By: Janani Bhave

One day, I got a letter from my school, The British School. I was going to go on a 5-day trip to Chitwan! I was so excited because it would be my first overnight field trip. The weekend before the trip, I started packing. I was glad that the school provided a packing list because I didn’t think I would come up with everything I would need. By the way, I have never packed my things by myself before. This would be my first time, so I got the packing list and I started packing. I got distracted many times. The hardest thing to pack was my washing kit because I was always feeling that I forgot something. Luckily I didn’t.

I was getting more and more excited so I did some research about Chitwan. This is what I learned and wrote before my trip: Chitwan is a National Park in Nepal. It protects forests, marshlands, and grasslands. The word Chitwan means “heart of the jungle”. Chitwan is one of the best wild life viewing national parks in Asia. You will have many chances to spot one-horned rhinos, deer, monkeys and 450 species of birds. If you are extremely lucky, you will see leopards, wild elephants, sloth bears or even a Bengal tiger! 7/10ths of the national park is covered in Sal forest. “Sal” is a large leaf, hard wood tree. Chitwan has more than 50 species of mammals including rhinos, tigers, deer, monkeys, elephants, leopards, sloth bears, wild boar and hyenas. Butterfly spotters have identified at least 67 species, some as large as your hand! Birds seen in Chitwan include bulbuls, mynahs, egrets, parakeets, jungle fowl, peacocks, kingfishers, oriels and various species of drongos. There are also rare species such as ruby checked sun birds, emerald doves, jungle owlets and crested horn bills. That is what I learned about Chitwan.

That’s Mr. Cross, my class teacher.

Monday, November 3, 2014, was the day I started getting sad because I was going to leave. I thought that I would miss my parents so much. I said good-bye to my mom and walked to school with my dad. Seeing my friends cheered me up a bit. Their parents were taking pictures of them. Then, we boarded the bus. I sat next to Meghna at the front of the bus.

Meghna and I waved goodbye to our parents from the bus.

We played hand games, but we soon got bored of them. We both knew that the ride would seem quicker if we fell asleep. After trying for a long time, I fell asleep. When I woke up, we were almost there. Soon, we came to a big crowd of people. They were crowded around a man selling what looked like sugarcane. The crowd of people looked so colorful. Finally, after 7 hours of driving, we reached our lodge, Sapna Village Lodge!

We went to the dining room and had a bowl of soup. I wished we got something cold because it was so hot! Then we had some time to go to our rooms, unpack, tidy up, and make a poster to put on the front of our door. I was in a room with Meghna, Shivanshi and Ujesha. So we unpacked, tidied up and made a poster. We named our dorm, The Girls Dorm. Then, Mr. Swift came to give us dorm points. Dorm points are points that people in our dorm earn. He gave us 3 points for cleaning our room and 2 points because he liked the way Meghna helped Ujesha carry her bag up the stairs to our room. Soon it was dinner time.

After dinner, we made candy for elephants and we fed it to them! What we had to do was tie some straw into a knot. Then we had to fill it with rice and feed it to the elephant. The elephant didn’t eat the bundle that I made, but it was fun trying to feed her. After that, we had a circle time when everyone had a chance to tell what they were looking forward to. Most people were looking forward to the jeep safari, the jungle walk or the canoe ride, like me. Mr. Swift was looking forward to breakfast!! And Ms. Kulung was looking forward to Friday, when we would leave!! Then, it was bedtime so we went up to our dorms, changed our clothes, brushed our teeth, combed our hair and went to bed.

When I woke up the next morning, it was really cold. Soon, I noticed that Shivanshi was awake and she just finished changing. Ujesha was also awake but she was still in bed. When we found out that Meghna was awake, we all got up and started getting ready. Our plan was to get ready and tidy up our room so when Mrs. Swift comes to wake us up, she would give us extra dorm points! Unfortunately, we didn’t get ready in time but we did get ready in time for breakfast.

After breakfast, I went with my class, 5C, on a jeep safari! We sat on seats at the top of the jeep. I loved the wind which was blowing so much on my face. Sometimes it got cold, but I still liked it. We saw some deer, some monkeys, a lizard sticking his head out of a hole, a cute little owlet, and even a leopard! We saw a lot of tall plants called elephant grass. I learned that elephant grass is called elephant grass because elephants eat it.

Some of the elephant grass was almost three times as tall as I am!

After the jeep safari, we went to our lodge and ate lunch. Then we went on a canoe ride. On the ride, we saw a lot of alligators. Some were really long. I enjoyed looking at them but it was really hot, so I wanted to get off. When the ride was over, we did a jungle walk. We saw a lot of huge spiders in the middle of their webs. We even saw a rhino bathing in a river! Many times, we had to jump over creeks and small streams. After the walk, we rode the canoe across the river and we walked back to our lodge.

We had to be really quiet when we spotted any wild animals like this rhino.

The next day, we went on an elephant safari! It was so much fun bumping along the trail on the back of an elephant. There were four people on each elephant. I was with Meghna, Zaki and Mrs. Swift. We were sitting in a box on the elephant. We were all turned outwards, each on one corner, holding on the railings of the wooden box. Our driver was sitting on the elephant’s neck. The seating was very interesting. We started in the grassy spaces. There we saw many peacocks. We soon reached the river. When the elephants started walking through the river, it sounded like a thunder storm! When they started going uphill and downhill, it was very bumpy. We also saw deer, monkeys, pheasants and even a wild boar.

People boarding an elephant – it looks hard, but its quite easy.

When the elephant safari was over, we went back to our lodge for lunch. After that, we went elephant washing! We went to a river where an elephant was, and once it was flipped over on its side, Mrs. Swift picked three people. She picked me, Rewa and Abayaa. We waded into the river and we rubbed water all over the elephant. Then we climbed onto the elephant and it sprayed us with its trunk!  I was both scared and excited right before it happened. I was scared because I felt like it might be too strong of a spray and excited because it probably would be refreshing. After everyone had a turn washing the elephant, we went back to the lodge for a shower. Then it was dinner time and then it was bedtime.

It was SO fun!

On Thursday we went bird watching. I was excited but we didn’t see very many birds. At the beginning we walked to the river banks. There, we saw a flock of birds who were taking a bath. When my friend, Alexia, let me borrow her binoculars I saw that the birds were all brown and white, but they had brown and white on different parts of their bodies. Then we started walking down the river. We only saw one more bird which had a very long tail. At one point, we saw hundreds of millipedes or centipedes. They looked exactly the same and they were crawling all over the grass. We kept walking until we came to our lodge. We ate lunch then we went to a Tharu Village.

Resting in the shade during a long hike. Everyone’s wearing long sleeves and long pants because of the mosquitoes.

Tharu people are a type of Nepali people. We were going to learn how to decorate their houses. First we rubbed mud and cow poo all over the outside of a house so that no cracks would be showing. Then we put paint on another house by making flowers and paisley shapes with our hands. After we finished, we went fishing!

I had never gone fishing before. We each had an oval shaped ring of wood with a net hanging from it. We also had a basket tied to the side of our waist. We were supposed to wade in the water, dip in our net, and put the fish we caught in our baskets. I didn’t catch any fish, though. Then, we went back to our lodge.

The rivers in Chitwan are pretty and blue unlike the rivers in Kathmandu.

The next day, we were going back home! I was excited to see my parents and brothers but I was also sad to leave Chitwan. After a long, boring bus ride, we finally reached The British School. Then I found my mom! I was happy to see her, but it felt like it had just been one day since I’d seen her. When I left home, I felt like I was going to miss my parents a lot, but I never actually did miss them much. I thought about them many times though… That was the end of my Chitwan trip!

My Didi made me a cake when I came home from the trip! She doesn’t know English well so she sounded out “WELCOME”.

Chapter 1: Car to Pokhara
I saw lots of new things on the way. The only thing that was the same from Telluride was the Manakamana Cable Cars. I saw lots of bamboo swings on the way back. They were big. I also saw mini bamboo swings.

Enormous bamboo swings — my Mom’s turn!

Chapter 2: Map
Our first lodge was Tikhedhungga. Our next lodge was Ghorepani. Our next lodge was Tadapani. And our next lodge was Ghandruk.

Chapter 3: Things I Saw on the Trek
In my binoculars, I saw the first wobbly bridge that we went on. It was made out of metal and string. I saw lots of cairns – they are stacks of rocks and the rocks are really really flat. And when I saw cairns, I saw a big one and then I said to my mom, “can I make a cairn?” And then mine was really small, but then when my dad and sister and brother and my friend Dan came then we all made lots of cairns. On the last day of the trek I saw a horn of a buffalo. It was on the path. Lots of horses too. One time the horse whacked its tail into my eye.

Sumanth next to the cairn he built

Chapter 5: Games that we played
First we were playing this game that we should not get seen by anybody. Even the people in our trek. Then we played another game which we were all shooting everybody, but not the Nepalis. In the last lodge which was called Annapurna Lodge, we played this game that someone was the Zombie and if the Zombie or the guy who had the stick touched you then you had to be another Zombie. Then we played a game which was wrestling.

The End

by Sumanth
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Day 1
On the first day we had to walk along the river for the whole day. There were lots of switchbacks so there was lots of shortcuts. The trails were very bumpy. There was one river and there were lots of waterfalls coming into that one big river. We had a nice lunch then kept walking and fell asleep in the lodge in Tikhedhungga.

Trail following the river

Day 2
We woke up after a quiet sleep. Our destination on that day was Ghorepani. The second day we had to walk half jungle and half not. Later on we saw some monkeys in the wild that looked like they had a long stripy tail of black and white and they were hanging on trees and jumping from tree to tree. There were even some little little ones. The monkeys’ faces looked extremely round. He had a very long tail. There were trees in the middle of the path so you could go around the trees in two different directions. Then we kept walking and slept at the lodge called Hungry Eye in Ghorepani. It had a fire so it was a warm lodge.

Day 3
On Day 3 we woke up at 4am. Then we put on lots of layers on us because it was very cold. It was dark so we used head lamps. I was one of the first people so when I looked back I saw a stream of head lamps. It was beautiful. On Poon Hill, we took lots of photos. On Poon Hill there was a flat cloud on top of a mountain so that made the mountain look like it had a flat top. The sunrise at Poon Hill looked like the same sunrise as Lion King with purple clouds.

Sunrise at Poon Hill…

The mountain children and how they survive up there is very interesting. Because there is basically nothing up there like toys, paper, clothes, swings, electricity, education, cars, bicycles, buses, trucks – they just have to get around by foot, everywhere. We don’t use the nature much as much as they do.

Day 4
On Day 4, we walked from Tadapani to Ghandruk. It was so short. The snow capped mountains looked very steep. We kept seeing the same set of snow capped mountains from different places and different elevations. The porters were very entertaining to the little kids. We ate lunch at the lodge. We did not do much walking so we had lots of time and lots of fun in Ghandruk. We played a game called Mille Bornes, a French auto car racing card game. We also played a wrestling game with the other boys in the grass.

Dan and Sajjan playing the Mille Bornes card game

Day 5
On Day 5, we walked from Ghandruk to Kilyu. We took a jeep from Kilyu to Birethanti. We ate lunch there and then walked to Nayapul and took a bus back to Pokhara. We walked 41 kilometers in total. Our highest elevation was on Poon Hill at 3210 meters from sea level.

by Sajjan
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My First Trek

In my family there are three kids — me, Sajjan and Sumanth. All three of us wanted a video game called Wii. Our parents had explained to us that we had to walk 1,000 kilometers to earn the Wii. We decided to go on a trek. It was my first trek! I was very excited to walk a lot of kilometers and so were my brothers. At last, the first day of the trek arrived. We were on our way to Pokhara. In the car, I saw so many beautiful and interesting things. I saw a lot of brick factories, flowers, trees, forests, and even a few snow-capped mountains! We also saw some roads that were decorated for Dashain. It was like silver streamers hanging from long strings which were tied to poles next to the road. It was really beautiful.

Sparkling Dashain decorations

After looking out the window, we watched a movie. The car that we were riding in was the first car that I saw in Nepal that was able to play movies! We all crowded around the screen as we watched The Lion King. I loved it. Then we stopped to take a walk on a bridge, over a massive river. We had to take stairs down to the bridge which I found very slippery. The bridge was huge! We only walked halfway across it before we came back.

One pedestrian bridges across the river along the drive to Pokhara

Then we got back into the car and drove to Gorkha, an old town. We ate lunch there at a restaurant called Rest and Test. We all ordered noodles which were very spicy. A man brought us tomato sauce and chili sauce. I wondered why he brought chili sauce when it was already so spicy. After that, our father told us a story about how the king of Gorkha united Nepal. It was very interesting. Finally, we reached Pokhara. We settled down in our hotel called Splendid View. Then we walked to a Punjabi restaurant for dinner. On the walk, I noticed a lot of differences between Kathmandu and Pokhara that I wasn’t expecting. The roads in Kathmandu are a lot busier than the roads in Pokhara. In Pokhara, there are a lot more tourists than in Kathmandu so there are more hotels, taxis, travel agencies, tourist buses, and many more things for tourists than in Kathmandu.

The next day, we took a boat ride to the bottom of the hill that the World Peace Pagoda is on. It was very beautiful. There was also an amazing view of Pokhara. It looked a lot like Kathmandu does from Swayumbhu (a temple in Kathmandu on a hill) except for a big lake in the middle of the town.

World Peace Pagoda in Pokhara, built by the Japanese

Then we ate lunch at a restaurant called Sweet Memories. We also went to Devi’s Fall which is an enormous roaring waterfall. There was a lot of mist which felt very refreshing. Then, we went to our friends’ hotel called Hotel Temple Tree. Our friends’ names are Maanav and Zoya. Maanav is 7 and Zoya is 2. We went swimming with them.

The next day was the start of our trek! We quickly ate breakfast and went to Hotel Barahi to meet our friends. There were four girls and seven boys – eleven children total. The girls were Charlotte, Maya, Riya and I and the boys were Sajjan, Sumi, William, Olli, Dan, Jack and Nicky. We all got into a bus and drove to Nayapul. On the way I saw a lot of goats walking down the road. What would happen is about 100 goats would come with 1 goat herd at the back. The goats would split in the middle and about half of them would go on one side of the bus while the other half would go on the other side. It was very cool but I wondered why the bus never stopped when the goats were passing. I found it extremely interesting because I never saw that many goats before.

At last we reached Nayapul. We trekked mostly next to the river. There were a lot of bridges that we had to cross to get over the river. They were very wobbly so what I did is go on the bridge and move around a lot and then the bridge would swing a little bit. It was very hot but there were a lot of waterfalls so we could wash our face in them. The water was so clean compared to the water in the rivers in Kathmandu. You could actually see through them! One time, we passed such a big waterfall which was flowing across the trail so we had to take our shoes off to go through it. It was so fun but suddenly a bunch of goats came to cross the river so we had to rush to the other side of the waterfall and move to the side because we heard that if you get in a goat’s way, he will push you. The expressions on the goats faces were so confused. Some of them were about to jump into the next waterfall. It was so funny!

Crossing the trail in 8 inch deep water – see the goats on the other side?

We continued going until we reached the lunch spot. I had fried rice and so did my brothers. I really liked it. The meals are so different from the USA because whenever we hiked there, we always picniced for lunch but in Nepal there are teahouses in the middle of the trails so we stop there for lunch. Saddly, when we continued to Tikhedhungga, Riya felt sick so she had to ride on a horse. I wish she wasn’t sick because Charlotte, Maya and I weren’t able to keep up with the horse. At the lodge, the girls and I played a lot of hand games. We played Concentration which is a hand game where you keep saying words that have to do with one topic and you cannot hesitate or repeat words. We also played a hand game that we made up and we kept making up different versions and were silly about it.

The next day was the hardest day. We had to gain 2,756 feet of elevation. Riya, the lead guide and I were the first to reach the lunch spot. A few minutes later, Ollie came with his porter and then some other porters came. And then a long time later, everyone else came. I was really proud of myself because I got to the lunch spot first and I had never reached first before. In the beginning, it was hot so I wet myself a lot in the waterfalls. But when we started gaining more elevation, I started feeling cold and sick. After lunch it started raining. That made me feel even worse. FINALLY we reached Ghorepani. The porters were the people who carried our things such as clothes, sleeping bags, medicines, small toys and some other things that we didn’t carry. They were men who carried big bags of our stuff on their heads with a little string. It was so amazing how they climbed all of the steep steps and went across all the waterfalls with those heavy bags on their heads.

Our porters were in their late teens or early 20s

The next morning we woke up really early to climb Poon Hill and see the sunrise. I was SO tired. Riya and Maya both didn’t come, so it was just me and Charlotte. At the top, the sunrise was beautiful and we were surrounded by snow capped mountains but I don’t think that it was worth climbing Poon Hill because it was dark when we started climbing and I was tired. We came back to Ghorepani and had breakfast. Then we went to Tadapani and on the hike we climbed up and down steep hills. I was VERY tired. I bought a box of Pringles and ate it as I waited for my friends who were behind me. When they reached, we made up a silly song called “My Butt’s Rubbin’ on the Wall”. We sang it until dinner time and then a few more times before bed time.

The next day was the easiest day. I hiked at the back of the line with Charlotte, Maya, Riya and William. We all pretended to be different people and change our names. Charlotte was Georgina. William was George. Maya was Clara. Riya was Ashley. And I was Molly. We started talking about things that were made up. I found it very funny. When we reached Ghandruk we had lunch. Then us girls went into the “girls room” to write songs. We wrote a lullaby and a Jungle Song. We preformed the Jungle Song with singing, dancing, acting, mouth noises, costumes and props. Then after dinner we sang the lullaby around our only camp fire on the trek. It was really fun.

Charlotte, Maya and Janani performing the Jungle Song

The next day we were going to Nayapul. It was a long way but it was all downhill. On the way, we saw a bamboo swing. In Nepal, when it is Dashain, Nepalis build bamboo swings. The one that we saw was gynormous! It looked like it was as tall as someone’s house! It was really cool. We walked a little more and stopped to catch a jeep because we were too tired to finish the walk. The jeep ride was very bumpy because I was sitting with the three other girls. When we reached the restaurant we wrote a song while eating. We planned to perform it in Kathmandu. After lunch we walked to the bus which went to Pokhara and the next day we drove home.

I’m really glad that my friends came because when they were with me I felt like I walked faster because I was having fun. One other thing I really liked about the trek was the horse bells. When I saw horses passing by, they had bells on their necks and even though some of them were with the same shepherd, all of their bells were different. It sounded really nice when one would come after another and as they would pass by me, their bells would all make different sounds and it sounded like a song.

PS – Next time I want to go on a longer trek!

by Janani