Everything but Tigers

Hi friends and family,

You might think that I have totally forgotten about my blogsite, but no, its just been a hectic time and then recently I had some interesting things happen to the airplane and ended up with some time off, so have been concentrating on Facebook, which I got on in late October. I know many of you aren't on Facebook so I will continue to write letters and put stuff on my blogsite so you can kind of keep up with what's going on with Karen and me in India.

Just a few days before Christmas, we were doing a company flight to Ranchi, India and level at 41,000 feet all of a sudden we heard a loud crack that sounded like a shotgun. Even with my noise-cancelling Bose headset on, it was noticeable. I looked up at the windshield and the pilot side windshield had cracked like a checkerboard. Because I have been flying Citations for 25 years, I knew that our aircraft had a thick, plexiglass layer with a thin glass layer on the outside and the glass was what had broken. We asked center for a descent to 15,000 feet and got the airplane back to Delhi, where it has been sitting for 3 weeks as of Wednesday. We had to get the windshield from Wichita and when it got here there was a technical hangup in customs for about a week. We now have it in hand and it should be ready to fly in the next day or two but I knew this was going to be lengthy and so I took a couple of side trips. I had been wanting to go to Kathmandu, Nepal and see Everest and the Himalayas ever since I arrived in India in late June of 2009. So, we called our travel agent, something you hardly do anymore in the states, but is definitely the best way to do things here, and in a day or so we were flying commercially to Kathmandu, only a one hour flight from here. Most of you have already seen the photos from our visit and know the stories but for those of you who haven't seen the photos, I only have a Canon 1000D digital camera with 10 megapixels but I will have to say some of the photos are just breathtaking. Of course, we didn't have cooperative weather for the mountain flight the next day. I opted to go anyway since I had come this far but it was like climbing Everest without getting all the way to the top - quite disappointing. I will definitely go back with a few days to spare so we can play the weather and catch the peak without an obscuring cloud deck but the photos that I was able to take were quite beautiful, just not the awesome photo of Everest that I had envisioned.

Karen and I shopped, ate, toured, and just enjoyed another country for a change. Kathmandu is growing and changing rapidly. I have a feeling that it is nothing like it was 10 years ago or anything like it was 25 years ago. To make a long story shorter: we loved Kathmandu. It was less crowded than India seems, the food was much less spicy and the roads seemed better, although there were still "jams" on the road during rush hours. We loved our hotel, with a view of the Himalayas once the fog burned off in the afternoons. Because it was kind of the off season we received excellent service and full attention everywhere we went. Karen had wanted to go visit a couple of casinos since they have none in India so we went over a couple of evenings to see what was going on. Karen is used to the huge casinos of Las Vegas or Biloxi, etc. and was shocked when we walked in and there were just a few, maybe a dozen, slot machines, and they looked like something out of the 50's and 60's. The funniest part to us was, that the Nepalese government doesn't allow the local Nepalese to gamble so the casinos cannot cater to locals at all. This means that the next available group is Indians and many do fly over for gambling junkets. The slot machines take and pay with Indian coins and the casinos will take Indian rupees, which almost no businesses in town will. They pay back in Nepalese rupees, which have a totally different value, so you have to be sharp and keeping track to make sure they don't shortchange you when you cash in your chips. Karen always had lots of helpers in the casino, even one guy who suggested which machine was generous, and it turned out to be. I was having fun at the blackjack tables and we came out ahead, so decided we liked Kathmandu. For those of you who are getting all judgmental and concerned, we spent more money on dinner than in the casino and nothing important was risked, it was only some interesting entertainment, where we met some nice Indians. If a Nepalese casino gets caught letting locals gamble, they immediately lose their license, so it's not something they tolerate. My friend Scott Graham, who successfully climbed Mt. Everest in May of 2004, told me that Kathmandu was a less than desireable little mountain city. It is suffering from extreme growth, water shortages, all the things that the cities of the world suffer from, but the whole time you are there you look to the horizon and see those Himalayas, and for me, that made everything okay. We enjoyed the Thamel area, which is kind of like Old Delhi, but caters more to the trekkers of the world and the tourist busses with it's shops, restaurants and lots of hippie types wandering the streets with backpacks and hiking boots and looking like they have no visible means of support. We ate at the Bhojan Grija, which was an authentic Nepalese restaurant with folk dances and music and an incredible meal. You got no choice about it, they just showed you what was being served that night but, even though we had no idea about most of it, we really found it tasty and enjoyed the program a lot. We stayed 3 days, flew back to Delhi, found out my plane was still a long ways from being fixed so called the travel agent again and said we wanted a tiger safari to Jim Corbett park if possible. He said no trains were available at the last minute but if we could stand a 6 and 1/2 hour drive on Indian roads, they would send a vehicle to our door. We have nothing like this kind of service in America but they sent a driver who picked us up at 7 a.m. and we were off to the park. Since it turned out that we left early on Sunday morning, we thought traffic would not be bad but they have no weekends here and it was just like any other day, busy and crowded. By early afternoon we were pulling into the park and to our very nice resort. Nothing was planned for the first afternoon since we didn't know what time we would arrive so we both decided to go for a full massage down at the spa. That turned out to be very relaxing and then we went to the main lodge where they were serving coffee and tea and showing movies about the tigers and elephants of India. That was where we learned that elephants are not feared in the jungles and that they have recently been carrying video cameras out into the jungle, into tiger dens, etc. and getting some spectacular footage. This was also when we decided to try the elephant safari because it looked like we could just ride our elephant and get some very interesting views of nature. The first day, though, was our regular safari from the back of a jeep. We had only paid for the group safari but since it was the off season and the resort was not crowded we got the private jeep for the group rate. They don't get the park permit to view tigers until the customers show up so we had to get up early and be at the reception at 6, ouch.

We hadn't planned properly for the cooler weather so we were borrowing clothing from the staff, etc., and the ride to the North end of the park in an open jeep in 30-40 degree temps was really cold. We found a blanket and blocked out a lot of the wind but were still shivering by the time we got to the gate where we actually left the road and started exploring the tiger road. Then, that road went even further up the mountain and the trees were now tall and everywhere so no sun to warm you up. Of course, our guide then told us about a man-eating tiger that had killed several people in the last year and one woman just 5 days before we were there. That added an element of scariness to the whole episode but we felt better when he explained that man-eaters are usually older tigers who can no longer kill wild game and end up taking the easy route and killing some poor, hapless villager. This poor lady had been out collecting food for her cattle and had it stacked on her head and was walking with some others back to the village. According to the guide, she was a little bit ahead of the rest of the group and they only found her hand, foot and her sari, as well as the stack of food for her cattle that she was carrying. Since these people are often small and vulnerable, that's what the tiger takes. They send out groups of men to hunt for the man-eaters, and since they are territorial and within a certain area, they can usually find them. Since India's tiger population is dwindling, they try now to tranquilize and capture these animals, rather than just shoot them, but sometimes circumstances prevent doing what they'd like to do. As you can see from the above photo, we were where tigers had been just a short time, maybe minutes, before.

Anyway, we saw lots of tracks and many kinds of game, including a good look at a leopard, which is even more rare than the tiger. I couldn't get my camera ready and get a shot before he was gone but we know we saw it and it is a treasured memory. On the back of the elephant, Karen thought she caught a glimpse of a tiger in the same area where we later saw fresh tracks. I never got a look but I had seen two tigers at Ranthlambore Park a year ago, so I had my wild tiger spotting and was just hoping for a good one for Karen. We will definitely go back just because the park itself was so beautiful and peaceful compared to the hustle and bustle of Delhi.

Now we are back in Delhi and I am just waiting for the call from the mechanics (called engineers here) to go test fly the airplane after the new window installation and the cure of the sealant. If everything goes well, we should be flying by midweek. It will be good to be back in the air, but with Christmas, New Years and some nice vacationing under my belt it was the perfect time for something to ground the airplane.

I think most of you have seen the photo albums that I posted online so I have only put up a couple of reminder pics as to what we were doing here lately. Still having a blast, enjoying the differences and now looking forward to our trip to America in early April so I can attend my 40th high school reunion from Thunderbird Academy in Scottsdale, Arizona. It's also where I got really serious about my flying and worked hard on my early training and it's where my folks are buried so I have a lot of ties to Scottsdale. My sister, Janet, lives there so I will be able to see family, too. While I am there, I will also go see my granddaughter Sadie, who just had her 1st birthday last week, visit my kids and also spend some time with friends.

We are experiencing really chilly weather here now and Karen now sees how it is to be here with no central heat in the house. We have one oil-filled, electric radiator type heater and Karen and the cats are fighting over being close to that. This time passes and then, the rest of the year it's too hot, with heat being back on by late February. At least we do have air-conditioning for that.

Hope everyone had a nice holiday season. I want to high-five and recognize three people who actually got Christmas cards through the mail to Karen and me. My niece Ashley was first and then my cousin Jerry and his wife from Redlands, CA got a card through. Just yesterday we got a nice card from Cherie Wical Sawyer, whom I knew when I was a student missionary in Botswana 38 years ago. Thanks so much, people, for making the effort to give us a real card. No packages have come through yet, so we are thinking about going to customs and see if they have anything for us.

We love and miss you all. God bless and we wish you the best for 2011.

Love,

Dan and Karen Clifford