In September, Nepal entered full festival mode to celebrate Dashain, a 15 day long Hindu festival. Traditionally, families gather, perform rituals and enjoy their traditional food. This year, some Mayans (volunteers, employees and students) took the opportunity to travel in Nepal. Krishna Rana, student, shares his experience.
Pokhara to Muktinath | A student’s adventure
Written by Krishna Rana, Student at Maya Universe Academy
We started our journey from Pokhara to Muktinath. It wasn’t easy. We took a bus from Pokhara to Beni and stayed the night. Many bus rides and walks later, we started to walk from Tatopani. Our plan was to stay at Ghasa but it wasn’t easy to reach there! We walked about 3 hours and suddenly one tractor arrived, so we took it. But the tractor driver didn’t know that there was a land slide going on. The tractor driver took us up in the hill and we tried to cross that land slide but the people were mad at us saying, “there is a land slide going on! You are risking to cross that land slide.” We went all the way down to pass on another other road. We reached Ghasa at 7:00 pm it was pitch dark them, at least we had our cell phones to use as a flash light. It was hard to get hotels to sleep. All the hotels were packed because of the land slide. We went all the way up through the village and finally we got a hotel but only to find out that we have to sleep in the living room on the bench! We were all wet because all the roads were full of water flowing.
The following morning, we began our walk to Kobang. We stopped for rice at Lete, in a hotel called Eco hotel; it was fancy and nice but what a big thing happened! We ordered Veg. rice and vegetables but the owner brought Changra‘s soup (stock from sheep?) instead of Daal (lentil soup, typical feature in Nepali meal set). All of us were so hungry, we didn’t notice that it was a Changra’s soup. We didn’t like it. We found out what it was as we washed our hands after eating .. our hands remained oily! The hotel’s owner is also from Damauli (the nearest town where Maya’s central school is located); we felt cheated by him.
While on the way to Kobang, we crossed a river. The river wasn’t too big; the water was under our knee but it was so difficult crossing that river! The water was freezing. Somehow we crossed this river and finally reached Kobang. Staying at Kobang was a nice night where we got to see mountains but not the best.
As we made our way to head to Jomson, we did not have any NCELL (local telephony network) connection. We passed through Marpha, famous for their apples!
Once we reached Muktinath we went up to the temple which is famous at Muktinath. Anil took a holy bath at the 108 taps and we also did a ‘Puja‘ (act of worship) there at Muktinath. Later we met Krishna and Alex sir on the way but we did’t see Mayan sir because he was sick. We went to Jong for a night there also at Jong long time ago there used to be a kingdom around 700 years ago.
Since it was still summer time, we did not see any snow as we walked through the mountains. I was suffering … we were at a high altitude; it was around 3000 meter high. We reached Kagbeni and wanted to meet up with Krishna dai and Alex Sir, so we found the hotel, and asked to the hotel owner, “is Krishna staying here?” The owner said,”Yes!” We were so happy but at the night we asked “where is Krishna?” The hotel owner replied, “they aren’t here.” We found out that we were not talking about the same Krishna! So, we were a little bit upset about this. At least we had Wifi!
We took a walk to Jomsom from Kagbeni with Mayan Sir. Krishna and Alex sir went an other way. We took a bus from Jomsom to Beni and from Beni to Pokhara, returning back to Maya school!
Maya Universe Academy 
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