So the saying around here goes: ‘The Nepalis invented trekking’. It is inevitable that
one’s trip to Nepal will, at some point, involve trekking. It comes in many shapes and
sizes from a ‘short’ five day excursion to a ‘Into Thin Air’ style Mt Everest challenge.
Depending on your fitness level, budget and willingness to risk your life, there is a
trek for you. Sarah having never trekked for longer than 2 1/2 consecutive days before,
thought hreself plenty adventurous enough by going with the “short” 5 day trek to
Poone Hill in the Annapurna range but before she knew it, she was hooked and we signed up for the “intermediate length” 12 day expedition through the Langtang region as well.

But first, a word on the practicalities:

The trekking industry in Nepal is probably the most organized of any industry in the
country. There are plenty (in fact an excessive number) of trekking agencies in
Kathmandu who contract plenty of government certified guides who will, in turn, hire
plenty of porters who will quite happily carry all your baggage to the plenty of
teahouses en-route that serve plenty of piping hot and carb rich meals for plenty of
sore-footed tourist. One can choose to pay a flat rate per day to the agency and go ‘all-
inclusive’ or pay just for the manpower and then pay for accommodation and food as
you go. All inclusive will set you back about $30 each per day and just paying for the
manpower is $13 a day per guide and $7 a day per porter. Food and lodging runs
about $7 each per day. Of course, with enough money you can do what ever you
want. We saw groups of twelve tourists with an entourage of twenty guides, sub-
guides, porters, cooks – they hiked in and then took a helicopter out, leaving the
entourage to hike the three days out with all their bags and equipment. There is a
hierarchy built into the system. Cooks aspire to be porters who aspire to be guides
who aspire to one day own their own agency. But, for as structured as it all sounds, it
actually turned out to be very relaxed and informal. It’s as close to how it must have
felt in the 1950′s considering the golden age of such boys-own adventures has now
passed and peaks (pun intended) as one of the best ‘tourist’ experiences we’ve had so
far.

So that’s the setup. Over to Sarah who will tell you, our faithful readers, what it feels
like to trek at an altitude of 2.6 miles above sea level.

Sarah says:

Oh yeah, we’ve hiked the Himalayas. What a spectacular experience. I will do my
best to convey the splendor but really, you should all just book your next holiday to
Nepal and experience it for yourself because it truly is mind blowing to see these
mountains with your own eyes. (Just a bit of personal background: the 2 1/2 day
hike mentioned above was not what I’d call a fun experience and I pretty much
whined the entire time. And not just because we were hiking in late spring along the
trail with the highest concentration of bears in America and I was on the look out for
Bear City at every turn. Hiking is hard and I was tired and my feet were tired and I
was kinda bored. So…..needless to say, though I agreed that you can’t come to Nepal
and NOT do some trekking in the Himalayas, I wasn’t really looking forward to the 5
days, which is by the way the shortest duration on offer.)

Nepal makes it very easy to hike for very long periods of time. They will carry your
bags for you! And copious amounts of perfect hiking food, hot and ready in 20
minutes is available virtually every 2 hours along the trail! How it worked for us was
this: our first day of trekking began by taking a cab to a fairly remote mountain
village, getting out of the cab, strapping on our bags and the walking began. We were
*instantly* in the most beautiful surrounding. Lush greens, a magnificent river of
crystal clear glacier water flowing over stunning rock formations, one water fall after
another, and jaw dropping mountain views. You could tilt your head all the way back
and still barely see the tops of some of these peaks. We shared the trail with many a
mule train, each wearing a bell decorated in Nepali embroidery to sound their
approach. We also shared the trail with local Nepali village people making their way
into the mountains to deliver supplies like bottled water and fire wood. Sure the
mules carried a lot but, let me tell you, so did the people. On their heads, on their
backs, on their backs but strapped to their heads…it was *amazing* to see how much
these people can carry and all while wearing flip-flops.

Before too long we’d enter a small mountain village where one building had been
turned into a guesthouse and eatery suitable for tourists. The Nepali tourist board
would have gone in and taught the people proper hygiene and food handling so that
they could work as hoteliers. The guesthouses were rustic but adorable. Most were
exactly the same: a large dining hall and a separate building for rooms, toilets and
showers. The walls didn’t always meet the ceilings, the windows didn’t always keep
the cold air out and the toilet was sometimes outside and down the hall, but
everything was always clean and the beds were pretty darn comfortable!

The food menu in the entire Himalayan mountain range is exactly the same as it’s
governed by the tourist board: banana porridge, Tibetan bread (sometimes it’s like a
beignet or donut without the sugar, sometimes it’s like naan), mixed macaroni
(vegetables, egg, cheese), mixed fried rice, mixed spaghetti, mixed mashed potatoes,
and of course, the house specialty and also the best choice:

DAL BHAT!!! Dal Bhat is the only menu item on the planet, I think, where it’s
customary for you to get seconds. The deal is, they bring you out your plate of rice
and curried vegetables and lentil soup and then like 10 minutes later they come
around and as you if you want more of anything. Amazing!

The must-try dessert item is called Snicker Roll – or sometimes Snacker Rool – which
is basically a snickers bar wrapped in Tibetan bread and kind of fried. Ummm, don’t
laugh, it’s good. And of course there’s always delicious milk tea. Dudh chiya. Rich
and sweet. yum.

So we got into a rhythm with our guide and our porter of getting up around 6am,
hiking by 7am, two hours later, tea break, two hours later Dal Bhat, two hours later
another tea break, two hours later, hiking done! And we’d settle into our next
guesthouse for the night and for more Dal Bhat. On our 3rd day we arose at 4am to
hike up to Poone Hill, the piece-de-resistance of this particular hiking trail. I tend to
think that sunrises are perhaps a bit overrated and sleeping is such a wonderful thing
but this was absolutely one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. As the sun
rose, the reward for hiking up to an elevation of 10,000ft came into wondrous view:
the Annapurna peaks. A 180 degree view of the most splendid snow covered peaks
I’d ever seen and it was also the highest elevation I’d ever been at.

Of course to get at that elevation you have to do some serious hiking – our 2nd day
was nothing but UP for 7 hours. And we were right at the start of the rainy season so
every day at precisely 2pm, the skies would open and we’d witness incredible
mountain storms with golf-ball size hail, thunder and lightening. But I can’t really
even say how cool it is to hike in these mountains, how awesome it is to see manmade
rice terraces deep in the mountains at 10,000ft. To see villages where people live in
these harsh mountain conditions year round.

It made us want more. I couldn’t even believe I was saying it or thinking it, but we
wanted more, we wanted longer. So when our volunteer thing didn’t work out, we
signed up for a 12 day trek in the Langtang region which is due north of Kathmandu
toward the Tibet border.

This circuit was more grueling and less commercial than Annapurna but so worth it.
These mountains!!!! Wow. Wow is all I can think of. Physically, we did alright
considering we’d never done anything even remotely this strenuous for this long ever
ever in our lives. On this trek we:

• went all the way up to about 15,000ft elevation

• we had to acclimatize

• we had to watch out for altitude sickness

• we went from about 35 degrees celciuss (95F) to 0C and back down again

• we hiked through a torrential downpour, after which we had to pluck leeches off our ankles and from our shoes and socks

• we had a group of left-over Maoists criminals try to intimidate us into giving them money and then they followed us for a few hours

• we hiked in snow

• I got 3 spider bites

• and because the 9 hour bus ride to our starting village, covering a grand distance of 75 miles, was so miserable, we just hiked ourselves all the way back to Kathmandu

• We hiked 138km/86 miles, reached an elevation of 4610m/15,120ft, over the course of the trek ascended a total of 6780m/22,248ft and descended a total of 4670m/15,32ft

Now, some of you may be wondering, “But what about Everest!!??”. Well, come to
find out, you can NOT see Mt. Everest from Kathmandu. It’s very far away. And you
can hike to Everest base camp but it’s rated as a very difficult hike, it’s several days
longer than our Langtang hike and it’s very very expensive. So, we opted not to do it.
This time. However, do you really think we’d go all the way to Nepal and not at least
see it??!!

Here she is: Mt. Everest:

Now, go climb a mountain!!

Despite it being somewhat of an afterthought, just a wouldn’t it be cool if we went to… we have ended up spending longer in Nepal than any other country – six weeks in total – and we’ve both given and received back so much more here than we expected or could have hoped for. We have lived with three families in three different areas of the country, we’ve learned some of the language, our affiliation with the volunteer agency helped us feel like we were apart of something bigger and like we had a connection, a family, in this very strange and foreign country. We have spent so much more time with locals here than anywhere else, we’ve traveled on the worst of their public transportation, we’ve been treated to local food with local families at their dinner tables, we’ve learned their card games, we’ve made friends. And we’ve hiked ourselves deep into the heart of their glorious Himalayan mountains – 16 days on foot, over 100 miles walked. And our eyes have seen beauty like we’ve never seen before.

I never could of anticipated the experiences we’ve had here but they’ve been some of the best of my life for so many different reasons. Finally, finally, what we’ve been asking for since the day we left home, finally happened – we were able to get close to locals in a very real way. Nepali people have nothing – a level of nothing that I think very few Americans could fathom – yet they want to give you everything. They want to give you a bed in their homes, a place at their table (or on their dirt floor) and as much food as you can fit into your stomach even if it means they go without.

We have come to love their ONE and only national dish: dal bhat – basically rice, a lentil soup and curried vegetables, usually potato and a green like beans or spinach. That’s it and most Nepali people eat this two times a day, every day of their lives. In fact, if you’re tired of the entire world being obsessed with American fast food, come to Nepal. Fast food chains don’t exist here and even if they did, Nepali people wouldn’t touch the stuff. It’s dal bhat all day, every day. With the help of our first trekking guide and friend, PM, I’m going to make a million for Nepal with a tee-shirt that says:

Nepali Life, Dal Bhat Life.

As in India, there is NO such thing as personal space in Nepal. Everything from the space you’re currently taking up on the sidewalk to the bus seat you’re sitting in – it’s all up for sharing and to us Westerners with a huge sense of space entitlement, this will quickly get your blood boiling. But guess what? You’ll be the only one upset. They might plop their bag of 500 potatoes at your feet on the bus without blinking but you can also put your potatoes or your annoyingly large backpacker rucksack, in between their legs and they’ll gladly mind it for you and will even take good care to make sure it doesn’t fall over. It doesn’t bother them – it’s just life and everyone just gets on with it! Ke garne – what to do?!

Nepali people, in all sincerity, view every single person as their brother and sister. You can feel it in the air and witness it at every turn. There is no such thing as a stranger here and it’s no act. They call each other brother and sister, they stop and say a few friendly words to each other on the street and it’s for real, all the time, whether the person really is their brother or if they’ve never met them before in their lives. One evening on one of our treks, David and I were trying to explain to one of the Nepali trekking guides how it’s not that way in America. For example, when I get on the bus after work, I’m not going to know anyone on the bus and I’m going to be tired and busy and I’m just going to want to sit quietly, keep to myself, listen to my iPod or read a book and certainly, for sure, I’m not going to want to talk to anyone. He simply could not relate to this and he thought we were saying that America is under some kind of bizarre dictatorship rule where we’re not allowed to talk to other people. It was nearly impossible for us to explain that, where we come from, people are not automatically your friend or family. You are strangers to each other and it takes time to become anything else. It’s not that we’re not allowed to talk to each other, we just don’t generally really want to. Total blank. Then he got quite upset and asked in his comical broken English, if a ‘citizen’ were to fall down on the ground, ‘what can you DO?!’ We were at a cultural impasse. He just would never understand just like I’ll never understand 2.5 million people all literally feeling like family.

This is not to say that I love everything about their ways, their ‘habits’. They stare at you while you eat – drives me crazy. And, in line with this personal space thing, they stand really really close to each other and sit really really close to each other. Again, it throws me completely off. Most people do not use Kleenex. No need when all you need to do is close one nostril and give the other one a nice hard blow. Go on – right there on the sidewalk – go for it. Just wipe your snotty finger on the closest wall. I guess some conservationists will be glad to know that trees are not dying for toilet tissue in Nepal. Also, it is completely socially acceptable to violently cough up phlegm and spit it on the street or, even better, on the floor of your house. I mean, this is like a smoker’s cough times 1,000. It sounds like dry-heaving or a choking dog and has been my alarm clock on more than one occasion as everyone does it and does it loudly and grotesquely. We’ve heard it has something to do with ridding the body of impurities – a Hindu thing maybe? I dunno.

It’s exciting to be here. It’s infuriating and exhausting and I’m overjoyed that I don’t have to ride on another of their public buses. It’s also heart-breaking to witness the extreme poverty and to learn more and more about the politics and cultural…..ummm….laziness, stubborness, I don’t know……that doesn’t seem to really want to make significant changes. But just like in Vietnam and Cambodia, Nepal gets under your skin and I do think I’ll miss it. I feel fulfilled, invigorated, accomplished – like I’ve done something big and good and new and I’ve grown from my time here. It was good, really good. And tomorrow when we fly out of here for our one lay-over night in Delhi, I know I’ll be a little sad.

Thanks to the Nepali choir boys and their hysterically funny and right-on rendition at 2am, outside our hotel room window, I’ve had this song stuck in my head for weeks: …..Leavin on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again…. You could get very angry that they’re singing when you want to be sleeping, but for the time being it won’t do any good. So just stick in your earplugs. Ke garne.

Austria – Rating 7
How much bother could a little country be? The stupid Austrian woman on our last trek was enough to put me off the entire place. She was hiking with another guide but we always end up at the same lodge each night. Not content with being the loudest in the room she had to talk non-stop for hours about how great she was because she finished the Anapurna Trek in 18 days instead of 21 and constantly criticized Nepali life – right there in front of the Nepalis. She would constantly talk over people, interrupt and disagree with everyone. By the end even the guides were ignoring her – all except her own guide who had to kow-tow a little to save his tip. But when she went to bed, man, did he tells us some stories about her. The whole nation would be damned on the irritation scale if it wasn’t for Peter and Yva who we met in Malaysia and single handed rescued their country from a 10 rating!!
France – Rating 1
Not at all irritating – mainly because every girl we met from there was really cute and the accent gets me every time.
Germany – Rating 8
Some German woman was eating pizza in the same restaurant as us and complained quite loudly that her pizza wasn’t green but more like a shade of brown. The menu had named the pizza the Green Pizza but the woman was unable to distinguish a name from the what color the item may actually be. It also escaped her attention we were in an organic restaurant where most things had the moniker “green” – we assume to reassure us our spending money there would somehow save the planet. Despite the waiter’s attempts to put her meal right she accused him of “talk, talk, talk” and slumped into a sulk. We also “met” another German whilst trekking. Again, we would all arrive in the same lodge in the evening but this guy wouldn’t interact with any one. Not even a hello, just a lame wave and a constant fiddling with his iPod. Why he irritated me, I don’t know – I never even spoke to him, but sometimes life on my blog is hard so he helps up the rating for poor Germany.
Israel – Rating 5
Poor Israelis. Everyone hates them. The guide books warn you where not to eat or drink lest the place be overrun with Israelis. Every local who works in the tourist industry in every country we visited has not one good word to say about them. They say they are rude and pushy and demanding. One Nepali guide said a party of Israelis fired their guide whilst half way up a mountain. The problem seems to stem from their compulsory National Service. Once the little 22 year olds get out of the army, work for a year and grow their hair they all go traveling. Its the like the Gap Year in Britain only these guys can strip and reassemble US made assault rifles in about two minutes. There’s a lot of pent up frustration in these now long haired youngsters and I guess it has to surface somewhere.The only country where they don’t seem to bother the locals is Malaysia, which as a Muslim state, has banned them altogether. Therefore they get a 10 on the rating but wait, what about the ones we met? Well, we thought they were great so balancing world view with our own experiences they get a 5.
Canada – Rating 2
What’s not love about the maple leaf carrying Canucks? Sure, they know it too and are at pains to let the world know they are not American by sewing their flag on every piece of luggage they own. But this only mildly irritates me so they get would get a 3 on the scale but we’ve met a number of French Canadian girls who were also cute and had that accent thing again so the rating goes back down to 2.
Japan – Rating 1
They move silently, like Ninjas, through the world. You wouldn’t know they’re there if it wasn’t for the repeated flash of their credit cards, weight of their camera gear and fascination with wildlife and mountain views.
Korea – Rating 2
Next to the Israelis, the Koreans are the next most hated nation by local people. Again, not sure why, they seemed fine to us but i can’t let the collective wisdom of Asia go by unheeded – hence the 2 on the scale.
Ireland – Rating 5
Everyone loves the Irish. I do too. But, because this is my blog I can be a little harsh and penalize them for having to open an Irish bar in every city in the world. Why do they have to do that? It only acts as a magnet for all the Irish wannabes such as the English, Aussies, Kiwis and, every year in March, the Americans. Nobody is as proud of their Irish heritage than the Americans on St Paddy’s day even if your last name is Goldstein. So a 5 just because they won’t put passport control in their own bars.
United Kingdom – Rating 3
I love to rag on the Brits. Being one myself is sometimes a curse. I hate to hear the whinny turns of phrase from across the room and then the self-flagellation as they engage their stiff upper lips and put up with whatever’s wrong. I hate the bad dress sense of adventure clothing that has never seen a speck of dirt. And I hate to witness the “we once owned your country” mentality that pervades around Asia. So, imagine my surprise when I couldn’t really find much bad to say about them on this trip. Sure, I heard many Indians complain the British were never nice but maybe that’s just sour grapes on both sides. We met some lovely Brits. However, I did smile during an interaction with some Brits on their gap year as they attempted to live the Hunter S. Thompson / Jack Kerouac life of traveling. Living on single digit rupees and trying all the suspect drugs they could find. But then they were happy to discuss how next year they’d be off to Oxford and Cambridge universities. That irritated me because I’m old and either I had not lived the Oxford/Cambridge life or the Thompson/Kerouac life – I can’t quite work out which.
The Netherlands – Rating 10
They get too close. As I write this, two big, hippy like Dutchmen are working on the computer next to me. They both have bought hippy-shit clothing including a Bob Marley Rasta style hat and they smell. They smell really bad and it’s not even that hot here. In a separate incident, a group of Dutch rushed up to the outside seating where we were happily enjoying a cup of tea. One of them stood about two feet from me, removed his shirt to reveal a sweaty, hairy, fifty year old back and then bent over and farted right by my head. For this act alone they receive a 10!
The United States Of America – Rating 10
I’m an equal opportunity ragger and as well as ragging on my home nation, I love to rag on my adopted one. Well, surprise again – I have nothing bad to say about the Americans tourists. Admittedly Asia is a long way from Kansas so most Kansans who would have hard time handling the culture change in Oklahoma decide to stay at home. I think the Americans keep a low profile these days. The travelling type doesn’t feel particularly proud to have to either defend or abhor the actions of Mr Bush so, all of sudden, getting the kind of restaurant service the average American feels they are entitled to the world over takes second place to having to answer the question “Did you vote for President Bush?” I am, I admit, a bleeding heart liberal but I am not exaggerating when I say the dislike for the President of the US in countries that have absolutely nothing to do with Iraq is absolutely real and widespread. This is not the time to sew Old Glory on to ones backpack with the same abandon as the Canadians. I give the Americans a rating of 10 not because of anything we’ve witnessed but because American foreign policy is really irritating me right now!
So that’s it. I glad if I’ve offended anyone; these are all western or developed nations and if you’ve read this and taken offense you must have had your eyes closed around Asia because there are far more important things that should offer offense than the observations presented herein. Besides, it’s my blog – I can write what I want!

Dear Diary, here we are back in Kathmandu, watching a fantastic rain storm from yet another retro-hippie cafe that serves reasonably strong coffee and reasonably pleasing chocolate cake and where, apparently, it’s acceptable to openly smoke marijuana……when we should be on our volunteer placement. I think we are grieving that it didn’t work out and our endless self psychoanalysis isn’t getting us anywhere. If we were to pay ourselves $150 per hour for 5 couch sessions, perhaps our notes would look something like this:

Stage One: Idealism

When the Info Nepal brochure said we’d live with a Nepalese family and teach English to small children in the town library, my mind conjured Sound Of Music images of a village nestled in the magestic Himalayan mountains inhabited by adorable children who would give us their undivided attention and devotion, a family that would introduce us to the Nepalese way of life yet live miraculously in a modern and western style home, and an entire village of potential new friends where we would feel like we belonged. We’d get to know the ways of the town and would while away our free time at the corner cafe, mingling with the locals and having a good laugh over a cup of tea. Some aspects would be hard, perhaps a little uncomfortable at times, but the feeling of fulfillment from doing something good would see us through.

Stage Two: Denial
I began to feel a little hesitant about our commitment to this program after our training village experience, what with the lack of a flushable toilet and a floor-cum-dining table coated in cow dung, but my mind refused to believe that our real placement would possibly be that bad. Isn’t it funny how you can look something square in the face and still not believe it to be true. Still, I knew we were tired, weary and perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to leave this kind of project to the end of our first 1/2 of traveling. I desperately tried to rekindle the excitement for the whole idea that I’d once felt but I must confess that as the taxi drove us to our permanent placement, farther and farther into dust-bowl oblivion, I secretly wished it would just keep driving forever – all the way back to Delhi International Airport where I could board the next flight to London.

Stage Three: Fortitude

As much as I wanted the taxi to keep driving, I also wanted to believe about myself that I have what it takes to exist under grueling and stressful conditions if an important situation calls for it- and I wanted to prove that to myself with this volunteer project more than anything even though I knew it was a mistake as soon as we arrived in our placement town. By this time we were both so emotionally invested in the *idea* of what we were there to do and invested in the organization from the 5 days we’d spent with other Info Nepal people in Kathmandu, not to mention our sense of pride in having made a commitment that we looked upon everything with a, “well….we will live with that. we will make it work” attitude.

Stage Four: Disappointment
You can give me a bedroom with an exposed tin roof in 100 degree heat that has a colony of bats and cockroaches the size of lizards, a matress that is literally a pillow and a piece of plywood, a one road town with absolutely nothing to do, a library in shambles and kids who only want to play the one game they’ve been playing since volunteers began coming to this town 4 years ago. You can give me any of those, just don’t give them to me all at once. To be disappointed in one thing is is easy to overcome; to be disappointed in everything takes more fortitude than I was able to muster, especially considering a bacteria growth to rival Alien was beginning to form somewhere in the lower half of my intestines. When it finally broke forth not even the clean but basic squat toilet could do anything to mask more disappointment. It’s not clear at this point if I’m disappointed in myself, the town, the family or Info Nepal; perhaps a little bit of all.

Stage Five: Hope
Unfortunately, I only had 2 healthy days in this town but, even so, we did have some good times. And you better believe that we clung to those good times with all our might when most of the time we were asking ourselves what the hell we were doing there. They gave us hope, hope that my tummy would get better and these little moments of charm would grow and grow. Each morning we were greeted cheerfully by our host mother with a wonderful cup of tea and we’d stand on our roof-top patio and watch the sun come up (Nepal wakes up very very early). We were audience to a wonderfully spectacular thunderstorm that cleared the air and left it cool enough for us to take a walk through their beautiful surrounds. It was a very rare opportunity for us to walk side-by-side and chat in peace. And then there was David’s brief breakthrough with the town kids where he actually felt he was teaching them something new. He was also approached by a local teacher who asked for extra lessons for some of his students. Teaching them provided the hope that the town kids would also be as attentive and willing to learn as these students were.

Stage Six: Entrapment
To feel trapped by geography, sickness, situation and a touch of home-sickness makes it very hard to maintain those moments of hope. The feeling doesn’t creep on you rather washes over you in one momentous emotion. Lunch time on the 4th day I felt well and truly trapped. Logic and reason lost out. It was time to go. My tummy just wasn’t getting any better, I was facing serious dehydration in that heat and that squat toilet was getting harder and harder to manage.

Stage Seven: Escapism

There was no easy or comfortable way to leave this town. Taxis do not originate there. The only way out was by an over-crowded, hot and bumpy busride 20 kms along a gravel road to the nearest large town where we’d need to find a taxi to take us another 20 kms to the nearest hotel. But the decision had been made so we made the lonely walk to the bus stop, our town of potential friends looking on with curiosity, and boarded the next bus that pulled through. Every person who boarded that bus seemed to be hauling 50 lb bags of potatoes for some reason so we all shared what little space there was, people and potatoes. From what we hear, however, this must have been our lucky day. No goats or chickens climbed on board. To top off this experience perfectly, upon disembarking the bus we were surrounded by the bus boys who tried to quietly but assertively charge us about 5 times the price of a normal fare.

Stage Eight: Grieving
We have talked round and round what went wrong. We’ve talked it to death and we’ve blamed:
everyone but ourselves,
us and no one else,
the kids,
the town,
my stomach bacteria,
the director of Info Nepal,
Info Nepal…

We’ve felt angry, sad, depressed, we’ve felt bitter about the money and then decided we didn’t feel bitter about the money, we have felt so many things and have tried so hard to come up with one definitive and satisfying answer to why. Why is it that other volunteers would see it through and we couldn’t. Why couldn’t or didn’t we make it work. Traveling is all about learning. Sometimes you learn about temples, restaurants, culture, religion but sometimes you learn about yourself. And sometimes it takes time and space to understand what it is you have just learned. Perhaps we will understand ourselves a little better soon or perhaps this will remain an enigma for quite a while.

p.s. Yay Kathmandu International Clinic and their special antibiotics

There are billions of people in this world. 300 million of them already live in the US which still leaves billions who would probably love to live there. Of those, 50,000 may win what used to be called the Green Card Lottery but is now known by its less Vegas like moniker: The USCIS Diversity Visa Program. The program alots a percentage of the 50,000 green cards on offer to each country based upon a reverse order of it’s current immigrants to the US. For example, there are many Brits in the US so the UK would probably get 10 of the 50,000 whereas there are hardly any Sudanese so they would get more. The potential immigrant applies and, providing they can afford the airfare over, the applications is put into Uncles Sam’s giant top hat and winners are pulled out at random.

However, this is not a lesson on US immigration policy rather it is a story o immpossible odds and a culture shock to potentially rival my previous post on the benifits of cleaning one’s kitchen floor with cow dung.

It begins with the phrase: “Well, there we were…”

Well, there we were sharing a hard concrete roof top in the blistering heat of an average Parbatipur day when a young man of about 21 leans over us with a huge smile, holds out his hand and introduces himself as Subash Shrestha. In formal but slightly flawed English he apologises for disturbing us but would to talk about America. You see, despite the impossible odds of being a fraction of the billions, fighting for Nepal’s fraction of the 50,000, in this remote town of 2000 he had won a coverted Diversity Visa and, in another stroke of probability magic, had found two Americans right on his doorstep to discuss it with.

Over this and subsequent conversations we learnt that all he knew about America was that he needed a social security number. This handy survival tip, printed in governmental green ink on the pamphlet that came enclosed with the congratulations letter from Uncle Sam was the first of three bullet points under the heading “What to do when you arrive in the US.”. It read simply, “Obtain a Social Security Nunmber”. The second bullet was “Take a driving test and obtain a driving licence.” and the third bullet implied that upon sucessful completion of the first two, a job would be forthcoming.

Subash comes from Parbatibur where there is not the concept of government social services into which an individual contributes or withdraws via that magical social security number. Nor does Parbatipur really have the concept of a driving test or a piece of paper that allows you drive and purchase alcohol if you look remotely under 35. However, Parbatipur does have the concept of jobs and Subash has had many.

He told me his teachers are proud of him bedcause, in cricket parlance, he is a great all-rounder. He spent six months as an English teacher where the only qualification required was to speak marginally more English than your students. He can, and loves to, drive the local bus and he earned his diploma Microsoft Word and Excel from the nearest technical college. Subash is optomistic he can secure a job in the US. I am not. He was a little purturbed however, when I informed him that bus drivers in America do not get accomodation as part of thier salary.

The Nepalis are very interested in the concept of minimum wage. Earning over $5 an hour is a tremendous monthly salary for anyone in Nepal. The therefore think that they will work hard for a year and return to Nepal a “rich man”. Despite my repeated attempts to expain they need to pay for food, lodging, transportation and taxes in a country where $5 hardly buys a cup of coffee, they refuse to see how they cannot return wealthy. The concept of the basic things in life costing more that a few rupees is so very alien to them.

The “fish out of water” theme has been central to so much of our popular culture, from Mork and Mindy to Crocodile Dundee but during my conversations with Subash I could only think of Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy. We think its funny that Subash is going to look the wrong way crossing the road or that he’s probably going to eat so much Ben and Jerry’s he’ll be sick. What’s not particulaly funny is that he doesn’t know Minnesota from Miami and doesn’t have a friend in the entire country to help him except for an old teacher in Michigan who, by the sounds out it, is trying to convince him to go to New York.

Subash has won his visa which means there is absolutly no way he’s NOT going to America. He knows that and everyone in the towns knows that. He is the local boy made good. They don’t understand the American Dream but they have faith Subash will be sucessful. America is rich, Nepal is poor – its as simple as that.

When we left Subash he was heading to Kathmandu to buy his airline ticket to America. He has nowhere to stay and nobody to meet him at whatever airport he lands at. Yet he won’t be the first to arrive in the US under such circumstances – this was how the country was formed. I have spent many hours trying to convince both Americans and non-Americans that the American Dream is alive, kicking and the backbone of the nation yet I often think only people like myself and Subash can really understand that. But, if my theories are correct, why am I frightened for my new Nepali buddy? Doesn’t Lady Liberty look after all those pass her gaze or does the American Dream exist only after one has obtained it?

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Clint Eastwood rode into Parbatipur on his way to chasing down some guy wearing a black stetson. I could imagine him squinting through his cigar smoke and tipping back his hat as he approached the edge of town. Parbatipur is where we’ll be volunteering and it looks as if it were lifted from a Hollywood western movie set and transplanted a few miles from Chitwan National Park. That’s not to say this is a theme town, on the contrary, it is a hardworking rural community whose principle source of income appears to be maize and, oddly enough, school exercise books.

Parpatibur is a one horse, one road settlement. The road is dust and gravel and the horse comes in the shape of an over-crowded and noisy bus – strangely, a welcome relief because Parbatipur is wonderfully devoid of cars and their associated unnecessary horn honking. Transportation in descending order of size is as follows: public bus, tractor, motorcycle, bicycle and goat. To be accurate we have yet to see anyone ride a goat however plenty of people seem to leash their goat and take it for walk. Ironically, this town has, as usual, a large number of stray dogs who would gladly succumb to the leash, walk for hours and, unlike their horned counterparts, wouldn’t stop every 10 meters to consume a piece of garbage. If however, this reversal of quadrupedal walking companions was to occur, the town would loose it’s greatest asset: it is, by far and away, the cleanest town we have seen since leaving home – a fact the goats play no small part in, I’m sure.
Commerce here is situated along “main street” and is performed from the ground floor of the two story, Clint Eastwood inspired buildings feebly alluded to in the first paragraph. The upper floors have wonderful balconies and patio space which provides yet another contradiction in this Twilight Zoned town. Nobody makes use of this balcony space, even to escape the heat (and it’s really really hot here). Between the hours of 11am and 3pm the whole town is deserted – you can almost hear the tumbleweeds roll down the middle of street. But I digress: commerce is as follows: 2 tailors. 2 pharmacies, 2 CD/music merchants, 1 general hardware store and a store that appears to sell nothing but a solitary strand of bananas which hang from it’s doorway. We have aptly named it “The Banana Store”. For as diverse as shopping here appears to be, every store sells one thing in common: school exercise books. They are stocked up in every store front as if the Parbatipur Chamber of Commerce secured the entire town a great deal on a bulk buy of 3 million 30 page, blue lined, red margined school books. If this had happened it would have been a well intended but unresearched gaff for, at 3pm when hundreds of uniformed school children spill from buses and alleyways and rush to the shops, it is not books they want but WWF trading cards. The 3 million books remain wrapped in dust protective plastic save for one stack which was ripped open with great aplomb when Sarah purchased the very book into which she is now taking dictation whilst I pace back and forth, metaphorical pipe in hand, like the Ernest Hemingway I so clearly am not.
Just one hundred meters from the center of town lie it’s outskirts and beyond those are miles and miles of corn rows interrupted by mud houses similar to the ones described in previous posts. In a surprising twist, everyone of these huts has the most immaculately kept front yard. I doubt Parbatipur has an Housing Association but then it apparently doesn’t need one. Neatly swept dirt lawns and rows of beautiful flowers adorn every house. Perhaps they have landscape gardeners here!
Another wonderful little quirk of Parbatipur is it’s very own radio station. Well, it’s not really a radio station, it’s one the CD vendors who, probably through implicit agreement with the rest of the town, starts playing music to attract customers at 5.30am as long as what he plays doesn’t offend anyone. Volume is of no consideration here; there are only two volumes of music in Nepal: on and off. If you have ever watched TV’s Northern Exposure (or have visited Roslyn, WA) then think of the Chris In The Morning Show. It sounds quite dreadful but actually provides the town with it’s own soundtrack, it’s own theme tune, a lite-motif by which the Parbatipurians can live their lives. Here’s the program breakdown:
5.30am to 7am: Wake up to the world with Nepali NPR
7am to 10am: Uplifting Nepali pop to start your day.
11am to 3pm: Sophisticated Indian tunes to cool you off in the heat of the afternoon.
3pm – 6pm: Arise from your nap with a selection of vigorous bicycling music (at this point the whole town appears from side alleys in riding bicycles in a bizarre and not terribly synchronized Busby Berkly style Hollywood/Bollywood musical number – I am not exaggerating)
6pm to 10pm: Indian spirituals by which to eat and rest well.
And so, another night draws in on this, the most bizarre little place on earth. I hope this provided you with an illuminating picture of the place we were to call home for three weeks. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Read Sarah’s upcoming post of trouble in the paradise they call Parbatipur.

Namaste!

Tapaai laai kasto chha? Hammi laai raamro chha. Hammi Nepal maa chhau. Hammi swyansewak hau tes kaaran hammi Nepali bhasaa sikdaichhau. Hammi hamro Nepali raamro aashaa chha. Hammi Kathmandu ko-laagi ek haptaa gaeko ra pachhi trekking Anapurna maa gaeko. Hammi laai thakai ra khushi laagyo tara David rangi changi laageko ra Sarah ko ghudaa ali-ali dukhayo. Anapurna himal sundar chha. Hammi dal-bhaat khaane ra hammi laai dudh chiyaa manparchha. Haat dhunus! Hawasta!

Literal translation as follows:

Greetings! You how are? We good are. We Nepal in are. We volunteers are therefore we Nepaali speak learning. We our Nepaali good hope is. We Kathmandu for one week were and later trekking Anapurna in went. We tired and happy feeling but David rangi-changi felt and Sarah’s knee little hurts. Anapurna mountains beautiful are. We daal-bhaat eat and we milk tea like. Go wash your hands! See you later.

In a effort to save our souls, atone for our self centered western existence and just to step off the tourist trail for a while, we have decided to volunteer in Nepal. Once upon a time one would have to give up two years for the Peace Corps but these days, with the influx of little time / much money do-gooders, one can buy ones way out of the confessional and onto the express elevator to karmic balance. Today volunteering means paying an NGO money to give you a “meaningful vacation experience”. As illustrated by the opening of this post, it is very easy to be cynical about the whole process but, nevertheless, here Sarah and I are, a few dollars poorer to help make someone else’s life a little richer.

The NGO we chose is called Info Nepal and they do a great job of putting the meaningful into the experience. Our total time with them is one month and the first week was spent in language and culture classes. We can now utter a smattering of Nepali and can tell a Hindu temple from a Bhuddist stupor. So confident are we that we can butcher the language enough to feel good about ourselves and to impress you, our dear readers, we shall attempt to write a future blog entry in Nepali.

Nepali culture is very strange when compared to our homogenized Anglo-American one so to prepare us for this paradigm shift we were sent to the village of Dhulikhel for two nights to stay with a family and get the shock over and done with. Info Nepal didn’t quite phrase it that way but were extremely insistent we pay the balance of our fee before we left for the village whereas they had been almost lackadaisical about it up to that point. That was my first indication this would be a very different experience and one other volunteers had found too much and had left the program demanding a refund. The reader would be advised to remember the Asian culture is to bargain for everything and refund nothing; a policy in direct opposition to our own.

Our training family could not have been nicer and they could also have not have been poorer. Sixteen family members lived in two structures on a small piece of land. The houses were a combination of brick and mud-bricks with no glass windows and no furniture to speak of. Breakfast and dinner (dahl-bhaat) was cooked on an open fire, served on a tin plate and eaten only with ones right hand whilst squatting on a mud floor in the only communal room in the house. Dhal Bhaat is rice served with a lentil soup. Pour the soup over the rice and stir with your hand until it makes a goopy mess then stuff it in your face. Sometimes a little vegetable is added. They eat this and only this twice a day thereby dispensing with the words “breakfast” and “dinner” and replacing them simply with dhal-bhaat. “Have you had Dhal-bhaat yet?” we would ask twice a day when we felt hungry. Yet, karma is good to us and these people gave us as much of their hard farmed food as we wanted even if it meant they went without. Once dhal-bhaat is done, the plates are taken to the outside standpipe to be washed and the mud floor is cleaned with cow dung. That’s right: cow dung! One of the daughters returned to the kitchen with a handful of cow crap, threw it on the floor and rolled it around like modeling clay. I have to admit, it does pick up the spilled rice well and they say it has anti-bacterial properties but I almost rangi-changi wak-wak’d my dhal-bhaat straight up again.

Translation note: Rangi Changi Wak Wak is a phrase Sarah and I made up from the Nepali words Rangi Changi meaning multi-colored and Wak Wak meaning vomit.

Our sleeping quarters were fine, as clean as they could be considering where we were and our family had done their absolute best to make it as comfortable as their means would allow. Electricity is scarce here. The whole country is on a rolling blackout schedule and so that combined with the our family’s single 60W light bulb dictates when the sun rises so does the family and vice-versa. We surfaced to find the yard already overflowing with harvested mustard grass. The girls, for it is only women in Napali families that do the manual labor, spent the whole day threshing and sieving the grass to extract mustard seeds which they would then mill into mustard oil. I thought I’d help out and, much to the amusement of the entire family, spent and hour or so sieving husks with a shaker to extract the seeds. For this I earned the name “Jalle-Daai” which means “Shaker Brother”. This is clearly the best nickname I’ve ever had.

About this time, nature called and both Sarah and I had to venture to the latrine. This is where it all started to unravel. The squat toilet was overflowing with a very large family’s worth of processed dhal-bhaat. It was not good. It was not remotely sanitary and, worse of all, it did not appear to bother the family one bit. We dropped some hints but in any culture it’s considered rude to mention to the host the state of their toilet. After they cleaned it, it was no better. Our fellow trainee volunteers reported similar problems at their houses too and nobody was feeling good about it. It didn’t seem to be a problem for the locals though.

After dhal-bhaat on the second night the power was on and most of the family retired upstairs to watch TV. This had just about the same level of surprise to me as the cow dung from the night before. Here are people with no running water, nothing but a fire to cook on and a toilet situation that’s making Everest seem like a small hill yet they have a TV!

Sarah and I spent some time ruminating on this. It is not our place to judge their culture unduly and, being Americans where not owning a TV is considered unconstitutional, it is certainly not our place to criticize their TV habits. This leaves us in a moral quandary. These people clearly have a sense of family and duty and tradition that makes the USA seem like the school shooting, crack addicted, self obsessed culture it’s trying so hard to be yet the families in this village seem to have problems with the most basic of skills required for human survival. At first we thought it was a general shunning of items outside their traditions but they have a TV and another host family have a computer. Then we thought it was a lack of infrastructure but other houses in the village appeared to have running water and more than one light bulb. Then we though that old wives’s tales might be true. Perhaps cow dung really is an antiseptic and washing dishes in cold water with no soap works great but then they all use shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste. Next we moved onto the economic theory that maybe these people are too poor to buy the things they need but the TV, computer and jeans came back – besides, soap is cheap everywhere in the world. So in the end, we were left completely stumped. These are no doubt the kindest, poorest, most proud and most welcoming people we have ever met we just can’t understand why they appear to deprive themselves of the cheap basics in life that would not only make their hard lives a little easier but also help prevent illness and disease that could make them live longer. Every family member acted and looked ten years older than they really were. The mother looked in her seventies even though she was in her mid-fifties, only two years older than Sarah’s mom. I guess having eight kids might have something to do with that. I’m not saying that soap is the answer to Nepal’s problems but our trainers repeatedly told us how proud everyone is of Nepali culture and how we must observe and not criticize, however, when a lack of the basics in life are hidden behind a mask of culture then one should take a closer look. Cultural change is not always for the worse.

We leave for our real placement in Chitwan tomorrow. It’s in another part of the country and with a different caste of family. You can be sure that a follow-up to this post is in your future.

Maybe because it sounds like Timbuku or maybe because its at the edge of the world, but to me, Kathmandu has always been a name belonging to science fiction. One could take the next space shuttle to Saturn’s Titan or Kathmandu, they both have the same number of layovers and both have the little screens in the back of the seat from where you can track your altitude and airspeed across the cosmos.

It therefore came as no surprise to me that Kathmandu actually feels a little like a space port (for Star Wars geeks think Mos Eisley). To further and probably strain the sci-fi analogy, its worth noting that we arrived here on New Years Day 2064. The strange planet that Nepal appears to be is 57 years ahead of us. Signs proudly say “Happy New Year 2064″ and people’s passports and driving licenses are all dated in the future. I have now overused the phrase “Great Scott, Marty – We have to get Back To The Future” but that’s not going to stop me if I think I can get a cheap laugh. In the future (your future, our past) we will post what you should expect from the year 2064 – it’s not pretty!

KTM airport, although modern, has a remote outpost feel to it too. It is right in the center of the city, about 5km from the tourist enclave of Thamel. The arrivals procedure took about an hour as three planes worth of tourists all lined up at once to pay for the $30 visa-on-entry which is basically a tourist tax – there is a $20 departure tax too also only payable by western tourists. Fortunately, they will take the $30 in any currency including the Standard Galactic Credit and the Tralmafadorian Blat (R.I.P. K.V . Jnr).

The city houses many temples on large plots of land overlooking Thamel. The temples are either Hindu or Bhuddist and are themselves small citidels. The stupas, painted with their large eyes and decorated by thousands of prayer flags fluttering in the wind look as if an alien culture left them here before blasting off back to their home planet as a cruel joke to the poor humans who would later try and apply meaning to the strange structures they inherited.

The new aliens, Westerners, all congregate in the enclave of Thamel. It’s a square area right in the center mainly accessed by small lanes and cut-throughs. It is here that the strangest culture of all exists. If one visits Nepal and only visits Thamel then one hasn’t visited Nepal at all. It has wonderful restaurants, flushing toilets, great shopping, no chain stores and feeling of both tranquility and transition. Every other store sells knock-off but great quality trekking and camping gear and fuels the feeling of space explorers stocking up on supplies before igniting boosters and heading into the wilds of space. Of course, everyone is going on organized treks around the mountains where they will attempt to feel like the pioneering westerners they clearly aren’t. They will buy new gear (they will use it just once) , hire a sherpa (who isn’t a member of the sherpa tribe at all), hire a porter to carry their bags (making a half-hearted attempt to ask about their well being) and then they will feel like explorers. Whilst trying not to sound like a hypocrite, we leave tomorrow for our trek.

Outside the safe walls of Thamel is the poverty we have now come to expect from these parts of Asia. Stray dogs by the thousands, poor sanitation, congestion and smog, dirt roads in city centers and the overall smell of corruption. The Maoists we right to start a revolution but there are no signs of it in the city now except for extremely well fortified hospitals and government buildings.

So here we are, on another strange planet. Yet the further we are from Planet Western Civilization the stronger it’s gravitational pull becomes. Kathmandu is one of my favorite space ports but only because I can escape Kathmandu and head into Thamel for a little home comfort. We will soon head off for a month to volunteer in a remote village in the center of Nepal and that will certainly be quite another world altogether.