presents from India

Some endings are just too damn good.

I spent my last day in Asia in Paharganj, Delhi, wandering around the backstreets and alleys. I wanted to soak up the cows, sewage, smiles, rotting mud, pollution, weird conversations and occasional brilliant bits of sun and rain. I always feel sad on last days. But hopeful too. Maybe I would get a Free Religious Revelation or A Really Good Deal or something.

I sat in the early evening enjoying a final chai. The tea was strong, spicy and hot, and its uhh bouquet went well with the smell coming from the open sewer running past the vallah's setup. Sitting beside me on the vallah's other stool was an older guy, a Kolkatan lawyer. He asked me the usual-- "what is your salary, my good sir? where is your wife?"-- and then asked me if I had a religion.

"Sort of," I told him.

"You must hear of the revelations of C.C. Govan," he told me. Rickshaws honked, motorcycles blared and three thousand people somehow filtered by through the narrow alley.

"He was in Chicago oen hundred years ago. he was invited to speak at the World Fair but was given only five minutes. He revealed the secret to eternal happiness."

"Yeah?" I said, "so what is it?"

"Listen," he said. "Here it is. Each human being has one heart. One shared heart. And--"

A taxi pulled up at the end of the alley and honked at the lawyer.

"I must go," he said.

"What about Mr Govan's story?"

"You will find it," he said, and was off.


An hour later I paid the hotel for acab to the airport. The cab guy carried my pack through the Paharganj alleys to where three Israelis, about 400 pounds of luggage and one tiny cab were waiting.

"Baksis?" said the cab guy and I gave him my last rupees.

After half an hour, it became apparent that (a) we were not going to fit into the cab and (b) we'd been hugely ripped off. For R$180 you can hire your OWN cab-- here we'd each paid R$180 to share. The taller fo the two Israeli chicks cursed.

"Ma-FA!" she said-- "rip off" in Hebrew and then roundly cursed the driver.

"GET ANOTHER CAB! THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS! I AM DISGUSTED WITH YOU PEOPLE!" she yelled. A small crowd gathered to watch.

"I am driver. No owner" said the small Indian behind the wheel.

"GET ANOTHER CAB!" yelled the Israeli chica. Her boyfriend looked on and grinned.

I finally convinced them that it was all OK, that the rain was over, and that we coudl fit some luggage on the roof. We got in, and drove to the airport, the Israeli chick in stony silence.

The aiport was air-con cool, neon, quiet, organised-- only the soldiers didnt' fit. I checked my bags and sat down and exhaled long and hard. Bye bye India. How perfect on my last day that I got both ripped off and nearly enlightened.

Now I'm home, and this blog is done.

india, again

I am sitting in a net cafe in Paharganj, Delhi, India, and in 6 hours i will (hopefullyy-- they aren't answering their phone) get on KLMs big fat aircon jet and fly to the exact opposite of Delhi, a place where weed is legal and dirt a crime (Amsterdam) and from there home.

Before i go i will shower and take more stupid videos of cyclists cows and street kids whacked out of their heads on solvents. and also fatten myself with indian food. its hot here-- like 35 degrees. today it dumped rain and about every fourth autorickshaw fucked up cos when there's enough rain puddles get big and then water splashes into engine compartments and things stop, often in the middle of vast brown sea-puddles that the rain plucks at and through which the drivers then haul their machiens in sandaled sloshing feet to dryer ground, where they wriggle underneath and then flick at dashboard wires. I went today to the Bahai temple in south delhi. which is an amazing structure, like an unfolding 200 foot tall lotus of marble, and the bahai have the good sense to not allow talking inside it. any religion can come and use it but nooooo preeeeaching. smart moves. it may be the only still place in this city that reeks of sex, dirt and an edgy energy that glints out of the bulging peculiarly hindi eyes of the crowds of local guys that you see in the streets, which are reserved for men and dogs, the women (and cats) generally confined indoors.

Coming back from Tibet, you realise just how sexual India is-- from the women's colours to the crazy music to the lurking energy of the men. a friend noted how similar a Paharganj street is to an Italian piazza. such a different vibe from nepal-- where everytyhign is calm-- and tibet, where the altitude and buddhism make the inhabitants really well dressed friendly space cases. In India, people want things; in Tibet, people just kind of look around and just accept the world. And in Nepal, people are on the make, but they have enough good sense, or Buddhism, to know hwo to sit back do nothin'.

Awards

From your omniscient omnipotent and omnipresently impartial narrator, Butch...it's the

TRAVELLING IN ASIA AWARDS!


BEST MEAL: fresh wild mushroom and green dal bhaat, Tadapani, Nepal OR tomato, pumpkin and bean soup with fresh cornbread, CHame, Nepal.

BEST CUP OF GODDAMN COFFEE: It's a tie-- Macke's cowboy coffee or New Orleans Cafe, Kathmandu.

WORST TOILETS: China. And they're WAY out in front, err, back.

BEST ALCOHOL: Nepal's kukhri rum.

WORST DRIVERS: Tibet. When one guy can shut an entire town down with a passing maneuver, you know you are in truly unskilled hands.

"Best (worst?) psycho-insane driver who refuses to stop for a red light even when he nearly gets into a deadly car accident and is forced to back up, only to run the light again": Indians. (this category c/o Inder Nirwan

RUDEST PEOPLE: Indian teenaged boys, Varanassi, India

HOTTEST WOMEN: honourable mentions to the lovely ladies of Jaisalmer, India, but the award goes to...THE LADIES OF NEPAL. Keep on walkin', women-- we see the results in your legs.

HOTTEST MEN (c/o my female friends): Tibetan nomads. Usually wearing a pinstriped suit, sword, aviator shades, Converse, with braided red hair, a felt tophat, and riding motorbikes with prayer flags and fringes, there is no cooler style in the world.

NICEST PEOPLE: the Tibetans, hands down.

FASHION VICTIM: all Chinese.

GROSSEST MEN: working-class Indians. Note to Indian guys-- please keep it in your pants. Your metaphorical pants, too. Oh, and the 'staches...

the "I'VE GOT IT AND, GOD-DAMN IT, I'M GONNA USE IT" award: Asian drivers and their horns.

BEST OPENING LINE FOR A CONVERSATION: "Excuse me, sir, do you believe in aliens?

BEST NAMED AIRLINES (and the slogans they ought to have): Nepal.

-- First you got (i'm not making this up-- I took a flight with them) COSMIC AIR ("We'll take you ANYWHERE in the Universe, man").

-- Then there's Gurkha Air ("If we get hijacked we just execute the hijackers with our kukhuri knives. All our pilots are trained assassins.").

-- Then there is Buddha Air ("If the flight doesn't come, just accept this fact.")

--The official one: Royal Nepalese Airlines ("We're like the King-- sometimes not there when you need us")

--And of course Yeti Air ("We might not exist but try us anyway.")


PLAYER AWARD: Macke MasTacos. Despite the unsettled question of lowering one's standards, he got it, persisting even after being initally rejected.

FAVORITE DRINK: Ginger lemon soda

BEST ROAD: it's a tie-- Kodari->Lhatse (views), NJP->Darjeeling (signs and welcome change in climate).

LEAST COMPERHENSIBLE SOCIAL INTERACTION: the guy who in Jodhpur train station came up to me and stuttered "C-C-C-CLEAN? C-C-C-CLEAN?" at me, over and over.

FAVORITE PLACE: Bhaktapur, Nepal. If the Middle Ages were clean and peaceful, and they had cellphones, it would be this place.

street scenes

A random set of impressions from Tibet. We go from Lhasa to the Nepal border-- imagine driving from Calgary to Vancouver on logging roads, with three 18,000 foot passes.

-- In Xigatse, a Tibetan guy is driving a tractor on the main street, towing a trailer full of Tibetan farmer types. This Chinese guy in a suit and no helmet passes the Tibetan and clips his wheel. The Chinese guy drops tyhe bike and rolls across the road. Comes up screaming. Launches himself at the Tibetan, tries to punch him. The Tibetan pulls out a two-foot sword. The Chinese guy backs off.

-- In Lhatse a boy with a thumb growing out of his thumb asks us for money and food.

-- Somewhere between Ritung and Lhasa we play pool OUTDOORS in the sunshine.

-- A monk is wearing white and yellow two-tone loafers, a North Face jacket, white socks, purple robes, and is talking on a cellphone. Why is it that when monks do anything not monkish, they look funny?

-- at Everest Base Camp they bury their vegetables in the mud come fall, and light fires in spring to thaw the mud and get the food out. The landscape is so parched that even yaks get fed hay. There's a village-wide waterfight thing going on-- all the girls are getting chased and soaked by boys.

-- this skinny ripped Brit from Yorkshire and a Norwegian chick show up on bikes. The Norwegian looks tall strong Nordic competent and beautiful. The chick checks into a tent "hotel" while the Yorkshireman builds-- what else-- a stone wall to protect his tent from the wind. The Norwegian chick apparently can ride 200 miles and climb 5.12 but she pussies out as soon as there is any hassle whatever, like a bit of wind or their stove won't light.

-- We're travelling with German Marco and his trashy Ossi girlfriend. East-bloc "style" means tight high-waisted pants, bad skin (something Wessis rarely have), heeled boots and way too much cleavage. Marco has a shit fetish. H is vocally horrified by every toilet he and his woman nee to use.

"CAN YOU PLEASE CLEAN MORE PERFECTLY ZE TOILET?" he barks, despairingly, at the hotel guy in Gyantse, "MY GIRLFRIENT MUST VERY URGENTLY USE ZE TOILET!"

He is fascinated with the yakshit pies the Tibetans put on their roofs for use as winterfuel. And his poor ass can't handle the pounding insane road.

-- Macke and I make it outside to catch sunset on Everest while everybody else is getting wasted off of 1.5 beers at 5000m (16,000 feet). We get ten minutes of full-glory light.

-- We hitch from EBC turnoff. Since we need good karma, I build a cairn and Macke befriends the only guy within 100 miles, a Tibetan with a huge ancient tent who filsl Macke's water bottle with (EWW) yak butter tea. It works. Within one hour, we catch a ride to the border in an empty LC whose drivers argue the whole way.

-- we meet a Jap cyclist whose most recent adventure was Argentina-Alsaka in 19 months.

-- As we drop into Nepal, we get trees, ground cover, waterfalls, and slower heart rates. Macke says "air smells nice, huh?" and the driver promptly fires up a smoke.

-- in The Last Chinese Hotel of my trip, in Zhangmou, there is good news and there's bad news. The good: the toilet exists. The bad: its got a hole and Macke promptly pisses in it and floods the bathroom.

-- Zhangmou at 11 PM is bustling-- cars and trucks move goods, people eat and have their hair done and play video games, and wow, are the girls ever trashy.

-- A Nepali comes up as we cross the Nepal-China bridge and says "Helicopter?" This is Kathmandu joke-talk for "rickshaw" (e.g. "ha, welcome to the third world, Nepal Division, we suck so much that our helicopter is a rickshaw") but the guy is weirdly serious. Yeah, he IS serious. $125 U.S. gets you a chopper to K-town. Fuck, there's a Maoist strike. We have to wait a day before going on. We take the longest busride in the world to Barabhise. The bus has more people on the roof than inside it.

-- K-town. Steak. Coffee. Pizza.

California Girl

So I 'm enjoying the evening air outside the Kirey and this blonde comes up to me. She's with a dark haired guy named Ray. She introduces herself. She's just gotten to Tibet. The topic of toilets comes up.

"It's soooo gross," she says. "I mean, I brought, like, seatcovers for the toilets. But there's, like, no toilet seats."

"..."

Ray says nothing.

"I have to squat. My legs hurt."

"..."

Ray asks me for a smoke.

"Why are there so many Chinese people here? I thought this was Tibet!"

"..."

"I'm finding it really hard to like breathe here. I wonder why...?"

Ray stares at his smoke.

Ganden-Samye

In Lhasa, walking up stairs makes you breathless.

But this does nothing to make you think twice about a trek where you not only haul all your own gear but truck over two 18,000 (5300m) passes.

Macke, Blume, a Chilean couple, an Irishman and I decide to trek from Ganden gompa (monastery) to Samye gompa. The Chileans and the Irish are one unit; we three another.
In the supermarket you only buy stuff with pictures on it cos Chinese is like Greek. Then you hope pictures and reality match. People randomly come up to you and ask you weird questions and offer you services and items. You feel like an illiterate celebrity.

You buy noodles, noodles, more noodles, noodles, dried fruit, and Meat Stick. These are skewers of marinated yak meat. You also load up on smokes and candy, and send Blume off to find the sine qua non of successful travel: real coffee.

You take a pilgrim's bus to Ganden. On this bus are Tibetan ladies and a dwarf with a roll of carpets larger than he is. You ditch your packs for a couple of hours of monastery watching. The usual smell of sewage is everywhere. In one chapel, one monk chants sutras and his buddy fiddles with his cell. In the murky kitchen the light is smoky and blue, and massive, human-sized vats of butter tea bubble and about thirty monks wqhack away at potatoes.
In the main hall a hundred monks chant sutras in pools of yellow-orange light. The sound comes from everywhere and has neither beginning nor end.

You get confused by the map and guide instructions but finally fire up a barren ridge along a rocky trail. On the crest you meet Unt. After the laughter subsides ("unt" means "camel" in Marashtran Hindi) you plop down for lunch. Unt is all too happy to eat candy and nuts, but is most impressed with mouth-numbing Meat Stick (it's spicy and it makes the sensation in your mouth vanish, like an anaesthetic) and then of course smokes.

You wander down through Lebhu village, where there's the usual friendly Tibetan freak scene-- a man with one leg, curious children, women with sunburned cheeks ("but not noses; why is that?" asks Macke), massive woofing mastiffs (nice doggie, nice NICE doggie...), a guy who looks
like he's been assembled by the Salvation Army, gawky teenagers, etc.

You cross the river and after an hour's walk up the next valley set up camp with the Chileans and the Irishman, who is blotchy red and white despite layers of sunblock.
Tibetans-- who totally lack Western ideas about privacy-- show up and stare at us while Macke makes noodles and you and Blume fiddle wiht the tent. You bought prayer flags for guylines and the Tibetanms are loving this. You get visited by a couple with a herd of yaks, a single guy in a pinstriped suit, and a small horde of children that you manhandle and (bad, BAD tourist) feed candy. One girl-- like Blume named Droma-- makes herself useful and even does your dishes.

You propose an ethnic stereotype trash-talk evening. The Chileans for some reason aren't into being referred to as "los huevones" even tho the Kraut, the Yank and the Mick are A-Ok with the names.

The next day you greet the Chileans with a "como durmieron ustedes huevones?" which for some reason the Chileans are less than excited about. They are industriously off at an early hour while you are on Latin time. At 11:00 you head out with Droma up the valley. You stop at her ba (nomad tent), the inside of which has a clay oven, neat beds, piles of blankets, and two boys with Hot Wheels toy cars. Droma Queen wants photos taken of her; the boys flee when cameras come out.

On the way up to the Zhug La, Blume passes you whiel you are pouring iodine into murky brown water and praying that the giardia will submit to the chemicals.

"I dont' stop," she says, "I must think."

The valleys are wide and grey-brown. You could roll asteroids around in them, they are so smooth. Billions of tiny flowers are everywhere. The odd yak groans.

On the Zhug La there are flags, a massive rotting old cairn, and brilliant tiny flowers. Blume shows up as you and Macke sit gasping.

"I can't go back to my stupid job," says Blume. This statement makes perfect sense up here. It's purification. You walk, you make step after step, your mind clears.

That afternoon the Chileans tell you that "huevon" is something like "motherfucker." So basically that morning you'd said "Hey how'd all y'all muthafuckas sleep?" The good Bonita's been using that name for you for ages. Hmm.

The Irishman is even splotchier today. Only three Tibetans stare at you and if you ignore them they will go and stare at the Irishman and his pot of noodles and then they eventually go away.

The next day-- because you have no gear or even pads-- you find a superb small crag on your second pass. You drool at unclimbed splitters and wicked ten-foot boulders.

In the afternoon as a wall of rain sweeps up the valley you frantically pitch your tent, and then the rainwall turns to mist and then hot sun. Blume goes to bathe and is overrun by a herd of yaks. Macke in his rain poncho looks like a mix of Klu Klux Klansman and U.S. Forest Service Ranger. DInner is Noodles and Meat Stick. You open a packet of marinated yak meat and soon
are rolling around in the grass, gasping.

The next day you get to the first village and succumb to the Tibetans' offer of a $2 tractor ride for the last 25 km. This turns into the most painful experience of your life as the tractor carriage is all metal, all angles, all pounding. You pass the Irishman who has a sense of trekking ethics.

You spend an evening in the Snowlands Restaurant. A small child spits at you. A drunk man wobbles around chanting. Endless locals stare in through the windo and wave. The Irishman drinks eight beers and Blume mixes beer and soda. The light outside becoems orange, deep blue, then black. There is a cow eating out of the toilet and the cow then enters the kitchen before trying to get into the restaurant. There is a cat on a leash in the kitchen, yowling.

The stumble home lurxches over rocks, around foul wet puddlles, and through dusky streets blue-grey in the halfmoon, with Tibetans giggling and singing and the odd yak bellowing.

The next day you get ripped off by the truck that take syou to the ferry. Samye monastery is stranded in a vast sandy valley. You take a flatboat across the river and in the middle the boatman runs it aground. You step into liquid and have the boat off the sandbank. Macke suggests that this assistance is worth a discount. Teh boatman disagrees.

On the bus back to Lhasa three Tibetan women chant and the driver chainsmokes. I see a series of unclimbed Apron-sized crags across the river and start planning the next expedition. Outside Lhasa we pass the "GOLDEN DRAGON TOURIST NOMAD VILLAGE." The multiple ironies here are obviously lost on the government.

Our next plan: find a shared ride to Everest basecamp (Tibet) then run for the border before our visas expore and the Chinese police get antsy. Back in five days.

Schoolpen?

So everywhere you go in Nepal, kids come up and say "One school pen for me?" Little bastards know that Tourist isn't good for candy (cos He's A Grown-Up) so they go for the "schoolpen" which they could maybe trade for candy at a store.

Macke and I call this "getting schoolpenned," as in, "did you get schoolpenned by that kid in the red boots?"

Our typical response is to say to the kids "One school pen for ME?" and hold out an open hand. This fucks them up nicely and makes them laugh, too.

I've been schoolpenned about 8 million times. It gets old pretty quick. Somebody, some time ago, gave some Nepali kid a pen, and-- in the way of colds and nursery rhymes-- the tactic has spread into India and Tibet. Actually it's seriously irritating.

SO TODAY Macke and I are sitting with our 200 lb. of food for our massive 4-day trek. We are sitting outside the Wang Bung Dung supermarket watching the human world pass by, waiting for Die Blume, who is off looking for a Visa-card friendly ATM. Tibetan kids pester us for yuan and the Chinese stare at the ever-hairier Macke with the weird shades and his new foldable cowboy hat and me with my hairy goddamn knees. Tibetans have no body hair.

This little girl maybe 8 comes up. She's got braided hair, looks halfway Tibetan and halfway Chinese, with this cute cap-- a child molester's wet dream, basically-- and much to our surprise asks us for the receipts from the supermarket. She's got a bag of them.

The receipts? We hand them over and the girl smiles and says "tank you" and disappears into the store.

Then we get it-- she's collecting receipts and using the supermarket's customer points system to pick up a few goodies.

Two minutes later she is back. And hands me a pen. A schoolpen.

"Dude!" says Macke, cracking up, "you just schoolpenned a Tibetan!"

The Road Warrior Meets the Buddha, naming humans, Macke the Knife!

It all comes down to the Environment. I just finished reading Jared Diamond's GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL. In this book Diamond argues that it was local geo-ecological and climatic conditions which allowed first those in the Fertile Crescent and then Europeans and Chinese to dominate world history, rather than inherent superiorities in culture, IQ, genetics, etc. A fascinating read.

In Tibet, most of which is at or over 12,000 feet (3700m), agriculture and livestock keeping are not very productive, which is why there are fewer Tibetans (per area of land) than Chinese in China, which is relatively quite productive agriculturally.

Tibet's vast emptinesses mean fewer and smaller towns, which means ways less public transport, which means that Macke and I have to charter a Land Cruiser AND a driver (it is illegal for whiteys to drive in the, uhh, "Tibet Autonomous Region"), as well as rounding up a couple of chicks to make it all fun (and cheaper). The chicks are Suni, a Japanese-American student of Chinese who gets the nod cos of her language skills, and Die Blume, a German woman who's spent the past years kicking corporate Italian ass and now is a quester, fleeing the grind and the gear and the rest of it.

We get a LC for Y$1800 (about $250 for four days). We insist on signing a contract with the renter guys. They've obviously done this before. The contract has 15 items. The first ten involve costs, mileage, hassles, etc. The final ones include the following:
-- "Clients will determine music to be played on stereo."

-- "The driver will not drink, even when he is not driving."

-- "The driver will not smoke in the vehicle."

-- "If guide is provided, he will sit in the [horribly small and uncomfortable child] seats at the back of the vehicle."

-- "Clients will decide when and where to stop."

These guys have clearly had some experience with customer-driver conflict.

At 5 a.m. Macke is pounding on my door for departure. Our first stop is Nam-Tso Lake. We drive over a 5300m (17500 ft) pass and stop to look into the widest valley you ever saw. A Chinese tourist takes videos of us and I tell him that my video fee is Y$50. Tibetan dropka (herders) show up.

You want to style? Try their outfits: imitation Harley-Davidson bike, with two-foot leather fringes on handlebars, and flying a flag. Dead goat strapped to rack. Your outfit? Well start with a leather trenchcoat and a wool blzer. Tie your four-foot long hair up in red braids, and add some aviator sunglasses. Shoes-- anything goes. On your waist, a woven belt and a meter-long sword. Where your front tooth isn't, put a smoke. Scarves are good, too. Cowboy hats work, but better are felt fedoras.

"Hey," I tell one guy, pointing at his sword, "you show me yours and I'll shwo you mine..." and he laughs when I show him my wussy kukhri knife.

These are the coolest people I have ever met. They're like the Road Warrior meets Buddha.

Nam-tso is a horribly tacky Chinese hotel (is there any other kind?) which Macke and Suni, the first of the chicks we rent the Cruiser with, stay at. Blume, the Kraut chick, and I opt for digs in a tent in the next place.

You never saw such emptiness. I flee the group and get lost on the lake's penninsula. The lake stretches twenty kilometers across and lengthwise it disappears into the distance. The air is still. On two sides of the vast valley are 7000m (23,000 foot) peaks covered in snow and gleaming icy blue above the green brown dry hills. The Lake is the colour of a blue dream and the sky is a deep electric purplish stillness. My feet crunch gravel as I climb onto low hills and the valley unfolds into air so clear that your eyes fail with the distance. Way away a road crew of thirty psychedelic Tibetans fiddles with shovels in a ditch. Mastiffs bark at yaks. I dive into the liquid blue ice of the lake and then bake on the rocks in the sun. Sunset gives only minutes of good light, but for thirty seconds it seems liek the whole world is glowing quiet orange.

Dinner in the Chinese Cheese Palace sees Macke working on Suni, Blume chattering with a mothertongue-famished Italian and me watching Tibetans doing group circle dances to really slow Tibetan folk-disco. I eat a bowl of noodles with this weird mouth-numbing spice the Chinese use and add chillies. My mouth is simultaneously burning and numb.

The next morning Macke reports zero progress with Suni.

"Hang in there," I tell him, and our conversation then becomes un-reportable guy talk.

The next day we drive to Reting Monastery. At Jophong, a hundred pool tables are scattered outside around the square, along with snotty-nosed kids, dropka fashionistas in their leather coats and swords, yaks, women in wide-brimmed hats and billions of beer bottles. At Reting the monks put us up in a dorm and I take off to explore.

First I meet a monk who wants to practice his English. This English consists of him pointing at me and saying "big dick!" and then at himself and his buddy and saying "small dick!" He then asks me what my Tibetan name is and tells me his English name is Billy.

Well, I'd gotten "named" in the Jhokang in Lhasa. Talkign with monk, he told me my name was to be Theshi (or Tashi)-- pronounced "tay-shee," and meaning "good." Billy's friend didn't have an English name. SO I sat awhile and then it came to me. The guy was a Fred. "Fred!" he said, beaming, then said "small dick!" First human I've ever named.

Above Reting I wander through the green meadows and stupas of what looks like Buddha Park. In the gompa there's a mural of the current Dalai Lama and the monks are away, munching on tsampa and drinking tea.

We eat in the dining room, where the monks have a Little Red Telephone that rings quite a bit, and beer, and Pepsi. Macke wonders if the monastery has a contract with Pepsi-- all of the gompas we've seen so far sell only Pepsi. Claudia tells me that the monks have pronounced us married-- Macke and Suni, and Blume and I. The monks then name everybody else.

Macke-- "Tun Drop"-- "will succeed"
Suni-- "Yen Ji"-- they don't explain this one
Blume-- "Drama"-- a goddess of philosophy

We spend the evening shit-talking travelling stories in our rooom with candles, and Macke creates the usual charas joints which I'm the only one to refuse. Much later, during a piss break, Macke and Kumi take half an hour and I grin-- Macke has scored. GO MACKE! On his return, Blume and I crawl into our respective beds and MAcke drunkenly announces that "I'm sleeping with my new WIFE" and hops into the sack with Kumi.

The next morning Tsering, our amiable driver, wants to go get blessed by the monatery's lama (headmonk). Given that the Dalai Lama is officially a traitor and bad news to the Chinese, this lama has been appointed (approved) by the Chinese. At his compound we sign over bags and passports and are read the rules: no photos, no writing, and, oh yeah, don't make fun of the Lama.

On the way in, Macke whispers at me. "Dude. I got the bluest balls in the world. You may see me behind a bush soon." I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed that Macke has kept it in his pants.

Inside the compound we are first charged by a pet deer. A Chinese marionette gestures us forward. I ask him if I can see his gun and ask him what calibre it is but he's not having any.

The Lama is a ten year old child. There is a strangely drugged feel to his eyes. The others give him white scarves and get blessed. I stand in front of him and pull out my Grown Up Voice and tell him to take care of himself, cos nobody else will, really. The kid ought to be out screwing around with his friends, or going to school, and having a family. Instead he serves karma, and the Chinese.

Outside, Blume says "they fake EVERYTHING here! Clothes, labels, cars, bikes, and spiritual leaders."

We drive to Tidrum Nunnery. Macke and Suni look for their own space and Blume and I share the most decrepit hotel I've ever seen. There is no lock and the walls are cracked and separating. The toilets are from hell-- piles of shit and puddles of piss, that National Park Outhouse stink everywhere, dim bulb and vague slippery piles of anonymous waste. The place is fifty years old and it's never been cleaned. The main attraction here are the hotsprings, which are full of naked fat flabby Chinese tourists and skinny ripped Tibetans playing with their kids and their balls. Later, Blume tells me that the nuns in the women's pool spent their time comparing ass sizes and feeling Blume's arm-hair-- Tibetans don't have body hair.

Dinner is horrible fried rice eaten among staring pie-eyed Tibetan men in a filthy dim cavern of a restaurant filled with people but still somehow empty, and the blasting of Tibetan disco music.
On the last day Blume and I wander up the canyon to have fantasies about first-routing trad lines in the canyon and we then hang out with the nuns, who are like small children. One wants to take photos with Blume's digital, another mischeivously tries to divert a hose and spray Blume, and another vogues for us.

On this morning, Macke makes no comment about the colour of his balls so I'm assuming the best.

We head back to Lhasa. Macke and Suni do their best to keep the phsycial affection under Tibetan wraps. Tsering pulls over every half hour or so to vomit-- he at some Chinese boiled noodles yesterday. We eat in a Chinese Muslim restaurant, and get the usual-- thupka yaksha (noodle and yak-meat) and beef and fried peppers. On the TV is a Governator movie, both dubbed into, and subtitled in, Chinese.

"Tsung wa," says Arnie, then his lips move, and then he smashes some guy's head. I get it-- Hollywood makes retarded simple movies cos anybody can follow the plot without knowing the language. The implied audience is obviously ADHD highschool boys with too much texting time on their plans, and foreigners.

We tip Tsering Y$100, a deck of Prides, a box of matches, and Macke gives him a Tibetan music tape-- so now Tsering has two tapes.

We get rooms at the Kirey and soon enough Macke, irrepressible, is AGAIN making plans. "DUDE! We gotta see Everest Basecamp! And start trekking!" We agree to meet tomorrow and then it's time to chill out.

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In Drepung Monastery there is a candle-heat powered prayer wheel.

Sun makes rain, and rain and sun make grass. Grass makes yak. Yak makes milk, milk makes butter, and butter makes candles. Candles make prayers and prayers make teh Gods give the Sun another spin.

Monk battles, monk music, monk kitchen, and Illegal Stuff

If you are Chinese please stop reading this blog now. If youa re old and don't get rap music, also stop reading now. And if youa re udner 18 this is llegal, go away, do your homework, dont' have sex, and dont' argue with your parents.

Macke shows at my place with plans...trekking, monstery visits. Nobody is IN! Everybody just wants to "hang out in Lhasa". WHat the f**k? We decide it's the altitude. At over 12,000 feet, it's hard for lots of folks to simply walk up stairs. To get an idea-- imagine going to the top of WHistler's peak, and heading 3,000 feet stright up from there.

Macke and I head out to ______ Monastery one morning. At the entrance a couple of monks are screwing around with exercise equipment-- flexible bars and pec-builders. They go for our guidebook-- Tibetans don't get to see many photos of their own country, thanks to the Ch*nese media (or lack thereof). One guy yells as he points at a picture of a Tibetan jewellery seller. He grabs the book and runs outside and soon comes back with the woman in question and a horde of admirers. She's a celebrity now-- she's made it into the Lonely Planet. The monks want to practise their fragmentary English and we work on our Tibetan, which is now so mixed with Hindi and Nepali that we must come off as indigent trader speakers of Asian pidgin.

_________ Monastery is ancient and still. The smell of sewage is everywhere. The chapels are full of massive Buddhas. In one, there are one thousand some identical statuettes fo the Buddha. Somebody msut have made money off of THAT order. The outer walls are hot white and inside it is cool dark reds and oranges.

We hike up the mountain with sleeping bags and cups of instant noodles to _______ Hermitage where two massive snarling mastiffs are thank God (if She exists) chained up and a herd of yaks pass us and give us long slow stares. The monks are happy to see us and give us mats to crash on and hot water-- one of the great CHinese customs is getting boiling hot water for tea in your hotel room-- before they show us around their gompa. At 4600m and two hours' walk uphill from ______, the place is beautiful. The monk then leads us to a smaller building, flicks on some lights and there, on the main alter, is a phot of the D*lai L*ma, the spiritual leader of T*bet, (who is officially a traitor to the Chinese and how has been in exile since 1959). The monks' possession of this photo is the kind of thing that would invite the Chinese government to come in and throw all the monks into jail and destroy the place. Wow. This is cool. Hold up that torch, boys.

Later one of the monks makes yak butter tea. He boils water and purs it into a tall think churn. He adds what loosk liek a cubic foot of yak butter and starts churning. I throw cultural sensitivity to the wind and flatly refuse; Macke accepts a cup and guilts me into sipping it. It's liquid butter, not bad, but hwo these folks live on this is amazing. Well, it's locally ecologically sanely produced protein and fat. It's interestign that TIbetans are generally taller and thicker than Nepalis-- it must be the high-in-yak diet.

The next morning we gasp and stumble up to Gambo Utse at 18,000 feet (5300 meters). The place looks like a spiritual graveyard. Thousands of cairn altars-- some ten feet high-- cover the peak and its ridge. Prayer flags flap and whisper. The sun is blinding and plays hide and seek with huge cumulus clouds. We are dizzy and exhausted-- this is more than twice the height of Whistler or Lake Louise ski areas but stunned by the views, and at the simple purity of ordinary Buddhists' devotions and the thousands of simple altars.

We retrieve our stuff and head back down to the valley. Back at ____________ Monastery we follow what sounds like duelling bagpipes into a courtyard where four monks are getting caffeinated and hyper on serial shots of Pepsi and playing their gelinhs (short horns) in eerie modal harmonies that wail like slow bagpipes and swirl seven note octaves around a basal drone. The monks force hits of Pepsi on us.

We walk down through the quiet lanes, walls white-hot in the sun, to a railing where we hear what sounds like a yelling riot punctuated with slaps and cracks. Monk hockey? Monk fights? Turns out it's Monk Philosophical Battles! Groups of monks are scattered around a garden of trees and gravel. One yells a burst of speech, punctuated and rhythmic, and ends by slapping his hands together, WHAP! The other responds and ends with another WHAP! The monks are, uhh, into it. One guy has grabbed the other by the throat and is screaming Buddhist doctrine at him. Another pair of monks needs to be restrained from physically assaulting each other as they yell and smack. Eminem oughta see THIS shit. I'm imagining the battles as something like this:

"Yo I'm tha muthafuckin' MC Chang Tse and I'm'a work yo ass. I'm a show the homes that they no muthafuckin' Eight-Fold Path." SMACK!

"Yo, Chang, we got the MC Hung Wah in da house, word up, yo style, "it's like dyin' in my sleep-- I dont' feel it" the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path, muthafucka is the WAY, nigga, the WAY, what you talkin' 'bout?" SMACK!

(or here is Inder Nirwan's version:

"Yo nukka, you can't be in mah crib.. buddah said."
"Thats it foo' time to smack you upside the head"...
"Break it down!")


(etc etc-- the closest thing we have to live intense debate in Western society is rap battles- OK maybe the monks don't swear but it sure sounds like it from the yelling). The point of this is learning scripture and udnertsanding. If you can defend it in argument, you know it.

Later I see the monastery kitchen, where pots big enought to stew entire hippies sit silently in the darkness and a lone monk reads a comic book.

At the entrance, another group of monks calls us over. One of the local kids is wear crotchless training pants and rolls around on a sack of rice like a pedophile's wet dream. The monks buy us water (!!) and seem kind of surprised that we made it all the way to the top of Gambo Utse.

We catch a ride into town on a bus driven by a sane man and at my hotel I find The Polish Chick in my room with her German friend. She immediately goes off on the shamanic energies available in Ganden Monastery. Luckily Macke shows up. He's been eyeing a pair of luscious Israelis and corrals me into dinner with this pair. But since everybody is exhausted and we barely share a language, dinner is a bit awkward (especially when Macke tries to explain the weirdnesses of apple tree reproductive biology to the ladies-- did you know that any given apple seed from an apple tree can turn itno any other breed of apple tree? that's why growers all graft trees). We finish the evening withTibetan streetfood-- spicy meat skewers and flatbread and beer in the smoky street.

Our plans-- a remote monasteries tour, and then a trek involving TWO 18,000 foot passes, oh, yeah, and then magically overthrowing the Ch*inese g*overnment and giving the Tibetans their own land back. Wish us luck.

Lhasa

Lhasa used to be "the forbidden city" but now it's swamped by Chinese architecture (almost as bad as our own-- huge bland dull and sometimes tacky). The old Tibetan section, the Bharkot, is filled in the morning by pilgrims doing koras (circumambulations) and praying. A little girl walks up to me and says "Hi! Fuck you! Money!" Somebody's obviously had some fun at her expense. Steamed pork dumplings in sweet and sour sauce cost 5 cents and I pig out. Inside the Jhokang (the spiritual center of Tibetan Buddhism) are a few hundred Chinese tourists, out to enjoy what their government forgot to destroy, and even a few monks.

You have to give the CHinese some credit. They have wide clean roads, drivers who follow traffic laws, excellent cheap Chinese food, little obvious poverty and a sense of social propriety totally missing from Nepal or (way worse) India. People do not come up to you here, yelling, or making obscene gestures, or dragging you into their shop, or asking bizarre questions about God, aliens or your salary.

There are beggars here, and they are Tibetan, not Chinese. A road sign points to a new 'burb-- "Upper Class Residences This Way." Tibetans are the Blacks of China. Their language is not taught in school or used by the government; cultural activities are severely restricted (e.g. monasteries with room for 3000 monks are allowed 700), and they are the bottom fo the social ladder in their own country. Whatever happened to the People's Republic of Equality?

Macke and I have talked about this and I've decided that-- as awful as the Chinese are with regards to h*man r*ights, the environment, etc, in the long run, the Tibetans will survive. The Chinese are building a society that as of the worst aspects of Western societies: massive reliance on fossil fuels, total devaluation of the environment, materialism, everything resting on technology. The Tibetans, meanwhile, are built for surviving at high altitude. They eat locally available foods (potatos, yak products, greens), use locally sustainable "power" (water, yak, goat etc) and their religion as deeply anti-materialistic.

When push comes to shove-- as it is starting to in the world of energy-- Tibet will be low priority for the Chinese. It is thousands of kilometers form the edge of Chinese civilisation (Chengdu is 2200 km away!) and Tibet's main contribution has been forests, which the CHinese have basically destroyed, and now mining. Mining is energy intensive and therefore more and more expensive. In the long run, the CHinese in Tibet will have problems dealing with higher living costs and lower government subsidies, whiel the Tibetans with their yaks and simple plots of land will be OK. Until then, though, life is rough for the Tibetans.

The road to Lhasa (2)

LHATSE, TIBET. 1 June 2005

Much to my surprise I am still alive despite Fong Dong Bung's best efforts.

The guy is the Worst Driver in the Whole World. On the flats, he hammers the pedals, and the ancient, brake-losing Land Cruiser (LC) bounces and slams, drifting across from ditch to pothole to waterbar. Uphills, he simply forgets to shift until the engine sputters, and then he shakes the whole vehicle by shifting from fourth to first and then wondering why the other cruisers in our convoy pass us. When he is overdoing the speed we yell at him and he slows for five minutes, wondeirng what the problem is, then hanmmers again. LIFE, man, LIFE! I HAVE it and I want to KEEP it.

A sign reads "STAY ON ROAD. DO NOT DAMAGE GRASSLANDS" so Fong Dong Bung naturally drives off the road to short cut. While doing so the other five trucks in our convoy pass us. In Lhatse, Fong Dong Bung first drives into a tiny parkign lot and makes it impossible for the other ten vehicles there to move. Cowboy Hat Man yells at him and he double parks in the street. Thirty trucks honk him away. He then parks in the intersection of an alley and the main street, blocking TWO streets (there being a parking spot five meters away), and we bail, leaving him to deal with the vehicle.

We stop for a dance festival. Several hundred people are sitting in the dirt sipping butter tea and chang (barley beer you sip through a metal straw). A man in brown wool pants, a blue striped blazer, a wool cowboy hat and wearing huge Fitover sunglasses (the kind that 75 year old WInnebago drivers from Alabama, or me when sending 5.12 routes, wear) hands me his baby and gestures for me to take it. The baby is drooling and snot leaks from its nose. I pass it to a nearby woman. A young drunk guy and his friend offer me some chang. Tastes like a mix of lemonade piss vodka and pasta. The band is a couple of guys playing the cham-nheh, an instrument that sounds vaguely like a lower banjo and has two pairs and one lone string. The music is jangly and beat-heavy, and groups of kids and adults take turns doing dances in the fierce sunlight and dirt. Everybody is smoking and spitting and coughing. Everybody wants to chat but Tibetan is the third language I will probably fail to master this trip and I havnt yet started failing to learn it.

In Lhatse I toss my stuff onto my dorm bed and go wander through this hybrid Tibetan-Chinese town. The Chinese contribution to Tibetan society is good cheap food, wide clean streets and really stupid boring horrible architecture. Also snottiness-- Chinese here in my experience are arrogant and cold-- they seem to regard the rest of the world as barbarians. The Tibetans contribute wierd quirky homemade architecture (stone walls will yak horns in them, flowerpots, rows of yakshit and wood topping walls, prayer flags, etc), friendly smiles and hellos, endlessly curious children, and using tractors with trailers to move everythign from heaps of live chickens to heaps of live people.

At Tingri, we see the North Face of Everest and eat Chinese food. Later Macke and I hear the sounds of a cham-nheh being tuned and-- what the hell-- walk into a Tibetan house uninvited. There four guys are munching tsampa-- roasted barley flour mixed with a bit of water-- and we gesture at them and get to try the cham-nheh. It's tuned to something like an open dropped D and sounds like a mix between a banjo and a dobro steel-stringed buiter. Blues sounds good on it but the lack of frets really makes you pay attention. I belt out white-boy's version of "Mannish Boy" and the Tibetans are psyched. The Tibetans show us some riffs-- the guy can finger pick pretty well, and when he uses a pick he makes somwthing that sounds very vaguely like arhythmic bluegrass.


2 June XIGATSE.

We are staying at the Shambala. My stomach and ass are combat operations areas. This situation is not made any better by the stink of mold on the cheap-room third floor, where the toilet is, once again, literally overflowing with shit. What's WITH the CHinese? These guys invented gunpowder, writing, the printing press, distance earthquake detection devices, catapults, Taoism and bureaucracy, yet they can't build toilets you can flush or urinals that drain somewhere other than the floor. I can get it when Tibetans in farmhouses have open-pit toilets but this on the third floor of a hotel? The good news is, our room is 40 meters from the toilet. The Bad news is, our room is 40 meters from the toilet.

I pass out for an hour and then walk to Khumbu chorten whose insides are a spiralling set of rooms full of Buddhas and protector deities-- several hundred-- and whose walls are painted with thousands more Buddhas.

In TIbet you need to learn your Mandarin and your Tibetan. I'm too sick to really bother right now (even tho I usually quite enjoy figuring out new languages) so I'm reduced to pointing and waving and making faces when I buy bread and fruit for the next day. Tibetan seems manageable-- although where English or Nepali use 4 words to say "what is your name?", Tibetan uses way more: "Kirang tse la kari shugi yena?". Mandarin is grammatically a lot easier (no verb tenses, noun genders, verb conjugations, articles, etc) but the tones are a bitch. You think you're saying "thanks" but you're REALLY saying "my shoes are purple."

4 June Lhasa.

Today we get up at 4:00 a.m. to get to the La Tso (amazing turquoise lake) before they close the road for its daily dose of construction. AN older Brit is a nurse. I've seen her doing reiki ("energy healing") and she surprisngly tells me "use your Trinidazole for your guts" instead of recommended some bullshit homeopathic medicine. I submit and take the pills. I'm too weak not to. WHatever is in my gut is stronger than my own bacteria.

It takes the drivers another forty minutes to get organised-- one guy didnt' wake up; another lost his keys-- and Macke and I get all angry with the hurry-up-and-wait situation. Mercifully it's too dark for me to actually see how close to death Bong Dong Bung is takling us as we drive toward the lake.

WHen we get to the 4800 m viewpoint for the turqoise lake, it's cloudy and the light is flat. Macke cusses a bit, we wrap ourselves in all the clothes we own, and Bong Gung Bung points it downhill to Lhasa. He gets one last chance to kill us as the Landcruiser's marginal brakes fail while he is doing the three-way pass on a crowded road.

In Lhasa I flee the group and check into the Kirey where I am alone in a triple. At the local restaurant, Yangdun, a young Tibetan lady, and I agree to trade language lessons. I meet a couple of Chinese who've cycled from Chengdu-- 2200 km. I meet a human rights activist who is 22 years old. She is suing ExxonMobil for polluting a town in Oklahoma. She has been sent threatening letters from the U.S. government (Patriot Act-- tax dollars hard at work) telling her that she has been officially labelled "subversive" after her Amnesty International work took her to investigate the deaths of hundreds of women in Juarez, Mexico, in which the police and U.S. customs are implicated. She is here investigating the h*m*n r*ghts situation of orphans here in T*bet and shows me emails which she tries to send home but which have been c*nsored by the Ch*nese g*vernment.

As I write this I note that I can publish these entries but I can't actually SEE them-- the g*vernment has blocked blogspot.com.

More later.

The road to Lhasa (1)

How very stereotypically Asian-- the only way you can get to Tibet (oops, China) is in a tour group cos the Chinese government does not issue individual visas to individuals. You can only get an individual visa through a group. Go figure. Macke and I sign up for bargain-basement trip to Lhasa-- the jump-and-dump of Tibet tours-- that takes you from Kathmandu, Nepal to Lhasa and then leaves you to your own devices. You get rooms and wheels but no meals. We are in two mini-busses.

So, Butch, you thought INDIA was chaos...

I get the travelling ball properly rolling by getting a serious case of the shits the night before we leave. After a night on the toilet I'm exhausted and dehydrated. I have trinidazole (the B-52 of antibiotics) and Cipromax (the hydrogen bomb) but refuse them-- this will clear up, I say to myself, I'm strong, antibiotics are bad, etc. Words of an idiot.

In the morning we leave Kathmandu and stop for breakfast at Dhulikel. The tour guys forgot that you can't cook for thirty people in tweny minutes and so some are forced to leave the retaurant without eating. I crawl into the bushes and then pass out in the bus.

An hour later one bus dies. We get dropped off in a tiny baking hot town. I crawl into the toilet. We get moved to the Bhoti Kosi where we watch people bungee jump and wait for the other bus. I crawl into the bushes.

We arrive at Khandun, the border. The street is 1.5 truck-widths wide and trucks are comign the other way. This is a signal to the bus driver to push through. Somehow he does.

At Chinese Customs a five foot tall marionette in a green suit and Army cap comes out with a machine that sprays about three cubic centimeters of cleansing blue fog onto the edges of our luggage. He then presents us with thermometers which thank God we don't get to put into any of our bodily orifices but rather under our armpits. There is no mercury in the thermometers, or none that I can see.

I then fill out the Health form. The box asks if I have diahrea, fever, possibly an amoebic infection or giardiasis, at least one mental disorder, etc. Of course I tick "no" for all of them, wiping the sweat off my feversih forehead and shaking. I crawl into the toilet.

The Customs guy laughs when I request a Chinese stamp in my passport-- their visa is on a separate sheet of paper-- but obliges. We walk up with our gear to the Tibet side transport, a fleet of ancient battered Land Cruisers manned by a (yes I'm using the phrase) motley crew of Tibetans. One guy looks happy but kind of weasely. Another wears a cowboy hat and is a dead ringer for a Mexican sheriff. Another looks pure-bred Hindu. The "leader" is a skinny guy in a white Tilley hat named Dorje ("lightning bolt" in Tibetan).

Our driver-- we'll call him Fong Dong Bung-- cranks the LC into shuddering spastic gear and we lurch up the road.

First impressions of Chinese Tibet: they like to play pool, they wear horrible pointy dress shoes with their tacky pseudo-dress clothes, the streets are remarkably clean, and OMFG there's no ENglish anywhere!

We lurch up the twisting mountain road. It is 2.5 truckwidths wide. A mile-long line of trucks fills one side of the road. Ahead of us another Landcruiser is jockeying for position. A five-ton is coming, passing parked trucks. Fong Dong Bung cranks up (if you can do that on a two-speaker system) some horrible Chinese pop music-- which sounds like Sara McLauchlin's band with the chipmunks on vocals, the whole thing filtered through a bongfull of Novocaine and Percocet-- and guns the LC into the four foot wide space between the roadbarrier and the oncoming five-ton truck.

He could wait. He could just wait ten meters back and let the five-ton by. But no.

Ahead of us, the other Landcruiser front-ends another truck and there is the thump of a trashed radiator. Our LC stops. We are literally one inch from the barrier on one side and two inches from the oncoming truck on the other. One minute later all traffic going both ways for a mile has been stopped by us. Fong Dong Bung licks his lips and peers vaguely into the rear view mirror where another Landcuiser is four feet behind us.

The Tibetan-Mexican looking guy shows up and screams at Fong Dong Bung. Traffic cops show up. I want to crawl into the toilet. Half an hour later we are moving again, up into the ever colder darkenss of the Tibetan plateau.

The trip will take four more days. In Nyalam we get our first Chinese hotel. It has green carpets, wild psychedelic oriental wallpaper, and huge Thermoses of hot water to make green tea. The toilet is a hole in the floor and it's clogged with shit. I go into the ladies' and that evening beg Immodium (a.k.a. "plug") from the Aussie lady our car.

The next day we drive from 1400 meters to 5200 in two hours. We stop for photos at a dusty village where a Tibetan man whose face has been melted off and then reapplied shoves a hand with one finger at me and asks for money. Tibetan women-- who look like Native Canadians, but much more weatherbeaten-- wear mostly black, their hair braided with red ribbon, skirts with rectangular abstract patterns, and a wild variety of shoes, from Converse clones to men's dress shoes to Tibetan red-yellow-green handwoven thick-soles. A woman heards goats and kids yell at us. I look for a toilet. There are no trees for fifty miles.

At the first of the day's summits (5200m, about 18,000 feet) most of us are gasping for breath. There are a billion prayer flags and the air...well, you can see for 3,000 miles. The air is so clear it's like the world is suspended in invisible crystal. There's nothing between you and things-- things are just there. North, brown peaks stretch off to infinity. The sky is a deep electric unreal blue. South, we see Everest and Choy-Oyu, white teeth in the sky. Here there are wind-powered prayer wheels.

There is no sound. And no toilet.

I'm Offensive-- dead pope

Go away.

WARNING: this post makes fun of the Catholic Church. IT IS OFFENSIVE. DO NOT READ THIS. DO YOUR HOMEWORK OR GO TO YOUR JOB.

Compassion to the recently deceased John Paul II. ANybody who can go and forgive the guy who tried to kill him has got to have somethign going for him.

But seriously, folks-- what is UP with the Papacy?

--You need to be going on senile to qualify to be Pope.

--You get elected by old farts (MALE old farts).

--You get to tell people how to run their sex lives even though you've (presumably) never had sex yourself.

--Your Church has spent over two hundred fifty million dollars over the last thirty years (in the U.S. alone) in defending itself and its pedophile priests. Meanwhile, you condemn homosexual people. In other words, it's not OK for a man to fuck another man but OK for a man to fuck a child.

-- You are supposedly conversant in matters spiritual. Yet your reading is confined to Catholic Christian philosophers, most of whom were already dead 500 years ago. That's like a fan of mystery stories ending her reading with Sherlock Holmes stories. This leads you to make really intelligent pronunciations, like how bad birth control is ("it's unnatural") in a world of 6.5 billion people.

-- The only way you can quit your job is by dying.

Kathmandu (2)

WHere do you from where you've already been? I left Chitwan, Macke went kayaking again, and the Dutchman was off to the West of Nepal.

The road up to Kathmandu was hot and grey. Vendors' plates of cucumbers arranged like bleached flowers floated otuside the bus windows in one-road towns. Grey strings of soldiers shuffled along the roadsides, guns glinting black. Brown fog of diesel and steaming greay sky hammered at my head.

In Kathmandu I found coffee and the Royal Gorkha Hotel, whose owner complains fo the lack fo business but can't quite see how the blasting Hindi music and the bartender's endless channel-surfing might discourage tourists.

One morning I get up at 4 and cycle through streets filled with bird sounds and the swish of the streetcleaner people and the clatter of their trash bikes. In Bhaktapur where as in all cool palces there are no cars the streets are glowing red brick and the morning market is happening in the Durbar. Women are lined up with the day's vegetables. A woman with nine fingers plays with chillies that gleam in the sun. Men squint into the light, smoke, and eat yoghurt from clay bowls. Women wander through the alleys with plates of food. Where there are altars they make pujja-- offering to Buddhsit or Hindu deities-- by leaving food. Some of these altars are old paving stones and you watch your sandalfeet when you walk. Wheat is piled golden onto the road, where you motorcycles horses dogs Nepalis what have you walk on it to thresh it and men in dark vests and caps drink tea and talk.

Another day I ride at dawn out to Boudha, the largest Tibetan settlement in Nepal. The Tibetans got invaded ("Hi. We're the Chinese. Fuck you. Sign here. Now die." is pretty much how it went) in 1959 by the Peopole's Liberation Army of CHina and many have scattered all over the Subcontinent in monastic communities. The most famous Tibetan exile community is in Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama (the Pope of Tibetan Buddhism, but way smarter and WAY more fun than the Catholic Pope, and also not senile and drooling and shitting his pants, and also conversant with philosophy that was written after 1100 A.D. (the Pope's reading seems to end with Anselm-- that's like, you like gangster movies and you never get past the first Godfather)) has his summer residence.

Anyway. Boudha is a massive stupa-- a white dome about forty meters across which starts at ground level topped with a gold spire. The stupa represents the world and has various altars aroudn its edges. At 6 in the morning there are hundreds of people-- Indians, Nepalis, monks in purple robes, holy men in orange with insane white stand-up hair smoking chillums, kids, housewives, dogs-- all walking clockwise around it saying prayers. On the stupa boys, monkeys at height, whitewash pigeonshit in arcing green lines off the dome. A guy with three fingers prostrates himself on the pavement and mutters prayers, gets up, moves sideways six feet, and does it again-- spiritual pushups. In one of the altars, the largest prayer wheels I've ever seen (eight feet tall) are turned by a Nepali-sizeddwarf-- the guy is under three feet. A woman does pujja in the acrid plastic smoke of garbage somebody's stufffed into another altar. A man feeds pigeons and my sandals slap them into the sky.

Later that day I meet Macke. Who always has some kind of plan thats going to change YOUR plans.

"Hey!" he says. He's practically drooling with excitement. "Wanna go to Tibet?"

Sauhara

The facts: Royal Chitwan National Park is in the Nepali lowland area, the Terai. One quarter of all Asian rhinoceri live here; so do significant numbers of tigers, wild elephants, huge #s of birds, monkeys, etc. Some of it is flatland, some swamp, and some low hills. The area is I believe a World Heritage Site, and has located nearby an elephant and a crocodile breeding center. Westayed outside, in Sahaura.

The experience:

We arrive in Thandi Bazaar after our bus driver is arrested. We are dripping with sweat. Macke digs in his pack and finds his camera and glasses have been stolen from off the roof. As the hotel touts swarm us-- "you come nice hotel very good price"-- Macke groans "I need some space, man!" and we leave it to the Dutchman to find wheels to Sahaura. He finds Danish, an affable Nepali youth in a red tanktop.

The hotel is called maybe "Rainforest Jungle Safari Lodge"-- every place in town has a similar name. We book a trek into the jungle with Danish and Yaron-- by law you must hire two guides, who will deal with angry rhinoceri, dumb questions, ticks, and what have you.

At five oclock a grey wall of rain pounds down. Outside my room water buffalo chew cud and drip grey saliva. In the pounding rain two Nepali women get totally nude and wash. Macke, who is off with the Dutchman smoking and staring at the corn, would appreciate the view. The corn thrashes madly in the wind and rain.

6:00 a.m. At breakfast, Danish tells us to put on shoes, long pants, and darker colours. I cuss inside-- I'm already soaked in sweat. The Russian who is coming along is wearing brilliant red and green clothes, and gets no instructions to change. perhaps he will be fed to the rhinos.

6:30 We sit in a dugout and are poled into the slow shallow river, the only sounds birdcries echoing and the swish of water. Elephants drink on the far bank in the orange morninglight and on the near bank people wash.

6:45 We slide past a young woman washing her hair. "Meera, Meera" calls Danish. She turns away and hides behind her hair.

7:00 We put ashore. From the top of the sndy bank we look down onto a black rhino, who takes his slow time wadign the river. He's a two-ton armoured armed pig with all the time in the world. The Russian and his guides disappear on their trek. Yaron makes monkey calls and the rhesi answer. Birds shriek in the gloom and we truck past piles of elephant shit and around muddy rhino wallowing pits. There are tiger pawmarks in the mud, and yellow flowers, and suddenly Macke is dripping blood. A leech has crawled onto his leg. We wade through elephant grass, poke aroudn in forests, and a few hours later are back on the river shore, baking.

"Hey, Danesh," says Macke, "what was up with that girl Meera on the river?"

"Well,"says Danesh, "she's divorced. We had a good time and then she wanted to marry. But I didn't. It's like a resturant. WHen you get tired of one kind of food, you go to another place."

In the afternoon we go to the Elephant Breeding Center. I buy thirty bananas. Macke and ther Dutchman laugh-- "hey man, is that enough bananas, you think?" At the center we're chased by baby elephants-- they're about four feet high and act more or less like an 8th grader the day after Halloween-- who communicate telepathically about the huge banana stash we've got.

Later a wall of black rain drives us into a hostel where hail bigger than golfballs pounds the roof and makes it sound like we're inside a popcorn popper. The light is dim and green.

After, air washed and orange in sunset, we take a muddy track back and see a tall youth arguing with an old shoe-cobbler. They start hitting each other. Luckily one of them appears drunk and neither can land a punch. At the school, children play tag, covered in brown mud-- one game for boys and the Two Cool Girls, and another for the girls. The flagpole is black and has a green orange cord crawling up it.

We are stranded for three days in Sahaura because the Maoists have declared a strike. Mornings are breakfast on the shaded patio with birds chattering and the incidental teaching of English to Danish's protege, Munn, who is one foot shorter and about three thousand vocab items behind Danesh. Days, elephants are bathed in the riverby their mahouts, who get the elephants to put their smokes onto the roofs of huts before heading into the water to be cleaned. Afternoons the skies turn black and the light sick yellow, and then the rains come and from thatched huts on the riverside I watch the rain pluck at the river and lightning boom and flicker around the sky. Evenings we drink tea and wander through streets, full of cricketrsounds and frogburps, whose black puddles hold streetlights and whose edges are rimmed with light.

We bike to Twenty Thousand Lakes and swim in canals, see termite mounds seven feet tall, and weatch a rhino from thirty feet away. Kids flip and dive into warm water and old men amble by in the baking green heat of the forest. At the next village there are amaryli, succulent red against purplish green broadleaves. The air is crystalised sweat. WOmen in red; men in black grey brown and white.

One evening we try H. We smoke it with Danesh. Macke vomits and then feels fine, I feel mildly relaxed, and we later agree that it was a huge waste of money and an experience not worth repeating. "Kids: drugs are bad, m'kay?" You've all seen rhart South Park episode, right?

I spend one day walking. At an orphanage kids in blue mount bicycles en masse and head to school. I have roast corn and tea with a farmer. We discuss fertiliser, manure, Maoists, Nepali history and school. His wife shows me her kids' straight-A report cards and his father-- a six foot six beanpole of a man wearing shorts! weird for a Nepali-- ambles by and beams at us. Women in brilliant red thresh wheat and wash clothes. Men sit under pipal trees and smoke.

I meet a Nepali human rights worker in a restaurant and he says he's happy that the King has taken over the government.

"Why?" I ask him

"Because people here don't understand democracy. They think that democracy means, "hey, I can break things, steal things, blow things up." We need a strong arm!"

He holds a glass of water over the stone floor.

He says "If I drop this and break it, oen of my countrymen would say "hey, it's democracy, I can do whatever I want" and then shakes his head.

Finally, three days later, we leave-- Macke for more kayaking, the Dutchman for eastern nepal, and me to Kathmandu.

Next-- Kathmandu Valley's religious sites, the Dutch lady rolling stone, and preparations for my next destination-- TIBET!

Sausage Party

Warning: this blog is offensive and should not be read by anyone. Its implied author is sexist racist homophobic classist colonialist etc (she hates everything). If you are younger than 18, please go away and do your homework or something. If you are older than 18, please go out and get a/work at your job, and contribute to the relentless expansion of the world economic system.

So after rafting (which is probably a good activity for retarded rednecks-- you sit and the river and guides administer doeses of adrenalin to you-- all you do is paddle sometimes) we go for bigger kicks-- kayaking. We look at three or four kayaking outfits, ruling out the one that caters to Israelis. If there is one place where you don't want "the best price," it's the middle of a massive whitewater rapid.

The Dutchman, Macke and I meet our skinny ripped must-be-a-babe-magnet of a guide, Narender, at Pokhara Lakeside at 11:00 one morning, and start immediately on the first challenge: finding a kayak that fits. I'm 6'3"; the Dutchman is 6'8" and so there is some fiddling to be done before we wade through the Lakeside muck and fold ourselves into the boats.

Challenge # 2 is paddling the fucking kayak in a straight line. Yes, that's FUCKING kayak cos this small maneuverable boat is all TOO small and maneuverable. Our wakes, as we slosh our way across Phewa Tal the way drunk people move toward the one pizza place that's still open at three in the morning, look like Ss and Js and full-on spirals.

At far lakeside, we start working on rolls, THE essential thing in kayaking. Yeah, you can bail every time you flip, but, well, that's like getting your leader to z-pull you when the crimpers get really crimpy, or getting your essay off of evilhouseofcheat.com-- it takes a lot of time and seriously cuts down on your style quotient. And style is what we totally lack here. Narender can roll in three seconds flat; we are shown step-by-step (paddle position, body position, smack your paddle, flick your hips, flip your head back) and then spend three hours getting water so far up our noses that I can no longer hear anything. Macke and I manage one roll each (about a 5% success rate); the Dutchman (6 foot 8) appears to be too tall or something, but man does he ever PERSIST!

Eventually the afternoon's black and grey wall of rain comes and thrums at the lack, and we hustle back to Pokhara. Narender relates the rest of the plan: tomorrow we put in on the Seti, and camp. Grade Two and 3+ rapids. On the second night we will be joined by The Fat Chick who will finish our trip with us (she does a shorter version).

"The fat chick?"

"Yes. She is larger woman," says Naron, "from top to middle normal. From--" [gesturs at hips] "she is ENORMOUS. She took five years ago kayak class."

"What's her name?"

"I not know."

So now we have a ghost fourth, The Fat Chick. That evening, what Macke refers to as surfer's UND-- unexpected nasal discharge-- happens and column of Phewa water blasts out of my nose, and my hearing returns.

The next day we put in and face our next massive challenges: physical pain and eddying out. I'm sore in places I didn't know existed and in the ab muscles on the sides of my guts, lower back, knees, you name it. Eddying out means going from where it's still (ie behind a rock) into fast current. WHen the current flips you over (or tries) you lean AWAY from it and paddle, HARD. I am realising that kayaking is counterintuitive. If it feels right, it will flip you, and the weirdest maneuvers seem to work. Once again Macke and I get it fairly quick, but the Dutchman-- who it will later turn out is both too tall AND too skinny for his kayak-- gets rolled every time he tries to eddy out.

We start down the river, chased by the support raft and our safety kayaker, Naran. The smallest whitewater is exciting; any wave over two feet seems awesome. After two hours, the lunchtime consensus is, kayking kicks rafting's ass. We eat ona sandy beach and then put into the shallows for a few hundred more rolls. Macke gets it first; I manage a few, but the Dutchman is still having trouble. It's his hip-flick and paddle position. While Narender the Dutchman's kayak (adding padding around the hips) I watch the sky darken and a wall of white sand approach as the wind picks up. A minute later there is pounding howling sideways sand wind rain that picks the cooks up and tosses them into a frenzy of gathering things together.

We take shelter in the local teahouse with a Nepali family, a goat and some chickens. We do the usual stupid lame flirt moves on the girls ("keti! timi dere ramro tsa! tapayko biva ha?" [wench! you're hot! are you married?]) with one, and only one thing in mind...tea! hot tea. Rule #1 (for animals and humans)-- always flatter, or make friends with, the food source.

Narender tells us his story as the rain and wind thump away at the roof and we stand in the mucky floor by the woodstove. His Dad was a Gurkha. These are the Nepali soldiers that the Brits first recruited in the early 1800s and who are, well, seriously bad motherfuckers-- the kind of soldiers you won't ever want to see on the wrong end of a rifle. Legendary endurance, undefeatable morale, infinite patience, and a total willingness to drop the hammer seem to bbe ther qualities. In the Second World War, they were less than 3% of the British Army, but won 20% of the Victoria Crosses. After the war, when India became independent, the Brits got 4 regiments and the Nepalis kept 6. The Gurkhas still serve today with distinction (Kosovo, Timor, Haiti) and its one of the highest honours in Nepali society for a young guy to get into a Brit Gurkha regiment. Their terrifying curved knives are a popular souvenir. Kinda weird, all thigns ocnsidered-- the Nepalis are some of the mellowest friendly people around. "use the Dark Side, Luke" or whatever.

But everything has a downside. Take a Buddhist peasant from his farm, family, language and culture, put him in the Army far from home, keep him there for 12 years, and teach him English culture by having him spend free time in the pub, and you get a mess. WHen he came back, Narender's dad drank, and beat him. His Mom died when he was nine months old. Dad remarried and stepmom made no bones about her dislike for Narender, her new responsibility. Narender bounced (literally) between his parents and grandparents. In Nepal, people beat their kids if they want, and kids get to kiss their parents feet if they want forgiveness. That's how it is.

Narender bailed at age 12. He went to Pokhara and picked up garbage, dug ditches, carried water, cleaned floors, and lived in alleys. He asked the manager of the restaurant where he washed dishes if he could get help with school.

"Yeah," said the manager, "but you have to choose-- I either pay your salary, or I pay for your school."

Narender chose school. Mornings, he studied. Afternoons and evenings, he washed dishes. Nights, he slept on the restaurant floor-- he had no home.

At this point in the story, its dark out. We are drinking rum and listening to the glistening drip of rain outside. Dal baht comes.

A Brit introduced Narender to kayaking, and the bug bit him. He worked three jobs, safety kayaked, worked on his English, and finally sved the 35,000 rupees ($800 U.S.) needed to do a two-month guide's course in Manali, India. He was one of ten candidates out of sixty who passed the exam. Hey...is anybody reading this still under the impression that THEIR life has been tough?

"So..you like the work?"

"Yeah. Good. Lots of girls. Fun."

"So you have a girlfriend or what?" This is the standard razzing line used on Nepali guys, who seem to get married at about age 20 with no dating experience.

"Yeah, lots."

"??"

"You kayak and then you make a fire, and the girls they drink, then they touch and ask you things..."

"So what kind of girls do you prefer? White or Nepali?" Macke and I have been hugely imporessed by the Nepali girls, who are fit, pretty and sociable.

"White girls. All kinds."

It turns out Narender is just a wee bit of a player. He's had all kinds, but doesn't like Nepali girls so much. They sound according to him like gold-diggers. Eventually it's time to pass out so we lay our mats on the wood floor and turn in. Outside the stars are huge.

Next day I wake up at four, listen to an argument in the teahouse lady's bedroom, and move my mat down to the beach, where I sleep poorly. Macke and the Dutchman are awoken when the teahouse keti, her kids, two goats and a chicken emerge form their bedroom. Macke does yoga on the beach whiel three kids watch, silent and still. The Dutchman and I swill Nescafe (which ought to be a four-letter word).

Then I get in my boat and pull of three perfect rolls right off the bat. Macke does a few; the Dutchman isnt quite there, and I'm all amped at my New Rolling Skills. These skills disappear at the next rapids when I flip, get my head pounded on the rocks and bail after two tries. Narender grins as he tows my submarine kayak to shore. Macke gets dumped once; the Dutchman twice, and we end up on a beautiful sand beach near a village.

Once we've finished our day-- rolls, rolls and more rolls get me up to about 90% success, and I can now roll without being "in proper position"-- the locals show up, grab our gear, and start screwing around. Two kids cram into one kayak. One guy works his rolls. Another does rolls without a spray-skirt. The younger kdis scream and dive in the water; the older kids toss the youngsters around and watch them, and we are seeing the future kayak guides of Nepal training themselves.

Of course there's nothing better to do while waiting for dinner than a little wager. When will The Fat Chick and her guide show up? How much will she weigh? We bet cups of chai, being Real Men and all:

Macke: 4:45 and 250 pounds
Butch: 6:15 and 150 pounds
Dutchman: 5:15 and 190 pounds

That evening we drink kukhri rum while Macke-- who is half-Chinese and therefore alcohol-allergic-- uses some of the Annapurna weed and Narender tells retarded sex jokes. Then it's time for rafting and kayaking stories, which include...

a) Narender and friends getting hired by the Israeli Embassy to recover the body of a girl who fell off a raft on the Kaligandakhi. The girl fell into a "hole" (massive permanent eddy) and her body was there for 17 days. They used explosives to move the rock.

b) A girl falling off of a trekking trail when she moved DOWNHILL of a mule-train, sliding down the hill, and falling into the river. By the time Narender and crew got the body, it had no hands, feet or face.

c) A bunch of Israelkis going rafting. They refused to put any effort into their paddling. At the first rapids, the raft flipped. After that, Nrender tells us that they paddled very, very hard.

The Fat Chick doesn't show up, there are billions of stars, the wind is warm, and the company tents stink of mold, but we don't care.

On Day Three, the Dutchman gets into his boat and without warning perfectly executes three rolls. We do Grade 3+ rapids. I get dumped twice, Macke and the Dutchman once. The Seti-- warm and clear-- merges with another river, which is dark muddy and freezing. Huge waves toss us around. We end our trip at a beach whose sand bakes our feet and where the soil around a tree's roots have been eroded, its trunk now starting eight feet above ground, still alive. Bram and Macke do more rolls; we start sweating as soon as we leave the water.

We bid Narender goodbye and pile into a minibus headed down to the Terai plain. The bus inches through checkpost after Army checkpost. We sweat. In Thandi Bazaar, the bus driver pulls over and vanishes. A storkeeper beats a small child, hands him to a woman, who beats him and then fires him off into an alley. The driver puts everybody back on the bus, drives twnety meters, and vanishes. We sweat. Later the bus monkey tells us that the driver has been arrested for not having a driver's license (now THERE'S a story). We catch another mini to Sauhara.

When we arrive in Sauhara, Macke's camera and glasses have been stolen, we are sweatier than any human being has ever been, period, in the history of the Universe, hotel touts swarm us, and the great mystery remains...what happened to The Fat Chick?

Stay tuned.

Nepali politics

Here's a good article that explains the political situation here.


http://www.counterpunch.org/acharya04082005.html

Rafting and Pokhara

Warning. This blog is extremely offensive and should not be read by anyone. Stop reading now and start either working or doing homework, or some other productive activity. Stop wasting your time and start making more money. GO AWAY.

Rafting is for retarded rednecks. Or, as my woman put it, for coporate bonding team days. You sit, and small doses opf adrenalin are adminsitered to you. Macke, the Blonde, the Dutchman, two Lebanese-Americans and a Yank medical intern and I spent the astronomical sum of $110 to raft the Kaligandaki.

On the first day the Blonde got bus-sick and nearly vomited on a Nepali soldier. As we sat and waited for the bus driver to have his morning dal bhat, the Blonde queasily swayed as she sat on a wooden bench outside a vegetabel seller's. A small child squatted in front of us, took a piss, dropped her gum in her piss, picked it up, and popped it back into her mouth. Diesel trucks farted at us, the sun baked, and veggies rotted.

On a raft you sit, talk smack, and paddle every now and again. The rapids are fun, but overall, its boring. On the first day the Blonde lay in her tent, groaning, while the Yank intern told medical horror stories among a fantastic collection of weird smoothed boulders and the cooks constructed an elaborate meal. We ate in warm wind, drifting sand, river rushing sounds, among the crinkly orange fires of candles inside pastic bag lanterns.

The best rapids were day one; day two featured Macke falling into the water. We decided to waterfight the support raft. Very foolish choices, my friends-- they had buckets. We got wet, they laughed, it was all good. The Blonde felt fine that day, so we could rib her about her "paddling" technique-- how can a woman who does triathlons (and played pro tennis) not know how to do more than lillydip? But like most women, she reveled in the attention. In the evening, our guide Gopal told stories about the huge #s of Western chicks he's hooked up with, since he's funny, hot and In Charge (the 3 qualities women wa want most, except of course for $$). The two Lebanese-Americans didnt socialise much-- they smoked endless joints and talked about Buddhism. I get that energy-sucking feelign from them, and also, the Buddha wasn't down with pot, so I avoided them.

On our last day we took out, and headed back to Pokhara. On Macke and my flirting with yet another luscious local keti, the Blonde pulled female rank told us that one was NOT to tell a young man his sister was hot.

"Why not? Every guy knows exactly how hot every woman is (except his mom of course)."

"Cos that's Bad." said the Blonde.

"Well, I have to admit, my brother is pretty hot," said Macke "though I'm obviously not gay."

"SO," I said to Macke, "if your brother was a girl, would you do him-- er, I mean, her?"

"EWWWW" comes a groan from Macke and the Blonde.

etc etc.

In Pokhara we immediately decided on doing a kayaking course and trip. A man's gotta knwo how to Eskimo roll, I figure. But before that we had two days to dink around.

Mornings the distant Annpurnas gleamed red and blue above the smnoky green hills. We walked once through the birdchattering gloom to the World Peace Stupa, where an ancient wizened man sold Macke weed and we watched the sunrise unfold its glowing mat and lay it on the Himalaya, then dust haze on top. A blonde potbeklied German approached us and on opening his mouth turned out to be Nepali. Sixties love child? Ever bought a dharma bead necklace from a German?

Phewa Tal's water was a rippled mercury mirror we swim through as we took the boat back towards breakfast. At shore Tibetan women selling handicrafts approached us with their usual line: "You want to see something?" Macke and I are getting sick of this so we briefly contemplate saying "Yeah, show us your tits!" But hey. If your country got conquered and you got kicked out, you'd be scraping a living, and the Tibetan ladies are sweeties. So we smiled.

The village drunk, curly haired, walked around with a lunghi not covering his balls, singing. Under the chowk's pipal tree was a yellow vintage VW Beetle. Merchants sat in front of their wars and chatted, smoking. The odd Israeli rumbled by on an old Enfield.

The Blonde and I visited the SOS Children's VIllage for Tibetans. The Blonde-- who cannot pass a merchant without buying something-- tarried with a Tibetan lady over orange and blue stone necklaces. Westwards, a black wall of clou built, chasing weak yellow sun away. The rain hammered at us and we fled to a Tibetan retaurant, where the rain shook the roof and we wrapped ourselves ina blanket while kids rolled in sudden mud and a miniature man brought endless sweet black tea.

The rain leaves the air washed, smelling of cut grass, and fresh, ground gelaming, edges of puddles lines with light, the sky a damp soft blue.


Next: kayaking

Butch Hillhurst-- Closet Hippie? You decide!

This is guest entry from my current travelling partner Macke MasTacos:

"I've been travelling with Butch for a while now, and have firsthand witnessed his hippie hatred and how whenever he spies a skinny, stoned, dreadlocked one, he remarks upon wishing he had his rifle [shotgun-- you get more of 'em that way], or how he wants to "eat that hippie for breakfast." And through all his hippie hatred (words that you've surely read in early blog posts) I've realized by carefully observing his own actions and likes, that heis really a closet hippie, and hippiephobe.

Butch's inner hippie shines clearly.

1) Doesn't use soap when he bathes (not even on his feet!)
2) Talks about feeling people's "energies"
3) Planted trees for 10 years [yeah...for industrial logging coporations]
4) Owns Birkenstocks (and declares them his favorite footwear) [me and Bill Gates both]
5) Can't stop talking about his new rainbow hat
6) Flirted with vegetarianism
7) Likes drumming, but isn't very good at it
8) Has been to a Grateful Dead show (Come on, how more hippie can you get?)
9) Wears an ethnic skirt in public [it's a LUNGHI, Macke, and when in Rome...]
10) Favorite coffee is "organic rainforest blend from Bean Around the World
11) Says frequently that he wants to "eat a hippie" (you are what you eat)
12) (And, worst of all) Got mistaken for an Israeli Hippie by a Nepali!

I don't know if Butch exhibits all these behaviors in Canada, or just some, but next time you see him please congratulate him for finding his inner hippie in India."

--Macke Mastacos

Annapurna Journals (3)

Days 14 & 15 The Kiwis dog us, The Son racing ahead of his father to hit his pipeful of charas. In Kalopani the rain lays the smack down and blasts us as we sprint into town. We eat with an Israeli couple and a couple of Nepalis who do shots of raxi. The Israelis eat what seems like six meals and then explain that since he has hemorrhoids rice is out of the question.

In the morning massive Dhaulagiri stretches its fiery arms out northwards into the shadows of the sleeping valley. We stop for breakfast above the start of the long hill that leads to Ghorepani and jack our nervous systems up on FAKE GODDAMN COFFEE. The descent is another knee-bender but Team Butch and Macke makes short work of it, passing yet another load of tourists gasping under the massive horrible weight of one water bottle and two trekking poles each.

The Maoist rebellion is in full swing in Nepal. There is corruption, low incomes ($300/year!) and limited development outside Kathmandu. So the Maoists want to solvce all these problems by having a one-party People's State. They dont' kill tourists-- they just ask for "donations" and they give receipts. I'm almost willing to pay the $2/day (more for Yanks and Limeys-- I wonder why...) to meet a real live revolutionary (and maybe have Macke take my photo with him.)

In Tatopani ("hot water") we soak in the hotsprings and then the French show up. NOTE TO EUROS: IF YOU ARE GOING TO WEAR A SPEEDO, YOU NEED A CERTAIN BODY TYPE. Ask Dan Savage; he'll back me up on this one. Banana pouches and beer bellies don't mix. After dinner a bunch of us sit around and compare ACL scars. The Blonde it turns out is an ex-professional tennis player who will soon have three business and computer science degrees under her belt. The Kiwi Son on the other hand has the opposite qualifications: he has received three (*3) D.U.I.s in the past year and so is going to be spending some time...at hoem with his "Missus" he bong and his X-Box, which suit shim fine. He sits silently, hitting his pipe, and suddenly collapses onto the floor. Weeks later we STILL havn't figured out what exactly made him temporarily collapse.

DAY SEVENTEEN. After a rest day, we climb 1700m (5000 feet) up to Ghorepani ("horse water") through acres of corn and Maoist graffiti. Thomal and I bet Macke that it will rain. Macke, who I am starting to realise tends to get what he wants, wins-- it has to rain for 20 minutes and after dumping for 14 minutes Macke insists that the liught drizzle coming down doesn't qualify as rain. He wins two apple pies and two coffees but the entertainment value of the bet is well worth the price.

No Maoists. In Ghoirepani there is a massive inspirational poster on the wall. It is apicture of pre 9/11 New York, with the words "GOD MADE THE COUNTRY AND MAN MADE THE TOWN" on it. Outside, Maoist slogans like "Long Live the People's Revolution" are sprayed onto walls.

DAY 18 19 20. We got up at 4:30 a.m. to walk up to Poon Hill and see the sunrise and all we got was this lousy mist. No mountains. For three days we walk Nepali Flat: "little bit up little bit down." In Kadapani we have magnificent dal bhat with local wild mushrooms and greens. In Chomrong we gorge on the Nepali version of "German" pastry. There we meet a girl who Macke calls Mustang Keti, a Tibetan refugee (now second generation) who sells handicrafts. The Mustang is the northern part of Nepal and its women are real independent traders. She's obviously very flirtable with.

"Keti, timi dere ramro tsa!" I tell her and she doesn't even blush.

"That girl is FIRE" says Thomel.

After finding out she's from Mustang I tell her I would eventualy like to visit that part of Nepal.

"You married?" she asks.

"No."

"We marry."

Wow, that was easy. Nepali style: marriage then love. Western style: love then marriage.

"OK," I say, "that will work...you can visit Canada and I get to see the Mustang region."

"Very good" she says and we laugh.

Below CHomrong, on the day's second 2000 foot descent, Thomel curses as it rains.

"Why are we going down?"

"Come on," I tell him, "it's obvious."

"?"

"We go down so we can go back up."

"AHHHH! IT's all becoming clear!" he says, "And let me guess! We go down--"

"--so we can go UP!"

This makes life easier.

Also easy is dealing with accomodations when Thomel is around. Macke and I make him our Business Agent. If there is negotiating to be done, we send in the Hebe. In Bamboo we get the woRld's hottest solar shower. Then we meet...the German who had altitude sickness in Manang. he hired a horse to carry him over Thorung La. He' s still spaced out and dreamy, headed for Annapurna Base Camp.

The next day we fire up through sun mist and wind to Annapurna Base Camp. Trees are wrapped with moss that glows in weak sun. Bamboo rattles in the wind. Pink flowers poke out of frozen mud and rock. We buy peanut cookies from a deaf girl and her father whose left eye droops. Rhododendrons glow red.

At ABC we again see the Kiwis, minus the Blonde. The Son wants more charas from Macke. Dad looks exhausted. The Blonde is sick down in the valley. We eat dinner with a towering amiable Dutchman, Bram, and his hyperactive guide, Raju, who can curse a blue streak and seems to vibrate where he sits. Bram has Met the Maoists. He shows us his "receipt" from the People's Republic. ALogn with the receipt is a Maoist political treatise. It is totally full of historical inaccuracies (e.g. there was no "Aryan invasion of India" because there were no Aryans). For a political movement which worships at the altar of History, the Maoists have a lot of history wrong. Rain and mist envelope the camp. We get ten minutes of sun and then the evening descends.

DAY 21. Morning is mist...but then for forty magnificent minutes the mist lifts and we are dumbstruck at the walls of orange rock and ice that surround us and rise to 8000 meters. Prayer flags flap. The wind whispers. The sky is still and empty.

The day is a joint-demolishing 3000 meter (10,000 foot) descent to Jhinu Danda. We pass the Kiwis again. The Son begs the use of the pipe from Macke. We pass the Blonde who is terribly sick and having trouble walking. We give her all her antibiotics and wish her well. At Jhinu Danda, after eleven hours of walking, in the dark we find the hotsrpings to be...a lukewarm trickle. But enduro days have their own rewards and it's cool to sit in the warm windy rustling forest darkness and stare up at the thick clusters of stars squeezed between the dark shapes of the mountains.

That evening we are klept awake by two Israelis who yabber at top volume until midnight. WHat ARE they discussing?

DAY 22. We are awoken by the Israelis. Thomel translates from the Hebrew for us. Bear in mind this is at like 7:00 a.m.:

"Hey man how long is your dick?"

"See for yourself!"

"..."

"..."

"That's nothing. Look at MINE!"

"..."

"So, bitch, get me some coffee."

"Fuck you. YOU get the coffee."

"My dick is bigger than yours. YOU get the coffee!"

Etc etc.

I thank the Israelis for the Hebrew lesson and we hit the road. This will be our final day. Macke's calculations have an easy four hour riverside stroll.

Four hours later...we are clambering up and down the "Nepali flat" trail. It's pissing rain. The Blonde is still quite sick and cannot eat. Her "guide" refuses to carry her pack for her, so I shoulder it. This will be a sight for the Nepalis: a tourist carrying two packs and a guide waltzing along merrily behind. The Blonde now has to think of what to tip him, contemplates not tipping much (cos her guide is lazy) and then immediately feels female guilt at calling it like it is.

I cajole curse plead with support and otherwise verbally attempt to keep The Blonde moving. We need to get her to a hospital, and if we miss the last bus she is going to be a whole lot sicker.

"Come on, girl," I tell her, "there's a clean bed with white sheets, a hot shower with a clean bathmat, five hot Italian men who are totally funny, clean underwear AND a doctor awaiting you."

The Blonde nods shakily, grins, and stumbles forward. We pass a parter carrying a woman on his back. I gesture at him. The Blonde makes a face, grins, and explains that this would be cheating. She WILL finish under her own power.

We make it. We get to Nayapul. For the first tiem in three weeks we hear diesel engines and bus horns. We climb into the largely empty bus and collapse. 300 km, 19 walking days, 9200m (32,000 feet) of total vertical gain and loss. We're tired. We've made it.

The only problem is the bus. It is the oldest bus I have ever seen. A set of seats is totally broken and detached from their moorings. Every edge that protrudes is sharp and busted. The windows either don't shut, don't open, or don't exist. The seats are loose. There is no clutch. We could die at any time. And The Blonde has the worst farts you could imagine. Somehow we get to Pokhara, showers, steak, beer, clean sheets, pavement, flat ground, warmth, pastry, Internet, news and nothing at all to do.

END OF STORY:
-- The Blonde got better and came rafting with us.
-- We didn't meet any Maoists.
-- Macke hasn't yet heard from the Polish Chick.
-- The Hebe got us a great deal at his hotel in Pokhara.
-- Nobody scored with The Blonde
-- the Polish Chick made it (although it took her 5 days longer than us to do 50 less kilometers)

Annapurna Journals (2)

DAY 8. At 5:00 A.M. we are at about 4800m (16,000 feet) above Pisang, watching the sun paint a hundred miles of vertical rockwalls and sheets of ice orange. Annapurna has a crest of orange light and white plumes of spindrift eerily still. All is still. Yaks and goats bleat way below us. It's freezing. The air is blue, the mountains orange, and the sky a blueish black.

We bid goodbye to the lovely (and still umarried!) Tsiring and head off. In Khulu the streets are strewn with pine needles and the village smells of pinewood, newcut. In Barkat we meet The Blonde, a Polish-Italian-American girl doing the trek (gasp!) wiuthout a female partner! The afternoon light turns the dusty dry plains orange and yellow and we find the comapriative luxury of lukewarm solar showers at the Yak Hotel in Manang, elev. 10,000 feet.

Dinner in Manang is a bit of a scene. As an accimatisation point for those who are heading up to Thorung Pass, and as the last spot to bail out before the Thorung, it hasa few trekekrs kicking around. Macke and I walk into the dining hall and are first surrounded by the babble of French. A group of bulging greying French tourists groan and massage their feet as they sit around the fire. We move through them and sit across from a pair of middle-aged blondes wearing bright red Axel Rose bandanas, who are making the horrible mistake of wearing tight SPandex pants without having gotten their saggy asses into shape. The crowd of about twenty other middle aged women-- not a man among them-- stares hungrily at us two guys. Some of them are wearing huge brilliant orange puffy down jackets. This is Team Dubai. A collection of middle-aged divorcess out to trek the Annapurna. I get more irritated looks from the French girl's boyfriend-- who lacks English but not jealousy-- as I chat her up before our dal bhat comes.

DAY NINE. We drink stupendous amounts of REAL GODDAMN COFFEE, write in our journals and take stills of the weird architecture of Nepal. There's an American guy here doing some "research" on mule trains. Three Norwegian girls are looking at migration patterns. A nepali guy with a guitar asks me to play and then stares bug-eyed at my fumbly frozen fingers as I hack through some simple finger-picking. He then belts out a superb rendition of Neil Young's "Old Man." The sun scratches sharp black and white shadows onto the cobbles and horses whinny. The sky is infinite still blue. Tibetan women "just looking you sir" at us to buy necklaces. Team Dubai in their orange jackets spread out through town, recconoitering, and the French sit on the porch and massage their muscles. Our laundry drips and steams in the sudden fierce sun.

After dinner the Polish Chick and her friend come and find us to finish the game of Pitch. I realise that I'm retarded when it comes to cards. After four nights of play I still can't put all the rules together.

DAY TEN. We head out to Baraga Gompa in the morning. Inside there is the deep AAUUMMMM of Buddhist chanting. Outside is a German in a white t-shirt.

"Halo!" he says.

"Hey, man. Where are you heading?"

"Ja, I am from Chermany. It iss ncie here ja."

"..."

"Ja I sink I am haffink altitute proplems viss se air here ja. I loff se singink in se gompas."

"Are you uhh here for religious reasons?"

He goes into a discourse on the history of Tibetan Buddhism.

"No, are YOU here for religious reasons?"

"I am loffink sings here" he says and then begins to talk of his hometown.

He tells us that he's been here a few days, that he likes flowers and Buddhists and apple pie, and that in an attempt to cure his altitude sickness (barfing, headache, not sleeping) he will go to Tilicho ICe Lake (elev 5000 m or 16000 feet) on his own, with no guide, to "acclimatise." I figure he will die before he gets anywhere up the trail. He is insane, sick, and loving it.

Inside the gompa women are prostrating themselves and the rinpoche in deep purploe robes is leading chanting and call-and-response worship. People spin pryer wheels, finger Buddhist rosaries, and at the back two guys wink and chat between prostrations. The women are definitely kore into things than the men. Outside, after, the German wanders off in his oxygen-deprrived stupor and we watch an oxenteam hacking away at the earth and decline the offer of tsampa from the women cooking at the field's edge.

That afternoon we fire another 2500 feetr up to Ledar, passing Team Dubai, the French and a dead horse tyhat's been eviscerated by vultures and Himalayan dryness. Forest vanishes and the landscape becomes tilted and lunar. Outside Ledar signs read "horse service available." I wonder what on Earth this means, since we have seen no horse trains, and onlya few porters, for the last four days. Over dinner with the Blonde we meet the Kiwi and his dreadlocked Son, who macke thinks are on a bonding mission. The Polish CHick is nowhere to be found. Macke eyes the Blonde. So do I. The Son whsipers

"Have you got any gear?" to us. He's been Jonesing since he can't very well fire up in front of Dad. Macke sets him up.

DAY ELEVEN. We add another 1200 feet to the elevation. On arriving at Thorung Phedi we see a French woman walking ten steps, then stopping. Her porter is carrying everythign she owns. We eat spaghetti lunch with a South African engineer who opines of both Nepal and the U.S. that "people get the government they deserve." I'm leery at lunch-- Thorung Phedi is supposed to have "rampant giardiasis". Visions of gaseous shits AND altitude sickness.

After lunch we see what "horse service" really means: the French woman is now being carried uphill on a horse. We blast up another 1200 feet to High Camp, where all the trekkers go to the hotel with the big new dining room, and Macke and I-- in asome poor bargaining-- get relegated to the second-class hotel. Which, it turns out, is a pretty good deal. Our hotel has heating in the dining room, fast service and no noise at 4:00 the next a.m. when all fo the fat old tourists get up to begin the battle with Thorung La.

Team Dubai gets its brieifing for the next day-- the hardest of the trek, an 800 m climb to Thorung La (elev 5200 m, or 18,000 feet) followed by a 1700 m (5000 foot) descenet to Muktinath.

"We'll have a steady group that leaves at four thirty," says the Norwegian Blonde, "and a group for the really energetic people that will leave at five." Wow, what a self-esteem booster choosing a group must be.

Macke plays cards and works on the Blonde, and I get into my book, the hugely overwritten THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS by Arundhati Roy. Here's a writer who can't leave well enough alone-- there's always room for another simile. She must have Really Listened to her creative writing teacher. Team Dubai is hurting: one of the guides has altitude sickness and giardia and must retreat to Manang to see if she can get airlifted out. I can see what might have happened: the latrines from High Camp empty directly into the water basin that leads to Thorung Phedi. MMMM.

DAY TWELVE. We sleep in past the older tourists and at 5:30 get the trail. It is a weird walk. We pass everybody from High Camp in the next hour and three-quarters and get into the time-trialish sluggish groove of altitude walking: high heart rate, slow breaths, and many small steps. Thorung La does to Team Dubai and the French what Lance Armstrong does to the Tour in the Alps: scatters and breaks them. The French woman arrives on horse. Porters carry their loads to the pass, then go back down to help the laggards carry their Gore-Tex jackets and their water bottles. The older folks gasp walk ten feet and lean like stoned insects on their trekking-pole legs, antsized from the pass. Macke and I take pics, drink tea (an astronomical $1 U.S.) and savour the bizarre feeling of breathing at 18,000 feet.

The descent is a knee-grinder. In Muktinath we check into the Hotel Bob Marley, whose manager is a ladyboy (Nepali transgendered man) named Angela who, I gotta admit, knows how to dress. The Muktinath Temple complex is a holy site for Buddhists and Hindus. In the complex are the 108 Waterspouts, where a man ina suit ritually cleans his hair under each. The Eternal Flame-- a natural gas jet that never goes out-- flickers beneath an altar in a dim gompa where and orange-clad, head-shaved nun is sweeping. Aboce the complex, ona fractured stone slope, are hundreds of stone altars, minichortens, sticking up orange in the last of the light against the grey of the rockfield. I watch the sunset dip behind the Dhaulagiri Massif and head for dinner.

In the Hotel Bob Marley there are-- what else?-- stoned Israelis enthusing about How Groovy the hotel is and drinking Rasta tea. Macke and I tink away at a five-string guitar and Macke gets annihilated in chess by a Norwegian whose school English is so perfect it makes him sound like a textbook CD.

DAY THIRTEEN. We traipse down (ahhhh) to Kagbeni, where we see an Israeli girl and her parents. Her Dad has the classic middle-aged man look: his ass has migrated around to become his belly. He must have flown in-- there's no way this guy could have walked. We note that Israeli girls in Nepal tend to have a fair bit of back, and then talk turns to the Polish Chick and the Blonde. It's weird how some people have "low energy": they kind of suck your energy out of you. The Polish CHick, we decide, is one such person (as is her trekking partner), but the Italian-Polish-American Blonde has energy surplus.

Kagbeni is the bottom of the Mustang region of Nepal. Tibetan is spoken, the houses are wood, and weirdly green fields drift and waves wheatstalks at us in the drywind. The Gompa is magnificent-- homemade wood beams, God images, bells and purple cloth-- and we sadly leave. We're trying to catch the Blonde and the Kiwis in Marpha, but when we get to Jomsom, the rain begins, pounding at us. Take rain, add exhaustion, mix with warm apple pie and the propect fo Yak steak, and you get two guys who don't want to walk any further.
Jomsom has two tractors, some soldiers, and a bank that looks like it was recently converted from a barn and is guarded by a sleepy guy with a twelve-guage. Macke changes money, we order steaks fro dinner, buy some apple brandy, and pass out.