Nepal Revisited
17/12/2012
I have just computed that we have been in Nepal twelve days and it occurs to me that writing a travel blog is a lot like making a baby..the delivery proves much more difficult than the conception.
We are back in Kathmandu now and doing the things that tourists do. If its true that everything seems smaller when you come back to it decades later then Kathmandu has escaped the problem. I would not be surprised if it has grown fifty times in population since 1979 but I doubt anyone has attempted to count the heads, which seem constantly going somewhere. The number of auto-rickshaws is drastically reduced and bicycle rickshaws even more so, replaced by nasty suspension-free tin-can taxis that bully their way through the narrow alleyways surrounded by a seething entourage of motorcycles. Walking anywhere is hideous. The only impression I have of diminution is of the size of the people, possibly because they have almost universally adopted versions of Western dress, especially sad for the women as Nepali dress was infinitely more elegant. In fact the women seem to have disappeared from sight. Those you do see are generally perched on scooters and weaving their way through the chaos with pert resignation.
The young men have not changed. They still lounge in louche groups leering and sharing their fantasies as tourist women walk past. They have developed a passion for wearing cloth face masks which makes them look like gangs of rather effeminate highwaymen, clad as they are in stove-pipe pants and fake leather jackets.
Presumably the masks are intended to filter carbon monoxide. All this internal combustion has turned the perpetual haze in the Kathmandu valley into a caramel fog, worst in the mornings but present all day to some degree. Planes still take off through it, I note. I presume the pilots have a very good recollection of the position of the surrounding hills or else a particularly long white stick. Landing into the fudge- coloured gloop must be even more challenging.
Kathmandu has become like any northern Indian city. Construction of buildings is everywhere and progresses at astonishing speed. Women mix mortar by hand, carry sand up building sites in baskets on their back and bricks are flung around a tenuous framework of concrete pillars from the top of which protrudes reinforcing steel like tousled bunches of russet chives. If an earthquake ever hits this valley the destruction of buildings and loss of life will be beyond estimation.
And over it all carousing crowds of crows compete to be heard above the continuous tin symphony of taxi and motorbike horns as they weave their stinky way through alleyways designed to accommodate a genteel procession of artisans, merchants and cows.
It feels quite familiar nonetheless. Nepal has adeptly responded to the tourist industry and has developed quarters in Kathmandu, Pokhara and all the popular tourist destinations that cater to every possible wish of foreign visitors, (except a wish for peace and quiet). Wading through the streets of Thamel I have been offered drugs twice, porn..(mumble, something..), once and a nice warm sweater and scarf approximately 14,000 times. This I take as a sad reflection on my age, further reinforced by the fact that I feel no need for any of the above.
I allowed my judgement to be outvoted by my apprehension and engaged an agent to arrange bus travel to Pokhara and Chitwan and a porter for the trek we undertook. Mr Prakash had a tuberculous cough which he was as keen to spread around as he was to wedge us into a hotel other than the one I had chosen and various other decisions, contrary to my instincts.
We shovelled ourselves into a bus at 7 am and swayed and weaved our way through the seven hour bus ride. In place of the envisaged nuggety porter, we were accompanied by a diminutive 18 year old student who turned out to be Mr Prakash's nephew, on his college break. He had the face of an eager ferret, sheltered inside a voluminous custard yellow hoodie. As he was Chetri, he saw himself as mentor rather than porter and the most I was able to induce him to carry was a water-bottle. His command of English was roughly equivalent to my dusted off 35 year old himal-billy Nepali but he persisted doggedly in English to share his encyclopoedic knowledge of cricket and soccer. He appeared to be able to recall the scores over the last two years of every player in the Indian professional cricket league, knew all the Australian cricket teams history and had favourite football clubs he avidly followed in the German, Spanish, Italian, English and European leagues. I proved a disappointment to him in this regard but it was only a minor impediment as he was compulsively gregarious and engaged with anyone who would sit still long enough at all the lodges we stayed along the way.
The trek to Poon Hill was fine and we were blessed with great visibility every day. I was surprised to find that the climb to the top, by some geological calamity, had become at least twice as long and three times as steep since I last "summited" there thirty five years ago.
Tessa spent an hour plus thermalling in a paraglider with a handsome Spanish pilot over the Pokhara foothills and has declared herself hooked on paragliding.
We survived the bus-ride to Chitwan and enjoyed the two days of elephant-back riding and crocodile harassing. On the second night was the "Tharu Peoples Cultural Dance” presentation , attendance at which was apparently compulsory. The master of ceremonies must have learnt his English in Belgium. He bore a striking vocal resemblance to the vowel-mangling gendarme from 'Allo, 'Allo, and physically, but for the loss of a moustache and substitution of high-powered horn-rimmed glasses, he would have been a competent understudy.
I have decided that road travel, especially by bus is the most hazardous occupation we undertake here so at great expense we substituted the return trip to Kathmandu, (seven hours up winding switchback roads)with a twenty minute flight.. It was...sublime...
I shall cease..pro tem..
Adrian
Onward and Upward 18/12/2012
We are wandering around on our last morning in Nepal, spending our remaining rupiah on things we know will be invaluable in the future. I am knick-knackered with haggling prices down;, such a complex system. I think there are two economies in Kathmandu. The goods and services in the tourist precinct are generally haggled down to about a third to a half of what the cost at home might be but they are still about five to ten times their real purchase price. Either that, or these cubby-hole shopkeepers are dollar millionaires judging by the quantity of stock they carry.
Yesterday we were at Pashupathinath, a much scaled down version of Varanasi There were a number of incineration being conducted on the ghats simultaneously including one of someone of obvious import. He was massively garlanded under heaps of marigolds and attended by a military band that wheezed and squeaked its way through some military sounding airs with the Last Post saved for last. When the attendant funeral dignirati washed his feet in the river, the designated washer abandoned his slippers and waded in, in his socks. The slippers floated away, a sacrifice to grief. They had teddy bear patterns on them .. I think they may have been borrowed.
Beside them a collection of ten or so women were wailing ritualistically over the shrouded bundle on the next ghat ten metres away as the various cleansings and anointing progressed, apparently unimpressed with the gravity of the ceremony next to them. Another group of four or five brought the bloated corpse of a woman to the water’s edge and abandoned her there with her face showing. Tess thought the woman was pregnant; I though maybe she was just a few days late.
A few feet away a crowd of ghat-urchins squabble and sift the river for remnants of value with makeshift sieves and, I suppose, dream of the day to come when they will strike gold, a filling or maybe a titanium hip prosthesis they can sell for scrap.
It seems that all these remembered places are so much more crowded now, with local people who seem to be filling their time with seeing the sights if not involved in commerce. At Boudhanath, there were few Tibetans and almost no Western tourists, other than the intense young women prostating themselves continuously on an endless inward journey of discovery. The laid out platforms are polished smooth by countless pampered palms as their owners slide forward onto their faces repeatedly, searching for that missing piece to complete their puzzle, in the dust that blows around the stoupa.
The Western tourists have changed most markedly, The stoner in baggy pants and dreads is extinct, and young back-packers, mostly Australian students are in the minority. Oddly, the rest seem to be old, lean American men, usually bearded and travelling alone, on a quest to find themselves, or at least to try and remember where they left themselves on that draft-dodging odyssey they did in the sixties. They gather at breakfast in the Guest House to compare ailments, and meet again on the terrace as the sun sets to compare their purchases and the progress of their enlightenment.
The great majority of tourists are Chinese, Malaysian, Indian and Japanese and are almost all middle-aged.
It's time to go; the chariot awaits.
Adrian
19/12/12
“..and so we say farewell..to Balham..”
.or maybe Bedlam..KT-style.. after a vertiginous final journey, back-tracking and meandering through the rocky steep alleyways of the new suburbs, because the road to the airport was blocked, we hit Departures..
A sign at the entrance said “No Explosive Capes Or Fira Woras Permitted Past this Point.. I was pleased about the capes but the fira-woras were disappointing..because I had a breeding pair in my carry-on, that a guy in Thamel said I’d be able to take on the plane,, “noo problem, special morning price..good luck for me free to look etc…”
Arrival at Singapore was surreal.. like being teleported from a bad version of the Flintstones to the Jetsons. Tessa and I flopped onto the twin feather football fields in the downtown Intercontinental and just grinned. Yabba Dabba Doooo…
20/12/12..
Episode four.. In which the Intrepid Pair go in search of the Wildman of Borneo.
Kota Kinabalu, ..not quite Copacabana..but Sabah seems remarkably well organised if a little top-heavy in the oil-palm plantation department.
We dined at Bomber Burgers, offering the “Authentic American Experience”.. there were shakes ‘n’ fries and waiters with baseball caps on backwards, but the crowning glory was the décor. From the ceiling were suspended sticks of bombs, poised to rain down and cluster-fuck the diners.. apparently the memory of the “authentic American experience of war in the Pacific’ lives on.. I thought it very witty.
And on the whole we found the Sabah-Malaysians very welcoming, courteous, matter-of-fact, just..nice.
Sandakan, on the other side of Sabah, was where some of the Allied prisoners of war captured in Singapore ended up and only six survived.. but for a couple of fate-twists my genetic line might have ended there in 1945. It wouldn’t be the worst place to rejoin the carbon atom pool but I was glad to be seeing it rather than being it all the same. Not that you could see that much.. the Heavens were rent and water was the order of that day and part of the next.. the title “rain forest” required no imagination..
Our quest for the Olde Man of the Foreste, or “ranga” to the Australian tourist, yielded mixed results. Not surprisingly, the rehabilitation of orphaned baby orang utan does not include tea parties or photo opportunities with busloads of eager foreign anthropomorphists. To get your hands on one of those ‘lil’ critters you have to pay and volunteer to stay there.. an ingenious plan to milk extra revenue from plump English misfits who hope, that by donning white gumboots and getting down and dirty in the jungle with their whanau, the missing link they’ve been vainly looking for on a housing estate in Bolton will suddenly materialise.
Although they put out fresh fruit and vege in the forest every day, the Gingas in the Mist make their own lunch dates and only one checked in while we were there.
He appeared to be mildly entertained by our presence and demonstrated a facility for sphincter management, (#1. and #2.) whilst hanging from a rope by one arm which, I must admit, implied a nonchalance and more highly evolved upper body strength than I could ever have aspired to.
He had clearly developed an unnatural passion for dairy during his early years because he spent the rest the time upended in a bucket of milk; apparently they normally spend the first seven years with their mothers so I guess he could be excused. He was probably one of those types who would have insisted that his mother come down to kindy to breast-feed him.
While we were watching, a jet-black squirrel gingerly stuttered his way through the canopy, down on to the feeding platform and helped himself to a piece of apple. The German student next to me named him “Gunther”.. I thought he looked more like an Eric.. It wasn’t much but it was something.
The next couple of days were spent on excursions by boat on a wide, brown scurrying river , guided by the confusingly named Amazon Tours, in search of the “ecological wonderland” of Borneo, the star of which, we were repeatedly reminded, is the Proboscis Monkey; undoubtedly the result of God rising on the fifth day with a migraine and losing patience with the whingers from his previous day’s creations..
GOD: “Ok, that’s enough.. you lot there, move to the left..I shall call you….English tourists…. You others, on the right, all of you whining about the size of your genitals, I’ve got a surprise for you.. a second penis.. a huge one.. but the surprise is its on your FACE..! and I’ll call you..oh I don’t know.. I’ll leave it to the Greeks..they’re good with names for weird sexual stuff…”
The life on the wild-side was there all right, horn-bills and eagles and snakes..well one snake., .dick-head monkeys and all.. even a place on the bank where a pygmy elephant had recently been but, (head-slapping moment for “nth” time) rather than crowding along the bank, waving and begging for fruit bonbons, the majority of the fauna remained obdurately wild and perched, glowering, high in the trees. Our Chinese tour companions had thought it through more thoroughly and were armed with camera lenses the size of bazookas. We wannabe-naturalist dilettantes made do with a pair of loaned binoculars that had one stuffed channel .. so I suppose it was technically a telescope.
The highlight of our return trip was in a particularly dark towering cave, inhabited, apparently, by two million bats and an equal number of tiny birds called swifts who make nests in the roof made of dried swift-spit, which are knocked off into a basket by little men climbing around on rickety bamboo ladders. Swift-spit soup is highly valued when made into a medicinal consommé, although I still think you can’t beat a thin chicken potage when one is peaky. The harvest is well-paid apparently and clearly perilous. The floor of the cave is thickly covered with choking primaeval ooze, the product of centuries of what our Prime Minister would risk confusing with David Beckham . Tracking through this in the gloom and round your feet as you slither up and down the board-walk are fat rats and legions of enormous, scuttling cockroaches with rattling carapaces. On the sides of the cave in every crack and crannie are long-legged centipedes, another Creationists’ dream. Imagine a really fat, long worm , trying to control fifty pairs of daddy-long legs with a brain the size of a pin-head. Evolution just doesn’t have a sense of humour that cruel.
Tessa judged it to be #1. in her holiday highlight list.
And so, by road, air and sea we made our way to Bunga Raya Resort in the Tunku Abdul Ramen Maritime Park.
25/12/12
Chapter 6.. Feliz Navidad..
We arrived on a balmy, breezy Christmas eve, after a crazy sleigh-ride in a cruiser-for-two with twin 225 Honda outboards, piloted by a four foot eight, nugget-brown Santa.
We dined by the scaled down home-built Victoria Falls that turned from purple to orange to turquoise and we muttered our way through Christmas carols accompanied by seventeen brown elves, dressed in red satin mini-tunics edged with white cotton wool., and Dancer and Prancer on guitar. We retired to our bush-nestled villa where the air was elegantly manicured to 18 degrees C. with a DVD of Johnny English 2. and a bottle of London gin bought from the superette in Kota Kinabalu. It was clear Christmas was going to be Hell.
Disappointingly, there was no annoying uncle to arrive late, drink your whisky, and call your sister fat, but in other respects Christmas Day was traditional. Too much turkey and ham, too much, too much, and egg nog.. really.. egg nog.. on the house.. The weather was beautiful, if a little challenging for the Ginger bread House, in particular the Snow-man and the icing icicles which sweated syrup as the day steamed on, and attracted swarms of little flies from the 840 varieties of hibiscus surrounding the al fresco dining area.
For such is the meaning of Bunga Raya.. hibiscus, that is, not obscene excess..
We snoozed the afternoon away, like a couple of pythons who’d swallowed goats. We missed dinner..we felt sick.. I think it was something we’d eaten. We did manage to stagger to happy hour for a complimentary Margherita and the salt seemed to do me good.
27/12/12..
Back to Orbit City..
The black and white liveried staff of the Singapore Intercontinental were apparently over the moon to see us back. Christmas still lingered in the elegant commercial heart that beats in the breast of Singapore.
We burrowed our way into the Metro and whooshed about the town through Malls and stalls and bright acrylic temples that looked incongruously clean and new. The worshipers were courteous and quietly welcoming and the atmosphere was no less reverential than in the smoke-choked ghats of Pashupathinath.
On our final day we launched a walking expedition to find the Raffles Hotel. Even in the midst of ongoing construction the city remains coiffed and buffed in fine Oriental order. We never quite reached the hotel, but we did arrive at the Concert Hall, a giant supine durian and associated arts orientated quarter. We dodged downpours and washed up in a bar where they had boutique beer on tap. All was well with the world, and we would soon be mounting the silver bird bound for home.