So we are getting out of Kathmandu Valley this week with all of it's pollution and heading up to Langtang National Park in the Himalayan Mountains (the mountain range of Mount Everest). The pictures I'm putting here give a glimpse into the amount of air pollution in the Kathmandu Valley. The two pictures are roughly the same except one was taken during a normal day in Kathmandu and one was taken the day after a rare rainfall that temporarily swept the air pollution out. Pretty incredible.
Anyway, we are heading up to a very remote part of Nepal for 8 days where we will visit two villages that are a few hours hike to the nearest road. The trip there includes: a 30 minute hike, followed by a 20 minute landrover ride, followed by a very curvy 11 hour bus ride (if we don't hit any areas where strikes are going on), followed by a hike up to the village which apparently takes a nepali 2 hours, and a really fit Hawaiin guy 4 hours so anybody's guess on how long it will take us. I'm really looking forward to the trip and seeing what village life is like here in Nepal. We plan on taking lots of pictures and have actually phoned ahead to the two villages to let them know of our plans to take a ton of family portraits. It is very rare to have any photos at all of your family in this area and people absolutely love them so we decided to set up a number of shooting days to take photos and get them printed and sent back to the villages from Kathmandu. We are also taking a couple of medications with us to hand out. It is amazing the number of people who die from diarrhea so we are taking a number of Imodium pills and rehydration powders, as well as a Katadyn water pump and iodine for our own water.
Oh and I thought this was pretty funny. One of the doctors who has been working here in Nepal for many years told us that we should really be hoping to be sleeping in a hut that has cow dung for a floor. The other possibilities are concrete and wood which he said will either be filled with bed bugs or extremely hard to sleep on. I've never hoped to sleep on cow dung before but life's full of surprises!
So we will be back on the 30th and appreciate your prayers for the villages of Gatlang and Nesing as well as our own health and travel.
It took me a minute to realize that the mountains were missing in the one picture. It's like those mind games, "What's wrong with this picture?" By the way, I finally mailed a letter to you two. It is dated much earlier than sent, so don't get confused by that. Have fun in the mountains!
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