Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright...

I just got back fom a trip to Pokhara and Chitwan. All told, since Friday, I've traveled by bus, rowboat, car, Land Rover, elephant, horse-drawn carriage, the back of a pick-up truck, the back of a motorcycle, two-prop airplane and taxi.

The only major disappointment was that we couldn't go paragliding or rafting in Pokhara (the weather wasn't clear enough in the mornings for paragliding, and by the time we gave up on that it was too late to go rafting). We also tried to go on a pony trek, but the guy was qouting alarmingly high prices (I swear we thought he would explain to use that the horse ride was expensive because petrol prices were so high, but we didn't let him get that far.) Instead we went rowing on the lake, which we had done the day before, but was still extremely nice.

In Chitwan, we took an elephant safari, seeing, among other animals, a baby rhino, and got to swim with elephants. We also saw an elephant breeding sanctuary and took a walk through a Tharu village (the Tharu are the oldest inhabitants of the Chitwan area; they supposedly have an immunity to malaria.)

On the walk through the village, the guide (really just some guy from the hotel) explained that the people in that area had to be prepared for tiger attacks. Apparently, the older tigers, when they can't catch deer anymore, sometimes attack people (the tiger in the Patan zoo is described as "a man-eater from Chitwan;" this description makes more sense now, as previously I had imagined random Dutch tourists being eaten and the tiger being sent to the zoo as punishment.) We saw a field of cattle, and I asked our guide, half-jokingly, if the tigers ever eat the livestock. He said that farmers had lost buffalo, goats,anything to tigers. I said something about that was just like Bahl Chaat (the national board game, in which tigers try to eat goats,) the way he responded made me think he thought this a more serious comparison than I had intended.
There as a strike on today, so no jeeps or cars were going to the airport, so the hotel found a guy to take me on the back of his motorbike.

Now I'm back in Kathmandu, one sweatshirt to the poorer and a reasonably bad sunburn to the richer, working on (or, more precisely, procrastinating from working on by blogging,) a revised version of a powerpoint presentation that I have to give tomorrow. I've given this presentation before, but I'm a bit nervous, as tomorrow I have to to do it for members of the Constituent Assembly.

The oddity of all of this is that I'm basically telling a group of people in the equivalent of Congress what to put in their damn constitution. I'm barely 26, and have exactly 1 year of legal education. I'm not sure in which universe I'm qualified to tell anyone, least of all a group of people, which, if past events are any indication, includes combat veterans from the Civil War and people who have been involved in Nepali politics for many years, how they should run their country, but I'm fairly certain it ought not to be this one.