Final Week in India and Arrival in Nepal: May 21 to May 28

After a two-month delay, I will finish documenting the last few weeks of my travels this spring in two blog posts. Enjoy!

On the 21^st, Shilpa’s fiancée Jay visited campus. We had dinner along with Sumit, Anameka, and Shilpa’s brother Abhishek at Laxmi, a restaurant just outside the IIT Bombay main gate. I was grateful for the opportunity to meet Jay given my friendship with Shilpa. After dinner, Sumit and I hurried to a viewing of the IPL (Indian cricket league) Final in the gymkhana building on campus. We were just in time to watch the last three overs and see the Mumbai Indians win by just one run. This would be like walking into a screening of Game 7 of the World Series in the top of the 7^th inning—at the peak of the excitement.

The next day I again ate with Shilpa, Jay, and Abhishek in the Hostel 11 mess. I wish I had started eating in the H11 mess earlier in the semester, because the food was definitely superior to that of the H12/13/14 mess where I ate on a daily basis. After lunch, I picked up some paint thinner from the Earth Science department to use with the special high-temperature paint for my project I had received from a friend of Professor Sardeshpande. The paint was very old, so it did not mix well with the thinner—it took considerable effort to get the paint to a reasonable consistency so that I could use it for my project. Eventually I somewhat succeeded and painted the receiver of the solar roaster, a project that took most of the afternoon.

On the 23^rd, I got a chance to test the prototype of the solar roaster to see what the stagnation temperature would be without any material inside the receiver tube. Shilpa and Sumit helped me set up the heavy prototype in the lawn outside the CTARA workshop. Without a wind-blocking system, the receiver reached 120°C. This is not as hot as I was hoping it would get, but it was a promising result given the mediocre paint job and the constant breeze. The project was a success because a working prototype had been created in just one semester; it was rewarding to see my work in physical form on campus. Now that the prototype is in the workshop, another CTARA student in a future year can easily pick up from where I left off and continue designing and testing this product. I am excited to see how the solar roaster progresses in the coming years and glad that my work resulted in the creation of a prototype.

I spent most of the next day packing my belongings and donating things that I no longer needed. In this context, “donating” means leaving items (clothes, books, etc.) by the elevators so that the hostel workers who clean the hallways and the bathrooms can take them if they wish. In the evening, Shilpa, Sumit, Anameka, and Abhishek took me out to dinner to a thali restaurant in R City Mall. The dinner was delicious and it was a great evening to spend with my friends. They host at the restaurant must have known that our party would eat a lot because he placed us in the back corner of the restaurant where the chapatti server rarely ventured. We all got a good laugh from that.

On my last full day in India, Sumit and I woke up early in the morning to hike up Sameer Hill, the tallest hill in the area, where we had a great view of the IIT Bombay campus, Powai Lake, and the surrounding neighborhoods. It was a bittersweet morning—great to spend time with Sumit but sad that it was my last morning in India. At breakfast back in the hostel, I brought my maple almond butter to the dining hall and introduced Sumit to the joys of the almond butter-banana sandwich (no peanut butter was out that day). Most of the rest of the day I spent packing and getting organized to fly out the next evening. On a whim, I decided to call the airline and see what the baggage allowance was, because the information was not readily available online. In doing so, I found out that my flight was cancelled and that my only option was to be put on a different flight at 8:00am the next morning instead of my scheduled 5:00pm departure. They never informed me of the flight cancellation, so I am glad I called the airline, because I would have shown up in the evening with no plane to get on. Sometimes these things just work out.

I ate dinner with Sumit, Shilpa, and Anameka at the Hostel 8 canteen, home of the famous dal tadka and bhindi fry with plain paratha. We then went to Shilpa’s room to talk and spend my last evening in India together. Sumit, Shilpa, and Anameka surprised me with a cake and an Indian cookbook as a parting gift. We enjoyed the dessert and talked about our first impressions of one another from five months before when we had all just met. At 10:00pm, boys are no longer allowed in girls’ hostels, so we took a walk around the campus and ended up at our favorite spot, the bridge near Hostel 13 that goes to the new research park area. It spans the many large water pipes that run parallel to the edge of the IIT campus, and it is a nice place to idly chat on a nice Indian summer night. Eventually, though, it was time to go to bed—I returned to my room and finished the last bit of packing I had left.

I awoke in my hostel room for the last time in the early morning (3:30am) on May 26^th after sleeping just a couple hours. My neighbor Abebe had stayed up watching a movie to make sure I was awake in time to leave for my flight. He walked me down to the loading area where Sumit and Akshay also bid me farewell. It was a great farewell that likely would have been more emotional had it not been so early in the morning. I was excited to be on the way home via Nepal, but more saddened at having to part from my friends in India. It had been a wonderful four months at IIT Bombay and I expect the friendships I made to last many years to come.

Entering the airport was like re-entering into a Westernized country—Starbucks and the universal airport food court look the same the world over—and it startled me a little after spending such a long time living in India. My flight was uneventful and I arrived in Nepal in the late morning. After waiting what seemed like a long time for my checked bag, I found a prepaid taxi stand to take me to my hostel. It turns out that the taxi stand was a travel company that also organizes hiking trips. They offered to take me to their office to discuss hiring a guide, which I had planned to do, so I willingly got roped into hiring a guide from their company to hike the Annapurna Circuit. We were to leave the following morning, so it was time to head to my hostel, the Sparkling Turtle Backpacker’s Hostel on the east side of Kathmandu, for a nap and to pack my bag for the upcoming hiking trip. The hostel was fantastic, but more about that later.

My guide Gopal met me the following morning at my hostel and we took a cab to the bus stand, where we started on an 8-hour journey to Besishahar for the night. The drive was much different from the long bus rides I had taken in India. The bumpy road was similar, as was the traffic, but for most of the drive we were passing through green mountains rather than dry brown flatlands. I have not visited Vietnam, but the greenery we passed during the drive was similar to what I imagine the Vietnamese mountains to look like. We spent the evening walking around Besishahar looking at the multicolored buildings and planning the upcoming two weeks of hiking.

On the morning of the 28^th, Gopal and I woke early to try and find a jeep to drive us a few hours up the bumpy dirt road to where we would begin our hike in Darapani. A couple jeeps filled up minutes before Gopal began talking to the drivers, and we finally found a car at 9:00am. It was clear that the jeep driver has all the power in this situation, because he is doing us a favor by driving us up the road. We waited patiently in the car as he drove us back and forth across Besishahar picking up other loads for another hour before we zoomed on up the bumpy rocky road. By the time we had driven about three hours, we caught up to the jeeps that left at 8:00am—either they were going very slowly or we were going dangerously fast. Probably the latter. We exited the jeep at Darapani and began to walk along the Annapurna Circuit trail. Hotels with restaurants in the villages along the trail would serve as our source of food and our bedrooms over the next ten days as we hiked. We walked about 3 hours to Timang, where we slept for the night. While eating some garlic soup on the roof of the hotel to warm the chill from the evening wind, I met a Russian woman who had been traveling continuously for over a year—she is a psychology consultant who conducts appointments via Skype. This sounded like a pretty good way to travel and work at the same time, provided there was a way to ensure that there would be a reliable internet connection whenever an appointment was scheduled.