Soul Searching

Nepal seems to be the overall poorest country I’ve visited so far, and although the street urchins are absolutely filthy, the kind of filth that’s hard to imagine, they look pretty healthy.

I think I’m missing a day somewhere? Somewhere with a *beni in it…

Ps – don’t shoot me, but at this point things look a lot like the Alps, without the comfort and food. Maybe with a porter things will look better…

* – It’s really cold, be prepared. It staying above freezing but since there’s no heat so you never get warm. There are no heaters where you sleep. Even if you find hot water, no matter what you think sitting in your warm room in the west, you’re not getting naked in a room that’s 34 degrees to wash off. Test the hot water, they all say they have it, 90% don’t. That’s not completely true. They have their version. We would call it cool. No where near warm. It’s very high altitude, it takes a few days to acclimate, don’t start by going straight up. Hire a porter and guide. If it’s low season you can get two in one. I’m here at the lowest point in the season. During other months 150 people a day are coming through (I’m glad it’s not that time!)

Bangkok – no where near as sleazy as I would have imagined. Malls, movies, and unpaved roads. It was actually really nice.

Katmandu – one version of hell, must be ring number three or four from Dante’s Inferno. The sheer pandemonium was kind of shocking. Cars going every way you can imagine, bicycles, and rickshaws on top of that. It made me realize how used to rules we are in the West. Even in Indonesia there were rules, bendable, even option but everyone had a notion of them. Not here.

Pokhara – Lakeside district nice, food everywhere sucks and it’s really cold. Like everywhere else here, there’s no heat. That wouldn’t be so bad if you could get a place to warm up once in a while… I saw a cow fall down. You’d think with four legs and all it’s be hard…

Trekking* – first really bad idea to go from Phuket, Thailand where it’s 90° F to Nepal, where it’s 60° F in the daytime and around 32° F at night, really bad. I arrive in Jomsum and make my way to Kagbeni – after harrowing 16 seat airplane ride. The plane was almost grounded due to heavy fog and strong winds. They didn’t tell us until after. The plane took off and everything was fine until we started to land. The small plane had to make a 180° turn to land. The only problem was that it had to make the complete turn in a narrow valley. I swear I could have spit out the window onto the mountainside. That coupled with the wind made for an exciting voyage. Only me and one other trekker arrived that day. No one else was able to get in for another 5 days dues to the winds. No one had come in the previous 3 days because the planes were grounded due to fog. Very low season. I decide no porter, no guide, just me and my 40 pound pack. If anyone had questions about my intelligence, let those be gone. It’s confirmed. I am stupid. Not just stupid, but stupid and stubborn – a deadly combination.

Day one – Jomsom to Kagbeni, the first mistake, uphill on my first day. A 2 ½ hour trek takes me six. Not because I’m slow. I was moving at a pace similar to the locals. I just took the “safe” way. The actual path. Then everyone told me afterward that it’s a lot shorter to cut through the dried up river bed. Kagbeni turns out to be my favorite place on the trek. I found a really nice tea house with a family of very clean tea house. The food was good too. A nice place to rest. It’s really cold.

Day two – on to Muktinath. Way too cold. The higher the altitude, the colder and thinner the air. Dirty and completely disgusting. The bed the sheets smell, that sour sweet rancid smell of filth from not being washed in ages. Like a bat out of hell.

Day three – Muktinath to Kagbeni “take a shortcut” in Nepali means let’s see how stupid this westerner is … the 2 ½ hour shortcut takes six hours, climbs to mountains and goes back to where I started from! At least I get a clean place to sleep.

Day four – going down hill now, the hard part is over. So now, of course, hire a porter.
Kagbeni to Kalopeni

Day five Kalopeni – to Tatopani – hot shower, aaahhh

Day six Tatopani to Sikha – famous for its “hot springs” (nasty), no hot water due to hot springs

Day seven Sikha to Ghorepani – dirty, nasty place

Day eight Ghorepani to Nayapul, 6 ½ hours, met guide, had handkerchief stolen, tasted raxi, a rice wine. If I had any worries about parasites, I’m sure this stuff took care of them…

Pokhara – relax and recuperate. Laundry, nice hotel, kind of hot water

Back in Katmandu – a 7 hour bus ride back to the mouth of hell

Ok, so despite my best efforts to dissuade all but the most serious of professional mountain climbers, you still want to visit Nepal. What do you need to make the trip as comfortable, safe, and fun as possible?

a guide – $7 a day, make sure that they agree to feed and bed themselves
a porter – around the same as a guide, same agreements. The little, skinny guy who came with me on the second half of my trek could eat FIVE heaping plates of rice and dahl four times a day!
a sleeping bag – you can rent one in Jomsum
a small electric heater with an adapter plug – wow. It would have been a totally different trip with one of these. Way more pleasant. You would have to pick one up stateside or in Europe. This is part of the reason you need a porter ;^) I’ve seen really small, light weight ones. You can just leave it with your guide/porter after… I would get up around 8 am eat, trek, try and get somewhere by 5 or 6 pm, eat again, and then get in bed (under the smelly covers), and wait for the next day. It was so cold I couldn’t even type, or read! My hands would freeze in minutes…
warm clothes – yes, warm clothes. I used my super light weight, fast drying, travel clothes. Yes, stupid. So stupid. The Himalayas you say? Yes. So stupid… You can rent some of these in Jomsum as well.

Trek for short periods. I think 3 – 4 days would be better than 10. You could do small ones to a bunch of different places, and take breaks in between to recover.
Allow some time to acclimate to the altitude. Smart trekkers go DOWN first for a few days when they get to a high altitude location. Unlike me, who went UP…
Know that the food is uniformly bad (and you’re getting the good stuff!)

September, October is prime time with 4,500 people arriving in Jomsum each month. All the hotels, no matter how crappy, are completely booked by 2 pm. That means you have to be done walking every day by that time. The least busy time is now, January and February. The day I arrived there was only one other person, which explains why I got lost all the time – there was no one to follow.

I don’t know what the word in Nepali is for “shortcut” but it probably is something similar in meaning to “let’s send this guy over a couple of mountains and see if he lives.” Anyway, after the first disastrous day, in which a 2 ½ hour trek took me 6 ½ hours, because I decided I should be able to recognize a marked trail without any help, I decided to ask the locals for directions BEFORE hitting the road. Well needless to say what is a shortcut for some one that is used to walking over mountains regularly isn’t quite the same for a guy with a 40 pound pack on his back. And they do this thing where they just kind of wag their hand in a general direction and say “straight” or “follow the path.” The only problem is there are a million forks in the road, and sometimes the “path” is the wrong way! You’ll be happily walking on a clear “path” and suddenly there’s a sign that points directly away from the path, into nothingness. So which do you choose? I chose to stay on the path. The map said that there was only one town for miles, and I figured the “path” had to lead there. Completely wrong. The “path,” of course, lead to nowhere. Impossible? Not here. I ended up hiking from 4500 meters to 5500 meters (I think that’s around 18,000 feet), and back again. Brutal.

Indonesia – the land of mangy dogs
Thailand – dozens of dogs with really short legs, there must be one very busy, short-legged male dog running around Thailand…
Nepal – dirty dogs but cute, almost all of them – sleeping…

It seems there are strained relations between the native Nepalese and the Tibetans. Whenever I talked to a hindu Nepalese, and they would tell me the religious breakdown of the population, they would always say, the king is hindu, 48% of the general population is hindu, 48% is Buddhist and 4% other religions (muslim, Christian, etc.), and that there were more hindus than anyone else. To which I would reply, I thought the proportions were the same? No. hindus are the majority. What’s the percentage? 48%. And the Buddhists? 48%. The same percentage. Yes. Then they’re even? No. more hindus, many more. What are the numbers again? 48% both. Okay. I get it.

That said, they both subscribe to a caste system. A minimum of three. Bottom – untouchables, middle – normal blue collar folk, and I never met the third kind, Top – royalty. Even the Buddhists have servants. Which I imagine they look at as an act of grace, and maybe it is here. Who knows?

Anyway, that brings us to namaste, which means something like I recognize the light (Buddha) in you, as the same light (Buddha) that shines in me. Now, given a sentiment like that, uttered 100 times a day or more, you’d think that honesty and compassion would rule. Not so. Everyone is trying to rip everyone off and lying in the process. They don’t seem to treat each other with much respect (hey! It’s like NYC!) I was hiking down a dirt lane and there was a guy with a mule. The mule had a broken leg, and I saw the guy kick the mule in the broken leg! I shook my finger at him but all he did was say “namaste.” I don’t know, maybe up there they have a way to heal the mule’s broken leg, and he was just trying to get it to a place where it could get care, but it didn’t really seem like it. It didn’t seem very “namaste” to me. Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of people that seem hard working, honest, and kind. It’s off season here, so maybe the hawks are trying harder to reach their prey…

The very first thing that happened in the airport was a kindly looking taxi driver came up to me and quoted me a price for a ride to the city. I said I wanted to check with official taxi stand to see their price. He told me the price would be the same as his. Then he talked to me of how terrible it would be to live in a world without trust, without integrity, without belief in others. I explained that I was from Brooklyn, and no offense to him or his honesty, but I wanted to check the price anyway. Of course, he was trying to rip me off.

It turned out to be a blessing. Those lines were used a couple of times on me (trust me, honesty), and every single time it was some sort of scam. Namaste.

It’s like many of the Buddhists all over the world, how many actually practice compassion in their everyday life?