This is my first post here in Haveyoubeenhere Community. I'd like to present this video I made about searching for Red Pandas in the mountains of Nepal. I had some small funding from Earth Touch to cover the costs of the trip. So I asked my good buddy Gustavo from Spain to join me and we started from Kathmandu and travelled first by bus to a small village at the entrance to the Langtang Valley and then hiked up the valley with our guide Chimmii Lama. Chimmii is from Thulo Syabru and claimed to know exactly where to find this elusive critter.
We started by connecting with a gentleman named Hem Baral based in Kathmandu that gave us great insight in to the challenges facing the Red Panda and how and where we could best find one to capture on film. Hem explained to us that habitat enroachment has pushed the Red Panda deeper and deeper into the mountains far from any established trekking routes or villages so finding one would be not without considerable hardship!
Im sorry to report that after several days of pre-dawn starts and freezing hikes in the high altitude the nearest we got to filming a Red Panda was holding a a collection of bright green, still steaming Red Panda turds.....:) My guide Chimmii was super excited about this as it meant there was A Red Panda very close - probably gleefully watching us pick up his shit from behind a grove of bamboo I imagine.
To compound the challenges my friend Gustavo (2nd camera) couldn't handle the high altitude and we had to send him back down to lower altitude which meant I was lugging all the camera gear myself and doing everything with one camera. The village that we had used as a base was Tulo Shyphro. It's absolutely the most beautiful village I ever visited in Nepal. It sits on a high ridge and has the most incredible views of the Himalayan mountain range including peaks well over 7000m. The village itself is nowadays a popular stop for hikers descending from the Gosakuinda Lakes or starting the Langtang Valley trek. It has lots of beautiful old buildings with the ornate door and window frames.
So once I had returned empty handed from the high cloud forests (where there was most certainly Red Pandas as we had found their poo every day) I had to decide what I was going to tell Earth Touch as they had funded my trip and were eagerly awaiting the promised footage....:) So we rested for a few days where I cut this video with the graceful help from a professional VO artist. I purchased a couple of stock clips online of the pesky critters, added them to the trailer video and told earth Touch "send more money"
They said NO! hahaha. But we reached a compromise for a trip down to the Chitwan National Park to film Greater One-horned Rhinos - but that's a story for another post. I hope you like this video - it shows some wonderful scenery of the journey from Kathmandu to the mountains of the Langtang region of Nepal.