Saturday, 07 february 2009, Chitwan

Wake up call at 6:00.
At 6:30 Dill was already in the office with the charts and books packed in a weekend bag for us. (Dhanyabad Dill).
He accompanied us in the taxi, taking us to the bus stop for the tourist bus bringing us to Chitwan. A 6 hour drive.
Around 07:00 the bus took off.

I noticed that the traffic is not as busy as last year. Maybe one of the reasons of less traffic jams is also that now there are no long lines of cars waiting at the petrol stations blocking the road.
A relaxing tour. After about 3 hours driving, taking in the scenery of mountains, rivers, the rice fields, passing through villages, a coffee stop.
After half an hour on the road again.
We arrived at the Royal Park Hotel in Chitwan at 13:00.
A quick refreshing, a warm welcome of Suk and lunchtime.

Chitwan is in the Terai area (south Nepal.)
Here the temperature is much higher than in the Kathmandu valley. In the summer months (June - July - August, also called wet season or monsoon season (heavy rainfalls) the temperature reaches up to 40 degrees or more.

Activities in Chitwan National Park
- Guided jungle walks - fauna, flora and birdwatching
- Rhino watch - elephant safari
- Dugout Canoes on the Rapti river - crocodiles.
- Visit to the Elephant Breeding Centre & nursery
- Visit a Tharu village - fascinating insight in unique village life
- Tharu music and dance, a traditional evening.

The accommodation at the Royal Park Hotel is perfect for everyone wanting to enjoy nature in peace and at their own leisure. The hotel's rooms are built in Nepalese style with all Western comforts, reminding you of casual and roomy ambiance of a safari hotel. (insert picture room).
Our guests are always surrounded by the beauty of the region as panoramic windows have been installed in all our hotel houses for spectacular views. A terrace bar with a deck over the river's banks allows for a view of the animals watering holes.
Tending the main restaurant, bar and garden restaurant our staff at the Royal Park Hotel complete the atmosphere with candle lights and lanterns. With a variety of superb Indian and Nepalese dishes to choose from, we will ensure your experience in culinary at its bests (and they DO!).

The hotel is an excellent starting point for excursions and safaris. Multilingual guides lead the way for trips and treks into the Jungle and the grassland beyond. We also offer slide shows about the land and its natural treasures as well as a selection of books and videos for those seeking more comprehensive information.
price: 3 nights 4 days including program: 12.320 Rs per person.

15:00 A ride with the ox cart (insert picture) through the village. We stopped at a mud house in the village where Suk showed us the kitchen (picture), the dining room and two bedrooms. In this house (picture) lives 1 family with 19!! persons. From grandmother/father/father/mother/sons-daughters with their husbands/wives to the grandchildren.
They eat all together in the central dining area. Looking into one of the bedrooms you see a big wooden platform on poles: the bed of 1 couple and their children. A rope with a curtain tossed over it, divides that room into two areas. On the other side the same wooden platform with rice mats spread out for another couple with their children.
The house has 3 or 4 compartments like this, simply separated by a mud wall or a curtain.
This families income is based on growing rice, vegetables, lentils and mustard seeds.

They plant the mustard seeds in the same field together with lentils. While the mustard plant is growing higher ready to be harvest, they leave the lentils to grow until their harvesting. The villagers harvest the mustard plants by hand (pulling them out), pile them and leave them in the sun to dry. They take them to their homes, where they hit the dried plants with a stick, so the dried 'leave containers' open and the mustard sheets fall out. Taking away the plants it leaves the seeds, which they 'clean' with a sieve, ready now to put them in bags for selling on the market. From this house we had a little walk through the fields (where also marijuana plants grow as a weed) (picture) to the Tharu museum (picture man and woman).

Back to the hotel with the ox-cart, a short stop in the Internet, a run to our room for a shower while the electricity was still on.
At the moment we have only 2 hours electricity a day.

19:00 Diner was served. An after diner coffee in the garden, where Suk joined us.
We had a nice, long conversation.

Dear Reader, this is Rita2
I have travelled to Nepal to accompany Rita1 with her volunteer - charity work and I have been blessed to meet our travel guide in Chitwan, who is called Sukram, who is desperately trying to improve the conditions in the school within his own village.
Suk, as I prefer to call him, not only works full time but he also has a small kiosk-type shop adjacent to the school in question and has a wife and 2 children of his own to support, yet his intense enthusiasm to help his own community can only be commended.
After many years myself being associated with the English education system, firstly as a governor, then as a classroom support assistant and finally as a support teacher, I was able to offer Suk some tips to help with his mission. My main problem was that I did not know how the education system worked in Nepal.
Suk explained that there are 2 types of schools: government and non-government (boarding) schools. The school in his village is a government school and he showed me some photos of it.
The first striking thing to hit me, was how bleak the interior of the classrooms appeared.
The rooms were all painted white, with many walls now flaking their white emulsion, and apart from worn blackboards and benches and desks, that was it.

Fortunately, we had already purchased 20 or so wall charts from YOUR kindly donated money, and these were going to immediately make a difference in brightening up an un-inspired learning environment. I also suggested to Suk, that maybe the teachers could display the children's work and that a couple of tins of coloured paint could be used to paint numbers and letters around the classroom. I also suggested that maybe the staff moral may be low working in such a gloomy environment and I offered him a couple of suggestions to promote class challenges and introduce prefects in the school.
Suk loved the simple ideas that I had proposed and he too had a vision to extend the school's learning environment. He believed that by implementing 1 or 2 creative teachers to support and train the current staff, that a more cheerful and rewarding school ethos could be achieved.
The creative teaching books that we had already purchased in Kathmandu would be a useful resource for the creative teachers to use.
He wanted to see more singing, more art and more practical teaching methods used in the school as opposed to the current un-inspiring copying from a text book. With Suk's vision and my suggestions we hoped that we could make a difference, however, it was all well and good me offering simple advice, but the following day I would, in fact, be experiencing first hand the life of a simple, Nepal village school.