So we arrived in at our 'Jungle Lagoon Lodge' just after lunch and settled into our new place. It looked pretty nice - just like a little villa with lots of 'jungle' noises outside. A very pleasant change to the noises of Thamel. The lodge was a little deserted. There were only three of us there... Tourism in the area has been hit by recent maoist activity (a nepali communism group), but we were assured by our guide that the UN had visited, by invitation, and locked up all their guns in a container just down the road. Any attempted attack on the container and the UN's alarm would go off. Hmmm....
Over the next day or two we went on an elephant back safari, which was a lot fun! We saw a baby rhino, two species of deer, crocodiles, peacocks, jungle cockerels, kingfishers, hundreds of butterflies and alarming host of insects. I wont delve into too much detail since the Everest Trek report totaled about four pages in MS Word - yep it really was that much!! I'll just let the photos speak this time...
As you all know I didn't really get much sleep in the Everest Region. Well I thought getting down to 80m above sea level would really do the trick, but I was very much mistaken! During the first night I was stirred from a deep sleep by a feeling of my bed moving. The previous few nights my bed was attached to Reena's, and I'd often find one of her legs sprawled across my bed somehow or another so I didn't think more of it. Then I suddenly heard a scrambling noise across the room and felt another bed shudder. At this point I was awake enough to realise that Reena's bed was a good metre away from my own. With a rush of adrenaline I screamed Reena's name, grabbed for my torch, sat up quick and started scanning around the room with a beam of light. Looking down the side of my bed I could see a trail of food coming from the unfinished dinner on the coffee table, and on closer inspection found some rice on my head board... What in the world... in a jungle lagoon lodge.. would be running all over my bed and make it shudder so much?!? We told the guide the day after about the incident - he seemed not to bother, neither did any of the workers at the lodge. His idea of living with the wild was 'well its only a little leech, let it suck my blood and have a feed. Its better than walking into any temple and giving an offering'. No sympathy for the two city girls with a wild animal in their room at night!
The next night, I simply couldn't sleep. We had pulled out beds away from the walls, hung up our food in plastic bags inside our wardrobe. I was armed with a torch wrapped around one wrist and a camera in the other, I wish I'd had a little pellet gun. Sure enough, the scratching began and we got full glimpse of our midnight guest - it was filthy rat! check it out!! Look at its dirty great long tail!!!
I actually was awake a lot of the night - Reena managed to get some sleep - I think mainly cos it didn't like her bed. It liked mine! It took me two and a half hours to get this shot. It took me a while to get over the gasp and flinch reflex every time it poked its head out, which would cause it to scuttle away... only to return 15 minutes later... I fell asleep eventually, but I obviously hadn't pulled my bed away far enough from the wall cos it made the jump, crash landed on the floor. Reena sat up and screamed as it ran up the curtains! I dunno how we made it through the night. We were supposed to go birdwatching at 6:30 that morning. I told Reena I wouldn't make it since I had spent the night rat watching. I spent the morning catching up on some sleep.
My immune system has taken a bit of a bashing this week. Although I didn't get any of the immediate symptoms of altitude sickness like headache, nausea, nose bleed, frothing at the mouth, etc... I really think that the lack of oxygen for 10 days hit my immune system pretty bad. Its taking me ages to shake off this cough and cold. The night before we left for Chitwan (a six hour bus ride) I was developing a fever, which turned out to be a rather nasty bout of diarrhoea the next morning... I didn't enjoy that bus ride one bit. Once we got to the lodge, and I managed to drag myself to the dinner table, my eyes started to swell up... I look like something out of a medical textbook (only, I'll give you also the happy ending 24 hours later).
Reena had such a blase attitude about it all, which kept me from fretting too much. 'Yep I know you're hacking half your lungs out, and your guts are exploding themselves on you, and your eyes are about to weld shut, but you'll be alright!' Im sure if I had started bleeding to death she would have raised the alarm! (only kidding reena, you looked after me great, and no I don't want to drink any more water!) If only to settle the nerves of my parents - I'm much better now, thanks to the marvels of modern medicine and the resilience of the amazingly engineered human body. I was drugged up literally to the eyeballs with painkillers, antibiotics, antihistamines, steroids, and other invading pathogens. At least the mosquitoes left me alone! I'm usually a rather tasty morsel for those creatures. Reena got bitten though... Does insect repellent actually make any difference?!
Anyway... We're off to Tibet tomorrow - back to the cold and high altitude. In two days we'll be back up to 5140m. We should hit Lhasa in one week's time, during which we'll get another view of Everest. Hopefully something a little more substantial this time!
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