More weekend, more HASH

Despite the large number of hydro-electric plants in Nepal, the country cannot supply enough electricity for all its residents, especially those in Kathmandu. For that reason, they have a load shedding schedule and depending on the area where you live or work, the electricity gets cut off at least once a day for a few hours.

That is why Friday was a long and slow day of work for most of us at the office. It was hard to get things done when the electricity got cut off twice in one day. However, a solid day of work it was, and some progress was made in testing this voltage regulator. In short, the device worked fine with an input voltage between 6.7 and 5.78, but anything below that it failed to charge the mobile phone. This has led to a reconsideration of how the charger was made, mainly because the batteries that EcoSystems uses come in user boxes with some complicated circuits in them that affect how the appliances we plug in function.

This user boxes are interesting to comment on. A very simple design: a wooden box, with a switch and a small light on it. The user box will disconnect the battery from the circuit to prevent over draining, thus prolonging its life time. The little light on top will indicate the user if the battery is empty or if there is something wrong with the userbox-appliance interaction. At the office there are a bunch of this user boxes connected to LEDs all over the place, just draining batteries 24/7 in order to test the batteries, the LEDs and the user boxes. One of the problems of doing this is that if the lights empty the batteries in the middle of the night when there is no one around, we would not be able to tell exactly how long that light was on for. For that reason I used some of that spare load shedding time to plug in "my alarm clock" to a solar panel so that when the LEDs go out the clock stops, telling us how long the light was on for.


















The end of the week came with an afternoon in Asan were Mike and I got a new transistor and 20 new light sensors. We used the opportunity to take a look at some mountaineering gear in Thamel before heading home.

Saturday was too epic for me to survive, but surprisingly enough I made it out in one piece. We decided to attend the HASH (a run that happens every Saturday, read my 2 post for more details or go to http://aponarch.com/hhhh/) but this time Mike and Brendan thought that riding bikes would not satisfy our desire for physical activity. Instead I was convinced to go on what would be a 30min slow jog to the meeting place. To our misery it turned into a 50min sprint up a mountain because we thought we were going to be late.

This week the HASH was absolutely astonishing. It was all going very well for the first 90min. Good pace, good views and fairly flat. Until the paper trails started to lead up the mountains. And these are not rolling hills from Ohio or nice looking Autumn New England mountains, these are pre-Himalayan steep painful mountains. So in a short time we gained incredible elevation and lost our breath. The reward though was to be able to see the snowy peaks in the distance across the valley of Kathmandu. Luckily we got a ride home, saving us a 50min run home after an intense 4 hour work out. A convenient ride I must say, because Mike got to fix a friends motorbike by changing the spark plug on the spot, earning him his new nick name: Sparky.

Then the festivities came up and we met up with the hashers at a small festival going on near our flat. Here we tried the local spirits, Roxy (or at least it is pronounced that way) which is made out of rice and tastes like a light tequila.

Sunday came with no rest and the Roxy did not make it easier. Having eaten only a cheese and egg croissant, we spent the whole day in Thamel getting all the gear we need to sustain ourselves for a month in the mountains. A very didactic task it was too, because we spent a lot of time talking to people about the trekking areas and particularly an Australian mountaineering veteran who convinced us to buy his gloves with a beer in one hand and a cup of tea on the other.

HASHers across the fields South of Kathmandu with the city at the back







































Mike and I tasting the local spirits at a festival with fellow HASHers

















Local festivities by a small Temple and surrounded by a large pool

Day 1 at EcoSystems

First day of work is always exciting, interesting and fast-moving. I was introduced to Nandu, our boss, and a few fellow employees, shown around the office and given my nice wide desk next to the window with a pleasant view of the fields outside of the city.

When the tour was over, the clock started to run and there was no time to lose. I started looking a the components of cell phone chargers and seeing how the one modified to work off 6VDC was working. Also realized that we were going to need a discharging station for cell phone batteries. This was made by putting together 52 LEDs that manage to discharge a full cell phone battery in 45min. It's fascinating how many things you could power with your cell phone battery; you know, if you are ever stuck in a James Bond situation, with a cell phone, a Petzl head lamp and AAA batteries, smash the headlamp, take the LEDs out, and use the cell phone battery to power the LEDs and deactivate the bomb. Remember to cut the red wire!!!!

The day ended with a conversation with Nandu, where I was told that if civil work broke in India or more bombs kept killing people in Pakistan, I would have to be evacuated out of Nepal because of my yellow and green hair.

Tuesday came and it turned out that we needed a few electronic components to make our own cell phone charger. Mike and I headed into the city and spent several hours walking around trying to get the right resistors, transistors, capacitors and diodes. After hours of walking and hundreds of conversations with locals that kept telling us that the store next door definitely had them, we found a shop who had all sorts of electronic components. It was also necessary to buy a light sensor and what he handed me seemed exactly like an LED, so I politely asked him if I could use his cell phone but as I started to remove the battery I was stopped by Mike who found the whole situation ridiculous.

Being in Thamel and Asan we took the oportunity to look into mountaneering gear, buying and rental options. We also stumbled upon this awesome buddhist temple, Itum Bahal. This beautiful place is right in the middle of the city, surrounded by crowded little buildings and you can only get to through small little alleys, and once you get into the open square, the huge dome with lines of colorful praying flags hanging from the tower in the middle to the buildings surrounding it, dominate the view.

A partly assembled version of the PedalPower

















LED lamps discharging batteries in their user boxes

















Mike and David going across a river using the wire bridge

















Yellowgreen hair by the Buddhist temple Itum Bahal

Introduction to Kathmandu

Upon arriving at the airport my initial disappointment of loosing a piece of luggage was overcome by the happiness of seeing Mike at the airport. After filling me in with the news from Kathmandu and EcoSystems he quickly instructed Naresh, our company driver, to take us to Rosie Hughes '07's house. There I was welcomed by a nice little crowd (which included 4 Dartmouth students or alumni) hosing down water from the roof and trowing a banana peel with which Mike seems to have stumbled and fell. A delicious first course in Kathmandu accompanied by gin and tonic.

Our going to bed at deep ours into the night seemed to be no excuse to forget our commitment to our fitness. The next day we woke up to attend the HASH (an acronym). This is an event where a bunch of foreigners, mostly but not exclusively Americans and Europeans, get together every Saturday somewhere in the outskirts of Kathmandu. The HASH has a leader(s) that changes from week to week, and that leader will run through a series of back country trails, brooks and back gardens leaving small trails of paper every couple of hundred meters. The rest of the group attending that day will try to follow his route as fast as possible and when the route is unclear people will go in different directions and when one of them finds the right route he/she will shoute 'on-on' to signal the rest that he has found the right route. The run lasts approximately 2 hours and is of unknown length.

This 2 hour run took the tiny bit of energy I had left after not sleeping for more than a couple of hours in 5 days, a 19 hours of travelling and biking through Kathmandu without a face mask (Kathmandu is a really polluted, smoky city) for an hour to get to the HASH.

Happy nonetheless, the weekend ended with a short shopping day in Thamel, the most commercial area of the city, looking for a present for David Brennan '07 who was flying back to Hanover on Sunday. After a brief goodbye at the airport, I got my remaining piece of luggage back and headed back home to get ready for my first day of work.

Bridges, batteries and mountains

This autumn offered an alternative to another term back in college, an alternative where learning happens quickly and continuously. The alternative came in the form of working for EcoSystems Pvt. Ltd. in Kathmandu, Nepal. Ecosystems is developing and already supplying a pedal power device where users can pedal to charge a battery used to provide LED lighting and power other appliances. Concurrently, the company builds cable car bridges across rivers, valleys and other areas where they are needed. These bridges consist on a human powered cable car that can transport 2 people at a time; an excellent resource for small villages and towns that are cut off from markets, schools and communication due to their geographical location.

Among the many tasks at EcoSystems Nepal we have to develop a mobile phone charger that works off the 6V battery, improve the design of the PedalPower and the bridges and lower manufacturing costs of both.

With the Nepali Dasai holidays coming soon, Brendan Huang '08, Mike Wood '10 and I are planning to head to the Khumbu region, particularly the large East-West valley south of Everest, to trek around the region and if the itinerary permits it, climb Island Peak and Lobuche East.