We pass color-painted children and teenagers on our journey this Happy Holi holiday-kids running around with projectiles of every sort filled with water dyed red, blue, yellow, orange and blue.The 3-day Hindu holiday celebrates happiness and fun and having a good life. Bijay our driver says the holiday is mostly for the younger generations to enjoy, and can be especially intense in the tourist towns like Pokhara and Kathmandu, where some tourists enter right into the fray.
I remember Eric and I playing with a bunch of Nepali kids and getting powder smeared all over my face, up my nose. In the excitement of the play, it took me a while to realize that a bit of surreptitious groping was going on. I was thirteen. I knew when to quit while I was ahead. Not sure if that lesson always stuck.
The almost 4-hour drive to Chitwan bordered on an extreme abdomen workout, holding myself in place in the back seat. Yes, we wore seat belts, but still...a rocking road and speed bumps that were not intentional, just the road falling apart, or being repaired. Only one near-fatal event. The bus coming straight at us while passing another bus careened back into his lane in time. We all gasped. Bijay (an excellent driver) says the public transportation drivers aren't so careful because time is money. Hurray for capitalism.
We descend through hillsides so steep they seem uninhabitable, the land unworkable, but small houses cling, and pathways wind down and around to terraced squares just beginning to green. It's spring. Trees are almost in full leaf, and rice planting has begun in the lower lands of the terai.
Outside our room at Green Mansions Lodge, six woman throw handfuls of rice over a soaked section of field. I smell good dirt and gardenias. Birds vie for attention.
Some mosquitos flutter around the edges of the screens which are not exactly tight to the window frames. The door to our room hangs a good inch above the floor. I am not going to worry about it, the possibility of malaria, I mean. We've been told that the original peoples who fled to these southern foothills of the Himalayas, escaping someone or something (not much has changed in the world) were resistant to the malaria and survived to become the indigenous people, the Tharu.
An entire village Sauraha has sprung up around these safari-type lodges which edge the boundary of the national park. No lodges are allowed in the park, a new rule since the Tiger Top days when I visited in the mid-60's with my friend whose Dad seemed to me to be the original white bwana. We saw tigers back then, and Cathy and I got chased out of our sunbathing spot by the sighting of a rhino. Their lodge consisted of thatched huts on tall posts and we rode elephants through tall grass. Do I think I will have some memories recreated?
Jill, I feel like I'm there with you (rhino, bus, colored stuff up nose). God, what fun. You are so brave. (Easy for me to say I'm there with you. It isn't my ankle.) Thank you so much for doing this wonderful writing. This coming Wednesday night may be snowed out again. You're doing more writing than we are.
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