April 12, 2009 - Sunday - Day 271

It's Easter Sunday .  I haven't written in more than a month.  I have been busy with the guys and Lauren here.  But even so, I have definitely had time to write.  I have forced down the compulsion to write anything because I don't want to have to confront these feelings.

 

I let myself get silly drunk last night.  I had hoped for a biggish gathering at my place following the Hash.  The Hash itself was an epic 2-3 hour death march that Rosie and I had to shortcut for our own sanity.  I was hoping for a bit gathering so that I wouldn't be alone long enough to realise that I am alone again for another 3 months.  There's a quarter and a bit left to this assignment and while part of me finds it very easy to deal with that and why I want to see it out, another part of me thinks that first part is totally insane and tries to talk him out of it.

 

Due to the death marching quality of yesterday's Hash our gathering was a relaxed group of 4, one fighting off nausea, and another fighting an uncontrollable urge to sleep while I determinedly ate too much for my stomach to hold in, between bouts of incessant chattering.  The other person was left to flit between the three of us and out rampaging illness, interfering emotions and uncontrollable fatigue/negativity -well not really, but none of us was really glowing with the fantasticness of the run that we just completed.

 

Today passed in a haze of desperate internet browsing, hangover food, cards, a nap and a 2 or 3 hours of solid reading.  All designed for the same thing, the same goal.  Don't let the brain have time to think lest dribble like this start pouring from my hand through a pen to paper.  I was desperate to find media - movies, music, news - or even gossip from friends back home to distract myself from the horrible realisation that 3 months is still an epic quarter of my assignment and I am living alone.

 

That, and that the Blues lost by 4 f'ings point to the Bombers yesterday in a clincher I should have been at, at the MCG.  Damn the internet and its ability to keep me informed wherever I am in the world.

The Tang of Langtang

Some of you thought that it would happen.  But it didn't.  And I wasn't.  Or I shan't.  Maybe I couldn't.  But I don't remember.  And who really cares anyway?

Yes, its almost been an epic month since I last posted.  I have done so much in that time that my head has been exploding with the bloggability of it all.  Let's start at the very beginning (I have it on Julie Andrews authority that its a very good place to start).  You all thought that my friends Lauren, Jojo, Naomi, Clint and I were zipping off to Everest Base Camp for a romp in the snow before falling back down the hill again.  You'd be absolutely correct.  That's exactly what we thought we were doing as well.  However Yeti Airlines, did not appear to think that it wasthe best plan in the world.  In fact, they were so concerned with the last group of Aussies that they sent there were such a bad omen that they didn't want to send any more and cancelled our flights to Lukla (the most horrifying and probably one of highest air strips in the world) not once but twice.

Catching on that it just wasn't going to happen and obtaining the services of a very bouncy and happy little Nepali guide called Kamal (who has a very interesting life story that I will share another day) we re-organised our trip and decided to head into the Langtang range to the north of Kathmandu instead.  

You see, although Everest is very famous, the whole top third of Nepal is Himalaya and there are plenty of other places to go wandering through hills if you really feel like it. Luckily Langtang is accessible by car (well, sort of, there were roads in the parts that hadn't been wiped out by landslides or floods) and is remarkably less touristed than its sister regions Everest and Annapurna.

Day 1, Jojo on a mission to prove to himself that he can do... ummmm stuff like climbing hills almost died as the pollution in Kathmandu had basically turned his lungs into tarpits.  Determined to carry his bag all the way, by lunch time Kamal had taken over and was carrying not only Joe's but his own bag as well.  As we sat down to our dinner the rain came in and apparently brought some snow with us as it peppered the mountains above us with a beautiful little jacket of white.

Day 2, we got to the actual village of Langtang that was settled by Tibetan immigrants more than 900 years ago if I have my stories straight (which I probably have not).  There were a great many children running about our ankles as we investigated the town all with horribly runny noses, dirty faces and wind-blown cheeks.  

Apparently there's an Australian bloke that lives there who runs down and back from inside a few hours where we started 2 days before simply to check his email.  

Day 3, from Langtang village we crawled up an epic altitude that almost killed Jojo and had Clint speechless on account of altitude sickness at about 3800m from sea level.  Kamal and I were going to climb to one of the nearby peaks when a freak snowstorm blew up from Langtang and made visibility impossible.  

After a lunch sitting in a freezing dining room with no wood heater to keep us warm we rushed back to Langtang for the relative warmth of our sleeping bags only to be woken in the middle of the night by terrifying winds blowing through the cracks in the wall.

The rest of the days blurred together as I started to forget what day of teh week it was and what the outside world was like.  It was beautiful to spend time walking from  one teahouse to the next with everything I needed strapped to my back and the beaitiful mountains and jungles we walked through to see. 

We came  back down from Langtang, much to Naomi and Clint's relief as they were both very poorly from climbing so quickly the day before.  The down didn't last long before we started back up towards the east on our way to the Gosaikunda Lakes, a group of beautiful high altitude Himalayan lakes.  Lauren always led the pack, charging ahead at times about 20 minutes in front of everyone else.  Apparently she got some training in scooting up Mt Buninyong with textbooks in a backpack cos she was afraid of letting everyone else down.  In all honesty she just put us to shame.

Death threats were murmured about Kamal as he pushed us to our limits "just 30 minutes more, it couldn't be more than that, I promise" but we always took them back when we reached our destinations.  The walking was incredibly hard, but the views were spectacular and I think many of us were pushed beyond what we though were our physical limitations.  To quote Jojo "Rob, I'm having the time of my life...I can't lift my arms above my shoulders, but I'm having the time of my life".

Passing the lakes on the coldest night yet we started to see a pattern in the weather.  We would get beautiful morning with sunshine fresh snow underfoot and time temperatures.  But come 1 o'clock the cloud would set in bringing snow, hail, rain and misery.  Our moods always plummetted in the afternoon.  At one point I think I was carrying around an extra kilo because of the snow that had accumulated on my pack.

We had two porters, a 19 year old called Subas and a 50 something called Krishna.  Both were absolute guns.  Carrying Lauren, Naomi and Clint's packs they were absolute machines.  Charging ahead of us in the mornings, and always having our rooms ready and waiting for us by the time we arrived of an evening.  Krishna was a very pleasant old man, but he really kept to himself.  Subas was the real entertainer "Subas?  Do you know where the toilet is?"

"OK Mr Rob Daai"

"Yeah, OK.  But do you know where the toilet is?"

"OK, OK, OK"

Climbing the Pass after the lakes was the hardest except possibly for coming down them afterward.  That's where Clint had an innovative idea.  At one point he said "Rob, hold this" and promptly gave me his stick, sat down on his raincoat and toboggoned down the hill.  The man is a genius.  He even caught up to Lauren who had made a massive head start on us.  She turned around at one point to see a large man coming down the mountain at her on his belly screaming like a yeti.  Not before he got this cracker of a video of Kamal coming down after him.

There are plenty of other notables, including the Almost But Not Quite Nearly Snow Leopard Sighting (which I swore was really a Yeti), everyone was sick on something except for me, however I made up for that by trying to knee cap myself on a rock whlie walking down a mountain side over what was probably mainly ice.  There was the epic Middle of the Night Toilet FAIL (its supposed to go in the hole dufus) among others.  But that's enough for now.  

Enjoy the photos, and wish jealously that you took up a 12 month volunteer assignment in Nepal.

[for those of you receiving this by email - don't be lazy, visit the blog and actually see the photos, they're wicked!]

Shooting Fish In a Barrell

A book with a title linking it to a rather epicly cynical life lesson. The Himalayan Book Club's latest effort was:

Unfortunately, again I found this book to be quite disappointing. When I say "again" its not that I read it twice and expected it to be better the second time around, but that this is not the first time I have been disappoo-inted in the promises set forth in a Himalayan Book Club book.

Fantastic premise.

In a "note to the reader", the author describes how she stumbled into an odd section of the library. Here ghosts had communicated stories through mediums (sometimes in languages never previously understood by the medium) about their lives. Saving Fish From Drowning was supposedly a story based on the actual tellings of Bibi Chen, a famous art-critique / collector / or something. She was to be going on a trip to China and Burma with some friends. Unfortunately, she was gruesomely murdered first. And that's where the story starts off. Bibi narrates the story as her friends continue to Burma without her. And, that "note to the reader" was just a pile of horse poop.

The grumpy and disparaging main character, Bibi, I found myself liking in spite of her prickly personality. She was a 60-something American immigrant who fled Shanghai with her family when the Communists took over. Initially narrating the story in a way only a ghost could, she ultimately had difficulty in having a lasting role throughout the later parts of the book.

She told us about the leadup to her death. And discussed rather amusingly how annoyed she was as she watched over her own funeral and was concerned for the welfare of her puppy Poochini. Normally, I would instantly annoyed with a person whose dog's name was Poochini, but that's probably not the first contradictive thing I have ever said. I found her dry wit and disdain for her "friends" very entertaining.

There were flashbacks to China, where she talked of the only character possibly more cantankerous and interesting than Bibi herself, the evil step-mother Sweet Ma. Probably the highlight of the book (a shame as it was in one of the first few chapters) was where she described how she had been paying for her hideous step-mother to stay in an old person's home described as "Death's Waiting Room".

When she became infirm, I put her in the best of senior residences, at great expense to myself. She was not grateful. She called it Death's Waiting Room. For years, I told myself to be patient, knowing she would soon die. Surely her explosive anger might cause a similar effect on the blood vessels or her brain or heart. She was nearly ninety-one and I only sixty-three when I passed her by and flew out of this world.

Oh, how she wept. She recalled our past together as such a rosy relationship that I wondered if she was more senile than I thought. Or could it be that she had actually had a change of heart? When I discerned the answer, I changed my mind about her as well. Whereas I once looked forward to her end, I now wish her a long, long life. Let her not leave Death's Waiting Room and join me as her companion in the afterlife.

Haha, oh dear.

Unfortunately it seemed as if it was all down hill from there. That was pretty much the last of the interesting insights to Bibi and the person she became as a result of Sweet Ma's love and affection.

As a ghost she followed her frineds through China and Burma as they made one horrible cultural faux-pas after another before getting themselves abducted in a forest by a tribe of jungle people hiding from the Burmese military regime. To summarise, the characters were boring and sex-obsessed. Quite disturbing when one of the couples to get it on in the jungle had an age gap of about 40 years. And if they didn't I only thought Heidi was in her mid-twenties because she was as equally immature and dopey as I am. Moff, her sexual deviant in crime was late 60's as far as I could tell and some kind of hippie trapped in the wrong decade.

The jungle people mistook young Rupert (a 15 year old) for a reincarnated Jesus in their bizarrely warped version of Christianity because he was carrying a book - they took to be the bible - and could perform card tricks. The rest whinged about their marriages, their incompetence, their lack of significant others or were simply forgotten by the author who, at points, seemed to also forget that Bibi was actually narrating the story. Bibi's insights and understanding of Buddhism, Chinese and Burmese culture all appeared to dry up as the book progressed. It became more and more frustrating and dull as the main characters made one appaling decision after another.

There was one or two references (in various forms) to Saving Fish From Drowning. One was totally literal, where a fisherman claimed to be actually saving them. The other (one paragraph later) was an argument about the US' role in the world, and how it goes in to save people from themselves but does as much collateral damage as it helps, but the book never really came to a head on the issue.

I think rather than save these from drowning, it might have been less painful to have just shot them in their barrel. Stay tuned for more book club rants...

Characters > Katherine

I have been feeling creatively pathetic recently, and I haven't had a clue what to write about for months.  Then I remembered this old little thing.  The characters that I have met in Nepal.  This post is about one of my favourites.  Katherine.

[joint birthday party hilarity]

She's an American who arrived here just two weeks before I did on a program called Princeton in Asia.  She's working somewhere between Child Protection and Education at the US branch of Save the Children [SAVE THEM!  SAVE THEM!].  She's the only one amongst my close friend circle living in Lazimpat and it means we get to do a lot of amazing stuff together.  She could fall asleep inside a lion's mouth, or on the tracks of an oncoming steam train at the drop of a hat which makes her a rather bad movie-watching buddy but is an amazingly good-hearted and optimistic person.

Our first encounter pretty much was an epic 30km uphill bike ride (man, those ARE beautiful photos, and I wish I was writing stuff like that now) through mud and rain in the middle of the monsoon, where we got lost and had images of appearing in the newspapers back home as "two stupid Western tourists lost in the forest"*.  

This even was closely followed by an adventure through the Nagarjun Forest - an area in which the former king lives.  It was organised in the heat of the moment on a Friday night over drinks.  "Its the weekend tomorrow and we don't even know what we are going to do?!?!!" Luckily, Gemma's friend Jaya (you should remember him from such adventures as Mero Charpi Explode Chha) came to the rescue and recommended the walk.  Amindst talk of "making the most of our time in Nepal" and doing something every weekend and totally embracing the outdoorsiness we climbed up another hill and I can't seem to find any post that has shared those photos with you [gasp].

Of course, the frequency of these adventuires deteriorated, once we established ourselves with routines and discovered that we might actually need to do work while we are here.  So, while we still try to organise the occaisional adventure, or get ourselves out the Hash, we usually content ourselves with hanging out between my place and hers and our favourite locales in Lazimpat.  

And we still have 4 months of adventures to enjoy!

*Incidentally I have heard rumours that there are mass graves in that particular national park from the insurgency (just in case this post left you with too good of a "happy feeling")

Medicated Haze

Tonight I wandered out to grab some more vitamins.  Less than a week until my friends arrive and a few days after that we set out on our trek...I MUST GET BETTER!  

I'd been home all day, kind of in and out of sleep.  I have been using every little trick I have learned in my 25 years of life to get better.  They're probably clashing against one another. 

There's the lemon, honey tea trick.  My aunt imparted this one.  She juice about 5 lemons, heated it up, whacked in a tea bag and added some honey.  I don't know if it worke,d but it tasted amazing, although at the time I thought it was a collosal amount of lemons.  Because I wasn't in the mood to hunt down some lemons, I have to make do wtih lemon flavoured dissolvable multi-vitamins.

Lemonade.  My mother always encouraged me to drink plenty of lemonade to get some sugar and energy into me as well as to get the fluids moving.  She also, as previously mentioned is a huge fan of lemsip - a sort of lemon /drug cocktail available back home.

Books and music.  I have always found that the best reading can be done when confined to bed.  I polished off Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince one day when I was home with [edit],  SO I have almost finished our latest booclub book, "Saving Fish From Drowning".  A book with a fantastic premise - great introduction, very interesting main character.  Unfortunately it seems that the introduction was the peak of the story and the main character died in the first chapter.  Oh well, at least part of it was good.

The music helkps me sleep.  For some reason when I hear the voices of my favourite bands singing familiar songs it rocks me to sleep as if I were on a train.  

So there I was at 8pm...the power just gone out.  Medicated, wearing my pajamas and wandering the aisles of my corner supermarket on the hunt for more vitamins like a junkie from Robocop.  I was wearing brown leather shoes with my long blue pajama pants.  I was wobbly and kept holding my head.  To add to my appearance, I had forgotten to put my glasses on before leaving the house.   So I was squinting at everyone.  The best part was that nobody thought I was acting strangely.  All the guys working in the shop now recognise me and it was just another day.  

I don't know why, but I am constantly surprised that I live here now.  People know me here.  They accept me as just another person not an odd (or off) foreigner to be gaped at.

Namaste.

Racist Bastards

I'm not a racist.  I'm certain.  Like 90% certain.  

I am sure that character flaw does not mean I should be forced to endure the current torture I do on a daily basis.  It's really hard to swallow the racist mongrels that taunt me on the way to work.  They come yelling at my heels like rabid dogs.

But get this, the reason I know that they're racist is because they only go for me when I have the legs of my pants rolled up.  You know, "nerdy - i'm on my way to work and don't want to look like a tractor took an oil pee on me" style rolled up pants.  

I could go past with everything covered but my eyes and they would leave me alone.  Cover everything up and they ignore you, show the tiniest interest in them or the slightest flash of a white leg under your jeans and they'll be running alongside with no friendly intentions.  Racists.

I don't think I'd mind a racist parrot, screaming profanities at me each morning as I wake up.  Or perhaps a cat so incensed at the colour of the curtains that it rips them down while you are away.  But a gang of 4 dogs waiting on the corner to 'have a chat' with me each morning really chomps the biscuit.

Sometimes I have to make an important decision.  Slow down at the intersection or have my skin pierced by viscious teeth?  Weigh up the options, under the wheels of that bus?  Or accept a mauling from 4 potentially rabies infested rabid black dogs?*

*I'm not entirely sure but "rabies infested rabid" might mean the same thing...

The Small Things

A friend of mine recently said, "Enjoy yourself Rob, keep enjoying the little things."  She's been awfully happy and bright with herself recently, so I thought it was a rather easy thing to say.  But I gave it a go anyway.  It was remarkably refreshing.  I think it's been a long time since I really did that.  I'm not sure why it is, but immediately after she said it, I was seeing them everywhere.

After getting off the phone from a great talk with my girlfriend, I ran down the road to grab some dinner.  As I walked, Jebediah - La Di Da Daa came on from my playlist.  Its a great soundtrack to this post.

At a restaurant I was at in Nargarkot the generator kicked in and Bob Marley started winding up on the CD player.  Immediately, the wind also picked up and the tree outside the window started dancing.

Riding past Ratna Park (the busy bus hub of the city), a minivan screamed past me, literally bulging with the amount of people inside, the 'conductor' had his head out the window screaming out the bus' destinations.  On the back window was a sticker "Welcome to Nepal".

As I was riding to the lookout above Nargarkot a dog started running alongside.  I think it could have been the same one that went up theree with Dilli and me last time. Or perhaps,tht's just an active imagination.

A boy gave me a red flower.

At Shivapuri (recent festival), my neighbours stole wood from the construction site next to our compound and we had a fire in our courtyard and shared popcorn, while everyone laughed at my inability to understand Crazy Neighbour Lady's rants.

An old man grinned at me while I was on the way to work thing morning.