SWING TIME IN NEPAL
Due to the time of night at Dammam airport, still stifling at the end of October, queues were short and visa control reasonably swift by native standards. Maybe the cops had been given a refresher course in how to open and stamp a passport.
At 4am we lifted off the Saudi sand and flew 35 minutes to drop down into Qatari sands. Should have taken the bus.
Doha airport is a soulless shopping mall with a few toilets and smoking rooms thrown in and not exactly the place I ever wanted to spend time in, let alone at 5am, so I grabbed a coffee, croissant and newspaper and watched the sun come up in the viewing lounge amid hundreds of robed travellers in creamy white, orange and brown; men preening their beards cross-legged on plastic seats, giving me the eyeball; women veiled and cowed on the floor, picking at plastic bags of food; observing their obligatory pilgrimage to Makkah: the Saudis second biggest money-spinner, after oil.
As usual, I was off in the opposite direction.
The 4.5 hour flight to Kathmandu was packed with Nepalese heading home for their Dasain (Harvest) festival, from jobs mostly in the Gulf, although the woman next to me worked as a housemaid in Tel Aviv. “Better salary than Arabs pay,” she confided. She has a five year old son, who she hadn’t seen for 12 months, living with her parents somewhere in the countryside. Housemaids in Saudi are lucky to get home once every five years.
The party atmosphere was buoyant and I was heart-warmed by the cheer that went up when the mountains came into view, Himalayan peaks penetrating the 8,000 metre cloud cover. The Nepalese then screamed with relief when we landed safely on Kathmandu tarmac. There are many air accidents in Nepal, mainly involving light aircraft.
The terminal was like walking into the 1950s. In vivid contrast to Doha’s shiny steel and glass kit, Kathmandu was red brick and wood, empty apart from us, darkened corners owning history, and a ‘complaining box’ nailed to a teak beam. I half expected a tiger’s face to peep through the window.
An official in a soft pinky-purply Fez style hat came along the immigration queue with a stapler. I’d been beaten to the front of the line by eight Polish trekkers. The official politely asked for the passport-sized photos we were primed to offer up at this point and he waited patiently when most of the Poles had theirs buried deep in cavernous backpacks. He then gently stapled each photo to the visa form. Christ, if the Saudi cops had to do that, they’d be out on strike. $25 were handed over in exchange for a colourful 15 day visa. The immigration guy smiled and said, “Welcome to Nepal.”
Tribhuvan International Airport is only 8km from the city centre, but it took us an hour and a half to get through the chaos on the streets. Added to the traffic gridlock was the daily 7-9pm power cut that threw the city into surreal flickering candlelight and flashing headlight, business as usual in the shops, while sacred cows meandered in search of elusive grass, exhaust fumes having replaced oxygen.
I smoked in the back of the tiny Mazuki taxi, noting that the Nepalese drive on the left, arm out of the window, head grazing the roof, basically a pile of scrap made at least 30 years ago in Japan by Suzuki.
“Any idea where I can get some hash?” I asked the driver.
“Pot?” he eyed me in the mirror.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I don’t smoke, but you can get it in Thamel. No problem. You don’t have to look for it: those guys will find you.”
“Fair enough.”
Thamel is Kathmandu Central – the old town still furnished with buildings over 500 years old, at least one statue going back a thousand – and where the 1960s hippy entourage put down roots. Opium, LSD, hashish and rice wine with a view of the mountains, and the mellow, flower-scented air of Nepal had brought the Magic Bus to a halt and ever since Kathmandu has been the name at the end of the trail to end all trails.
Shame the traffic was destroying the experience these days, but how amazing this place must have been before the car industry smothered the planet with its insidious product.
The taxi dropped me at the Hotel Ambassador, half-demolished to make way for a new road, just down the street from the dusty old British Embassy. I checked in, swiftly checked out the room (English football on TV, cockroaches in bathroom) then took a wander.
The roads are a mass of pot-holes and rubble with a vague strip of tarmac down the middle. Cars, trucks, buses and a million scooters jostle for that piece of smooth surface. Blue uniformed, masked traffic cops stand elevated in the epicentre, signalling professionally with their arms, blowing manically on whistles, the mayhem completely oblivious at their feet.
Fifteen minutes later and I was in Thamel – ethnic clothes, pashmina, Yak antlers, second hand bookshops, mountaineering gear, travel companies accompanied by smiles, no hard-sell - chatting to a tricyclist, or, as he put it, 'a rickshaw man'.
“Can you just ride around for a while?” I asked.
“Sure,” he beamed at me. “You wanna go Durbar Square?”
“I wanna go everywhere, but not tonight. Do a little tour.”
It was a bit Lord Hadlow of the Raj, I confess, but he was up for it and he hopped onto his saddle, flashing a smile ingrained onto his nut-brown face. He was wearing a brown suit with red polo neck sweater and plimsolls, no socks, weighing no more than 50 kilos. While I attempted to find a half-comfy square inch of cushion, he turned and we were eye to eye.
“Where from, sir?”
“England. Although my Mum is a Jock.”
“Oh yes, sir. Very good.”
We rode around. He knew every street and alley and rattled past the multi-coloured fabric shops and pharmacies whose medicines were kept in small wooden drawers in huge wooden cabinets. Every now and then a cow slowed us down giving me time to study the women buying vegetables; children scampering; girls as slender as willow carrying gallon jugs of water in either hand, wobbling home; storekeepers meditating at the counter.
Other than the pestilent roar of vehicles, the people went about their everyday business with a tender smile and a polite interaction. Hard-earned money changed hands and I soon learned that a sheep is 1 rupee, a yak is 5, an antelope 10, a stag 20, a goat 50, a rhino 100 (about $1), a tiger 500, and fittingly the largest note was an elephant at 1000. My wallet was a zoo.
There was something happening that I couldn't quite put my finger on.
I tapped the driver, Rads, on the back and asked him to take us to a tea house – he had to be thirsty – and we were soon walking into a beautiful flower-filled courtyard restaurant called Gaia, where with an inquisitive grin the manager watched Rads, suit covered in grease, sit down with me.
“He’s my driver,” I said. “And interpreter. And fixer.”
“I only have one arm,” Rads told me when the Coke had been poured, and he pulled his left arm from his pocket, then pulled a sock from the arm to reveal a perfectly rectangular stump at the wrist, delicately stitched, I noticed, when he gave me a close-up.
“Accident with tut-tut,” he said, by way of a smiley explanation.
A tut-tut is a motorbike with a double back seat, one down from a mini-bus and one up from a rickshaw. Rads had just maneuvered us through the backstreets of Kathmandu literally single-handed. He was gonna get a decent tip, but more pressing for me was another matter entirely.
“Hey, Rads. You know where I can get some pot?”
“Yes, sir. No problem. You want?”
“Yep.”
Once he’d finished his Coke with a lip smacking slurp, he jumped up and told me to wait there, he’d be about 20 minutes, and so I wolfed down some peanut chicken satay with onion rings. He came back with a lump of dope the size and shape of a large dice. Nepalese Temple Bomb is world famous hashish, cultivated in the Himalayan foothills and used religiously by Hindu sadhu (monks). Good for them! Whenever I’m in Holland it’s what I always smoke. Now I was in the backyard and rolling one up in the al fresco toilet. This practice is illegal now, thanks to the insane, meddling pressure of the United States government (what the fuck has it got to do with them?) but the Nepalese cops are pretty cool about enforcing the law. Good for them!
The journey back to the hotel was a foggy black and white movie; On the Himal Massif rather than the Waterfront. The traffic was much thinner and the headlights of the few vehicles that spluttered along were diluted amid the smog and ash and dust. In places whole clumps of thick black electricity wires sagged to the ground, perilously close to puddles. We skirted mounds of garbage and shattered pieces of concrete adorned by brightly coloured flowers growing through it all, as if trying to reclaim the land man was attempting to ruin.
On the vague road the cows had become silhouettes, rearing out of the murk. Humans stumbled home and soldier-packed Land Rovers cruised by, automatic weapons clanking on the metalled sides, civil war still very fresh in the memory. I puffed away on a joint.
Outside the hotel, as I paid Rads handsomely for his energetic services, I spotted a likely looking bar across the street and suddenly realised that I could drink again after months of desert abstinence, and so we arranged a sort of DIY guided tour round the Old Town the next day, and he happily cycled off, bell tinkling, while I went over to the pub with great enthusiasm.
Suitably high, I now had out-of-the-sand fever – a wild euphoria - and the adrenaline of freedom was coursing through me. So too, soon enough, was the whisky of my old friend and buddy Johnnie Walker, alongside a cool, cool glass of fresh Everest beer. The evening was marred a little by the fingers of the suspiciously-too-friendly waiter tickling my inner thigh and only a threat of pain stopped them going further north.
*
The next morning I smoked in the hotel garden, black coffee nursing my hangover, and watched a huge bird circle high up in the big blue sky, wings like broad paddles, floating across the thermals.
“What is that bird?” I asked a waiter.
“We call it Tchill,” he answered, “I don’t know what it is in English. A kind of eagle.”
Bang on time, Rads picked me up in his rickshaw and took me on a smashing tour of the city: smashing up and down kerbs; smashing through potholes; smashing over cobblestones; smashing round bends, often on one wheel. It was an all-day smashing journey and my arse still aches. At one point, on a lengthy uphill stretch, he turned to me and panted, “We have to walk now, sir.”
We stopped at gigantic Ratna Park and wandered through a market full of juicy pineapple chunks and freshly split coconut, pomegranates, satsumas, tiny bananas, apples as edible as cricket balls, guava, ice cream, flutes and clothes laid out in piles on the ground. Colour was everywhere. A theatre production was being acted out under an ancient Banyan tree, entirely encircled by a neck-stretched crowd every now and then breaking into uproarious laughter, children peeping out from between legs, enrapt by the actors on their impromptu dirt stage.
A girl holding an ice cream, pretty as a picture in her best holiday frock, came across to me, smiled coyly, put her tiny hands together in prayer and said, “Nameste”, before running back on little legs to her mother. Nameste, a ubiquitous form of welcome, I found out later, translates as ‘I bow to you’.
At 4am we lifted off the Saudi sand and flew 35 minutes to drop down into Qatari sands. Should have taken the bus.
Doha airport is a soulless shopping mall with a few toilets and smoking rooms thrown in and not exactly the place I ever wanted to spend time in, let alone at 5am, so I grabbed a coffee, croissant and newspaper and watched the sun come up in the viewing lounge amid hundreds of robed travellers in creamy white, orange and brown; men preening their beards cross-legged on plastic seats, giving me the eyeball; women veiled and cowed on the floor, picking at plastic bags of food; observing their obligatory pilgrimage to Makkah: the Saudis second biggest money-spinner, after oil.
As usual, I was off in the opposite direction.
The 4.5 hour flight to Kathmandu was packed with Nepalese heading home for their Dasain (Harvest) festival, from jobs mostly in the Gulf, although the woman next to me worked as a housemaid in Tel Aviv. “Better salary than Arabs pay,” she confided. She has a five year old son, who she hadn’t seen for 12 months, living with her parents somewhere in the countryside. Housemaids in Saudi are lucky to get home once every five years.
The party atmosphere was buoyant and I was heart-warmed by the cheer that went up when the mountains came into view, Himalayan peaks penetrating the 8,000 metre cloud cover. The Nepalese then screamed with relief when we landed safely on Kathmandu tarmac. There are many air accidents in Nepal, mainly involving light aircraft.
The terminal was like walking into the 1950s. In vivid contrast to Doha’s shiny steel and glass kit, Kathmandu was red brick and wood, empty apart from us, darkened corners owning history, and a ‘complaining box’ nailed to a teak beam. I half expected a tiger’s face to peep through the window.
An official in a soft pinky-purply Fez style hat came along the immigration queue with a stapler. I’d been beaten to the front of the line by eight Polish trekkers. The official politely asked for the passport-sized photos we were primed to offer up at this point and he waited patiently when most of the Poles had theirs buried deep in cavernous backpacks. He then gently stapled each photo to the visa form. Christ, if the Saudi cops had to do that, they’d be out on strike. $25 were handed over in exchange for a colourful 15 day visa. The immigration guy smiled and said, “Welcome to Nepal.”
Tribhuvan International Airport is only 8km from the city centre, but it took us an hour and a half to get through the chaos on the streets. Added to the traffic gridlock was the daily 7-9pm power cut that threw the city into surreal flickering candlelight and flashing headlight, business as usual in the shops, while sacred cows meandered in search of elusive grass, exhaust fumes having replaced oxygen.
I smoked in the back of the tiny Mazuki taxi, noting that the Nepalese drive on the left, arm out of the window, head grazing the roof, basically a pile of scrap made at least 30 years ago in Japan by Suzuki.
“Any idea where I can get some hash?” I asked the driver.
“Pot?” he eyed me in the mirror.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I don’t smoke, but you can get it in Thamel. No problem. You don’t have to look for it: those guys will find you.”
“Fair enough.”
Thamel is Kathmandu Central – the old town still furnished with buildings over 500 years old, at least one statue going back a thousand – and where the 1960s hippy entourage put down roots. Opium, LSD, hashish and rice wine with a view of the mountains, and the mellow, flower-scented air of Nepal had brought the Magic Bus to a halt and ever since Kathmandu has been the name at the end of the trail to end all trails.
Shame the traffic was destroying the experience these days, but how amazing this place must have been before the car industry smothered the planet with its insidious product.
The taxi dropped me at the Hotel Ambassador, half-demolished to make way for a new road, just down the street from the dusty old British Embassy. I checked in, swiftly checked out the room (English football on TV, cockroaches in bathroom) then took a wander.
The roads are a mass of pot-holes and rubble with a vague strip of tarmac down the middle. Cars, trucks, buses and a million scooters jostle for that piece of smooth surface. Blue uniformed, masked traffic cops stand elevated in the epicentre, signalling professionally with their arms, blowing manically on whistles, the mayhem completely oblivious at their feet.
Fifteen minutes later and I was in Thamel – ethnic clothes, pashmina, Yak antlers, second hand bookshops, mountaineering gear, travel companies accompanied by smiles, no hard-sell - chatting to a tricyclist, or, as he put it, 'a rickshaw man'.
“Can you just ride around for a while?” I asked.
“Sure,” he beamed at me. “You wanna go Durbar Square?”
“I wanna go everywhere, but not tonight. Do a little tour.”
It was a bit Lord Hadlow of the Raj, I confess, but he was up for it and he hopped onto his saddle, flashing a smile ingrained onto his nut-brown face. He was wearing a brown suit with red polo neck sweater and plimsolls, no socks, weighing no more than 50 kilos. While I attempted to find a half-comfy square inch of cushion, he turned and we were eye to eye.
“Where from, sir?”
“England. Although my Mum is a Jock.”
“Oh yes, sir. Very good.”
We rode around. He knew every street and alley and rattled past the multi-coloured fabric shops and pharmacies whose medicines were kept in small wooden drawers in huge wooden cabinets. Every now and then a cow slowed us down giving me time to study the women buying vegetables; children scampering; girls as slender as willow carrying gallon jugs of water in either hand, wobbling home; storekeepers meditating at the counter.
Other than the pestilent roar of vehicles, the people went about their everyday business with a tender smile and a polite interaction. Hard-earned money changed hands and I soon learned that a sheep is 1 rupee, a yak is 5, an antelope 10, a stag 20, a goat 50, a rhino 100 (about $1), a tiger 500, and fittingly the largest note was an elephant at 1000. My wallet was a zoo.
There was something happening that I couldn't quite put my finger on.
I tapped the driver, Rads, on the back and asked him to take us to a tea house – he had to be thirsty – and we were soon walking into a beautiful flower-filled courtyard restaurant called Gaia, where with an inquisitive grin the manager watched Rads, suit covered in grease, sit down with me.
“He’s my driver,” I said. “And interpreter. And fixer.”
“I only have one arm,” Rads told me when the Coke had been poured, and he pulled his left arm from his pocket, then pulled a sock from the arm to reveal a perfectly rectangular stump at the wrist, delicately stitched, I noticed, when he gave me a close-up.
“Accident with tut-tut,” he said, by way of a smiley explanation.
A tut-tut is a motorbike with a double back seat, one down from a mini-bus and one up from a rickshaw. Rads had just maneuvered us through the backstreets of Kathmandu literally single-handed. He was gonna get a decent tip, but more pressing for me was another matter entirely.
“Hey, Rads. You know where I can get some pot?”
“Yes, sir. No problem. You want?”
“Yep.”
Once he’d finished his Coke with a lip smacking slurp, he jumped up and told me to wait there, he’d be about 20 minutes, and so I wolfed down some peanut chicken satay with onion rings. He came back with a lump of dope the size and shape of a large dice. Nepalese Temple Bomb is world famous hashish, cultivated in the Himalayan foothills and used religiously by Hindu sadhu (monks). Good for them! Whenever I’m in Holland it’s what I always smoke. Now I was in the backyard and rolling one up in the al fresco toilet. This practice is illegal now, thanks to the insane, meddling pressure of the United States government (what the fuck has it got to do with them?) but the Nepalese cops are pretty cool about enforcing the law. Good for them!
The journey back to the hotel was a foggy black and white movie; On the Himal Massif rather than the Waterfront. The traffic was much thinner and the headlights of the few vehicles that spluttered along were diluted amid the smog and ash and dust. In places whole clumps of thick black electricity wires sagged to the ground, perilously close to puddles. We skirted mounds of garbage and shattered pieces of concrete adorned by brightly coloured flowers growing through it all, as if trying to reclaim the land man was attempting to ruin.
On the vague road the cows had become silhouettes, rearing out of the murk. Humans stumbled home and soldier-packed Land Rovers cruised by, automatic weapons clanking on the metalled sides, civil war still very fresh in the memory. I puffed away on a joint.
Outside the hotel, as I paid Rads handsomely for his energetic services, I spotted a likely looking bar across the street and suddenly realised that I could drink again after months of desert abstinence, and so we arranged a sort of DIY guided tour round the Old Town the next day, and he happily cycled off, bell tinkling, while I went over to the pub with great enthusiasm.
Suitably high, I now had out-of-the-sand fever – a wild euphoria - and the adrenaline of freedom was coursing through me. So too, soon enough, was the whisky of my old friend and buddy Johnnie Walker, alongside a cool, cool glass of fresh Everest beer. The evening was marred a little by the fingers of the suspiciously-too-friendly waiter tickling my inner thigh and only a threat of pain stopped them going further north.
*
The next morning I smoked in the hotel garden, black coffee nursing my hangover, and watched a huge bird circle high up in the big blue sky, wings like broad paddles, floating across the thermals.
“What is that bird?” I asked a waiter.
“We call it Tchill,” he answered, “I don’t know what it is in English. A kind of eagle.”
Bang on time, Rads picked me up in his rickshaw and took me on a smashing tour of the city: smashing up and down kerbs; smashing through potholes; smashing over cobblestones; smashing round bends, often on one wheel. It was an all-day smashing journey and my arse still aches. At one point, on a lengthy uphill stretch, he turned to me and panted, “We have to walk now, sir.”
We stopped at gigantic Ratna Park and wandered through a market full of juicy pineapple chunks and freshly split coconut, pomegranates, satsumas, tiny bananas, apples as edible as cricket balls, guava, ice cream, flutes and clothes laid out in piles on the ground. Colour was everywhere. A theatre production was being acted out under an ancient Banyan tree, entirely encircled by a neck-stretched crowd every now and then breaking into uproarious laughter, children peeping out from between legs, enrapt by the actors on their impromptu dirt stage.
A girl holding an ice cream, pretty as a picture in her best holiday frock, came across to me, smiled coyly, put her tiny hands together in prayer and said, “Nameste”, before running back on little legs to her mother. Nameste, a ubiquitous form of welcome, I found out later, translates as ‘I bow to you’.
Further on and still part of the same park we came across a military parade ground with thousands of soldiers on display, standing to attention in perfect formation along three sides of the square, the fourth side taken up by the Army’s top brass, flanked by cannons, the perimeter patrolled by soldiers spaced 50 metres apart in blue camouflage with sub-machine guns in their hands. In front of them was a spiked steel fence.
“What’s that all about, Rads?”
“Dasain,” he grinned. “Dasain festival, sir.”
“But there are loads of army on the streets too.”
“Too much drinking, sir. Drinking and fighting.”
In religious terms, this military display signifies the first day of the festival and is known as Fulpati, whereby, thanks to the Lonely Planet, I learn that ‘A jar of flowers symbolising the goddess Taleju is carried from Gorkha to Kathmandu and presented to the President ’ - on the parade ground we’d just passed. From there it is taken to Durbar Square where we unwittingly follow it. No wonder it was such a beautiful day.
The festival is rather like Christmas as families get together, have a feast, drink too much and the entire nation grinds to a halt. In a very fragile political climate this show of military strength was certainly also a message to the people not to step out of line, get pissed up and shout out rude stuff about the current Maoist Prime Minister who mimics China’s long dead Chairman Mao, posthumously agreed upon as a murderous cretin, lying in his Beijing mausoleum over the border in China, a man who had criminally dispatched the Red army to invade Tibet and sent tens of thousands fleeing in the only direction open to them – over the Himalayas – and today there are Tibetan settlements tending yak pastures scattered all over Nepal, exiled from their sacred land by a bunch of duplicitous pseudo-capitalist/communist toe-rags. Later on in the trip I met a Tibetan lady who told me that her mother and father had carried her as a two-year-old on that very route, fleeing the Chinese, and she was still here 55 years later selling the likes of me colourful handmade wrist bands.
“Don’t you like it in Nepal?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said. “They are mostly very good people here, and it is beautiful, but it isn’t my real home.”
Rads pedalled south and still the park was on our right, now a massive expanse of grass that needed mowing (surely a herd of elephants could knock it off in an afternoon), filled with cricket matches, and at the end, just before a huge set of cast iron gates, was a bamboo scaffold shaped like the frame of a pyramid and surrounded by people. On closer inspection there were four 15 metre or so bamboo ‘trunks’ spaced evenly apart and bent inwards, tied together at the top. From this summit, rope and wooden seat had been attached and queues of budding, excited swingers were forming, patiently waiting their turn.
Swing Time had begun, a tradition lasting only for the two weeks of the harvest festivities, Rads informed me, at the end of which the swings were disassembled and the children went home fighting off the tears and the bad karma, much like taking down the Christmas tree before twelfth night.
Reading my map, I asked him to make a short detour, which wasn’t short at all and involved getting off on another hill, but then we dropped down to the Bagmati river – the destination – and I wished we hadn’t as we looked down from a bridge onto a trickle of filthy, oil-sheened water and banks covered in plastic and other garbage and I looked up at the Himalayan peaks and thought of the stories I’d heard about Mount Everest being a dumping ground for climbers’ trash and man’s uncanny, unrelenting ability to turn a paradise into a shithole. As if on cue a truck roared by and blasted carbon monoxide into our faces.
Eventually we got to medieval Durbar (Palace) Square, parts of which date back to the 12th century, including Kathmandap, the very first shelter for pilgrims in the valley, which gave the city its name. Right then the square’s principle beauty was its absence of traffic and we wandered through in a serenity that allowed the red-brown, ornately roofed temples to be absorbed. But it wasn’t just a tourist attraction because market stalls and stores catered to local residents and school children in smart uniforms hung out at the Shiva (Elephant) temple – Shiva being the Goddess of Success.
Hey! Elephants rule!
The few hawkers of jewellery and embroidered purses (somehow I bought one – Happy Christmas sis!) were the least aggressive of any I’ve ever come across, in vivid contrast to the all-in rugby match that occurs when a group of tourists turn up at the Great Wall of China, for example, or the incessant insincerity of Arab salesmen, glinting smiles masking their jealousy and its off-shoot of hatred. Instead, these people politely asked only for interest and pushed no further. Rads watched me all the way round, sometimes tugging my sleeve and explaining a palace or temple or statue.
“Time for tea, I reckon.”
“Yes, sir. Come this way. I know good place,” and we watched the sun set from a 3rd floor restaurant reached by rickety old wooden stairs.
A boy appeared on the adjacent rooftop with a big bobbin of thread attached to a homemade kite flying hundreds of metres above the city, up among the tchill birds. He called out to a friend a few rooves away and I saw that there were myriad kites up in the sky, a pastime banned by the Taliban in not far off Afghanistan, for reasons only their demented minds can explain.
Our final port of call took us to Freak Street, the original bohemian stronghold colonised in the 1960s at the end of the overland trail from Europe, Australasia and North America. Only a few cafes and travel agents remain, the majority having been moved to northern Thamel, no doubt because the deranged appearances, predilection for free sex and copious drug use of the hippies gave the square a bad name. Yet Old Town Kathmandu is not so much going back to the 1960s, more like the 16th century, still pulsating with life. I was keeping my eyes peeled for any legendary drop-outs who had got here and stayed, tripping to the dark side of the moon and never quite coming back, swallowed up by the background in their wildly colourful clothes, shaggy beards and sticks. But none came into view.
“Home James!”
The day had knackered me out so Christ knows how Rads felt pedalling all day under a glaring sun, smiling all the way, apart from half way through the detour. That evening he was off home for Dasain, back to a town on the Trisuli River, world famous for its white water and consequent rafting. He had a wife, two daughters and a son to see, and the blissful anticipation was clear on his Buddhist face.
“Can you send me $100 a month, sir?”
“We’ll see about that,” I laughed and tipped him well. “Get the kids something nice, eh?”
JUNGLE BOOGIE
Oooh-bi-doo
I wanna be like you-ooh-ooh
Walk like you
Talk like you
Ooh-ooh-bi-doo
(with thanks to Robert and Richard Sherman)
There aren’t any tchills in the jungle skies, but birdsong fills the air. There isn’t much pollution either, just the occasional mini-truck and tractor. It’s hazy and humid with harvest being reaped; rice thrashed into bins; and, on the jungle’s edge, flashes of colour, red and purple, flying through gaps in the lime-green palm fronds, accompanied by shrieks of laughter from the jungle kids on swings. An elephant thuds and lumbers round a bend in the track; another’s out-of-tune trumpet snort sounds from a distant garden stable; and the children giggle some more.
Bengal tigers (apparently very shy, but God help you if you piss one off) are out there, prowling the forest floor, lounging on branches, 125 at last count, hidden behind the banana trees, and roaming the hills that straddle the border with India, no visa necessary. The tigers are a hundred times more likely to see us than we are them, so I gave the jungle walk a miss and my fellow group members came back with tales of rampant rhinos, snakes and giant spiders. An American woman had almost fainted.
Just across the track from languid, colonial, tendril-draped Hotel Park Side in the village of Sauraha where the farmland merges with fruit trees before joining savanna then deep jungle forest is a building with a sign announcing Elephant Dung Paper Shop - recycling of the highest order. I found out that it was a community initiative along with a meeting hall, a children’s study centre and courses for adults in needlework, first aid and English language. A clinic is also planned as outbreaks of malaria and cholera are as numerous as plane crashes, yet the barefoot children appeared to be bursting with health and happiness, especially when swinging through the trees.
Harvest Festival appeared to be an occasion where everyone walked around smiling, although I did get the impression that this was a normal state of affairs.
Man, I could live here!
Wandering down the track I came across three girls sitting on a swing, and the smallest, no more than three years old, stared, eyes agog, at the hulking foreigner, a novel jungle beast.
“Hi. Can I take your photo?” I asked, pointing at the camera.
“Yes,” they sniggered.
“What’s your name?” asked the cheeky one, who could easily have been Mowgli’s sister in a pale blue skirt and pink shirt with Love Me Love written on it. I told them, and kick myself now that I can’t remember theirs, although in my feeble defence I had just smoked a spliff in the hotel garden.
“Put your glasses on,” Miss Cheeky said. “You look like a movie star.”
Cue more titters and I obliged, reflecting that it was one of the sweetest pieces of flattery I’d ever received, coming from the embodiment of natural beauty sitting on a simple swing in the heart of the jungle.
A truck parped its horn, I jumped, the girls laughed and I turned to see the grinning hotel boss waving me aboard as we were off to see the elephants. The girls waved too, rocking with fits of laughter and as I looked back they began to swing and at that point in time there were no happier children on earth.
*
The elephants were awesome! No wonder they feature on the 1000 rupee note. OK, they are chained to huge logs to prevent them escaping, but out in the jungle there are human dangers in the form of poachers who down the elephants, often with machetes as they are quieter than guns, hacking off ivory tusks, leaving the animals to a slow death for the sake of a bit of money, so the breeding centres which rear and train the animals into a life of domestication are beneficial in the whole scheme of things.
There were three seven month old babies, as cute as cute can be and naughty too as I found out when one went trundling past, kind of smiling on the way, slammed on the brakes, came back to where I stood then methodically began to raise a front leg over the fence where a top rail was missing.
Tickling the perfectly round grey pad of his foot I caught the determination in his eyes as he slowly set about getting the other front leg over. At this point my amusement was interrupted by about 50 tourists frantically clicking off photos in his face and I realised that little Babar really shouldn’t be doing this as he was trying to escape and was half way there. I beckoned over a keeper who swiftly took stock of the situation, picked up a bunch of twigs, whacked Babar on the head and shouted. Babar paused, had a look round with a guilty expression and then unhurriedly began raising his legs back over the bar like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He’d obviously done this before and I reflected that no comedy could get across the humour in this situation. If Babar could speak, he’d tell jokes all day long in a squeaky voice.
That evening, under a coconut tree, chatting with Dave from Seattle about the time I’d played cricket in his fair, rain-lashed hometown (he didn’t have the faintest idea what I was on about), Dillip the guide arrived with information on the next day’s tiger hunt.
“We get a discount if no tigers show up, right?” I said.
“Ha-ha,” Dillip answered. “But you have elephants in your pockets, sir. We’ve only got rhinos.”
Dave and I looked at each other quizzically. I’d just treated him to a rooftop joint away from his uber-dictatorial girlfriend. While Dave looked embarrassed and very stoned, I giggled.
“Beg your pardon?” Dave asked, shuffling about a bit.
It all became clear when Dillip pulled a 100 rupee note out of his pocket and we all laughed like hyenas.
“Hang on,” I said. “I’ve only got a couple of yaks. Is there a cash machine round here, Dillip? Or do you call it an animal dispenser?”
“In Sauraha, sir. Come on, I’ll take you.”
We went to town on a motorbike, no helmets, chugging along through the forest, ducking bunches of bananas and for the rest of the trip Dave and I were cracking wildlife jokes, which no one else understood.
“Your trunk is hanging out, Dave.”
“Bet you wish yours could.”
“Put it away for God’s sake, there are children around.”
*
The next morning we set out early on safari to look for tigers from the back of an elephant called Sharingar.
Tigers and elephants get on fine, just as Kipling told us in the Jungle Book. In fact all the animals lived in harmony: it’s jungle law (overseen by Baloo) and the elephants can go anywhere they like because they are usually no threat to other animals, unless of course you get in their broad path. Surely the elephant is king of the jungle? Deer, preferably young bucks, are a tiger’s meal of choice for breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. Shame the tigers can’t be trained to hunt human poachers.
After giving Sharingar some bananas, which she delicately accepted with her watering can-like trunk that has 4,000 muscles, we were off. There were four of us wedged into a wooden seat strapped to her back, including a Czech woman who didn’t stop bloody talking. Perched with expert nonchalance on Sharingar's neck was the mahout, or driver, a wiry and informative chap called Garima.
Elephants get angry when hungry or when their babies are at risk. Indeed, I’d witnessed this anger the previous day at the breeding centre when at feeding time a huge adult male, seven tonnes of him, stood swaying his head from side to side and snorting in an irate manner, kicking up dust, sated only when a keeper dropped a mound of salted rice and molasses wrapped in banana leaves at his feet. In one day these magnificent beasts can eat their way through 200 kilos of grass and of all the animals in the kingdom wild elephants protecting their young are the most feared by park rangers. Much like humans, elephants live an average of 78 years although the pregnancy period lasts two years. Baby elephants are known as ganesh and adults as shiva. Their ears are smaller than their African cousins'.
Garima was steering Sharingar by placing his bare feet behind the ears, pressing gently to go right or left, with a tap on the top of the head to indicate straight on. Elephants can understand 25 words, which is better than most of my students in Saudi can manage after a 10 week course.
We spent an hour or so tramping through the undergrowth and saw, other than Jack Shit, a poxy deer. No tigers, no rhinos, no sloth bears (whatever they are), no pythons and not even a monkey – Kipling’s least favourite animal, which in a Darwinian sense rings true if you accept that humans and monkeys come from the same ilk and are put on earth to cause trouble, exemplified by the poachers who with deliberate evil upset the balance of nature.
As the sun rose higher and the air got steamy, I realised it was too late in the day as the entire animal kingdom was having a kip. Garima told us that when herds of deer race out of the undergrowth and gather, shaking with terror, on paths, you know there is a tiger about.
Gripped by jungle fever, I extended the stay by a night. But as the Park Side was full – this was high season and a very steady flow of visitors were coming and going - I had to relocate to the sister hotel in nearby Sauraha where that evening I got involved with a group of Nepali tour guides who spoke Chinese, and so we had some sort of surreal conversation in that language while the Bagpiper whisky flowed, then, when we tired of Mandarin, we switched to fluent English and the waiter brought out a jam jar full of hashish and we skinned one up on the patio opposite the Happy House bookshop, elephants’ trumpet calls (or, maybe snoring) in the distance, and I leaned back in my wicker chair, exhaled and watched the moon flit through the branches of a Bodhi tree.
There’s definitely something going on here, I thought, not for the first time.
Staggering off to bed, up the track, I prayed that there weren’t any tigers about to give me a free glimpse of the wild life, and I stood looking at the flat rectangular hotel rising out of a field of mustard, jungle behind, shimmering in mist as if a plantation house in America’s Deep South.
With great reluctance I prised myself out of there but the hotel manager, adopted as a young boy by a German couple, asked me to come back and “do some community work.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by this – building swings, thrashing rice, picking bananas, teaching, mashing up elephant dung - yet it was certainly food for thought and I’ve been pondering it ever since.
Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
Old Mother Nature's recipes
That brings the bare necessities of life
(With thanks to Terry Gilkyson)
POKHARA
After a five hour bus journey travelling 106km crammed into the front seat, shifting position every ten minutes because my legs are too long, next to 101 bags and a pony-tailed girl too coy to even look at me, the bus teetering on dirt roads high above emerald green rivers, we finally reached the lakeside town of Pokhara beneath the 8,000 metre Annapurnas and another ‘wow’ moment arrived.
Like the tigers, the mountains of Nepal can be shy, hiding behind clouds for much of the time, but when the sky clears it is as if a huge curtain has been opened to reveal one of the world’s most spectacular natural wonders – the Himal Massif stretching 800 kilometres across the nation’s entire northern border with Tibet and still growing!
What appeared above the roof and treetops that afternoon, as if by magic, seemingly within touching distance, was the Annapurna range with Machhapuchhare or Fishtail Mountain at the fore. It is a staggering, show-stopping view made even more spiritual when I found out that Fishtail, a 6,997 metre triangle of snow and rock, has been declared a holy virgin mountain that cannot be climbed. In the two weeks I was there, three climbing deaths were reported in the Annapurnas alone.
Pokhara is a pre or post trek town, the gateway to the loftiest of peaks, crawling with Western and Japanese walkers and I noticed a lot of Chinese tourists too, screeching excitedly at each other – ting bu dong, I don’t understand - from the patios of hastily assembled Chinese restaurants, the latest walking wallets, no doubt bargaining the Nepalese stallholders down to zero profit. I’d heard of the nouveau riche in China leaving their Ferraris and BMWs on grass verges near the airports because they refuse to pay $2 parking fees in the airport itself, tight as a Beijing duck’s ass.
A very mellow atmosphere pervaded: Nepalese well used to the tourist industry making the wheels turn like clockwork; flowers - Rhododendrons and Chrysanthemums - everywhere; foreigners smiling over pancakes and English breakfasts, even sushi; long-haired rockers whacking out live music; and, inevitably, the kids, sometimes adults, flying from branches on swings, the waters of the lake twinkling in the background.
I’d already booked the Hotel Tara which was so shiny and brand new that they hadn’t even finished building it, but it was clean and tidy and when the porter accompanied me to the room I noticed that my lump of hash was diminishing thanks to plenty of jungle puffing, and I asked if he could get me some more.
“No problem sir.”
Twenty minutes later he was back with a lump this time the size and shape of a mini Mars bar, and later on, more than once, I held it up to my mouth, remembering at the last second what it actually was. The porter and I smoked one together on the balcony.
“What time do you go to bed, sir?” he asked.
“Erm, about 11 or 12 …” I answered, puzzled.
“I will come then and sleep with you, sir.”
“Eh?”
“I will come and sleep with you, is it OK sir?”
“Erm … No thanks mate. The hash will do nicely, but thanks for asking.” He wasn’t aware of the girlfriend who at that moment was browsing in a bookshop.
“I’ll come at 11, sir.”
“You’ll be in for a surprise,” I laughed, paid him for his trouble and ushered his gay ass out of the door.
“Shall I come at 11 or 12, sir?” was his parting shot and his face was a comical, wide-eyed sight of disappointment when we later turned up in the lobby restaurant for dinner.
It was becoming clear that swinging the other way was also a local tradition and I noticed a fair few western men with Nepalese ‘friends’ a little too close by their side.
A man in his 70s paddled us across the lake in his boat.
“Mind if I smoke this?” I asked, pulling out a joint.
“Go ahead,” he said, “As long as you pass it to me.”
“How long have you been doing this job?” was the second question.
“All my life,” he smiled and I envied the contentment etched on his face.
“Ever seen a tiger?”
“Oh, too many, sir. I can remember 30 or 40 years ago you could see them over there,” he pointed to the far bank where the trees came down to the water’s edge. “You would often see tigers coming down to drink, sir.”
“No shit!”
“Not shit, sir - tigers. They stopped coming. Too many people. Too many people, sir, killing the tigers.”
My mind turned with guilt to the British King George the Fifth Twat and his son Edward the Eighth Pratt, who, on one single trip to Nepal in 1911, had slaughtered 39 tigers. How glorious that empire was . . .
In the modern day, the present government of Nepal, headed by Mad Mao the Maddest, was struggling to decide which country to tie its fortune to – India or China - and I’d bet that the Chinese would have the entire Nepalese menagerie cooked, eaten, bones crushed and poured into medicine bottles before you could say ni hao ha ji ba.
Like the tigers, the mountains of Nepal can be shy, hiding behind clouds for much of the time, but when the sky clears it is as if a huge curtain has been opened to reveal one of the world’s most spectacular natural wonders – the Himal Massif stretching 800 kilometres across the nation’s entire northern border with Tibet and still growing!
What appeared above the roof and treetops that afternoon, as if by magic, seemingly within touching distance, was the Annapurna range with Machhapuchhare or Fishtail Mountain at the fore. It is a staggering, show-stopping view made even more spiritual when I found out that Fishtail, a 6,997 metre triangle of snow and rock, has been declared a holy virgin mountain that cannot be climbed. In the two weeks I was there, three climbing deaths were reported in the Annapurnas alone.
Pokhara is a pre or post trek town, the gateway to the loftiest of peaks, crawling with Western and Japanese walkers and I noticed a lot of Chinese tourists too, screeching excitedly at each other – ting bu dong, I don’t understand - from the patios of hastily assembled Chinese restaurants, the latest walking wallets, no doubt bargaining the Nepalese stallholders down to zero profit. I’d heard of the nouveau riche in China leaving their Ferraris and BMWs on grass verges near the airports because they refuse to pay $2 parking fees in the airport itself, tight as a Beijing duck’s ass.
A very mellow atmosphere pervaded: Nepalese well used to the tourist industry making the wheels turn like clockwork; flowers - Rhododendrons and Chrysanthemums - everywhere; foreigners smiling over pancakes and English breakfasts, even sushi; long-haired rockers whacking out live music; and, inevitably, the kids, sometimes adults, flying from branches on swings, the waters of the lake twinkling in the background.
I’d already booked the Hotel Tara which was so shiny and brand new that they hadn’t even finished building it, but it was clean and tidy and when the porter accompanied me to the room I noticed that my lump of hash was diminishing thanks to plenty of jungle puffing, and I asked if he could get me some more.
“No problem sir.”
Twenty minutes later he was back with a lump this time the size and shape of a mini Mars bar, and later on, more than once, I held it up to my mouth, remembering at the last second what it actually was. The porter and I smoked one together on the balcony.
“What time do you go to bed, sir?” he asked.
“Erm, about 11 or 12 …” I answered, puzzled.
“I will come then and sleep with you, sir.”
“Eh?”
“I will come and sleep with you, is it OK sir?”
“Erm … No thanks mate. The hash will do nicely, but thanks for asking.” He wasn’t aware of the girlfriend who at that moment was browsing in a bookshop.
“I’ll come at 11, sir.”
“You’ll be in for a surprise,” I laughed, paid him for his trouble and ushered his gay ass out of the door.
“Shall I come at 11 or 12, sir?” was his parting shot and his face was a comical, wide-eyed sight of disappointment when we later turned up in the lobby restaurant for dinner.
It was becoming clear that swinging the other way was also a local tradition and I noticed a fair few western men with Nepalese ‘friends’ a little too close by their side.
A man in his 70s paddled us across the lake in his boat.
“Mind if I smoke this?” I asked, pulling out a joint.
“Go ahead,” he said, “As long as you pass it to me.”
“How long have you been doing this job?” was the second question.
“All my life,” he smiled and I envied the contentment etched on his face.
“Ever seen a tiger?”
“Oh, too many, sir. I can remember 30 or 40 years ago you could see them over there,” he pointed to the far bank where the trees came down to the water’s edge. “You would often see tigers coming down to drink, sir.”
“No shit!”
“Not shit, sir - tigers. They stopped coming. Too many people. Too many people, sir, killing the tigers.”
My mind turned with guilt to the British King George the Fifth Twat and his son Edward the Eighth Pratt, who, on one single trip to Nepal in 1911, had slaughtered 39 tigers. How glorious that empire was . . .
In the modern day, the present government of Nepal, headed by Mad Mao the Maddest, was struggling to decide which country to tie its fortune to – India or China - and I’d bet that the Chinese would have the entire Nepalese menagerie cooked, eaten, bones crushed and poured into medicine bottles before you could say ni hao ha ji ba.
Walking uphill to the World Peace Pagoda, and down the other side, a village appeared and a man in a smart dark grey uniform and peaked cap came marching out of a house straight for me. It was the local copper with a moustache. Jesus, I’m going to be arrested, I thought, thinking back to the joint just consumed in a patch of shaded woodland. Standing right in front of me, nose six inches from mine, he stamped his feet and saluted.
“I am Gorkha,” he announced and shook my hand. “Where from?”
The British nationality goes a long way in these parts (even if our festering monarchy did gun down the wildlife) primarily because, for almost 200 years, a Gorkha Regiment has been an integrated part of the British army, and each year 12000 young men turn up for selection to the regiment most famed for its bravery and honesty. Only around 200 are chosen. The training involves running up and down the Himalayas with a basket on the back filled with 30kg of stones.
In fact this region, with Pokhara as its capital, is called Gorkha, and that name is also given to the people of the area, so “I’m a Gorkha” doesn’t actually mean a soldier in the British army, although the motto ‘It’s better to die than live like a coward’ is omnipresent.
While they may not be the tallest of people, an uncommonly high count of red blood cells due to their mountain existence give the Gorkhas extra strength and stamina, especially at lofty altitudes. Further north, where they are as at ease on the precipice as a goat, the toughness of the Sherpa people is legendary. Just recently a one-legged Sherpa (maybe a mate of Rads) climbed to the summit of Everest and I was also amazed to read that the record for getting up that mountain is set at 8 hours.
The fearless and dependable reputation of the Gorkhas means that they are much in demand as soldiers, policemen and bodyguards in America, Brunei, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In Britain they have always received a pension at the end of their military service and are now offered full citizenship if they so wish.
“I am Gorkha,” he announced and shook my hand. “Where from?”
The British nationality goes a long way in these parts (even if our festering monarchy did gun down the wildlife) primarily because, for almost 200 years, a Gorkha Regiment has been an integrated part of the British army, and each year 12000 young men turn up for selection to the regiment most famed for its bravery and honesty. Only around 200 are chosen. The training involves running up and down the Himalayas with a basket on the back filled with 30kg of stones.
In fact this region, with Pokhara as its capital, is called Gorkha, and that name is also given to the people of the area, so “I’m a Gorkha” doesn’t actually mean a soldier in the British army, although the motto ‘It’s better to die than live like a coward’ is omnipresent.
While they may not be the tallest of people, an uncommonly high count of red blood cells due to their mountain existence give the Gorkhas extra strength and stamina, especially at lofty altitudes. Further north, where they are as at ease on the precipice as a goat, the toughness of the Sherpa people is legendary. Just recently a one-legged Sherpa (maybe a mate of Rads) climbed to the summit of Everest and I was also amazed to read that the record for getting up that mountain is set at 8 hours.
The fearless and dependable reputation of the Gorkhas means that they are much in demand as soldiers, policemen and bodyguards in America, Brunei, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In Britain they have always received a pension at the end of their military service and are now offered full citizenship if they so wish.
In the late afternoon in a café called Love Kush I looked down at a plate of plump momos: steamed dumplings filled with vegetables and beef, a local delicacy, also popular over the border in China. Dunking one in soy sauce and just about to eat it, something out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. There was a burst of colour coming from the trees, the lake beyond. It was a girl in a shiny purple dress, soaring high on a swing.
There were tchills in Pokhara too, and man was this place the perfect place to chill out, especially on discovery of a hotel pool down the street, which cost $5, and was worth every cent when floating on your back with a perfect view of the mountains above. Sod that trekking lark.
True to form, a German woman beat me to the final two towels in the basket, but an accommodating chap, dressed like a cricketer, rushed off to get more, fresh and warm from the laundry, and as I sparked up a cigarette, the same German woman said loudly, “Ugh, smoke!”
And so I replied, “Ugh, Deutschlander!”
*
Christ, it was difficult to leave that place, but work called and fighting off a great desire to phone my boss and tell him to stick his job where the sun don't shine, the 7 hour, 200km journey back to Kathmandu began. We stopped for lunch at a riverside restaurant where I munched away and saw the top of a bamboo swing, ropes straining and creaking, down on the beach, shrieks and cackles drifting off into the valley. As long as the kids were happy, I was happy.
Solo again back in the capital, I booked into the Hotel Shanker, a 100 year old royal Rana palace of endless corridors, countless nooks and crannies with a surprisingly named ‘Kunti Bar’, which later that evening I drank in and watched waiters staring at glasses, walking away, turning and staring at them again. Two over-loud, over-pompous Englishmen in the corner had perhaps prompted the naming of the place.
The next day, looking for the exit, as if in a maze, I got lost and ended up in massive kitchens where I got chatting to the head chef, a Gorkha, who didn’t bat an eyelid at finding a foreigner aimlessly wandering around stoned in his workplace and he proudly told me that he’d worked for seven years at the British embassy in Kathmandu.
“You are looking for the swimming pool,” he said, not as a question, more as if it was an everyday occurrence.
On the final morning I hunted down my faithful sidekick Rads, back on the saddle after his Dasain festivities, smile still firmly in place.
As we cycled about, running errands – gifts, a pinky-purply hat for me, hash, and second hand books – I finally saw him: a true freak leftover from the 60s and still here, shambling around in grimy hippy garb, straggly hair, beard, cowboy hatand in his late 60s perhaps, ashen-faced, million mile stare orbiting Saturn - the place where his brain spends most of its time. He should be put in a museum as a live exhibit much as bears and lions were once shown round Europe in circus caravans. More worryingly the thought, 'Hmm . . . that's a retirement option' crossed my mind and remains there still.
The final port of call was the Garden of Dreams, built in the 1920s by an Austrian Field Marshall with gambling money won from his father and while I meditated in the peaceful, leafy, colonnaded environment away from the fumes of Thamel, I mused on Nepalese happiness and their ebullient natural serenity, no matter what hardship, a smile and a friend nearby. There is some sort of innate theatre going on: elation when the windows are thrown open; elation at the sight of life; elation when going out into the street, into the world; a squeal of laughter at the sight of a known face . . . and there's more, much more.
These people don’t talk about religion, they do it, because they are born with it and are surrounded by it. They are religion. I was converted.
There were tchills in Pokhara too, and man was this place the perfect place to chill out, especially on discovery of a hotel pool down the street, which cost $5, and was worth every cent when floating on your back with a perfect view of the mountains above. Sod that trekking lark.
True to form, a German woman beat me to the final two towels in the basket, but an accommodating chap, dressed like a cricketer, rushed off to get more, fresh and warm from the laundry, and as I sparked up a cigarette, the same German woman said loudly, “Ugh, smoke!”
And so I replied, “Ugh, Deutschlander!”
*
Christ, it was difficult to leave that place, but work called and fighting off a great desire to phone my boss and tell him to stick his job where the sun don't shine, the 7 hour, 200km journey back to Kathmandu began. We stopped for lunch at a riverside restaurant where I munched away and saw the top of a bamboo swing, ropes straining and creaking, down on the beach, shrieks and cackles drifting off into the valley. As long as the kids were happy, I was happy.
Solo again back in the capital, I booked into the Hotel Shanker, a 100 year old royal Rana palace of endless corridors, countless nooks and crannies with a surprisingly named ‘Kunti Bar’, which later that evening I drank in and watched waiters staring at glasses, walking away, turning and staring at them again. Two over-loud, over-pompous Englishmen in the corner had perhaps prompted the naming of the place.
The next day, looking for the exit, as if in a maze, I got lost and ended up in massive kitchens where I got chatting to the head chef, a Gorkha, who didn’t bat an eyelid at finding a foreigner aimlessly wandering around stoned in his workplace and he proudly told me that he’d worked for seven years at the British embassy in Kathmandu.
“You are looking for the swimming pool,” he said, not as a question, more as if it was an everyday occurrence.
On the final morning I hunted down my faithful sidekick Rads, back on the saddle after his Dasain festivities, smile still firmly in place.
As we cycled about, running errands – gifts, a pinky-purply hat for me, hash, and second hand books – I finally saw him: a true freak leftover from the 60s and still here, shambling around in grimy hippy garb, straggly hair, beard, cowboy hatand in his late 60s perhaps, ashen-faced, million mile stare orbiting Saturn - the place where his brain spends most of its time. He should be put in a museum as a live exhibit much as bears and lions were once shown round Europe in circus caravans. More worryingly the thought, 'Hmm . . . that's a retirement option' crossed my mind and remains there still.
The final port of call was the Garden of Dreams, built in the 1920s by an Austrian Field Marshall with gambling money won from his father and while I meditated in the peaceful, leafy, colonnaded environment away from the fumes of Thamel, I mused on Nepalese happiness and their ebullient natural serenity, no matter what hardship, a smile and a friend nearby. There is some sort of innate theatre going on: elation when the windows are thrown open; elation at the sight of life; elation when going out into the street, into the world; a squeal of laughter at the sight of a known face . . . and there's more, much more.
These people don’t talk about religion, they do it, because they are born with it and are surrounded by it. They are religion. I was converted.
©poshparker.com 2012