Night Life in the Jungle

After a long day of hunting rhino and not finding any...

we stopped to relax at Sunset Beach...

and borrowed money from our escort so that we could split a beer.  I didn't take money into the jungle again after my former fiasco, Honesty and Poverty.

Dinner was buffet style with loads of yummy vegetables similar to Indian style cooking.

They were still working on the Maruni Sanctuary Lodge.  I can imagine a roaring fire here in the winter.  It will be spectacular.

They have a cultural program after dinner.  These Tharu boys are dancing traditional dances.  Again, I have the ghostly orbs floating through my photos, but not every photo.

It is inappropriate for the village girls to be out after dark so they are unable to participate in these dances.  However, they do have a dance that is traditionally preformed by a boy wearing a dress.

The boys are really expert at twirling their sticks.  Remember that we were on our jungle walk with two men carrying sticks.  I believe that they would have been quite capable of frightening off many wild creatures with the sticks, but I am still glad that we didn't run into an old hungry tiger.  On one of my visits we walked past a place where a woman had been eaten only two weeks before.  She was walking on a well used path through the jungle, alone.

After our lovely day in the jungle we received some very distressing news.  It was the very thing that I fear the most when I travel to Nepal.  A strike was called in the Terrai for the following day.  Strikes can be violent, but not always.  My biggest concern was that I had only one more day to finish all of my business in Kathmandu.  I had made promises to finalize orders and pay several craftspeople.  They day after that, we were supposed to leave Nepal.  If the strike continued, we would miss our flights home.  This was the very reason that I skipped my trip to Nepal several years in a row.