Tastes of Nepal

Nepal has amazing cuisine which I thought is also worth writing about. Contrary to common knowledge, it’s not really the same as Indian food – although it’s also a mixture of the tastes of the neighbouring countries, it has its own traits as well. It is true, that chilli and hot spices are used a lot – it’s pretty hard to find anything that is not spicy (or not sweet), they say that without spices the food is not food. There used to be a time for example, when I ate biscuits for lunch which was pretty strange for the locals – they said that since it’s not spicy, it’s no lunch. At the same time, all these spices differ from Indian ones: although they also use curry, different mixture of spices (masala) is more common.

Although at first it takes some time to get used to these kinds of food, by now I really enjoy eating at the small local places, that you can find everywhere on the street and where you can choose from a variety of local foods, just like momo (the pastry filled with vegies or buff or chicken), chowmin (veggie noodles), samosa (fried pastry filled with veggies), thupka (noodle soup with veggies or meat) and of course their national food the dal bhaat (rice with lentil soup an veggies) as well.

To bring the tastes of Nepal a bit closer, here are some recipes to try:

Dal Bhaat Tarkari

1.       Cook the rice in a usual way or in a pressure cooker.

2.       For the dal (lentil soup):

a.       Fry onion and garlic in the pressure cooker.

b.      Add turmeric powder and salt

c.       Add the lentils and cover it with about 3-4 times as much water

d.      Close the pressure cooker and let it cook. When it’s going to whistle, press the whistle down and let it cook more. Repeat this twice. At the third whistle turn the fire off and let it sit for 10 minutes, after that you can open the pressure cooker.

e.      At the same time fry some garlic and ginger in butter or ghee, then add this to the lentils.

f.        Add some more water, too, let it boil then turn off the fire.

3.       For the tarkari (veggies):

a.       You can use many different kinds of veggies to go with the dal bhaat. For example you can fry potatoes and onion and add some salt, ginger and garlic.

4.       For the pickles:

a.       Fry some onions

b.      Add tomatoes

c.       You can add garlic and ginger, too

For serving put some rice, veggies and pickles on a plate and the lentil soup in a separate ball. You can also put some ghee on the rice. When eating, the lentil soup should be poured on the rice. Nepalese people eat this just about every day (already at 10 in the morning!), eating by hand and using their fingers to mix all the ingredients. Be careful! It’s very tasty and very addictive! :)

Aloo Paratha: An originally Indian dish, which is a kind of bread, filled with potato (aloo) and served with veggie soup.

For the bread with potato:

1. Boil potato, peel it, cut it in small pieces and smash it by hand.
2. Add to the potato salt, turmeric, Sabji powder (veggie masala) and also some chopped onions.
3. Put the potato aside and make the pastry: Slowly mix some wheat flour with water, until it’s a consistent, one-piece ball. If you want to make plane roti (just plain bread itself, without potato), then just roll this pasta thin and fry it in some oil
4. Make small balls from the pastry make a hole on it and put the mashed potato inside. After this, close the ball.
5. Spray the ball with some flour and then roll it flat.
6. Fry it in little oil.

For the veggie soup:

1. Heat up some oil.
2. Add fenugreek seeds and wait until they turn to black.
3. Add some chopped onions, turmeric, and any veggies that you like – let them fry together.
4. Add some water and tomatoes and cook it covered.
5. At the end, add some Sabji masala a let it cook for a little more.

Ready!!! :)

Vivek’s Lamb Recipe: The other day, one of our friends’ prepared such a great dish with some lamb meat that I thought it’s also worth sharing it here.

1. Mix the chopped meat with salt, turmeric, red chilli powder, cumin powder and lots of chopped ginger and garlic – let it sit for at least 20 minutes.
2. Chop onions and fry them in the pressure cooker.
3. Add the meat as well and fry it.
4. Add potatoes and tomatoes (cut in 4 pieces).
5. Add water, close the pressure cooker and cook it for at least for 1 hour.

Aaaaand ready, too! Serve it with rice and enjoy!

By the way, as I got to know, you can also use chicken instead of lamb, but in this case you can also experiment with adding radish instead of potatoes..

 

Bhaktapur, Nagarkot, Changu Narayan and the sunrise in the fog

The list of the sights to see and have seen in Kathmandu valley is still not finished! :) Two weeks ago I spent a whole weekend wandering around the valley and visited the historical Bhaktapur, the village of Nagarkot and the world heritage site, Changu Narayan as well.

This was also my first two day long trip that I took alone, without any of the other volunteers. This was a challenge again to get around in the chaos of Nepal all alone, which filled me with excitement and satisfaction as well, after completing the trip without getting lost or producing any bigger disaster. Also, it was really nice to get out of the city little and have some autonomous time that now thinking about it, I’m missing a little bit.

Anyway, finally on a Saturday morning (after getting home pretty late because of trying to watch the football world cup that is sometimes shown here at 1am...) I set off early to walk to one of Kathmandu’s biggest bus park at Ratnapark. Finding a bus to Bhaktapur finally wasn’t as easy as I expected, but after I was directed to the old bus park, a pretty helpful bus driver pointed out a nice red bus to me, saying that that would take me to Bhaktapur. So this is how after about another 45 minutes of bus drive, I finally got to my first destination. Bhaktapur is a beautiful Newari city, one of the three royal cities and former kingdoms in Kathmandu valley, besides Kathmandu itself and Patan. It is also one of the world heritage sites in Nepal. Well, getting there, first you have to pay an entrance fee, which is pretty high (1500 Rs ~ around 12 Euros) but it is absolutely worth it. The whole town looks like if you just stepped into another century, full of beautiful temples and nice wooden decorations. It’s not only its Durbar Square that is fascinating, but the whole town has a special atmosphere – with all the nice buildings and the mountains in the background as well. As I’m already getting used to it when I’m travelling alone, again I found my guides for the city: first in a small Buddhist temple a monk started explaining to me about their heritage while also putting a tikka on me (you know, the red spot on the forehead which means blessing), and later another guy took me around Durbar Square and offered to accompany me to my next destination in Nagarkot to help me find the way and a cheap accommodation. Well, I didn’t take this offer, but it was still nice to listen to his explanation about Bhakatapur.

After this I looked for another bus to get me to Nagarkot. Well, this bus ride was an adventure again. Since the bus was already kinda full when I got there, they told me to sit in the front, almost by the bus driver. I don’t know if it was because of this, because I had a full view of the road or the trip would have been crazy anyway, but finally it was so far my scariest bus ride. Imagine an all the time bending road that looks like to have been designed for one vehicle, turning continuously left and right in the forest, while  other vehicles are coming from the other direction all the time, too, making the bus slow down, stop, or just stay on the sides. The distance between Bhaktapur and Nagarkot is not long, but because of these road conditions it took about one hour – which actually was still shorten than what I expected.

Getting to Nagarkot there came the next adventure: how to find a cheap accommodation. Since on the websites I could only find terribly expensive options – at least in Nepalese measures – and since I didn’t plan to spend the weekend in a fancy hotel anyway, I didn’t book any accommodation in advance. When I got off the bus, I got ‘attacked’ by a man from a hostel right away, who insisted on me looking at his rooms. Although he was offering better prices than what I have found before, I wanted to go for the cheapest option so I left him – even despite of the fact that it just started raining pretty hard and looking for a cheap room while totally soaked didn’t seem to be the best position for bargaining. Anyway, again this was the moment when I kinda found my local guides: some guys who were just chatting by a small cafe saw me walking up and then and started suggesting me the cheapest hostels. Although these turned out to be already full, soon I found myself picked up by one of them on a motorbike, riding to one of his friends, who was supposed to have a just newly built small guesthouse. Getting there I found a really local-looking place with a small room and a tiny Nepali style bathroom included – very-very simple place, but cheap and perfect for spending there just one night (Him Chuli Guesthouse). Well, after having a tea here together with the owners and later with ‘my guide’ as well, at his place, and waiting for the rain to stop, finally I took my first walks around the village.

Nagarkot itself seemed pretty much like a double-sided place to me: on one side it’s full of very fancy hotels and lots of foreigners, while on the other side it seems like a very simple, typical Nepalese village as well, where villagers are living their daily life – carrying grass, selling vegetables, going for water, getting their children ready for school... – just right by all the foreigners. It seems like an originally pretty poor village to me where they were clever enough to realize the beautiful location of the village and starting building a tourism business based on this creating this interesting, true faced image of the village.

After watching the sunset on the hillside in the company of a group from India, and – just to refresh the memories of the trekking – going to bed at 8 (!!!) o’clock, I woke up pretty early next morning and started my about 6 km long walk to the view tower from which I was supposed to see a beautiful sunrise. Although I saw some pretty nice views on the way, facing the hills all around, and low clouds among them, by the time I got to the view tower, I wasn’t so lucky to see anything: we were literally covered in fog.

After the view tower, the plan for this way a few hours hike (16 km – about 3-4 hours) to the world heritage temple, Changu Narayan. The first part of the road, to Telkot village lead through all kinds of small villages, with people sitting by their houses, goats wondering all around and people carrying for example big piles of dray grass. Although according to all the reviews, I read before, this part of the road was said to be less fascinating, I enjoyed this part the most – saying ‘Namaste’ to all the people, making contacts and asking for the right direction... In contrast with this, the next part of the road lead through a beautiful, thick forest, where although the way was pretty obvious, so there wasn’t a great danger of getting lost, but still, you could walk for more than an hour without even meeting one single person... It took me about 3 hours to finally get to the village of Changu Narayan, which is actually famous for its ancient temple that was still built in the 4th century. There were long stairs leading up to the temple, surrounded with colourful shops and also for example thanka (traditional Tibetan) painting schools. In the temple I again felt like a kinda star: I met a whole school who were just on a field trip and had to answer all different kinds of questions about the temple. Well, some of the students used the excuse of asking for answers to come up to me, which finally resulted having all the class and the teacher as well surrounding me, asking about me and taking pictures together with me as well! I even got the contact number of the school and an invitation to visit them somewhen! :)

Since after the visit in Changu Narayan, it was still early afternoon, I finally decided to instead of taking a bus back to Bhaktapur, follow the about another 6 km long highway back to Bhaktapur on feet, from where (after some tasty samosa as a snack for lunch) I took my bus back to Kathmandu. On the bus I had time for a rough calculation and realized that together with my walk home within Kathmandu, I took more than 40 km on feet just in one day which made it a bit more understandable, why my feet were in a bit shaky condition.

Visiting Kirtipur

Let’s look at another beautiful destination that I have visited a few weeks ago: Kirtipur. The village of Kirtipur is located just a few km from Kathmandu – around 7 km, but from Sanepa district, where we actually live, maybe it’s even closer. So one day, following travel book’s advises, we decided together with Stella, the Spanish volunteer to take a walking tour from Patan (remember, the district full of temples that I wrote about a long time ago) to Kirtipur and also Chobar – a small hill from where you are supposed to have really nice view on the valley. Well, probably the travel books didn’t take into consideration that we were living in Sanepa, since because our apartment is almost halfway between Patan and Kirtipur, it turned out to be a pretty big loop to start our trip in Patan. As a result of the long way there and back, after Patan I continued my way alone to Kirtipur which turned out to be around one hour of walking distance from Sanepa – where half of the road lead around Kathmandu, but the rest led by the feet of Chobar hill and through nice landscapes.

When I arrived to Kirtipur I immediately realized how different it was from Kathmandu: I just arrived to a real village, with no noise and peaceful atmosphere and with the villagers sitting on the street chatting or selling their products...Since my hand-drawn map of Kirtipur didn’t really reflect the reality, I decided to explore the village just by wandering around, with no exact destination at all. This is how I first found a pretty Thai Buddhist temple, where the monk invited me to go inside the temple and look at the huge golden Buddha statue there. It was also here that I met an interesting man and a young boy. To my surprise, the boy even knew where Hungary was, that it was neighbour to Austria – later I got to know that his parents were living in Vienna and he was kind of adopted by the man. They also suggested me to visit Bagh Bhairav temple and showed the direction in the way of uphill. While climbing up the stairs and asking for directions from the locals, this was when I met my companion for the rest of the day: a guy ran after me and offered to show me the way to the temple. Well, this finally resulted in showing me not only one temple, but whole Kirtipur: I felt like in a labyrinth going up and down and visiting all kinds of sights and temples – both Buddhist and Hindu. I have seen a tree with three different types of leaves – that if I remember well, represent Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva while the tree itself grew round a little statue inside. I have also seen a free village museum showing the villages occupations and traditions. While walking along the streets where the windows were decorated with thick wooden carving, according to Newari culture, my guide was explaining about many traditions of the Newari people from the funerals (like the cutting of the hair if someone close has died) to the ways of asking for a child from gods. I have seen the goddess for the women who they worship if they haven’t had a child, I got to know that college students visit Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge before exams and I have also seen the remaining of some animals sacrificed to the gods at different festivals – which as I got to know, are pretty frequent in Kirtipur based on Newari culture. Later – while my guide invited me to one of his friend’s house – I even tried a new kind of Nepalese drink, the rice beer, which have a white colour and a kind of sour taste. Well, I wouldn’t call it really beer, but finally it was still pretty nice.

Having spent all the afternoon in Kirtipur, I didn’t have enough time to still visit Chobar – so that trip still remains for another time. Since it was already getting dark, I had a fast walking trip back to Sanepa just to finish the long day with a nice Nepalese dinner.