Nepal - Diki Danda Village/Launch

We drove to the launch at Diki Danda quite a few times throughout the course of the trip. It was a good way to get away from the crowds at the main Pokhara launch, Sarankot, and it was a good starting point for the cross country flights Matty and Brad had planned for us.

We went up by van or jeep, and a group of us usually got out toward the top to walk the rest of the way to launch. For the walkers, the first view of the village was this school right next to our launch. You could tell it took great will power for the kids to stay in the school yard instead of running out to talk to us and touch our gear.


Our first day on launch, the weather was still recovering from rain the previous day and that gave us time to walk around the village.


From what I could see, this was a typical water source. On my morning runs and on my walking day at Begnas Lake, I saw women filling vessels, washing clothes and washing their hair at spigots like this one at the edge of a road or foot path.


On our walk through the village, we met a man who addressed us in English and asked if we wanted him to show us their herd of water buffalo. He told us how he had worked in Saudi Arabia for several years, but was now happy to be back to his village and family. He described the work there as dirty and difficult. He didn't say what kind of work he was doing, but something related to the oil industry is my guess. He said that they had acquired the buffalo herd at great expense, but seemed optimistic that it would help the villagers be more prosperous. The water buffalo work in the fields and also provide milk. At a guest house I visited on another day, the owner had installed a system for harvesting gas from buffalo dung. The gas produced was piped to his kitchen as cooking fuel. It seemed like a real improvement over using wood for cooking, which aside from requiring huge labor and time to collect also contributes to poor air quality and deforestation.


On our second day in Pokhara, Jessica, one of our tandem pilots, asked how many pictures of baby goats we'd taken. We were like, "Wha?" As the days went by, though, we began to understand. There were cute little baby goats just about everywhere we went--on launch at Sarankot, on launch at Diki Danda, in the village at Sirkot, etc. etc. Here are a couple of them, along with a friendly villager. Note the garden--even from our rooftop vantage at the hotel in town it looked like most everyone was growing a few cabbages and cauliflowers in their back yard.


Green terraces.