JumpEarth Around the World Adventure

Hello! After the temples, we swam in the hotel’s pool and ate dinner in the city. The next day we, again, toured temples. We saw three Hindu and Buddhist temples in the same style as the day before and then ate lunch. While we ate, we started feeding a small kitten and a breastfeeding mother dog, but when we gave the cat chicken they got into a fight and we all felt bad. After lunch, we went to a beautiful temple nicknamed the Lady Temple because it is so ornately carved and decorated, people say that men never would have had the patience to carve it, but it is actually called Banteay Srei. The carvings were chiseled immaculately and were very fine and detailed, and worthy of their name!

Personally, this is actually one of the highlights of Cambodia. We went to another temple, but one that is modern and people use it, and saw piles of human skulls left over from a war.

We swam in the pool again and Aba went to get a massage, but it was canceled. Then, as usual, even though I haven’t been mentioning it, we did homework. That night, the hotel hosted a barbeque in honor of Cambodia’s Independence Day and we fed another kitten. We went out to the old Night Market and I bought a present for a good friend of mine that was so perfect for her that I couldn’t resist! Aba bought some fried ice cream, and then we returned to the hotel. The next morning, we got up and drove to a butterfly pavilion. A guide explained to us the life cycle of a butterfly and showed it to us in different stages of life. The workers had sectioned off cabinets for eggs, caterpillars, and cocoons, but the butterflies flew free everywhere. There was a little boy running around and he kept offering us flowers!

Next, we drove to a silk factory. A couple of years ago, I thought that it would be a neat idea to farm silkworms and make silk, simple, right? Well, I did some research and discovered that in order to get the silk, worms in the cocoons are boiled alive in order to unravel the thread. I didn’t have the heart or the stomach for it, so I abandoned my ‘enterprise’. In this factory, we saw how mulberry leaves are grown, they are the only plant that silkworms eat, and two different types of silk, raw and fine. Raw silk is formed on the outside of the cocoon and is a bit rougher than fine silk, which forms the inside of the cocoon. We got to see how they pattern thread and scarves, a very interesting though complicated process that I will not go into here, and how they weave scarves and dye and unravel silk from the cocoons. One thing that made me feel better is that silkworms die the day they emerge from their cocoon, so they only lose 1/27th of their lives. Also, people eat the boiled worms.

We drove to the supermarket and bought food for a picnic we had planned to have in a Botanical Garden, but the book Aba was using was written in an odd fashion and we misunderstood. There was no botanical garden, so we made sandwiches and picnicked on our balcony. On this trip to Cambodia, we had tried palm juice, palm fruit, and sugar cane juice, and while we were eating our picnic we tried a foul-smelling fruit called Durian which only Meril savored. We swam and Aba got his massage, then we did homework and went out for dinner. This time, we all ate fried ice cream. Something that I found very interesting was that they served snakes in the street, something that I haven’t seen in other Asian countries.

After we ate, we drove in a tuk tuk to an acrobatic circus, which was very enjoyable. In the morning, we drove to the airport and flew for 1.5 hours. Then we got on another airplane and flew for another 1.5 hours. An interesting thing happened on both flights that I had never seen before, though I had heard of it. On both flights, we sat in row 14, but the row in front of us was row 12! I’d previously heard that some airlines skip row 13 because superstitious people don’t want to sit in it, but I’d never actually seen it until now. I’m dying!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 As soon as I catch my breath I’ll write more! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

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P.S

Guess who lost the food lottery! (Hint: ME)

Ella

Hi! The next few days in Kathmandu were mostly filled with homework in order to catch up, though we watched quite a few movies in the Dalai-la’s cinema! On our last night, it was the Festival of Light! There was a man doing some sand art for the hotel, and I watched him for a while so I could remember how to do it later.

We had a lot of fun and saw many lantern and candle-lit processions down the street, and the owner of the hotel even gave us free slices cake and we noticed that he had put our names on our room’s door!

The next morning, we woke up early in order to get to the airport and Aba almost thought that Ganesh wasn’t coming because he was so late. When we arrived at the airport, Ganesh had to leave us at the entrance, but before he left I gave him all the bracelets that I had made for him and his family. I also gave him half of a white, beaded necklace that I had found on the trek and fixed with my colorful string for his wife. We boarded our plane to Bangkok, Thailand with ease and I watched three movies! However, when we arrived in Thailand we had to go through a whole ordeal in order to finally board our flight. If I can finally persuade Aba to blog (wish me luck!), he’ll tell you about this in more detail, but I’ll make it quick. From what I gather, we had gone to our flight gate because that is where we had been told to get boarding passes, but we had been misinformed so we had to go to our company’s help desk. They were supposed to give us boarding passes there, but because we hadn’t flown into the country using their airline, they told us that we had to go through immigration before they could give them to us. However, Aba, being Aba, harassed one of the attendants into helping us and we sprinted and ran from one end of the airport to the other, going through many, many security checkpoints along the way. We had to go through immigration into Thailand, then out of Thailand, and then finally made it for our 6:15 boarding. We got there at 6:17… Close enough! Once on board, it was a very easy, short flight, but we were soaked with sweat. I think I was more sweaty than any given day from all of our treks combined! We landed in Cambodia and had to go through immigration inside of a room that looked like an Apple store, and then we were picked up by our hotel’s driver. His name is LaLa. We arrived at the hotel and were served some small snacks, my favorite was some homemade chips with spices in them, and then our friend Merrill came down! Merrill is from New York, and she has been friends with Aba since who knows when. She is going to travel with us until partway through Vietnam! Anyway, we got settled into our rooms, ate dinner, and took much-needed showers. Then, we fell asleep. The next day, we got up at 7:45 am and ate breakfast. We got ready and were inside of a hotel van with our driver, LaLa, and a guide by 9. We drove to and toured four temples, the first of which was Angkor Wat, one of the 7 Wonders of the World. It was astounding. In addition to it being the largest temple in the world, the architecture and vegetation of the temple were breathtaking. Piles of crumbled rock covered with moss alongside enormous domed and decorated towers was a sight to behold. After Angkor Wat, the next two temples were very similar and we went to lunch and bought two small wooden flutes! The next temple was special because giant trees were growing over it and holding the structure up. It was absolutely beautiful. Tomorrow, we are flying to Thailand where I will have more time to continue blogging and sleep because I still need to write about the next day and today. Sorry for the delay, guys, but goodnight!

Ella

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This morning we woke up at 5:15 am and were consequently very tired. We walked to the airport, but because we were a day early and on standby, they wouldn’t give us our boarding passes. However, it ended up not mattering because the sky became engulfed in clouds and only four planes were able to fly in before they closed the airport. While we waited, a small black dog came in and I played with it. We left and ate lunch, then returned and, after a lot of persuasion, managed to get a helicopter flight to Kathmandu. We were supposed to wait for twenty minutes for a helicopter, but we ended up waiting for 2.5 hours! It was odd because a helicopter landed for another group every couple of minutes even though we were there first, but it was never ours. Another odd thing was that there was a chicken in the landing pad! It didn’t even seem nervous at all! We finally got a helicopter and rode with a woman who had altitude sickness. Previously, we thought that we were flying with a young German woman with really wrinkly hands, but we were wrong. The view from the chopper was wonderful. There was a sea of dark green trees below us, but every once and a while I saw a bright red, yellow, or purple one as well. We flew over small and large villages and rocks covered with Tibetan flags. We went through valleys in the mountains and over the city, and once again Aba looked like he would die.

When we landed at the airport, the woman who was with us got taken away in an ambulance and we drove to the Dalai-la hotel in a car. After today’s fiasco, we had gotten there seven hours late. Ganesh’s wife called him, and he told her we were still in Lukla! We got to the hotel and took showers… Which was pure bliss. We ate dinner to the sound of lively Mexican music, did homework, and went to sleep.

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We woke up in Namche this morning and ate breakfast. Surprisingly, because a few days before I would’ve sworn that I would never eat it again in Nepal, I ordered a cheese omelet! We headed out and embarked on a relatively easy hike. We didn’t stop often, so Troy and I talked more about his childhood and we had a lot of fun taking pictures.

Also, apparently Ganesh didn’t drop his phone, it was stolen at the camp next to EBC. He had left his backpack in the dining room and a drunk guy took it out of his bag and sold it. When Ganesh called his phone, the guy who bought it said that Ganesh could buy it back if he’d come to get it. However, when Ganesh arrived he discovered that the phone had been broken, though the SIM card was still intact, and ended up walking 76 km total that day. On our way to Lukla, we saw a lot of cute kids. There was one kid in a blue jacket that demanded high-fives from all foreigners.

As we climbed up the last hill we saw many trekkers start their first day and laughed at them. There was even one woman who had put a flower in her hair! We said that they would all forget or abandon cleanliness and fashion after two or three days. We walked past the starting gate and got settled at the hotel.

We ate lunch at a restaurant and I worked on some more bracelets until we went back to the guest house. We ate dinner with Banu and the other porter, Giten Rai, and I gave Giten a bracelet and Banu two, for himself and for his sister. Banu made a really nice speech and, after talking to him, I learned that he has five sisters and a brother; he is the oldest. One of his sisters won the US Visa lottery and is now living in Alaska. Giten is one of five children, but he has a father while Banu does not. They both come from fishing villages. I also learned that Ganesh’s Christine was born on a festival day so no one was around and Ganesh had to steal his neighbor’s car and drove, for the first time, to the hospital with his wife. Christine was positioned sideways in her mother’s stomach, so Ganesh had to drive to get a government doctor to rearrange the baby’s position. When Ganesh saw Christine he was so loud that people thought he was crazy! After dinner, Banu, Giten, and Ganesh signed a map postcard for us. We did homework in our rooms and fell asleep.

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This morning we woke up and ate breakfast, I had Tibetan Bread with chocolate! I also started working on another bracelet. The hike today consisted of very steep uphills and very steep downhills with no in-betweens. While we hiked up, I was despairing (not really but kind of) because people still on the beginning of their trek were going downhill and we were going uphill, but I was looking forward to inwardly ridiculing and pitying the other trekkers! On the way down, we saw a woman being carried on a stretcher and covered with blankets being transported to the nearest hospital. We thought that she was pregnant and expecting to give birth in a week or so. Then, we arrived at a village called Khumjung.

A couple of days before we had watched the 2015 film, Sherpa, in which a sherpa called Phurba starred. Khumjung is his home, and we are at a guest house owned by his family. We met his wife and two sons, all featured in the movie, and his newest daughter. She was very funny and played with us and Ganesh. She rode a very old and dirty-looking stuffed cat and a horse saddle.

I gave her some candy, and she had a really loud laugh that went off roughly every minute. We ate a really good pizza with a new vegetable that had a special flavor. Even though Phurba wasn’t at home, it was a really great experience to meet his family as people rather than characters in a movie. As we left the enormous village, which is about as big as Namche, we saw the people carrying the woman on a stretcher. An old woman walked beside her and carried a bundle of blankets in her arms. The woman had given birth on the trail, but the baby in the blankets didn’t make a sound and all the people looked worried. Troy says that he thinks the baby was born prematurely. I hope it was just sleeping. We kept walking, and in the outskirts of the village we passed a soccer field with handmade goal posts and yaks grazing on the grass while some village boys played. We hiked up a steep hill to a stupa and then down the steep mountain to Namche, stopping twice at scenic points for pictures.

We had gone down in two days what it had taken us five to climb! While we walked, Troy and I got to talking and I learned that his father had eaten mammoth meat in college! He went on an excavation expedition and they had leftover meat so they let the students eat it! As we entered the village, we saw a woman and a girl holding a mother cat and a very tiny baby kitten which we were allowed to pet! It was probably only a couple of days old! When we arrived at the hotel, we discovered that there was a problem. The people who used our rooms were supposed to leave that morning but had gotten sick and decided to stay an extra couple of days in Namche, leaving us without rooms. The hotel owner told us that there was one room in which we could stay even though it didn’t have proper beds. He led us to the hotel’s Prayer Room. Every Buddhist household has one, and it is the most special and revered room in a house. After a quick discussion, we agreed to stay. I took a shower, but before the others took one Ganesh came into the room and told us that he had dropped his phone on the hike and that someone had found it when he called the number. He said that he was running back to get it. He was running back up until where we had slept the previous night. After Aba, Troy, and Asher finished their showers, we headed to the Everest Bakery. However, on the way there we stopped to buy Troy five large yak bells. I also bought a small, round metal box and the woman who owned the store was so happy that she gave me six lengths of yak-hair string for free! We walked to the bakery and I tried to make a bracelet with the new string, but discovered that yak hair is very brittle and breaks easily so I had to stop and experimented on normal string but with different techniques instead. We ordered food, and when my yak sizzler arrived I was very happy. The yak steak that I had eaten at Bob Marley on the Annapurna wasn’t very good, but I decided to try yak one more time and was not disappointed. It was a little tough, but delicious! For dessert, I ate chocolate cake and homemade vanilla ice cream! We left after I made some bracelets because the bakery was hosting a wedding that night and went back to the hotel. I finished a bracelet that I had been working on and then did homework and blogged. After that, I went to sleep.

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This morning was very exciting. We woke up and readied hurriedly, not even eating breakfast. I borrowed a marker from Ganesh in order to finish my surprise; a short bracelet glued to a rock covered in writing. It actually took me quite a long time to make because I only had a small bit of superglue, and rocks and string apparently don’t bond very well. Also, a marker that I had tried earlier had run out of ink so I attempted to erase my feeble marks with a wipe. Anyway, I finished my rock and put it in my pocket. We left, but on the way, we saw people climbing and turning around midway on the now cold and windy Kalapathar. The hike to EBC (Everest Base Camp) wasn’t very difficult, but it was chilly because of the early-morning temperature. When we arrived at EBC, we took a lot of photos and then Ganesh gave us each a shirt with a map of our route to EBC and our names on it. Then, I put down my rock next to some Tibetan flags.

We walked to the far end of the camp and saw glaciers and perilous-looking rocks. I remembered that it’s my ex-history teacher, Mrs. Perlick’s, birthday, so I numbed my hand writing her a birthday message on the ice.

We hiked back to the guest house and saw the Israelis, then continued walking for hours on relatively flat, beautiful ground, until we stopped to eat. While we were waiting, we peeked into a hospital and saw Halloween decorations! Oh, by the way, it’s Halloween!!!!!!! Halloween is one of my favorite holidays because I love making amazing costumes with my dad, Greg, and decorating the house (and pets) with creepy figures with Asher. I feel sorry for Aba because all day I asked him what time it was in Boulder so I could determine how long it was until the Halloween costume contest at school. After the hospital, we ate and got to watch a cute baby with her mother, and then kept walking and talking about superheroes until we got to our next village. The hotel we stayed at in Pangboche was recommended to us by our uncle Moti, and I got to meet a really sweet black dog and saw some little boys galloping on sticks as if they were horses! We played UNO in the dining hall, and then we read a letter written to us by Banu, one of our porters. I forgot to mention that Banu wasn’t able to hike with us to both Kalapathar and EBC because he didn’t feel well. He felt bad about it, and in the letter, he explained that he actually isn’t a proper porter and that he’s only doing this job in order to finance his younger sister’s education. His letter seemed very heartfelt and explained that he is responsible for both his family and himself, and that Ganesh should be free from all blame concerning his actions. One thing led to another, and then Ganesh told us about his own childhood. His father drank a lot, so he had to provide for his family. Every day he would come home from school to take care of his two-year-old sister and then he would ride his bicycle to the forest and chop wood for money. He said that the six orphan kids that he previously told us he raised weren’t actually orphans. He had found them on the street doing drugs, the oldest child only nine-years-old, because their families didn’t love or want them and were almost going to put them in an orphanage. Apparently, Ganesh pretended to be a cop and told the kids to get into his friend’s van. He drove them to his home where they have been educated in a government school and getting over their addictions ever since. We invited Banu inside, and some of the people played UNO while I made a bracelet. There are three days until we get to Lukla, and in that time I am going to attempt to make twelve bracelets, eight at the minimum; six for Ganesh’s orphans, one for his daughter, possibly two for him and his wife, possibly two for the porters, and one for Banu’s sister. I made the bracelets over the next hour or two, then blogged and went to bed. Happy Halloween!!!

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