I just finished washing my windbreaker/rain-jacket in the shower with a heavy-duty cleanser.  Ever since the jungle, it’s never quite smelled right…  That reminds me, I never did journal/blog about that part of Nepal.

First off, it meant another day on the highway, exhaust pipes of endless and uncountable trucks pumping that cartoonishly thick black smoke.  With the heat and the wind I expect the first drops of the next shower to turn dark like the drops of spilled coffee drying on the side of the cup.  If you pick your nose after a day on that highway it comes out like a little black worm, all muddy and smudgy.

The trucks are all junky old things that have been patched together innumerable times, and don't manage much speed, which I guess is why they tend to pass on the right, on a two lane road, as they go around completely blind corners.  It's a slow motion maneuver, and they often get back into their lane with a few feet of space before the next oncoming behemoth.  There's nothing you can do about this practice, so you sit back and trust your luck, but on the trip to Chitwan one of the other volunteers was napping, opened his eyes and looked out the front windshield to see a massive dumptruck headed straight for us, nice and close.  With the truth serum of sleep making him honest, he shouted "Oh God!" as the truck swerved back onto its side just in time, the wind of its close passage shaking our bus.

Chitwan National Park (the name comes from Sanskrit for “Heart of the Jungle”) borders a wildlife reserve to the east and an Indian National Park to the south to form 800 square miles of verdant jungle packed with a soul-uplifting variety of animals, the most famous (charismatic mega-fauna) are rhino, crocodile, sloth bear, and some cat thing called a…what was it?…tiger.  We saw the first two, and enjoyed staring into the jungle for the second pair.

Chitwan gets something like 2,500 mm of rain during the monsoon season, which, for us non-metric people is equivalent to 1.3 shitloads of precipitation.  The humidity when the sun comes out turns it into the interior of a rice cooker.  You strip off your rain jacket and swelter, then when a nice fresh breath of air comes you enjoy it then put your raincoat back on because the rain follows that wind by about 30 seconds, and feels pretty darn good.

On the edge of the park is the small town of Sauraha, where we went for the things tourists need, namely souvenirs, bottles of water, and an ATM.  Tourism has developed one street to provide these things, which has earned the nickname "Little Thamel".  I see what they mean, but elephants don't casually walk down the street in Thamel.

There are a lot of elephants in Sauraha; between the breeding center, an anti-poacher ranger force, the ones at the park for safari's, and the ones owned by hotels, I'm (very roughly) guessing there must be about 60 elephants living in that little town.  We were only there a couple days, but it is surprising how quickly people get used to seeing elephants wandering around.  I must be a city-yokel because I just couldn’t get over these massive animals, looking at you both warmly and impassively, and always with intelligence.

One of the tourist activities is bathing the elephants in the river, but the pouring rain makes the river dirty and the elephants don’t like it, so for our elephant bath we watched it following the mahout’s barked instructions to fill its trunk from a well-pipe, then spray it over its back and us, while we scrubbed its skin with pieces of broken bricks.  Now that’s micro-abrasion skin therapy.  We found a couple big purple lumps that seemed different, but didn’t come off when we scraped them with the bricks.  It’s hard to get leeches out of elephant skin, the mahout really had to twist and yank the things.

Another tourist highlight is the elephant-back safari through the jungle.  The movement of those things is tremendous, ponderous, and unique.  It was pouring down rain during ours, so no pictures after these first couple, which is a bummer because we sat a couple meters away (ie above) a mother and baby rhino, eating rain-washed leaves and looking slightly bored with us.

We saw a couple different types of rather stunning deer as well, but no tigers or sloth bears, which may be good since sloth bears go for your eyes when confronted with humans, and their massive claws tend to remove most of the face.  At one point the elephants apparently didn’t like something?  The mahouts were trying to lead them in one direction and they stopped and all started trumpeting, balking and shying away.  It was beautiful, stunning, and more than a little freaky, sitting on one’s back while it is obviously agitated.  Did you know they used the sound of an elephant trumpeting for a large portion of the T-Rex roar in Jurassic Park?  You can hear it.

Then there was the worst part.  Have you seen/read Like Water for Elephants?  You know the stuff about the bull hook?  The mahouts mostly carry stout sticks, though some have the vicious metal spike and barb weapons, and they whack the elephants on the top of the head with them.  Hard.  Really hard.  I tried to convince myself they have such thick skin that they could barely feel it, but when struck they make a crying sound that was one of the worst things I have ever heard.  It is so full of feeling, and made me think of a child being abused and not even knowing why.  As our driver hit our elephant we could feel it shaking, and the vibration of its cries running through our bodies.

I don’t want to travel to a new place and start telling people how to be, but it was horrible.  We made our dark looks and remonstrances as loud as possible without being confrontational, hoping it would dissuade him from further use, hoping customer displeasure can change the practices of centuries.  I assume they are used to the squeamish looks from tourists, but hopefully it will have an effect?

We also took a couple walks with our hotel guide, Laxman, who had a weeping abscess or something on his foot.  It had a big swollen lump, which he had drained but didn't go away, so it just leaked fluid continuously, and the swelling was reaching up his foot in a new direction in a big bulb of inflated skin.  When we would stop and all be looking at something, he would bend down and poke at it.

Our weekend had a pretty tight schedule, and Laxman would try to keep us moving.  We were on vacation though, and since we were the guests he couldn’t be very forceful, so he started asking my help in curtailing the endless photoshoots that would develop whenever we held still.  "Okay, now take one with my camera.  And his.  And hers.  And you’re going to facebook these to me, right?  Wait, the flash didn't go."

I don't really like that role, but at one point I was talking to Laxman while one of those “okay, now with my camera from this side, now that side, now underneath” sessions, and he got a call from the hotel boss, yelling at him to hurry us up and get us back in time for the next event.  I could see the helpless worry in his eyes.  The boss can fire him any time he feels like, on the spot.  There are very few jobs there, if you get one, you have to hold on to it.  Laxman’s foot must have been searingly painful, but he kept leading tours, every day.  He misses a tour, he doesn’t get paid.  He misses a few tours, he gets fired.  We miss an event we paid for, even if it's our own fault, and he gets in trouble for it.

We went to the elephant breeding center, which is one of the few other employers in the area.  Plus, it is a government job, so includes a pension, which is practically unheard of in Nepal.  Those guys spend a lot of them time up in the trees, gathering firewood and fodder, and the interview for the job is who can climb up and down the fastest.  The competition is so fierce, these guys running up and down the trees, that injuries and even fatalities are common.

The breeding center has about a hundred staff, and the job of cooking that much dal bhat twice a day was killing the cooks after only a couple years, so nowadays they have a rotating work schedule, with a different team each night responsible for the largest pots of rice I have ever seen.

The breeding center has a line of females (cows) and they initially brought in one bull once a year.  Eventually they would have had to worry about inbreeding, but that problem has solved itself since for the last decade or so, all the babies born there have been the result of incursions by wild elephants.

Laxman was telling us about one bull who stays nearby, and has learned about the load sharing and power outages.  He waits for the perimeter lights to go out, knocks over a section of the now un-electrified fence, and visits his girlfriends.  This is an incredibly powerful animal, and seeing entire sections of the steel fence that he had bashed out was impressive, to say the least.

The center has a pair of young twins, which are extremely rare, and a younger one who was ridiculously adorable.  I did not know something that size could be such a...kitten.  They have a dance they do when they want food, rocking forward and back, alternatively lifting a front foot then the opposite rear one.  They know when mealtime is approaching, and as we walked down the row, most of them were doing this rocking dance.  Pachyderm choreography.  The baby will do the dance at an adult elephant if there's no humans around.

Somehow I don't have a good picture of the little guy, but you can see him in there, back a bit on the left.

He could roam freely, but all the adults were chained at the ankle.  I was not sure how I felt about the use/exploitation? of these incredible animals.  They are well cared for, and Laxman was telling us about one old bull who was retired and set free in the park, but kept coming back to live at the center.  You can choose to see that as dependency and domestication, or as friendship (and comfort)...  The only ones I saw being mistreated (in my judgement) were the safari ones, who are kept under such strict discipline, perhaps because they're carrying a load of Nepal's only income on their backs.

It was the ones who patrol the jungle against poachers that I really wanted to spend time with...I wonder if I can volunteer as a park warden...  (In Sauraha there is the base the rangers live out of, complete with barbed wire, entrenchments, and pill boxes.  Poachers are serious business, and the type of people who will do the things they do, are obviously ruthless.)

So no tigers on our jungle trip, but as you can probably tell, I was fairly enamoured of the elephants.  We took a canoe trip to see some crocodiles and gharials, which were cool too, but I remember most clearly the site of coming around a bend to find a man standing in the middle of the river.  On top of it.

I was wondering if we had found Jesus (and surprise, he’s Hindu!) but then I noticed a smooth curve of rock beneath him, and a small one off to the side.  Of course, the one he was standing on turned out to be an elephant’s side, and the small one was the tip of its trunk, which was made clear a second later when he barked a command, and the entire massive animal lunged upward out of the water, rolling to its feet and up onto the riverbank in a display of power and majesty that left me breathless.

 (PS.  If you go outside of the monsoon season, you can "help" with that bathing process, presumably being dumped in the river at the end.  I will try my best not to be jealous when you do.)

Today at the gym

I have a couple weeks lag time before my new job starts, and I am enjoying the freedom of it immensely.  One of my regular activities is going to the gym, trying to replace the parts of me that withered in Nepal.  I just got back from there, where I followed my normal scheme of rowing machine, weights, then the fancy German circuit machines that increase the resistance on the reverse side of every exercise.  So high-tech!

I use the three weight benches on the side with the windows.  Today I was on the far right, with a guy who looked like Rod Corddry’s beefy younger brother (but with more Celtic tattoos) on my left.  The benches are kinda close together, so we tacitly agreed to alternate our exercises so we wouldn’t whack each other’s hands, which would undoubtedly result in broken fingers and much grunting.

I had just started my turn when it happened.  Over the radio a new song filled the room.  Risin’ up,back on the street, did my time, took my chances.  My ears perked up.  Went the distance now I’m back on my feet, just a man and his will to survive.  One of the bizarre things about gyms the world over is how seriously everyone takes themselves, but I could not keep the smile from my face.

So many times it happens too fast, you trade your passion for glory  I was starting to lose it, and could no longer lift those suddenly humorous things I was holding.  It’s not every day you find yourself in a Rocky montage.

Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past, you must fight just to keep them aliiiive. 

Mr. Corddry was looking at me to see what the deal was.  I think I was shaking a little…so he probably just assumed I was tired.

But when the chorus ripped out I couldn’t take any more, and had to sit down and just enjoy the moment.  Sing it with me now

It’s the eye of the tiger, it’s the thrill of the fight, risin’ up to the challenge of our rival, and the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night, and he’s watchin’ us all with the eeeeeeye…of the tiger.

Kathmandu's Durbar Square

The Kathmandu Valley has three main cities, Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur, though Kathmandu (KTM) has basically swallowed Patan.  They used to be rivals (after one kingdom was split between three sons) who competed to have the biggest, most ornate, most impressive buildings, which were clustered around the palaces.  So now each city has an area of temples, a palace, and monuments called Durbar Square.

They are the required tourist sites, so our first day in Kathmandu we walked down through the frenetic streets of rickshaws, motorcycles, dust, cows, dogs, garbage, vendors, and the constant stimulation of colors, smells, and sounds that felt like a rugby game for the brain

KTM’s square, more than the others, is chaotic, crowded, and that remarkable blend of sacred and profane that characterizes the developing world in my mind.  It’s the piles of garbage gathered and left to rot in the sun around temples and stupa’s on back streets.  The tourist kitsch pedalled out of ancient palaces.  Muddy prayer flags fallen in a heap.  It’s the goats walking around the Dattatraya Temple in Bhaktapur, dropping crap pellets in all the carved oil-lamp holders they’re stepping over.  It’s the taxi’s and motorcycles parked under the Maju Deval temple, and the exhaust stains on crimson banners.  Spray-painted slogans and pictures of Vishnu and Ganesh.  It’s the offerings given every morning and the stray dogs eating them and leaving a steaming pile of shit behind.  It’s the sacred cows (and sometimes non-castrated bulls) left to wander the streets after being offered in ceremonies of the devout, which graze in the piles of rotting garbage on street corners, hooves battered from a life on pavement.

It's a living city after all, and the laundry has to dry someplace.

We walked around the square that hot morning, trying to remember details from the guide book read before leaving the hotel (I can’t bring myself to walk around those places with the book open in my hands).  We were just discussing finding a café to get a lassi and read up on what the hell we were looking at when a chipper little fellow approached us with a very “official” looking laminated guide badge with his picture on it.

When we were in Tikal two years ago I waved off all the guides automatically, and after an hour of wondering what the hell each impressive pyramid was used for, decided maybe we should have sprung for a guide.  So when this fellow waved his badge long enough to see but not really inspect, I heard him out.

It was the usual lines about him studying history at a local university and yada yada yada and today is a very special day, when I can get you in to see something special, but it closes in an hour.  He wanted about $4.

So we had a guide.  He told us his name was “Chico” because previous tourists had told him he looked Peruvian, that he didn’t like Israeli’s, and that he met his wife half an hour before he married her.  Chico was a nice enough fellow, but didn’t seem to actually know anything about Durbar Square or its monuments.

He was handy for keeping the other touts away though, and at the Trailokya Mohan Narayan temple (whose window carvings date back to 1680 by the way) he spoke with one of the guys resting from their never-ending work of carrying massive burdens across town on their backs.  Chico smiled and told me the guy had agreed to let me try his burden, and that I was lucky, it wasn’t very heavy that day.  I fit the greasy strap over my forehead and stood up to find that apparently local’s aren’t used to this sight, and a surprisingly large crowd had gathered to watch me hobble around.  No, that wasn’t embarrassing or anything.  (That’s one of the things I love about travelling.  I can humiliate myself, and be anonymous again ten minutes later.)

After the tour he wanted to show us the best view of the square, and surprise, it’s a restaurant!  So we had a snack and offered to buy him something.  He ordered a big plate of fried rice and a beer.  The beer in Nepal costs twice as much as a meal and comes in gigantic bottles, it’s gotta be a liter in those puppies, or at least ¾.  Chico downed his beer and began telling us more and more about his arranged bride.  She was okay, but his mother-in-law…  He had a number of interesting things to say about his new mother dearest, which included the fact that she won’t let him drink any alcohol.  Luckily they eat fast in Nepal, so we finished our food and ran before he could get too gabby.

Here Chico is in the mirror of the Ganesh temple that you have to visit before beginning any journey.  This includes trekkers, so supposedly Tenzing and Hillary did a puja here before leaving for the first summiting of Everest.  It is described as one of the four most important Genesh shrines in the valley; I had to lead Chico to where it was.  (The mirror is provided so worshippers can check the tikka’s they self-apply from the provided materials.)

We ended up coming back to KTM’s Durbar Square with our volunteer group.  For that visit (the director) Rajesh asks one or two people to serve as tour guides for the others.  K and I volunteered, and after a little more research could talk about the small temple to Narayan, whose primary statue was stolen in 1766, and had not been replaced by 1768 when the city was conquered, so the conqueror just filled the void with his own choice, Bhagwati.

And could point out the elaborately carved balcony where the royal family used to watch festivals, back when there was a royal family (Nepal’s monarchy was abolished in 2008).

And about the theory that the famous erotic carvings on the roof struts of many temples may be intended to protect the structure from lightning, since the goddess of it is a shy female, so she would be too embarrassed to visit a structure with such explicit images.  (I think this was made up to please tourists.  I find it more likely that they just liked sex, or even wanted to inform the masses, the world’s first self-help books.  And given that at least one temple in Bhaktapur shows elephants doing it in basically the missionary position, I think they were also just entertaining themselves.)

And the smaller square in the corner, closed most of the year, where in 1846 a prince massacred most of the royal family, paving the way (in blood) for the corrupt and selfish Rana pseudo-dynasty that ruled and neglected Nepal for the next 101 years.  Every year they sacrifice 100’s of buffalo and goats there during Dashain (which begins in a couple weeks).  (There was another royal massacre in 2001, in case that sounds familiar.)

And that the temple with the often-photographed statues of Shiva and his consort Parvati looking out the window, may actually be built on a much older platform which was used for dances and other religious rites centuries beforehand.  I think it was during that anecdote that one of the Dutch girls stepped back and threw up in the street.

Nepal is cleaner than India, which is famous for giving all tourists a case of “Delhi Belly”, but a lot of visitors to Nepal still get a case of the Kathmandu Quickstep.  Luckily for the Dutchling, hers was coming out the top that afternoon.  She was embarrassed, the locals were pretty uninterested, and I realized that if you are going to throw up in a UNESCO World Heritage Site, this is the one to do it in.  It fit right in.

Here's Chico again, the massive Maju Deval on the left and rickshaws behind, trying to make a buck in Nepal.  So much beauty, so much poverty; so much nobility and desperation and more world than we can ever hope to know.

Traveling Home

We headed from our home in Nepal to our home in Belgium (sometimes the blessings of life overwhelm me) and had a layover in Bahrain.

As I said, we found the Bahrain airport a somewhat unnerving place on the way over, with that febrile Middle Eastern tension, dramatic white robes and scowling faces, burqa’s and subservient women’s positions, and not a smile to be seen, all mixed with the exhausted exhilaration of travellers en route to and from adventures, plus the nervous and maybe homesick faces of workers or migrants on their way to new jobs and lives, all in a setting made rather surreal by the presence of a Starbucks and a Chili’s restaurant.  Looking out the window at the Middle East, and hearing someone order a grande nonfat latte, all after spending two months hearing only broken English, makes for a weird afternoon.

There’s a massive US military presence in tiny Bahrain, so a noticeable percentage of the people there have the beefy solidity, scouring eyes, and short haircuts of servicemen (though I though the military had its own planes, so can’t but wonder if these guys were “contractors.”  I almost asked one guy, but he looked like he would kill me with his stir-stick if I spoke to him.).  I suspect the Starbucks and Chili’s make for the closest thing to home for American troops, and indeed I felt like I had flown from Kathmandu to Bahrain with a layover in Kansas.  It’s like a redneck’s private nightmare: a strip mall in the Heartland where most of the passerby are Muslims in full desert regalia, and there is a picture of Sheikh Hamad ibn Isa Al Kalifah smiling in his keffiye hung on top of the chili pepper logo.

Ramadan had ended the previous day, and I sat in a mix of amusement, guilt, and pity as men with bellies the size of Texas (or a Texan’s) stuffed home fries into their faces, guzzled soda from those oversized plastic faux-steins with jug handles, and tapped at Iphones with greasy fingers.  It was like America, only the customers were extra demanding and condescending to the staff.

I ate only natural foods all summer: rice, vegetables, and little pieces of chicken or buffalo (or goat lung at the barbecue) a couple times, all of which were most likely grown within the valley.  Now I was faced with an American-sized Ranch Chicken Sandwich with “tangy wing sauce” and a slab of meat larger, whiter, and more texturally consistent than anything you will ever find on a Nepali (i.e. natural) chicken.  It was awesome.  For the first third.  The second third was fine and dandy, and the final third was…challenging.  I was glad K was there to try the home fries…  Please honey, "try" all of them?

There I am, still wearing the kata scarf that I was given in the Nepali/Hindu farewell ceremony with Rajesh's family, the red tika dot on the forehead recently worn/washed off, and a monster food-thing in hand.  Given my mental state at the time, it is appropriate that I am blurry, while my delightful destroyer is solid.  The three meals before leaving Kathmandu, plus the airplane “food,” meant this was my fifth meal that day (or day-ish unit of time).  That may have been part of why I couldn’t sleep very well on the flight to London.  Oy, the belly rats were discontent, lemme tell ya.

With the lack of sleep and culinary irresponsibility weighing down my mind and body, we landed at Heathrow.  As we approached I marvelled at the giant office/apartment/university buildings, which looked like oversized batteries, a dozen storeys tall.  Surely they don’t need so many?  And the double decker buses looked almost realistic as we approached terra firma.  The British mastered uniformity (see: row houses) and exported it around the world for mixed results, an arguably benevolent disease.

We were in row 46, and it took awhile before our turn for the long walk through the 45 preceding rows, which looked like they had been the setting for a three day rockstar binge.  I am always amazed by how much mess humans make.  More garbage than I can account for, socks draped over armrests and is that a pair of underwear stuffed in the seatback pocket?

We both needed a bathroom visit, Heathrow is massive, and Italians are histrionic to the point of the ridiculous, so it took longer than we expected to make it to the Brussels Airlines desk for our boarding pass.  Once we got there we encountered some local fauna.  The British Grumpy Desk Beast is similar to its counterparts in other nations, but is characterized by a bulging gut that springs open a crucial button on the shirt front to leave a peaking zone of pasty belly.  Apparently undershirts are not part of the Heathrow dress code.  If it had been a video game monster, that would be the weakpoint you have to shoot/hit with a pineapple.

This Grumpy Desk Beast was fully mature, so it had some measure of influence over the lives of others which combined with the characteristic cantankerousness of the breed to make it bark at us “what time’s ya flight?...Na, ye won’t make it now, will you.”  (It was not phrased as a question.)  Our flight was scheduled to take off in 27 minutes.

This particular desk habitat was shared by a female Helpful Employee, a lovely species that unfortunately is seriously threatened by climate change.  Helpful Employee asked “which gate is it leaving from?” and scooped a phone up from under the desk, but Grumpy Beast swatted that idea with “if I knew that I wouldn’t be doing this, would I?  No.”  I asked if they could tell us the gate and we could try to run for it, the Beast pressed its lips together and its tightened eyes shouted “Run, eh?  Cuz it’s just that easy for you spring chickens, isn’t it?  No!”  And continued aloud “you’ll have to lad yourselves and try again.”

I put my backpack loaded with a stolen airplane blanket and 32 hours awake on my back and asked with, I must say, an impressive level of politeness “I’m sorry, what does ‘lad yourself’ mean?”

The Desk Beast looked at me with beady eyes barely restrained by thick glasses and said “yes, lad yourself.  (pause and scowl)  Gate 16.”  Feeling the likelihood of physical violence from one party or the other increasing, we opted to go see what Gate 16 was like.  Luckily it was staffed by another Helpful Employee, this one male.  I plan to go back and see if I can introduce the two Helpfuls to each other in the hope that they will form a breeding pair and continue the species.

Turns out we didn’t need to “lad” ourselves, but “land” ourselves, which meant we had to exit the airport, going through customs and border control and all that crap, reach the sidewalk outside Heathrow (hello bonny old England!) and then turn around and come back in the front door to reach the ticket desk for Brussels Airlines.  Apparently there was no way to transmit our need to be rescheduled outside of the security screened portion of the airport.  (When I go back for my Helpful Breeding Program, remind me to bring them a pair of telephones as a breeding present.)

I don’t know if it was the small Ganesh figurines we were carrying in our pockets (the elephant-headed Hindu god of fortune) or if England’s population of Helpful Employees is in fact robust, but the rest of the people we dealt with were delightful.  Shy Christopher at the check-in desk with his slightly oversized suit jacket and quiet voice deserved a hug.  The ticket desk guy wanted to hear about trekking possibilities in Nepal and to be honest I would love to go back and hike the Annapurna’s with the guy.  Even the grandfatherly customs official is invited to my birthday party.

We had just enough time to grab a bite to eat before our rescheduled flight, during which we saw some additional fauna, including the Ridiculously Attractive Scruffy Young Irish Lad With A Guitar, As If He Wasn’t Going To Get Laid As Easily As Breathe Already.  (I have observed that an acoustic guitar is the second most powerful tool in the human arsenal for procuring the attentions of the human female, only exceeded in power by a good Irish/Scottish accent, so this strumming Irish sonuvabeach with a scruffy beard and soulful blue eyes was just overkill.)

We landed in Brussels just about 24 hours after leaving Rajesh’s place, and it was good and peculiar to be back.  I saw my first car in months pass us on the lefthand side when it was legal to do so (just as lanes are something of a western concept, so are sides of the road).  Our baggage never popped out onto the conveyer belt but filling out the claim form was easy and they dropped the bags off the next day.  On the train we met a pair of gentlemen from Burkina Faso who wanted us to take their picture and then take one of us, and whose smiles shone brightly enough to blot out the reflected glare off the Desk Beast’s exposed paunch in my tender bruised memory.

So now I’m back in Belgium.  Still not sure exactly how that feels.  I flush the toilet with water cleaner than what I’ve been drinking all summer.  I walk down the street and no one looks at me; after all, no reason to stare at the white person in Belgium.  Eventually I know this anonymity and impersonality will grate on me a bit, but for now it is blessedly peaceful; I no longer feel like a diplomat onstage, representing The West.  I have a stunning variety of clothes to choose from, and best of all: none of them stink.  I don’t think I’ve heard a single car horn yet…and I may erupt into a hymn of gratitude for it.

But there are no little voices calling out questions or answers.  And there are no scents of cardamom ghosting around.  The only Buddhist chants around are the ones we brought with us (turns out that CD should have been titled “Hippies with a guitar sing Buddhism” but it’s still good).  I assume I have begun the inevitable process of forgetting.  I am supposed to start a new job in a couple weeks, though suddenly my prospective employer is not returning my emails.

Life goes on, for me, Nepal, and Grumpy Desk Beasts around the globe.

Last day in Kathmandu

The original schedule for our last day in Nepal was to get up at 4:00 AM to catch the morning flight to Bahrain for a 14 hour layover before continuing on to London.  I prepared myself for a long day of granola bars and airplane food.  Airlines seem to usually have two flights per day out of Kathmandu, and luckily they switched us to the evening flight, cutting our layover down to 2 hours.

That was welcome news, since we found the Bahraini airport a rather unnerving place the first time (so very much tension and so very many burqa’s), and though international airports are inherently interesting places, 14 hours is a long time to people-watch in the same hallway.

So instead we had another day in Kathmandu, starting with a leisurely goodbye to our three remaining program-mates (the others had all been voted off the island or eaten by sloth bears) as they departed for a village-to-village trek whose details made me jealous.  Then we walked into Basundhara for a masala omlet (sic), wandered a bit, had super-spiced veggie momos (a Nepali/Tibetan version of pot stickers), a nap, back into town for chicken butter masala curry with basmati rice and garlic roti (you can see where my priorities lay), then headed for the airport.

On the way we dropped off two Finnish girls at the orphanage where they will be volunteering for two weeks.  They were sweet girls, but their youth and green-ness were painfully obvious as they chattered away instead of paying attention to Rajesh (the program boss and superhero) even as he explained how to walk there (they would be going alone starting the next morning).

I admire Rajesh immensely for many reasons, one of which is how he somehow manages to shepherd group after group from giggling and oblivious to prepared to live for 2-12 weeks (or 10 months) in Nepali families and teach classes.  And the entire time he patiently answers questions and laughs gustily and genuinely at jokes, all of (both of) which he must have heard a thousand times before.  His entire family is a fortress of hospitality, personality, and authentic fundamental goodness.

We got onto the road to the airport to find gridlocked traffic (“gridlock” may not be the best term since there is nothing so orderly as a grid in Nepali traffic).  Nepal had just elected another in a long line of Prime Ministers that day (they rarely last a year) which may have contributed to the standstill.  Motorbikes buzzed and swirled like the flies in the gutters, while everyone else aggressively shouldered their way into spaces that seemed way too small, turning off their engines during the minutes between each miniscule movement.  I am deeply surprised to see so many relatively intact paint jobs as they defiantly refuse to ever give way.  A polite driver in Nepal would never go anywhere.  Literally.

The road was wide enough for 2 American lanes, or 3 European, so there were 4-5 Nepali.  The 3-4 in our direction were fully constipated, the 1 oncoming flowed steadily (a customary contrast in Nepal).  Half a kilometer farther along it switched, our side merged into 1 lane, which slid past 3 of stationary chaos.  No one had the patience or control to point out that it would work much better with two lanes in each direction, instead of the 4-into-1 bottlenecks on both sides.  This is Nepal.

I hear India takes all these things about Nepal and multiplies then several times over.  I am not ready for India right now.

There is not much you can do about gridlock, and I trusted Rajesh to do what could be done, so I sat back to enjoy my last bits of Nepal through the window of our little white van as he skilfully wedged it into closet-sized spaces, saying only “if you can drive in Kathmandu, you can drive anywhere.”

I watched fruit stands by the side of the road tended by women with colourful sari’s and potent scowls.  Cows wandered, grazed, or stood in peculiar places, utterly unmolested.  A woman in a bus in front of us stuck her leathery head out the window and vomited white liquid onto the street without looking; it was pure luck that there was no motorcycle coming.

Rajesh saved our bacon (not the first time) by swerving off onto small surface streets that spit us out unexpectedly close to the airport.  Having a local on your team is priceless.

Leaving a wonderful place and the people who made it even better is a uniquely difficult thing, but we took refuge in the distractions of travel, first stop: Bahrain.