Napa High students experience the community and culture of Nepal firsthand and beyond S E P T E M B E R / O C TO B E R 2 0 1 3 59 work included re-cementing the floors; painting the entire inside of the school and installing rain gutters so they can capture clean water. The tools we used were not necessarily made for the tasks at hand, which added to the challenge. A serrated ruler was used as a saw, for example. Our interaction with the 50-plus kids, aged five to twelve, was fun. Though they couldn’t speak English, we had no problem communicating through sign language and games. Graduating senior Rejean Ruel even played drums with them. In Nepal I had the opportunity to do some incredibly adventurous and thrilling things. These included hiking up the Thorong Pass (17,769 feet) and taking a boating safari out in Chitwan. The bus ride after the Thorong Pass hike was one ride that I will never forget. I was very ill with altitude sickness from going over the Pass and had to be transported from Muktinath to Jomson, via bus. The whole trip was only two-and-a-half hours, but I was scared about dying during that time. My fear was not completely ridiculous, as I would come to find out, for if you type in “Nepal and bus ride” on the internet, what pops up is “Nepal bus ride crash 30 dead,” “Nepal bus ride crash 7 dead,” and so on. The bus ride itself was on constant switchback roads with, at maximum, a foot-long gap between the road and a fortyfoot fall. Needless to say, it got my adrenaline running. At one point on the bus trip, when the bus stopped to let another bus come by, my friend (who was also sick) and I looked at each other and then the ground. I said, “I am pretty sure we are almost parallel to the ground,” then a bus came screaming by and almost hit us. After this experience, I have a new appreciation of the Napa Vine bus system. Three weeks into our trip we arrived in Chitwan, a national animal sanctuary. I had never been on a safari and didn’t know much about the animals that we were going to be seeing. However, it turned out that Chitwan holds a lot of species that I didn’t realize occupied that part of the world: one-horned rhinos, Bengal tigers, sloth bears (I did not realize that a sloth bear was one animal—I thought it was two different animals), and a lot of crocodiles. One of the tours offered at Chitwan is a river safari. What they don’t tell you is that the river is infested with crocodiles, and upon inquiry, they tell you that boats had been attacked and people have died. I felt like Indiana Jones going down the river looking for artifacts. Besides crocodiles, I got to see beautiful birds including the Kingfisher, which I had never seen before. The danger factor of this excursion added to an experience I will never forget. While in Chitwan, I was also fortunate to be able to ride an elephant twice, which was an unforgettable experience. Because you are on the elephant throughout the tour you get a very good view of the safari, and the animals are more willing to come up to you and do not feel as threatened. I highly recommend this to anyone who happens to go to Chitwan. I found the tour to be extremely fascinating and enlightening. One of the most physically demanding things I did on this trip was to climb Thorong Pass, the highest pass in the world. It passes through Thorong La, which allows you to get through the Annapurna mountain range. The pass itself isn’t particularly hard, except for the altitude. At the top of the pass it reaches 5,416 meters, which is 17,769 feet. At this altitude it gets hard to get a full breath of air, and you actually run a chance for acute mountain sickness. Acute mountain sickness can sometimes be fatal. It can develop into HAPE (high altitude pulmonary edema) or HACE (high altitude cerebral edema), which are very serious diseases. In HAPE and HACE, fluid accumulates in the lungs or the brain; if not treated, this can become fatal. However, we were prepared for these ailments, and luckily no one ever ended up getting sick with these diseases, although, as previously mentioned, I did get acute altitude sickness. Continued next page
NVLife_SeptOct_2013
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