekking permits and do a little shopping.

After lunch, Melissa, Dara and James did a little shopping in Thamel while Franz and I went out to see some of the city. Expecting a short trip without much to see, I had left my camera at home that morning, so sadly there are no photos. We spent a couple hours walking around and saw Thamel, Durbar Square, Kumari Ghar, the Pigeon Temple, Freak Street - not actually that interesting, and Indra Chowk - the main market street. Great stuff and worth a visit if you're in town.

Everything went well with the trekking permits, bus tickets and provisions purchasing.  Then just about the time we finished we learned that the prime minister had stepped down over a conflict about the head of the army. I don't know nearly enough about Nepali politics to begin to describe that, but Franz and Melissa's upstairs neighbors suggested that we stay in Kathmandu, stock up on food and supplies and lock ourselves in the house. It should be noted that these neighbors are easily frightened, and offer the same advice just about any time there's any sort of political unrest. This prompted a few hours of frantic information gathering as we had expected to leave Kathmandu around 4:30 the next morning and didn't have a lot of time to decide whether it was better to stay in Kathmandu where it would be easier to evacuate, should the need arise, or be up in the mountains where we would be less likely to be affected by unrest in the city.

After some debate we decided to go for it and head out for the trek in the morning. The rest of the evening was spent packing bags and having dinner before an early bed time. After all of the taveling and activity, falling asleep early for our 4:30 wake time wasn't a problem for Dara or I.

Gallery - A few shots from in and around Franz and Melissa's place in Kathmandu.

[svgallery name="Nepal1"]

Published by mcullen in Front Page Posts, travel
Tags: Nepal, trek

16 June 2009 — Comments are off for this post.

Nepal Part 1 – Getting There

Getting to Nepal takes a long time. In our case, two airlines, three flights, two layovers, and a total of nearly 30 hours of travel time. More like 35 hours if you start from the time we left our place and end when we arrived at Franz and Melissa's home in Kathmandu. No matter how you calculate it, you smell pretty bad by the time you get there. This is just as well, because you're going to smell pretty much until you're back at home.

Our itinerary went something like this:

- As advised for international flights, arrive at airport three hours early.
- Check bags, go through security and arrive at gate two hours and fifty minutes before flight leaves.
- Wait a really long time.
- Have an expensive beer at the Airport Chophouse.
- Wait a while longer.
- Take Frontier flight to Houston.
- Run as quickly as possible through the Houston airport (awful airport) in order to re-check bags for a flight that is supposed to leave in less than an hour.
- Arrive at gate and discover that flight has been delayed two hours.
- Board the plane, ignoring the ridiculous anti-swine flu masks that are being handed out.
- Watch movies on plane - there were 200 to choose from.
- Attempt to wipe spilled red wine from pants.
- Try to push sleeping, snoring, overweight guy back into his seat.
- Repeat for fifteen hours.
- Spend four mind numbing hours in Doha airport.
- Eat excellent lamb curry on flight from Doha to Kathmandu and finally sleep for six hours.
- For the first time in years heard cheers and clapping when the plane touched down in Kathmandu.

In Kathmandu (and Doha) there aren't jetways, so they run one of those portable sets of stairs up to the plane and you de-board on those. I can see the advantages of climate controlled jetways, but I like the visceral experience that stairs provide. I also happen to like planes, and you get a much better view of them from the stairs than you do from the windows at the gate. I had heard before that the air quality in Kathmandu was roughly equivalent to wrapping your lips around an an automobile exhaust pipe as it is started, however, leaving the plane we walked out into pleasantly warm, and very sweet smelling air.

James said that when he arrived at the airport in Kathmandu it was like a war zone. That's fairly accurate, though I'd classify it as more of a riot. Because of the at the time thought to be impending swine flu epidemic we were instructed to check in at the health desk upon arrival in Kathmandu. The sign was falling off and there was no one around so we bypassed that step. Baggage claim was a mess with the bags from our plane scattered across three different conveyors that were randomly stopping and starting. From there we made our way through customs, actually we were just waved through and into the throng outside arrivals where we were met by Franz and Melissa.

Published by mcullen in Front Page Posts
Tags: Nepal, travel

16 June 2009 — Comments are off for this post.

Camping on Guanella Pass

This weekend Dara and I went camping with Will and Franziska and their dog, Lucy, up on Guanella Pass. Well, not on the pass itself, this time they took us to one of their newly found favorite camping places. We were meeting another friend in Idaho Springs for lunch on the way up, so Will gave us directions to meet them up there.

As seems to be usual, Beaujo's took forever to get us our food. A little over an hour for a couple of pizzas, but they tasted much better than last time, so I won't complain too much.

After that we drove through Georgetown and up Guanella Pass. Guanella Pass was pretty rough. Definitely the worst condition I've seen it in in the years I've been going up there. From there I won't say much because it's supposed to be secret because it's great, and if lots of other people go in, they'll trash it like the other campsites up there, and it won't be great anymore. Also, the directions would likely just get somebody lost. There were something along the lines of park in the lot, walk perpendicular to the road to the lot to the left until you go over a steep hill and into a valley, then walk up the valley till you see us.

It was a fairly quick walk in with some thunder and a little bit of snow. Towards evening the clouds cleared and we had a pretty great sunset and the stars were able to come out. We cooked chicken sausages and red peppers for dinner and had a little wine and Dale's Pale Ale (beer in a can that doesn't suck). Will and I ran around in the willows at sunset grabbing some pictures. Dara and Franziska stayed in camp talking, probably relieved that they didn't have to put up with our craziness. Then we hung around the camp fire until bed time.

Sunday morning I woke to a sniffing sound outside the tent. In my addled waking state, my first thought was "bear!" because all of our food had been left just outside the tent underneath a poncho. Fortunately instead of having my fingers torn off when I lifted the rain fly, I just got a little lick from Lucy. Dara wasn't feeling well, so instead of heading up one of the nearby mountains as planned, we packed everything in and headed back to Boulder. Which was just as well because we were able to easily miss all of the usual Sunday afternoon traffic.

[svgallery name="GuanellaCamp"]

Published by mcullen in Front Page Posts, Mountains

15 June 2009 — Comments are off for this post.

U-Haul Haulin’ to California

Gas

A couple weeks ago Dan and I drove his truck and all of his stuff that would fit in a Uhaul out to California.

We left Boulder around 9:30 in the morning on Wednesday the 2nd and nearly immediately discovered that the tow vehicle was vastly underpowered. Driving south out of Boulder we struggled to maintain 35 mph driving up the smallish hill that 93 climbs. Figuring that the travel time was estimated using an average speed of nearly 70 mph, we also realized that we were in for a much longer than expected trip.

I-70 went about as well as could be hoped, slowly and without too much sway as long as we stayed under 60 mph. Anything over that and things got scary pretty quickly.

Arriving in Utah we decided that because our overloaded trailer was so much fun to drive on wide, relatively straight and level highways, it would be even better to take it through Coral Reef National Park, Grand Staircase Escalante State Park, Bryce Canyon, and Zion (if they let us into the park with the trailer). This ended up working out pretty well. There was a lot less traffic, we went a bit slower which made the trailer more manageable, and we went through some of the most beautiful parks in the country. And as a bonus we got to Zion before they opened the booth so we got to go through for free.

Wednesday night around midnight we found an empty dirt road near Zion, parked, and threw our sleeping bags out next to the truck. There was some cloud cover when I went to sleep, but I woke a couple times during the night after things had cleared up a bit, and the stars were pretty amazing. Second only to a couple of nights laying outside under them with Dara.

Driving into Santa Ana was an interesting experience with the typically suicidal California drivers practically changing lanes between the truck and trailer. After that it was a few hours of unpacking and dinner at Loco Burrito before flying back to Colorado the next morning.

[svgallery name="Uhaulin"]

Published by mcullen in Front Page Posts, travel
Tags: California, Coral Reef, Escilante, U-Haul, Zion
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