F**ked off to India

presents from India

2005-07-02T00:19:00.000+05:30

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

2005-06-29T18:04:00.000+05:30

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

2005-06-29T10:34:00.001+05:30

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

2005-06-27T09:53:00.000+05:30

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

2005-06-27T09:35:00.000+05:30

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

2005-06-20T12:59:00.000+05:30

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?

2005-06-14T18:31:00.000+05:30

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!

2005-06-13T09:49:00.000+05:30

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.

circle

2005-06-13T08:56:00.000+05:30

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

2005-06-08T09:53:00.000+05:30

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

2005-06-08T09:36:00.000+05:30

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)

2005-06-05T09:01:00.000+05:30

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)

2005-06-04T13:15:00.000+05:30

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

2005-06-04T13:01:00.000+05:30

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)

2005-06-04T12:25:00.000+05:30

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

2005-05-27T14:52:00.000+05:30

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

2005-05-26T13:49:00.000+05:30

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

2005-05-24T14:50:00.000+05:30

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

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

Rafting and Pokhara

2005-05-23T13:50:00.000+05:30

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!

2005-05-12T16:24:00.000+05:30

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)

2005-05-12T16:17:00.000+05:30

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)

2005-05-12T11:38:00.000+05:30

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.

The Year 2062.

2005-05-08T11:34:00.000+05:30

So Nepal is on the year 2062, their New Year's starts on 14 April, and they are 1:15 minutes off Delhi time. Let us think, as Macke and I did, on 2062.

As you may be aware, the world is probably entering what is know as "peak oil", where the production of fossil fuels (oil and its derivatives, natural gas, and coal) begins to decline. We're not running out of oil-- that will take 300 more years-- but we are entering the phase where we can no longer keep increasing the production of fossil fuels.

NAH! screams my technophile friend Whorne-- "we will make FUSION economically viable and all our problems will go away!" Well, aside from the fact that fusion-- despite many billions of dollars of investment and years of research hasnt yet produced any meaningful return on investment-- if the lack of energy doesnt become a problem, climate change or the looming crisis in world food production will.

So what will the year 2062 look like? Well, fossil fuels will be expensive. That means...localised agriculture. No more Caesar salads that get transported to Toronto from California in Fenbruary, and no more plastic crap from Wal MArt that was made in China. Many of us won't be online. Some our our relatives might have died from the conflicts that are probably coming up. The Army and the government are probably the main ones using motor vehicles. The U.S.-- which no longer has the water supplies, topsoil, fossil fuels or local infrastructure necessary to maintain itself-- has fragmented into smaller political groups. Las Vegas Phoenix and Houston are ghost towns. China has had 30 years of civil war after its agricultural system enters prolonged crisis due to overuse. India is in the same position. So is Europe.

Locallay, we all have gardens. We wear old clothes. We spend a lot of time sitting around playing cards. It's colder in winter cos heat is expensive. Our kids are short and sick cos there's less protein to feed them. We've learned to fight, and we're organised into small political units of 40-100 people. Men who have money, as always, have access to women. There's polygamy. The rule of law has changed back to locally administered communally-based "hearings" to do with crimes, and vigilante justice. Some body f**ks with you, you f**k them back. We eat less meat.

I'm willing to bet we'll have memories of "the collapse" and we will look back on this time of relative plenty as a kind of golden age. We'll wonder how the "ancients" did things like build massive skyscrapers (they're collapsing-- we salvage steel and other goods from them) and roads that go into insane places. We will be amazed that anybody was ever fat. We'll wonder how we had so much and f**ked it up so thoroughly.

Did your job basically involve manipulating symbols? Were you a teacher, businessman, person in marketing, computers, or government? You're probably kinda screwed cos what will matter will be your ability to grow food or make things tradeable for food.

The people who are going to be OK are those who live the way they did 1000 years ago, and whose ecosystemic environments aren't destroyed. Bhutan. Nepalese mountains. Southern Indian islanders. Ceylon. People in the upper Amazon. Industrialised nations' citizens-- get ready to rumble. Things are going to get ugly.

So welcome to the year 2062. Nepal. WHere satellite dishes get carried for 7 days on the backs of burros to places whose inhabitants don't understand most of the languages the dishes speak. Where the Army and the bus lines use fossil fuels, and everybody else shivers and burns wood. Where 80% of the population grows corn wheat and squash for a living and lives on about $2 (U.S.) a day. Where the wealthy own 5000% (that's right) more than the poor. WHere life is local, hard, cheap, slow, and short.

Of course I could be wrong. That would be nice. Look here for a much more detailed version of what I've just written about.

Going rafting. Stay tuned for Annpurna (2). Will Macke and Butch make it over Thorung La? Does the Polish Chick successfully lure Macke into her bed? What happens to the Mad German and Team Dubai? And where are those goddamned Maoists?

Annapurna journals (1)

2005-05-06T11:20:00.000+05:30

So we went for a little stroll around Annapurna. Me and Macke Mastacos. We started in Besisahar (bottom right corner) and did a massive counterclockwise walk that took us into Annpurna Base Camp ("ABC" on the map) and finally out. You can see a good map and a bunch of pictures here.

DAY ONE. We stumble, uncaffeinated, through Kathmandu's quiet morning streets, nearly miss the entire bus station, and just barely make our bus that will-- Maoist guerillas permitting-- take us to Dumre. Our packs go underneath in the locked compartment. The bus takes 5 hours to go 25 km as we wait in line and the Army searches various vehicles and the invisible Maoists hover somewhere int he thick warm haze of the Valley.

In Dumre we get off and the driver's assistant has lsot the key for the luggage compartment. Crowbars, screwdrivers and hammers are applied to the bus and Dumre kids stare at people trying to break into their own bus until the assistant finds his spare key and we are off. We climb onto the roof of the Besisahar bus and are asked for Rs250 each for the 20 km ride, more than we paid to ride in luxury the 140 km from Kathmandu. SO we do the ritual: we get off the bus, the assistant sees his evening's drinking money walking away, and we settle for Rs100 each. On the way to Besisahar we meet a French tour group who ask us

"You have a guide and porters?"

"No."

"Pourquoi pas?"

"Because we're STRONG!" I say, grinning at a woman whose boyfriend glares at me. That's OK-- he's French, and the French-- either cos their education system sucks, or cos French is the best language in the world, and therefore why bother to learn any others, especially le maudit anglais?-- know the least English of the travellers I've met.

"Hey, man," says Macke the Yank, "are you the obnoxious Canadian, or what?"

The bus lurches through orange haze, army checkpoints, cornfields and clusters of white houses. In Besisahar we eat with Sam, a Hong Kongian who wants to lose 20 lb and pick up the pieces after his live-with girlfriend dumped him...by texting him! The text-dump, ouch. On discovering he's never smoked weed, Macke resolves to get Sam baked at some point on the trek. The room costs Rs30 (60 cents) and dinner Rs150 ($3), the reverse of normal Nepal prices.

DAY TWO. Before breakfast, a drunk Nepali who is in the ambiguous zone between short and dwarf approaches me and says "Porter, porter," over and over. It is the year 2062 (really-- they use different year numbers, and their time zone is 1:15 from Delhi's...cos Nepal is DIFFERENT!) in Nepal and a footrace is on. Men in short shorts and women in baggy clothes run by, avoiding the drunk "porter" the potholes the people hanging out and the garbage.

We cheat and catch a bus 10 km further up the road to Khedi, then start to hoof it. There's a hydro project 1/2 done that was supposed to be completed five months ago. Corn grows and there is green wheat waving. We can see only about 10 km into the haze. Macke worries audibly about not being able to see anything. Lunch dal bhat (rice and lentils) is Rs120.

At Bahun Danda we call it a day and follow a pair of teenagers down to an amazing set of hotsprings that colour us orange. Macke does nipple and chest flexes that awe the Nepalis, who in turn do backflips and mini sprints up the vertical mountain to impress us.

DAY THREE. We pass through Jagat, a cluster of houses clinging to a steep lush mountianside, whose street is weird cobbles, and where a woman thrusts a baby with runnign sores at us and a horse wraps hsi lips around the local water fountain and guzzles. We meet a man with one eye, many mule-trains (Nepali 18-wheelers) that tink and whinny and shit as they pass us, an Austrian who tells us of a pneumonic Nepali porter he rescued in Jomsom (and so escaped maoist taxes), and a succession of Nepalis carrying loads that most Westerners couldn't get more than two inches off the ground.

We give the woman with the festering-sore baby some antibiotic cream and head off to Chame, where we meet a Pole and a Scot, two women doing the trek. After having dinner with them we have the obligatory guy conversation: "Hey, man, how many beers would it take to get you to get with her?" We decide that one of the girls requires 5-6 beers and the other one is beyond the transformative reach of beer goggles. This is horribly sexist, true, but women do the same thing: "If he bought me a _______ D'd marry him," etc. BTW if you ever want to start a good argument over dinner, ask the women why they like guys with money so much. They will all deny it ("I look for a sense of humour"), then you trot out the facts ("So if there's funny construction worker, and his identically funny and handsome lawyer brother, who gets a date with you?"), and off you go.

CHame starts looking Tibetan. WHen you first enter the village, you pass the maniwal, a long low-roofed outdoor structure which has prayer wheels that you spin as you walk past. The wheels read "om mani padme hum" (an invocation in Tibetan that I think has something to do with the lotus flower) and as they spin they supposedly fire these prayers off into the great karmic void, where they make life better. Above the village and around the chortens are prayer flags-- red blue white green yellow-- on which are printed prayers, and the wind flapping them does what the prayer wheels do. You always walk counterclockwise, or left, around maniwals or chortens, as this supposedly mimics the movementof the Heavens.

DAY FOUR. Into the pines. We gain 800m. The air gets cooler, the kids quieter, the mountain walls steeper. Dim rhododentron trees flicker bits of red at us. The locals gardens are complex: swidden (burn-and-rest) mixed with fruit trees mixed with herbs and veggies, composting, and recycling horse and cow manure.

In Baggarchap we start getting the full Nepal experience. A corn mill powered by water is twenty feet away from a house with a satellite dish that was humped in by humans and mules. The chorten's prayer flags wave against a sky fileld with dark blue light and shreds of cloud. In the gompa, monks chant and prayer wheels spin, and a Warholian sequence of psychedelic neon reproductions of Tibetan Buddhist gods covers the walls. Strings and cloth strips cover the posts and men in orange and blue robes make candles.

We have dinner with the Chicks and then Macke begins teaching us a card game called Pitch at which I, uhh, suck. I decide it's more fun to argue with the Polish chick (who is on the Shamanic PAth and reminds of this about every 5 minutes) than to agree, and so in response to a huge statement about the virtues of vegetarianism I tell her that eating meat and killing things are two of my favorite activities.

DAY FIVE. Up. Up. Up. At an Army checkpoint a soldier claims he can hit stuff from 400m with his rifle. The Maoist guerillas again fail to show up and ask us for "donations." In Thanchok a cluster of plastic chairs glows red and the village smells of freshcut pine and horsehit and woodsmoke. Piny mountainslopes rise above us and the trail clings to the sides of gorges and swings through the air on suspended bridges. We meet a porter carrying a sick man on a chair on his back, a man carrying several hundred watches, and another man with a supermarket on his head. Nepali teens wear tank tops, have ripped arms, and always have one item with a marijuana leaf on them. They look like L.A. Latino gangsters but take themselves a lot less seriously. In the evening at Chamje, the Polish girl invites Macke out to "watch the moon rise." GO MACKE!

You can tell a Euro from a mile away: the short shorts on the men. There is a small horde of Italians at one of the lodges. Please God don't let me have to see these guys in bathing suits...visions of fat men with skinny legs in Speedos...

DAY SIX. Up, up, up, to Upper Pisang (3100 m-- 10,000 feet). We have now changed climatic zones into the dry Interior-- like going from Hope to Kamloops-- and the villages change. Tibetan style means complex handmade stone walls, intricately and perfectly fitted together from found rocks. Yak horns jut from walls and the roofs have stones on them. Streets are rough-cobbled and over everything hangs Annpurna's walls of glaciers and rock, so massive your mind simply stops when you look at it. The sky is deeper blue and the lowland haze has gone. As we enter Upper Pisang a deaf woman with Seinfeldian man-hands gestures at us and shows us to the Himalaya Hotel, where we stare, dumbstruck, through the windows at the 7500m of blue-iced mountain across the valley.

Even better views await from the local gompa. In the evening, the deaf woman and the hotelier's wife joke around, imitating 50 cent in Nepali and being astonished at our glasses, esp my Flash Gordon cycling shades with the orange frames.

Day Seven: WHat is left of our minds vanishes over breakfast as the sun unfolds onto the five thousand meters of rock and ice that rise outside the windows. Tsampa is sick. Passputi explains that this has to do with stress: while he was away fro the last two weeks (the time it takes to walk out to Besisahar and deal with business stuff) Tsampa was aloen with their deaf employee, dealing with visitors, friends and some inclement weather (wind) that damaged their place. So she got sick. A local Tibetan healer/doctor comes to do a pujja, which involves chanting, the brushing of fire into her hair, and the consumption of a couple of drinks that are made of hot water and herbs.

Passputi takes us to the old gompa-- still in use despite sagging roof and tilting foundations until the new one up the hill is done-- where we listen to Buddhist pujja and then are offerted Tibetan tea, a fucking totally horrid fatty stinky stew of yak fat and herbs. I gag it down after tellign myself "it's soup not tea" but Macke has no such compunctions and pours his off the edge of the roof.

We walk through windy, stone-silent upper Pisang and head up to Garkot. Down on the valley floor is the tourist trail, but we choose a route that takes us abotu a thousand feet higher, to the village of Garkot. You work harder to walk this high, but from the Valley floor you see no views of the Annpurna Massif. Up here snowflakes flitter through beams of sunlight, the wind whispers, and a group of men gamble with gold coins and dice. Crazy leaning housewalls of rock and woodbeams tilt over silent lanes. Cows stare from people's courtyards. The fields are stony, scattered with rows of mounds of mulch. These are early-season alu-- potatoes-- that are the basis of Nepali mountian cuisine, cos you get the greatest amount of calories per unit of cultivated land from them. The skies are grey but dry. The Nepalis cough and spit as they make us dal bhat and lemon tea. AMazing how many people smoke up here, and how much lung disease there is. Too bad, cos this is one of the least pollute dpalces on Earth, and the Nepali lifestyle (eat right, exercise a lot, ignore Western media and the buying and selling of crap) could potentially be one of the healthiest.

We stop by the Ghame Kings' old ruined fort, where Macke wants to smoke some of the fine charas bought in Kathmandu, but he loses the piupe before imbibing, the irony of which is not lost on us. Cheech and Chong dialogue follows:

"You lose the WEED, man?"

"Oh, MAN, where is the PIPE? How I am I gonna have my WEED, man?"

"Is it in the little BAGGIE, MAN?"

"Aw, NO! WHat are we gonna DO with no WEED?"

But Macke saves the day by emptying and then re-filling a cigarette with the goods.

In Ngawal, we get beds in what I can only descrie as the Tourist Barn. Macke's stall has '70s flowery ceiling covers, plush nylon bedclothes and blue carpet. At tea in the kitchen, there are a group of five men chatting, and a few women, and I meet the lovely Tsiring, whose mother immediately begins the appropriate enquiries.

"You are married, yes?"

"No."

"Tsiring also not married."

"..."

"You batchellor. Very good. Very handsome."

"..."

"Your friend he married?"

"..."

"He also very handsome. Tsiring nice girl."

"Yes," I tell her Mom, "Bidi, tumara bache dere ramro tsa."

Tsiring turns bright red at this and giggles and her mother beams.

Another man walks into the kitchen and says something in Nepali that includes "bachra.". All of the men immediately stand up, and start grabbing knives. One guy pulls out a pair of numchucks. I wonder if maybe I shouldn't have told Tsiring's mom that her daughter was totally hot. The men vanish. Twenty minutes later, Tsiring's brother and Numchuck Man return with a dead goat which they truss and start gutting. The numchuck guy is deaf and lipreads and signs as he scoops heart lungs liver from the goat. Macke and I stand up to go and check out the village and suddenly my head is surrounded by hanging pieces of drying goatmeat and woodsmoke.

"Bachra por tsa?" asks Tsriring, gesturing at the goat.

"Uhh...tikchai, bachra mon por cho" I say. Maybe they'll add it to the food. I've never had goat.

Outside, we find a massive prayer wheel being turned by a waterwheel. Macke wonders if the Buddhists want to get good karma by way of sending out lots of prayers, or by godly recognition of their ingenuity in making such a device. We scout the trail to the ridge we'll climb tomorrow, and return to find Tsiring and her Mom doing the dishes in the gutter stream that runs past our hotel. A few feet upstream another sister is cleaning the remains of the goat. I breathe deeply while thinking gratefully of the good fortune of having brought a full course of giardiasis medication. We stuff ourselves with dal bhat, watch five minutes of a Hindi film at as neighbour's house (pity the porter who had to hump the TV up here) and pass out.

Annapurna index

2005-05-05T14:57:00.000+05:30

My trekking partner Macke Mastacos and I just walked around the Annapurna Massif and then in to the base of the range. Here's the stats. Full blow-by-blow in a day or two.

300-- distance in km estimated we walked (guidebook source)

19-- number of walking days

2-- number of rest days

9,200-- meters of elevation gain during trip (appr 31,000 feet)

5,400-- height in meters of Thorung La pass (appr 18,000 feet)

1-- number of French tourists carried over Thorung La on horseback

24-- number of plates of dal bhat (rice and lentils) eaten

47-- estimated numberof cups of Nescafe drunk during trek

197-- estimated number of cups of tea drunk

1-- bottle of apple brandy consumed

1-- number of guitars with less than six strings which were successfully played

1-- number of guitars with six strings which were successfully played

4 billion-- number of times "namaste" ("greetings to the God within you") was spoken

2-- number of marriageable Tibetan women encountered (out of maybe 5 total-- pretty good numbers, yeah?)

infinite-- number of marriageable Nepali women encountered

1-- number of serious marriage propositions hinted at by hot Nepali girls' mothers.

0-- number of Maoist insurgents demanding "tourism tax" encountered

2-- number of Israelis loudly discussing their penis sizes encountered

2-- number of tractors and motorcycles seen

Nepal dictionary

2005-05-05T14:44:00.000+05:30

A dictionary of things you find in Nepal

close the door (v)-- what Nepalis don't do, esp. when it's freezing outside.

heavy (adj)-- a word which in Nepal describes loads carried by mountain porters but which in America is used to describe the inhabitants

keti (n)-- hot Nepali serving girl, "wench," sister.

Nepali (n)-- somebody who can walk, eat, live or grow food anywhere.

pick her nose (v)-- what an Indian or Nepali woman will unselfconsciously do while talking to you.

porter (n)-- somebody who can carry three stoves, a metal table, two chickens and four sacks of rice on his back. He carries this load uphill, in flip-flops, in the rain, faster than an obese French tourist can carry a water bottle.

ramro (adj)-- a word which applies to bread, cigarettes, women and mountains, roughly "beautiful." e.g. "Keti, timi ramro tsa!" (hey girl, you're hot!)

rock-wall (n)-- a geographical feature which in many places is used for rock-climbing or the viewing pleasure of tourists, but which in Nepal is used mainly to grow food.

traveller (n)-- (1) a tourist with an attitude (2) a self-consciosu tourist

Kathmandu (1)

2005-04-11T22:03:00.000+05:30

If India ran a marathon, and then smoked a huge joint, it would be like Nepal: fit, calm and kinda wacky. Kathmandu is Delhi on tranquilisers; Delhi is Kathmandu on steroids and speed. If Delhi is a Corvette, Kathmandu is one of those ancient diesel Mercedes sedans that some hipie got ahold of and painted rainbow clours.

In the Nepal Peace Garden Cottage Hotel (really, folks, I shit you not, that's its name) me and three mongrel pooches are the only occupants. Nights, the 57 year old owner and I sit in the garden beside the empty pool and smoke Marlboros and drink raxi (rice whiskey) and listen to Black Sabbath and Nepalese pop, which sounds like cumbia with Hindi horn and string setions. sometimes it rains for five minutes and the stars fade into dark haze.

Thamel-- the tourist ghetto-- has about 1000 shops selling

a) cotton crap with bright colours
b) scarves
c) brass statues of the Buddha
d) massive Gurkha knives useful for decaptitating hippies
e) trekking equipment

and there is NOBODY HERE. This is cos the Maoists (poor rebels) are PISSED at the King, who this year dismissed the Parliament and is ruling by decree, kind of like the Chretien Liberals. Actually the Maoists have been around longer than that. The rebellion has both its tragic (100 ppl died yesterday in combat) and comic (the Maoists request "donations" from the tourists...and they give receipts) aspects. The Nepali soldiers I've met are like other Nepalis: so friendly its hard to imagine them screaming bloody murder and shooting people.

So Thamel is deserted. You go for dinner, and five bored waiters atend you. Everything is half-price. There is more "my special friend..." type calls on the street, but whatever. I can get solid Nepali food-- cooked spicy chickpeas, potatoes, and momos, which are steamed chillied beef dumplings- for $1, or an imitation Western meal-- complete with hippies asking if the coffee is free range and the beef shade-grown-- for $4.

I had a grat breakfast the other day. I found a hippie couple, beat the woman till she ran off questioning the purpose of the Universe, killed the male, and had him fried. The restaurant traded me the rest of the body for my breakfast. Really, I SWEAR it happened like that. I mean, meat is so cheap here...

SO what else. I went and climbed up Nagarjun, which is the King's private national park. The way up had waves of tree frogs and crickets droning a psychedelic haze. On the top of it were prayer flags, forty billion pieces of garbage, a fine hazy view over the Valley and a bunch of schoolteaches celebrating the end of their term by setting up a really complicated sound system that distorted all music beyond recognition but stil allowed them to dance.

I walked that afternoon down to Swayambhunath Stupa, this massive prayer mound sacred to the local Hindu and Buddhist populations. Atop it, the sun fragmented behind a cloud and the gold and white domes gleamed.

A man asked me If I wanted to buy a mantra (a phrase some people repeat when meditating). I told him he was the worst Buddhist and finest capitalist I'd ever met. Trying to sell words! My camera batteries died and I refused to pay $3 U.S. FOR ONE GODDAMN AA BATTERY and so I was forced to Be In The Moment and not use my camera and actually experince reality instead of photographing it.

It's hard to tell where Hinduism ends and Buddhism starts here. The Buddha told his followers "do not worship me" and I am not a God" and "you must do your own work, and find your own answers." He also reputedly said "IF you meet the Buddha on the road, kll him." But when the Buddha died the Mahayana School of Buddhism waited 400 years and just took Hindu Gods and god-characteristics and gave them Buddhist names. Kind of like the wily Maya, giving Catholic saints their Gods' attributes.

But that's OK. Jesus was a Jew; the Buddha was a Hindu; Mohammed was a "pagan" and everybody who really gets enlightened will change from the thing they started out as being. We have to do our own work. GODDAMNIT I wAs hoping I could just pray once a week and all would be well.

Nepalis are really into heavy metal, '70s and '80s metal. I think it was all the old-school hippies who broght their 8-tracks years ago, and also, BLAck Sabbath sounds a bit like Buddhist chanting. BTW did you guys know that a group of monks in France has recorded a Gregorian chanting version of Sabbath's greatest hits? Nepalis also like bizarre hybrid music, like imagine Ricky Martin and Ravi Shankar jamming.

Thats all for today. More tomorrow then I'm going to walk around Annapurna which should take thre weeks.

one travelling day

2005-04-09T13:07:00.000+05:30

In Jodhpur it is 46 degrees celsius at the station.

A woman sits with her two kids. A group of skinny teenageers stares at me.

On the train platform is an Indian family sitting on a blanket. Mom and daughter talk, and Dad plays with his mobile. A small boy plays with a bottle. The furnace wind clatters the bottle off across the platform. The boy, wide-eyed, steps off the blanket island into the flat sea of hot stone. He waddles after the bottle. Thirty yards from Mom, he grabs the bottle, and realises how far from shore he is, and gets the quizzical pre-cry look. Mom looks up, Dad puts the mobile down, and the boy, lost at sea, stares at me. I point to his family. Ha waddles halfway back, starts to cry, stops, looks around, and gets home, to cheering.

A huge fat man comes and shoves his crotch in my face and begins barking in Hindi. This must be Sister Fucker's brother. I ignore him and he goes away.

A skinny man in a purple shirt comes over and says

"C-c-c-c-clean? C-c-c-c-clean?"

I have no way to respond to this so he goes away.

The woman's two kids remove their shoes and come over to me, asking for money and pens. "Bhago!" I tell them. When this doesn't work, I use this skill that I learned from a friend of mine who teaches. It's called The Look. Works in all languages for all children. They run back to their mother.

Next morning in Delhi an Indian comes up to me and gives me an Englishman's passport and credit cards. I take them and tell him I'll call the embassy. At eight in th emorning--on a cloudless day-- the sky is gunmetal grey and still. You can taste the air. You can smoke without using cigarettes and get out of breath just by walking down the street. From the rooftop where I eat breakfast, I can see one kilometer before Delhi vanishes into smog.

At the chai wallah's, I meet Robert, a Frenchman whose right arm is in a thick cast. His pack-- and all ID, and money belt, and passport, and cards-- got jacked on the train, and, furious, he punched the wall, and broke his arm. Two days later, when he got to the doctor, they had to re-break it to properly set it. They put the anaesthetic in the wrong place, and so the simple operation screwed up cos he screamed in pain and moved his arm, etc etc. So now he's drifting around Delhi, waiting for money to come on the wire, bumming smokes. I buy him some Marlboroughs and a cup of chai.

The airport is a whole other Universe. It's ice-cold, err, I mean, room temperature. There are no beggars.

Kathmandu, Nepal, is cool, quiet, calm, and empty. Rumours fo the Maoist rebellion are keepign the billions of tourists away. I get a palatial room for $3 Cdn. and ample food for the same. Nepalis generally don't hassle you, there are no cows shitting in the street, and there are no blaring smoking honking rickshaws. In the night you can hear the Classic rock Napalis are partial to, and in the distance, snowy and hazy and still, the Himalaya.

Time to plan a trek.

The gold and the blue

2005-04-09T11:36:00.000+05:30

The "four hour ride" from Bikaner to Jaisalmer takes you seven.

The iPod you are using to take you away from India and into your mind brings endless attention from Indians, who stare grope giggle and pull at the 'phones.

The west wall of the sky is a flat grey hell breathing piss diesel camelfarts and incense at you, the sun drying your eyes into little squinty wrinkles.

Jaislamer in the evening light rises golden and glowing from the flat Thar scrubland, a sprinkle of concrete lanes aroudn it, and windmills off on the western horizon.

In Jaisalmer the rickshaws and hotel touts are a physical wall around the bus, screaming "hotel" and "my good sir" and "you come me now!" Even though you're a good Buddhist and you will remain detached, you get ready to kick some motherfucking Indian ass.

The One-Day Effect: on the day you arrive at a place-- even after ditching that most obviosu of "I'm new here" signs, your pack, in your hotel-- the lcoals can smell the arrivisme on you. BUT the day after, everybody, even those way away from where you're staying, leaves you alone.

The fort is twisted smoothed yellow stone alleyways, silent women smiling over tourist goods, and impossibly uneven cobbles glowing in the red evening light. Your hotel has doorways built for dwarves or teenage girls. The room has an ancient wooden carved vase, a silk carpet, and porno graffiti (with Hindi inscriptions) beside the bed. you wonder if they write "PISS SHIT CUNT" the way retarded Canadian teenaged boys do, or whether the tag gets philosophical.

In town, ancient yellowing walls and incricate haveli carvings hang over dusty cobbled streets, cows, quiet Indians and the whine of lassi blenders and the tink of smiths working metal. In the markets, Hindi morphs into Hindustani and Maharati, and you get even weirder looks than normal when using Hindi.

Vipassana does wierd things to your head. Nobody can fuck with you. Women stare, and want to flirt, and DO flirt. You've never had so many "psst!"s and giggles and winks. Everything is calm, even after getting an atrocious haircut and a way-too-jaggedy shave. Nobody "sees" your meditation but they feel something in you.

You stand in a haveli courtyard, in the shade, wind blowing through thick stone-walled passages, swigging freezing Limca, and still the sweat pours off your body.

These are the finest-dressed Indians yet. The women-- tall, slim, carryign themselves nobly-- wear flamign red skirts, masses of gold hjewellery, and a staggring array of fiery blouses and sari wraps. The men-- distinguished in white kurtas and pants, or dhoti, with fine craggy faces-- wear intense neon turbans and gold chains. There are no chapati bhellies here.

You visit the headquarers of the local windfarm. Using Danish technology and Indian manfactuering, the CEO tells you that there is "limitless room" for growth. The Indian electricity market is expanding faster than the supply. Recently, having signed nuclear technology and natural gas deals with the Iranians, the Indains were told off by Condoleeza Rice. The Indians quite properly told her to get stuffed. Groundwater is falling, temperatures are rising, snow in the Himalaya is disappearing...

You catch an afternoon bus to Jodhpur, the "Blue City." There are thirty people in the aisle and that many again on the roof. Beside you sits a Brit woman who stares at your chest almost as much as Indians stare at your yellow-and-blue Flash Gordon shades. You drink litre after litre of lukewarm batlipanni and don't need to piss. The usual questions start coming from the nearest Indian with both a command of English and an Indian audience-- "what is your salary?" "are you married to that blonde bardhesi woman?"-- a guy who shoves his standing crotch in your seated face and ignores the book you are reading. The Brit woman finally indulges her womanly privilege and says to him in Hindi: "Hey, Sister-fucker, go waste somebody else's time." Sister-fucker stares, mouth open, then turns around and proceeds to fart about every ten minutes. Brit lady smiles at you and touches your leg.

"Can you show me how to change the ISO on my camera?" she asks, smiling.

There is yelling at the back of the bus. Over the tops of seats and on peoples heads and shoudlers comes a desperate sweating man, pale and shaking. He steps on Sister Fucker's shoulder. Sister Fucker grabs him and starts cussing him out. Brit Lady stands up and tells Sister Fucker that the ditch would be a better place for vomit than the floor of the bus. Sick Man lunges forward, and dives headfirst off the slowing bus into the ditch, puking his guts out. There is some silence, and then water and medicien appear from nowhere, from everyone on the bus, and SIck Man nods weakly. For the rest of the ride, he hangs off the door, heaving and swaying int he hot sick breath of night wind. it is 45 degrees Celsius.

In Jodhpur, the most stlyish rickshaws you've ever seen cluster around the bus. Gold tassles, big systems with woofers, velvet roofs, multiple mirrors. Maybe "Pimp My Ride" could come and do and India special! The English woman gives you her phone #, an email, an invitation to visit her in Jaipur, and a kiss. You rattle through greasy thick billous air into the blue warren of the Old City.

In the morning, the red sun licks silently at the blue jumble of lanes and concrete that clusters under the massive old Fort, glowing red and orange in a still-clear sky. Yoga and then REAL GODDAMN COFFEE on the roof.

The Fort is almost as intereting as the incredible number of bardhesi hotties, doing their best to torment the men of India, wearing their lowrise jeans and skimpy tops. You hate to say it, but it needs to be said...Ladies: in a culture where they lock up their women and regulate sex, flaunting your blonde tanned fit body is an invitation to getting hassled. Ladies, god-DAMN you look fine, but please, don't EVER bitch about Indian men if you dress while in India for the club back home! Big, shaggy and baggy is the way to go. That burlap bag ought to go down to your ankles. India is like me-- old and sexist.

The Fort has amazing things...intricate stone-carved latticed windows to hide the purdah'd women from lustful male gazes (they knew a thing or two, those old-school religious folks), wild carpets, daggers (dont mess with a maharaja, boys, he'll cut your bits off in a second) and an East-meets-West decorating scheme which includes mechanised rocking cradles, Christmas tree baubles, hand-woven silk hangings, and swords big enough to cut three guys in half.

Afternoon and evenings are for getting lsot in the old blue maze of the city. Rickshaws clatter and fart, hundreds of children scream at you as you walk by, Indian men stare, goggle-eyed, and the sky slowly turns black. In the evening you listen to the girls' festival-- groups of them sit on rooftops, singing to the Goddess-- while the masjid blares "Alluh Akhbar" and the evening's smoke and food drifts through the thick night air.

The next day you are two horus late checkign out, and the managers-- a normally laid-back lot, mainly cos being nice to Western guys gets them closer to Western girls-- get ugly, demanding another day's rate, complaining how they've had to turn people away cos your room is still occupied. This despite the fact that the hotel is half empty.

You tell them that this is unreasonable.

They get really really angry.

You tell them that you are very sorry, but two hundred rupees for being an hour late is a bit much. Fifty is mroe reasonable, especially considering that the hotel is only half-full.

They start making sexual comments in Hindi. "I make big problem for you" they say.

"Bring it," you say, smiling gently. You're a good Buddhist, but you get ready...and they can't do anything anyway, since they havn't registered you at the hotel (trying to make some no-tax cash), and so you walk out. "Cos I'm the type of nigger that's built to last/Fuck with me, I'll put my foot in your ass," goes the old song.

It is 46 degreees celsius and the world is a hot rasping furnace as you stagger itno the train station, dreaming of cool Kathmandu, calm Nepalis, and snowy peaks.

Ewwww

2005-04-09T11:22:00.000+05:30

Today, the yucky stuff.

TAKING A CRAP IN INDIA. Ok. The toilet is a hole in the ground and beside it is a faucet and a small dipepr for water. Outside is your restaurant and your waiting meal. There is no toilet paper. Have at it!

TAKING A LEAK IN INDIA. Male? Easy. Whip it out, point it at a wall, and away you go. Female? Well, you go at home, in the morning. You don't need to go more than that, do you? In a recent edition of The India Times, it was reported that a major reason for girls failing to attend government schools was the relcutance of school boards to build toilets for girls. And if you have a kid, just pull its pants off, hang its ass off your front doorway, and have it squirt/dump into the street.

INDIAN GITCH. Not gonna speculate on the ladies', but the men...man...Indians (who are publicly quite homophobic, and whose constitution outlaws homosexuality) walk around looking like stylish '70s gay men, with their high-wasited jeans, tucked-in shirts, 'staches, big hair and of course hand-holding. The best lookign Indians are the Punjabis and the people of the Thar desert, with their wild turbans and Indian dress (kurtas etc) Indian underwear woudl make any Western man (gay or straight) shudder...satiny tight high-waisted banan pouches. Oh dear God. And if you aren't into that, you can take what looks like a turban, and do a sumo-wrestler kind of wrap-around system.

GAHHHH I can't go on this is too sick.

Camel driver chapati man!

2005-04-04T15:23:00.000+05:30

I am travelling with Mike(2), who I met in Jaipur through the insane local boys. We decide to visit Jaisalmer but since-- after standing in the correct line for two hours-- we find out the trains are full for the next four days, we head north to Bikaner.

The train is empty, and rattles through the warm darkness. WHen the train's horn goes, it seems to last for thirty awful howling seconds.An Indian teenager comes over and sits near us, and for six hours stares, nonstop. Mike and I are reading and chatting. As we are discussing the old traveller's question of national stereotypes, a younger boy appears.

"Do you believe in aliens?" he asks.

"..."

"I saw one. In a newspaper. But the newspaper was in Mumbai."

"..."

"Aliens can only come when there is no sun. Otherwise they are destroyed."

"..."

"Do you know the capital of Canada?"

Mike and I look at each other.

"Do you know all the states of India?" I ask the boy.

This starts Geography Wars. The kid can name 27/32 Indian states, I can name 40-some out of 50 American states (with help), and Mike the AMerican can name all of the Canadian provinces (with help).

The car suddenly fills with swirling choking dust. The air is green. People scramble for the windows and grey settles on everything. In Bikaner, we ditch the train and catch an autorickshaw. As we wait at the railway crossing, a steady stream of Indians on foot, bicycle or motorcycle sneaks under the lowered barricades. So THIS is why the trainn whistle goes for so long!

The next day we poke around dusty old Bikaner, and the mornign after finds us at the local Jain temple. The Jains are a Buddhist offshoot who take very seriously the Buddha's injunction not to kill, so they are strict vegetarians, stick to the jewelery business (at which they excel) and have amazing temples into which leather items and menstruating women are not allowed. This temple is the Rat Temple, and has hundreds of rats everywhere, well-fed by priests and visitors. Rats scurry over your feet as Indian kids, soldiers, itinerant sadhus and us tourists ogle the astonishing intricate marble.

We begin our camel trek here-- four days in the desert. We have Kalu, outr black riding camel, and Bura, our brown and taller cart-towing camel. Our unt-wallahs are Jesucran (23) and his nephew Ashok (12). Initially bummed that our bargain-price off-season trek-- a mere $12/day-- includes only one riding camel, we very quickly learn that camel riding sucks. More specifically, it annihilates your ass, hips, lower back and upper leg muscles. The cart-- with its blankets and packs-- is paradise.

We drift into a shimmering haze of heat and dust. Elementary conversations with the unt wallahs go something like this [in Hindi] [I am assuming]:

White Boy: "Hot India are yes."

Unt Wallah: "Yeah, India's fucking hot, man, and I don't know why you bardhesi nutcases want to ride around the desert on a stupid camel when you could be chilling [literally] in a hotel somewhere."

White Boy: "What? India are hot is yes."

Thus pass the days. Lunch is chapatis and vegetable stew cooked on a fire, along with colichai for me and dudhchai for the others. Jesucran hollers at blurred turbaned figures and sends Ashok scampering out into the heat to find goatmilk, which comes to us warm, in emptied mineral watrer bottles. We stuff ourselves, then snooze in the shade. Late in the afternoon, we go out again into the sun. Local villages have thatch-roofed mud huts or more solid concrete houses, with simple geometric patterns engraved into the walls, and hundreds of kids run out and scream "one pen!" and "hello!" and "panch rupiyem!" at us while the camels slurp murky green water

In the evening, the wallahs spread blankets in the sand for us. We learn the first of many new words-- goongooliAH-- these are the large slow and very friendly balck beetles which appear when you sit on the sand, and want to come over and say hello. The ever-hungry unts get massive bags of feed which they immediately start in on. Chai is followed by chapatis and dal, and then the sun starts to flame in the west, the sky turns velvety purple, and billions of stars start to tinkle, echoing the goat bells that come through the smoky darkness.

The secret to sleeping on sand without at mat is to scoop out a spot for your ass, and then when you turn sideways this hollow also accomodates your hips. Mornings, a cool breeze pokes at us and we shake the sand off and watch the sun climb into its position of superior frypower. Breakfast is toast, fruit and chai.

We see a brick kiln, around whose base the ground smolders, and the workers, feet ash-grey, invite us for tea. One evening we find a goat baking in the sun. Snot comes from its nose and blood from its ass. Jesucran feeds and waters it, and it perks up. That evening herds of goats baaaaah and tinkle their way through camp, and herders sit with the wallahs over chai and laugh. In the morning, something thumps my sleeping chest, and when I wake up, the goat has died. The camels are STILL eating. As Jesucran gets them ready, they piss and fart, and smack their lips while chewing pieces of wood and thorns. If the Apocalypse comes, its survivors will be people in Bhutan, rats, cockroaches, and camels (those who can live on nothing, or anything). In another village, a beautiful Indian girl follows us and makes jokes in HIndi, while we proposition her in Spanish. Camping in sand dunes, sunset turns the sand into ripples of blue and orange and gold while Jesucran fries smoky chapati. We tell best and worst girlfriend stories, argue about energy and ecology, work on the Hindi ("GoongooliAH maza he!" "Meri mahila mitri sundar he!" "Suraj garmi he.") and squint into the haze.

After four days, we have dinner with Jesucran back at his house, and get on a bus back to Bikaner, where
shaves, showers and cold Limca awaits. That evening, we eat dinenr with Swis nurse, her Malaysian boyfriend, and a drunken American physician who really really likes George W. Bush. After he makes a few comments like "Well, the Iraq invasion will pay off ina few years" and "Not that many people have died over there", I think to myself that I can forgive somebody's stupidity, but ignorance is another question.

In the morning, we watch raodies crankign laps in the velodrome before the silent sun scatters them, stuff ourselves with non-Indian food, and climb onto the Endless Bus To Jaisalmer.

10 things I miss about Canada...

2005-04-01T20:47:00.000+05:30

10) Bacon, eggs, hashbrowns (fried in the bacon grease) and REAL GODDAMN COFFEE.

9) How excrement is generally confined to toilets.

8) Vehicles with rear-view mirrors.

7) REAL GODDAMN COFFEE.

6) Knowing the price of a thing before hauling out my wallet.

5) Communicating with women beyond flirting and negotiating the price of vegetables.

4) REAL GODDAMN COFFEE

3) Drivers who stick to the appropriate side of the road.

2) Men who do not grab and move their balls around three inches from your face.

10) It's a toss-up-- reasd god-damn coffee, or my woman.

If you said "jump in the river," I would, cos it would probably be a good idea...

2005-03-28T21:33:00.001+05:30

There is rythmic chanting and the pounding of Indian techno. Outside the beer store, a crowd is singing and throwing red and yellow dye at each other, brilliant in the sun. A man lies on the pavement, covered in purple paint, his leg broken, clutching a bottle, screaming. His scooter lies, trashed, on the ground, and the motorcyclist he has run into is pouring shards of green glass and foamy beer out of his jacket pocket. The motorcycle's kick-starter lies a few feet away. I can barely see straight but I there are the cops. One is hitting his flask and another gestures at the man with the broken leg to get off the road.

It is Holi Festival.

flashback: Jaipur, Rajastan. 24 March.

On the wall of my room in the NeverClean Hotel is graffitied "ARISE, AWAKE, AND STOP NOT UNTIL THE GOAL HAS BEEN ACHIEVED." Indians-- like Westerners-- like their inspirationals.

After my morning Vipassana, I am feeling both Buddhist and snotty, so I write underneath it "GOAL NOT UNTIL THE STOP HAS BEEN ACHIEVED" and head out for breakfast. OK. Today is gonna be a CHILL DAY, needed after what I'd seen yesterday.

I've just come back to Jaipur after two days in the tiny rottinng town of Nawalghar, which is a couple of hundred kilometers north and about eighty years back in time, from Jaipur. Nawalghar has miniature still streets where flies buzz and cows have no rickshaw-induced stress, baking heat, and ancient crumbling havelis, which are the richly painted homes of wealthy merchants who ended up getting better returns elsewhere and so moving away to Mumbai or Chenas. I'd stayed in a very Brahmin guest house-- no eggs, no booze, and woe betide any skanky budget traveller like me who'd ever admit to stooping so low as to stay in a non-Brahmin hotel. The Brahmin are India's educated caste-- traditionally priests and teachers-- and as such a lot of the ones I've met are, well, kinda arrogant about their position on the social ladder.

Indian driving-- like that of the Mexicans-- is one of those things that first scares you shitless and then numbs you. 1500 people a day die on Indian roads. You forget this fact after the first few trips. When passing on blind corners and in ditches, using the wrong side of the road, playing chicken, etc, don't kill you, you think, "this is OK. Indians CAN drive."

At 6:30 a.m. on the 23rd I boarded a bus. The driver-- psychotic even by Indian standards-- compensated for the lack of morning coffee by giving us free doses of adrenalin. After Sikar, the bus slowed, then stopped. On the road was a flipped-over five-ton truck, carrying a couple of hundred propane cannisters, many of whom were leaking, spinnign and hissing. The stink of gas was overwhelming. The truck's cab was crushed, totally crushed, and blood dripped out from inside it. A minivan was bent in half around a tree. A woman lay on the ground, vomiting, while a pale-faced driver stabbed at his cellphone.

Two kilometers further down the road, we saw ANOTHER accident. Another truck lay in the ditch. Its cargo of goats bleated as one goat at a time scrambled out.

Thirty kilometers after that, we saw ANOTHER accident. Here, another five-ton had taken a flying leap off the road and into the trees. Horribly mangled, it hung there, with nobody in sight. In Jaipur, I headed for the NeverClean, where I tried to relax with some meditating and then eyeing the Israeli girls. One of them came over and introduced herself. Jasmin was an ex-army chick-- like all Israelis, she'd been drafted-- who had bailed on her assignment as a sniper. You know the world is fucked up when an army trains women to kill unarmed civlians. OK, I'm being sexist, but I am old and sexist, so there it is...women are built, eventually, for being Moms, and there's something seriously sick about the thought of a female sniper. After dealing with the political hassles (jail time) she was trying to get her mind back. We made plans for dinner, and decided to see the Observatory on the following day.

The next morning in Jaipur I re-confirmed my plans. This time I was really going to do it. I was really going to get across town, and see the Matar Jantar Observatory and NOT meet another succession of weird Indians. I just wanted to Play Tourist. Naturally, this is what happened:

8:45 Breakfast.

9:15 Start chatting with a "nice" Indian man who invites me for tea, and then hits me with a "business proposal." If I mail some "precious stones" to myself in Canada, he will pick them up from me there and pay me $20,000 cash (U.S.). While he babbles on, I begin calculating the number of ways in which this is a scam. His name is Vijay. I tell him "OK. Give me $15,000 cash up front, on Monday, and we'll talk." His enthusiasm subsides.

10:30 Arrive at Jantar Mantar http://www.photovault.com/Link/Universe/Observatories/Radio/Places/JaipurObservatory.html This place was built buy the local raj in the early 1700s. The guy could not only annihilate his opponents in battle (and polo), he was fanatic for architecture (founding the city of Jaipur), science, women (the harem was legendary), and astronomy and astrology. He sent people to Europe to visit the astronomical greats, and ended up building what looks kind of like a skateboard park on acid. This is one of the best architectural sites, because anybody who knows a wee bit of science can go and figure out what the devices do. They have a sundial accurate to within two seconds. I want to climb its walls, and the massive curved structure just begs to get rail-slid.

11:50 I meet Jasmin, who mentions that it is the Elephant Festival, an old tradition which has become more or less a tourist spectacle. We catch an auto rickshaw out to Gaudan Stadium, just in time to catch...

12:30 ELEPHANT POLO! The elephant is not a fast-moving creature, and a group of elephants, ridden by very colourful Rajastanis, circling and chasing a polo-ball the size of a basketball, is an even slower thing. Elephant polo looks like something a Soutrh Park kid would imagine on a peyote trip during Geography class. Even better than the drugged-out dundering of the elephants is the announcer's voice [do your best Indian accent here]:

"And now we observe the elephants, which derive as much satisfaction from playing polo as do human beings"

and

"See the elephants gracefully circle the field, colourfully battling"

and

"the elephant is indeed a marrrrrvelous crrreature"

2:00 Jasmin has a bus to catch to Bhundi, so I bid her goodbye and turn around to find...Mike. Uh-oh. There can only be one thing to follow a meeting with Mike, the Indo-Brit exporter who looks like a Latino gangster and emanates love...ALCOHOL. It is afternoon, and Mike, Raj2 [the second Raj I've met in Jaipur], Mike2 [ditto] and a couple of their friends want to get the Holi ball rolling.

Holi is the Hindu spring festival. Like most, it takes places on a full moon, and it marks the transition from winter. As we have a Surrey Evening, blasting out to the gem quarter in Raj2's car, charas making the rounds, Hindi pop and 50 cent pounding, the sun is sinking like a huge yellow gumdrop into the dark lkips of the valley's edge. Every streetcorner has a huge pile of wood and local grasses stacked, and around these stand groups of women, chanting puja. Around them floats the usual mess of cows, drunks, cyclists, garbage and people strolling. As the sun is eaten by the edge of the world, the fires are lit, and the orangey-blue air fills with sweet smoke.

The evening consists of a few rooftop beers-- carefully hidden from Raj2's Muslim parents-- and a drive out to a nondescript place on the highway. There we eat astonishingly good veg food and chat in the warm darkness with curious truckers who haul piles of carpets and loads of goats north to the Punjab. Raj2, after a few beers, gets philosophical. His Brit girlfriend watches as he expounds [best Indian accents again]:

"Sex isn't a desire, it's a NEED."

"All you need is love, my man"

"I am Indian. And so not living only to work like you bardhesis."

As we head back into town, Mike smiles. "See you at ten. Wear your worst clothes and bring some beer." My WORST clothes? Uh-oh.

At ten o'clock, Mike and Raj2 pick me up on Mike's bike. As we buzz through the traffic-emptry streets, we see crowds of people covered in purple red blue yellow what have you. Most are yelling and singing. There is an accident in the middle of the M.I. Road traffic circle, where two drunken, paint-covered men are trying to kill each other with rocks and pieces of wood whiel their destroyed cars smoulder.

In Raj2's courtyard, it is a scene from Party Dante. Sixty or seventy people are covered, head to toe, in dye, and are spraying beer at each other and moshing to pounding Hindi rap. People are rolling around on the floor-- covered in purple dye-- and as we walk in there is a chorus of Hindi and a mass of hands shoves beer, whiskey, Indian "spirits" and smoking charas at us. Everybody is hugging everybody else and screaming "Happy Holi! or "holi acha he!"

In an hour, I'm no longer seeing straight. There is a Columbian hippie swingingg from an iron chain in the ceiling. Raj2 is all over his Brit lady. One substance or another appears in my hands. One of Raj2's friends is quite the ladyboy, jumping on any available guy and trying to nuzzle their necks. I smack him away and he falls into the vast pool of dye, laughing. People rip each other's shirts off. A small, grinning boy has wads of stained money shoved at him, disappears, and returns with beer and liquor. Mosat amazingly, the three bardhesi girls are not being groped by any of the wasted Indian guys.

At about noon I stumble out into the street and find the accident. Mike and I move the screaming guy and his scooter, and Mike fumbles with his mobile. Bad day to crash and burn. We stagger to the beer store, load up, and head back into Raj2's vortex.

At some point in the afternoon, I am covered, head to toe, in purple green and yellow dye and having problems standing. I catch a cycle rickshaw home but I'm too hyper to sit, so I jump into the driver's seat and drive the wasted, laughing Indian back to my hotel, where he refuses the twenty rupees I offer him. You know the world is in a properly insane place when a foreigner can't pay an Indian.

Inside the Neverclean, the staff is drinking, and tourists and Indians alike sit on the lawn, smoking and chilling. I stumble into my room, where the spinning intensifies, and begin a trip into memory lane...highschool...projectile vomiting...

Moral of the story, if you need one:

a) drinking is bad; never ever do it. Also always do your work, never have sex (exzcept to produce babies when you are married), never argue with anybody, and abey all laws always.

b) if you want to swim, jump in the river, as a few people have said.

Travelling is what happens while you are making other plans

2005-03-27T13:40:00.000+05:30

Bored? Come to India! Never a dull moment.

Jaipur, Katichandra Palace Hotel, 6 days ago, 6:30 a.m.
Today, my goal is to walk across town, and see the City Palace and the old Mughal Observatory.
Wake up, shower, meditate.

7:35 a.m. Lobby.
A man carrying a shotgun approaches me.
"How much could you get for this in your country?"
The gun is a double-barrel that looks about 90 years old. I guess at $200.
"You want to buy this?" he asks me. "Twenty thousand ruppes. I give you two hundred shells."
I briefly contemplate how little hassle I would experience in the markets if I were to carry a gun around, and then say "nahim, shukria".

8:30 As I'm finishing breakfast, an Indian guy approaches me and wants to chat. After the usual pleasantries, I tell him I'm not interested in neither rickshaw rides, jewellery, carpets, silk, drugs or a guide. He smiles and says this:
"Many Indian peoiple bad. Stealing, lying. Me, no. I make puppets."
"Puppets?"
His name is Narender, and he is a Kathputli (folk marionette) performer. We go to his house. It's a 10' x 10' shack with a dirt floor in an alley. Inside sits Narender's late-20s brother, Bangali, who is putting the finishing touches on a female marioette. We have chai and talk about music. Kathputli is folk puppet theatre-- one or two people move the puppets, another plays tabla, and a third sings and plays harmonium. Old, old school narrative stuff. These guys have been at it for many generations.

"You went France?" asks Bangali.
"No."
"Italy?"
"Sorry, no."
"Tu hablas espaniol?"
"Err...si. Y tu?"
"Si, pues. Fui el anio pasado." say Bangali.

With this, Narender takes out his photo album. It is full of pictures of him and Bangali and their puppets in various parts of the world. There are newspaper articles about them, doing performances and giving workshops.
"Can you read this?" says Bangali about a newer-looking article clipped from a Spanish paper.
"It's Sp--" I start, and then I realise, the guy can't read. We talk more. When English doesnt work, they switch to other languages. I lose count after five.
"I South Africa tomorrow" says Narender.
These guys are illiterate, they live in a 100 square foot shack, they don't have a last name (Bangali's passport signature is his thumbprint), yet they speak six languages and have travelled the world.

10:30 a.m. Walking through Tripoli Bazaar, I strike up a conversation with Vijay, who is carrying an armload of fancy camera gear. He invites me over to his house. We have tea, and I meet his brother, an artist who makes miniatures. Half of these are impeccably drawn scenes from Hindu myth. The other half are full-on explicit penis-in-pussy porn.
"Love pictures," says Vijay, then he starts in with crticket talk.

12:40 p.m. I eat the hottest lunch I have ever had. A small Hell develops in my stomach and on my tongue. Deep fried chilies need beer to take the edge off the capsicum, but it's a little early.

12:50 I take a hit of Ventolin-- the air is BAD in Jaipur-- and an Indian guy approaches me.
"You have asthma?"
"Yeah."
"You can fix, no drug. I have too, but now no."
Arjoo motions me over to his motorcycle.
"I bring you to Ajay."

If you want to swim, you gotta jump in the river...

We pull up at a gem store."Oh, MAN," I tell Arjoo, "I am NOT buying jewels."
"No," he says, "Ajay only his parents here. He not work gems."
"Is this some kind of scam?"
Arjoo looks at me. "If you closed, nothing happen. Yes India bad people but very small. You must open."
"..."
"Not for buying. Ajay work not for money."

So Ajay Sindhi is an "energy healer." He reads chakras and perscribes cures of meditation, yoga, and sometimes the wearing of stones. I am skeptical, to say the least. After an hour, I am ushered in to see a small Indian man. He motions me to sit, looks at me, and says the following, in perfect English.

"You are a Scorpio. Early November. You have a minor injury in your right knee, and some kind of lung problem. You also have latent arthritis in both hands, which comes from physical activity. You mother was born on either the 18th or the 20th of January and your father shortly before that. You have experienced significant work stress during the last six and a half years. You had a wife or a girlfriend who was very mean and selfish. You have difficulty meditating but it has its benefits. You need to also be careful with your lower back and right ankle, especially when you are coming down from high places."

I try to form words.

"Come back in three days. I will tell you more. Now, I must go and teach my meditation class."

Outside, I blink stupidly at the sun. Arjoo grabs my arm.
"You are OK?"
"Uh...um..."
"Ok, now, we make party."

5:30 We get back on Arjoo's bike and head downtown.

6:30 After dinner, we end up at his friend Raj's place, a camera and photo store in Tripoli Bazaar. People show up. Mike looks like a Latino gangster with long hair. Baba looks like a smaller, shorter-haired version of Mike. Raj is six feet two-- the tallest Indian I've met-- and soon charas, beer and nasta are making the rounds. Then comes music, and finally-- gasp-- some Hindi porn on their computer. The porn is a scream. It's a game show. White girls, dhesi boys, and two wheels. You spin the wheel, which tells you your sex partner and sex act. It is the least erotic thing I have ever seen. Everyboy ignores it. I wonder why they play porn. IS this part of Indian young man life? To impress me?

Raj talks about his Punjabi girlfriend. She is rich, beautiful, over-ripe at the age of 36, and daily increasing her marriage offers to him."She'll buy me a house, a car, give me money, all this shit," he says.
"So what's stopping you?"
"Ahh, you know, so many girls..."

This prompts the rest of them to pull out their wallets and show off various bardhesi "girlfriends." I pull my woman's pic up on my digital. The bardhesi chicks seem to be about 35, overweight, kinda frumpy. My woman is the hottest, hands down.

Suddenly the room expodes into movement. The charas gets pushed into an empty. Beers get hidden, and one guy yanks the plug on the computer. Teh fan is turned on, and the music off. In walks and older Indian man and his wife. It is 11:30 p.m., the perfect time for getting your passport pic. The man glares at us whiel hsi wife sweeps by and into the photo studio. We freeze while Raj takes the pics, and collectively exhale when they leave.

"Big cop," says Raj, firing up the charas.

10:30 Later three of us get on Mike's bike and go to find a kathputli performance. As we blast through the dark, swerving around cows, garbage and pedestrians, Mike spots a small girl of about five. He pulls over. After a long talk, he pulls her onto the gas tank. The uhh four of us cruise around the streets, with Mike smoking and amazingly not burning the girl, and occasionally asking her questions. We pull up at an umarked house, the girl goes inside, and the mother nods at us from the doorway.

"Do you know her?" I ask.
"No. She was looking lost," says Mike.

11:50 We end up at the Mandawa, where Narender is doing his kathputli show. The music is enchanting, the puppeteering simple but skilled, and the singing wonderful. Afterward, I head back to my hotel.

I wonder what else could possibly happen to me today.

As I walk through the lobby, an old man approaches me.

"Do you believe in God?" he asks.
[This is actually a fairly typical Indian conversation opener]
"..."
"I was a Hindu. A good Hindu. A good person--"
I notice he is wearing a Livestrong bracelet.
"-- but my wife got cancer. They cured her."
"..."
"And one year later we were having dinner. And my wife said `I feel bad.' And she lay down. And she died."
"..."
"What kind of God do that?"

All I can do is hope I can sleep.

Next-- Holi Festival. And you thought Canadian teenagers knew how to party...

a bunch of random crap

2005-03-20T12:58:00.000+05:30

-- I sit down at the back of a small dhosa and order a veg plate. After I get the obligatory stare from every single person in the room, my thali arrives. The food tastes good. A local guy comes over with his plate, sits down beside me, and takes his cock out form under his lunghi, and starts stroking it. The food stops tasting good. The owner comes over, screams at Penis Man. Penis Man moves back to his table. The owner then picks him up by the collar, screams some more, and throws him into the street. The food tastes better.

-- at the Parragon in Kolkata, there is a crew of Koreans and Israelis who never leave the hotel. They sit in the courtyard, order momos and dal, and smoke endless chillums. There is one guy who I think was born with a chair attached to his ass. I see him at 10 pm when I retire to meditate, and I see him at 6 a.m. when i get up.

-- the chillum. This is a wooden tube about 10 inches long. You stuff hash and tobacco into it, and on top of that, you pack a tamping stone. Then you wrap a wet rag around the end you draw on. I am told that its wood (for Earth), stone, air and fire (the four medieval elements but not water). This is some kind of hippie shit. Nice and healthy. As nearly as i can tell, smoking chillums raises your awareness of...the hotel you are staying in, and the concrete around where you sit.

-- Hippie diets. Everybody has their theory. Take a pinch of ayurvedic diet theory, mix with a bit of "I love animals," add a superficial critique of capitalism (and some half-baked Buddhism), and VOILA, you have a diet-- veggies, pot, hash, sugar, caffeine, no exercise, little protein, an irregular sleep schedule. Very healthy.

-- I went to the Ba Bha Bhavan (spelling may be wrong), one of Mother Theresa's orphanages. There were a hundred kids there. Some of them have no limbs. Some have no brains. One is thirty-six years old. Her spine is bent literally in half. She drools. Her name means "beautiful" in Bengali. She has no language, but cried for weeks when another child died. She is three feet tall.

-- On the train, I meet a friendly Bengali (with the world's hottest wife) who now lives in the U.S. He runs a gas station in Atlanta.
"You know who I have problems with?" he asks me.
"Who?"
"Motherfucking niggers. Sons of bitches steal everything they get their hands on. Get their welfare cheques and buy beer. Beat their children. Stupid people."
"..."
"We should send them back to Africa."
"..."
"Motherfuckers want to send ME back to Bangladesh."
"What about Latino people?"
"Those people, they OK. They know how to work."
"Aren't Muslims supposed to be charitable to the poor?"
"Not for dumb niggers. They don't work. Allah, he's not stupid. You don't work, no money for you. That's like, you buy a gun, you shoot yourself in the head. Now I help you?"

-- Girls. I have one question. Can German girls ever be sexy? They are beautiful, smart, well-dressed, educated, kind, etc, but I cannot imagine a German girl being sexy. They probably do calculus in their minds while they kiss. There's the old line about a Spanish King, who said this-- "I speak French to my coutiers, Italian to my mistress, Spanish to the people, and German to my horse."

-- Girls (2) Spanish and Italian girls LOVE to flirt. And they (along with the Israeli women) don't complain about Indian men. English, anglo-Canadian and American girls, however, don't flirt, and can't stand the Indian men. COINCIDENCE?

-- Cricket. Now you want to talk about a simple game with complicated nuances. Right now is the India-Pakistan test. This is a five-DAY match playing in Kolkata, and in the minds of every Indian I've met in the last five days. Some of these guys are better known than Kobe Bryant, etc-- after all there are 1.4 billion Indians and Pakistanis, and only about .4 billion Yanks and Canucks. One guy-- Sauraj-- is apparently (according to my teenaged Indian girl informants, who are legion) the hottest man on the planet.

-- STREET PECKING ORDER. Bottom, pedestrian. Get out of the way, my man. I WILL run you or your foot over. Next-- cycle rickshaw and biycle. Above them, auto (motor) rickshaw. Next up: car. Above that, busses and trucks. Above them? The cow. Can go anywhere at any speed at any time it likes. And on top? The Alpha of the Road? The one who dominates?

Women on scooters. They don't turn their heads when they ride and they part traffic like Moses the Sea.

-- Jazzy B. New video out. This guy is like, Punjabi MC Hammer or something. His crew looks like if the Matrix had been filmed in Amritsar, and the baddies came from a Rajhastani puppet theatre. Oh yeah, this is the SHIT!

10 things I love about India

2005-03-16T17:28:00.000+05:30

1) Indian women. "Sari" means "use your imagination" in all local languages.

2) You don't buy a tool to do things here; you employ somebody.

3) Everything gets recycled.

4) You can do anything (except kiss or have sex) anywhere or anytime you want. This also applies to cows.

5) Indian people aren't too cool to hide their curiosity about things.

6) Indian people can, or will try, to sell, or build for you, anything. And if this is not possible, they know somebody who is an expert in that particualr thing.

7) Old technology: Enfields, 303s, Ambassadors, disposable clay chai cups, rickshaws, washing boards.

8) Mass near-vegetarianism.

9) Irony has not yet infected India (as nearly as I can tell).

10) Rickshaw drivers who compensate for insane behaviours with stops at the appropriate Gods' altars. There's a scientific term for this-- it's called "risk homeostasis"

11) Self-organising traffic.

Buddhist boot camp

2005-03-15T21:31:00.000+05:30

Enlightenment is work.

You don't just have a Durden-style car crash and "let go," or smoke a joint and stare at a flower, or have a cup of tea and ponder the Universe. Hell no. You sit on your ass, you focus your mind on your breathing, and you do nothing.

This is harder than it sounds. As a friend of mine once said, "the brain is not your friend." Don't just do something: sit there!

Initiation: there are twelve men and ten women doing the Vipassana. One guy is an I.T. man; another is a perfume maker. These speak Hinglish, or Benglish with each other. Many speak no Enlgish and I no Bengali. Four are Buddhist monks, with shaven heads and massively loud orange robes. We are kept separate from the women. We take a vow to do "shila" (morality) for the ten days of our retreat-- no sex, stealing, lying, cheating, consumption of intoxicants, or eating of meat. This is the foundation of Buddhist practice. Oh, yeah...and no communication of any kind. No email, MSN, books, talking, music, writing, or even glances at others. When you walk, you shuffle, staring down. The mattress is thin, the air dripping hot, and yet I fall asleep in seconds.

Day One. 4:30 a.m. OK. Breathe. No, do not think about the lovely young lady in the women's part of the hall, or listen to any of the 3000 MP3s stored in my head, or wonder what my woman is wearing right now (it could be that amazing pink mini she has, the one that makes her legs look...er HEMM), or if I will get a ticket for the 11:50 to Jaipur. Not thinking is harder than you think.

Day Two. Breakfast. Idli (rice cakes), tea, bananas, tamarind sauce. You notice little things, like sandals. Everybody except me has flip-flops, which is a good idea, since you have to take your sandals off like 30 times a day. Everybody's are grey, except the Buddhist monks' which are blue. Nice contrast with their orange robes. After breakfast we go to our residence and sleep till 7 a.m. meditation. Perfume Guy is quite perfumey today-- he farts about every 90 seconds and finally prompts IT Guy and I to go outside.

I realise that I am still taking drugs, so I kick antidepressants, tea, and sleeping pills. The night is a bt rough, but other than that, things are fine.

Day Three. My ass. Today I would like to discuss my ass. My ass is basically WAY too skinny to sit 10 hours a day without moving. You aren't supposed to move, as this improves concentration. You are also suposed to train yourself to detach yourelf from conscious physical pain, as this will enable the unconscious mind to detach itself from "sankharas" (cravings and versions). I cave, and ask the teacher for a chair. He manages not to laugh at me. This improves condtions for my ass. For the first time in my life, I wish I were fat. Big booty wins the day here.

Day Four. Teacher Discourse. Every evening, after 9.5 hours of meditating, we shuffle into the office and watch a one-hour DVD of S.N. Goenka, the modern populariser of Vipassana, talking about the day's experiences. He anticipates every reaction we have to the course. And reassures us that, yes, long is the road and hard that leads out of Hell, but that we can do it. I am struck at how easy it is to meditate after being told by him that, yes, I can do it. The man is a great speaker-- quite funny.

My ass is STILL sore.

I figure one thing out. Since all my clothes are filthy from train travel and trekking, I rummage around in my pack, and pull out my lunghi. It's a wrap-around Indian skirt for men, and it's perfect for meditation. Yes, it's worn with underwear. You are now laughing.

Day Five. Today, my mental wandering changed. All thoughts of sex vanished. I managed to sit one hour without moving a muscle. We have started Vipassana proper-- focus on physical sensations in the body. No mantras, no chanting, o thinking, no images, nothing-- just focus on the body. Sweat drips from us. The fans are used only during breaks. We need to feel ALL sensations. Intense vibrations shake me during my first full-on hour of focus. It is heavy E.M.D.R., it is hypnotherapy, it is a spiritual meatgrinder. I emerge, shaking, into birdsong and the hot breath of Kolkata spring.

Day Six. Today is hell. My legs are killing me. IT Guy is stealing constant glances my way. He is lonely or freaked out and clearly wants to talk. But we have vows. I cannot concentrate at ALL. My ass is killing me. I get angry, upset, confused, sad. I should bail. This is bullshit. Dumb. I can't even focus on BREATHING-- how am I ever gonna feel the whole-body vibrations and get into the moment?

Day Seven. Wow. So *this* is what happens. You start by focussing on a small area. Like, your forehead. You note whatever sensation you feel there-- breeze, hot, cold, sweat, whatever. The you move on to your ears, scalp, etc, and, piece by piece, you survey your body. After a while, my eyes-closed proprioceptors shut down, and I feel like I am floating. Then I feel a wird kind of body stone, where my entire skin tingles weirdly, and my hands feel transparent, for lack of a better word. Today, non-focus changes again. All thoughts about people which were critical disappear. I even manage to not get angry (in my head) with my ex! Those who know about the Widow Black will appreciate the significance of this.

This evening, I see one of the Indian guys heading outside after lights out. He comes back smelling of smoke. At evening meditation, Perfume Guy falls asleep, snores while, and then falls over with a thud onto the floor.
Day Eight. I've been doing my laundry during breaks for the last five days. I now have clothes other than my lunghi and my "I'M A MANGO" tanktop. I come out of morning sitting and suddenly I can feel every nerve in my body. not painful, not pleasant, just *there*.

The Indian girl who sits 3 people over from me is STILL smokin' hot even in her dull sari.

Day Nine: Oh my dear God, please can I have another ass to put on top of this one. Today is intense and quiet.

Day Ten: Talk. Today is decompression day. We take about half an hour to get into talk, and then I realise the truth of something that Goenka said. We havn't been allowed to talk because as soon as we start comparing experiences about the process, we stop experiencing the process. IT Guy had a hell of a time, and couldn't focus; Perfume Guy won't shut up about how much like Osho meditation this is, and the English-speaking women are ecstatic. None of ther experiences mirrors mine. I'm glad I had things on my own. It was MY experience, started and felt only by me.

Day Eleven: We catch a rickshaw and treain back downtown. I get offered sex, hash, cabs, pot, pills, clothes and redemption (from a Christian Indian) in the three blocks between Chowringhee and the hotel. It's hot. I'm tired. I check into Korea, oops, I mean, the Parragon, and start freaking out. Israelis, Italians and some Yank chicks smoke charas in the courtyard. Someboy just bought what you can tell by the arhythmic thumping is their first-ever tabla set. It is the contrast between my deep inner silence and the busy yabber of the world that works on me. And then the training kicks in, and I'm just there, observing, watching it all go by, detached.

(I only lose it once that evening, when I go to call my woman, and the phone guy fondles my arm and I pull away a little too sharply. A few of these Indian guys havn't yet figured out that Western male tourists don't enjoy handholding or arm caresses). But hey, whatever, it's alright.

Time to sit. Savatu bada mangalam!

What? You're still reading this? Here, have a look at what people who don't like Vipassana have to say!

one MORE thing I hate about India

2005-03-15T14:27:00.000+05:30

"Coffee."

10 things I hate about India

2005-03-15T10:55:00.000+05:30

1) Cups, full of boiling tea, which have no handles.

2) Indian men's morning routines. Instead of taking a nice relaxing dump, in private and with the newspaper, they hork and spit, and hork and spit, AND HORK AND SPIT! Oh, and apparently the women do the same. MMM.

3) The smell of diesel with breakfast.

4) Indian people and public space-- you can put, or do, anything you want, anywhere you want. This includes (but is not limited to) selling vegetables in the middle of a freeway, shaving (yes, shAving) somebody in the gutter, and driving your rickshaw into a crowd on the sidewalk in order to buy that 3 rupee bag of peanuts you've been drooling about all day.

4) Leaving a nice clean restaurant after a lovely meal, and seeing a boy washing dishes in the gutter, and then he carries those dishes back into the place where you just ate...

5) Being dumb enough to get a room with shared bathroom, AND failing to buy toilet paper, and THEN getting the shits.

6) Cops with really really big sticks-- we are talking like 6 foot long sticks-- who parade around blowing whistles at traffic and bashing rickshaw drivers.

7) Public urinals that have never, ever, in hundreds of years, been cleaned. I'm serious.

8) Paying 8 cents for something that's really worth 7 cents. GODDAMNIT I hate that. Trashes my self esteem.

9) The sight of hippie in the morning. Makes me reach for my whip.

10) "You my special friend! Very special friend price."

buddhism for total beginners

2005-03-13T22:06:00.000+05:30

OK, folks. Since I have just finished a Vipassana meditation course, I am going to be referring to Buddhism a whole lot. So here's the scoop on Buddhism! Should be fairly easy to read, although a bit long. I'm gonna keep it simple for you younger readers but I'm not leaving any ideas out. Cos all y'all's real s-m-r-t, right, even if you don't have vocabulary of Sidhhovian proportions (sorry, Nuvjit, had to get that one in there).

Siddhartha Gautama was born twenty-five centuries ago in northern India, and was a contemporary of Socrates. He was a prince, and lived an early life full of education and full access to various pleasures (wine, women, sport, etc). Unfulfilled, he left his home and wandered the earth as a "sadhu" (holy man), denying himself food and shelter in an attempt to purge himself of impurities. However, the traditional proto-Hindu practices of purification, self-denial, etc, did not work for him. One day he sat down and, determined to really get to the bottom fo things, sat under a tree for three days. And then reached enlightenement, at which point he was given the name "buddha," which in Pali means "the enlightened one." Note that the Buddha was GIVEN this name by others!

Buddha's insight was quite simple, and he summed it up in what is called the Four Noble Truths:

(a) life inevitably involves some suffering

(b) suffering is caused by craving for and/or aversion to (disgust with) things, sensations or ideas

(c) there is a way out of suffering-- to end craving and aversion

(d) the way out is what is called the Eight-Fold Path

The Eight-Fold Path involves three practices-- avoid evil, do good, and purify the mind. Buddhism is NOT a religion (it has no gods) and the Buddha is regarded as a teacher rather than a God or prophet figure. Indeed, he is reputed to have said "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." (i.e. "if you meet somebody who claims to know everything, you must reject this person"-- you must do your own work to achieve enlightenment). You can be Buddhist and also be a believer in other religions (although the uneducated will deny this).

Buddha's great insight involved taking Hindu ideas a step further. At the core of his teaching is the Hindu idea of "impermanence." Everything that is, arises and passes, be it life, human-made ojects, consciousness, whatever. The human mind, however, is built to crave certain things (food, sex, sweet tastes, love, etc) and experience aversion to (disgust with) others, such as scary animals, unpleasant people, danger, filth, etc.

Craving and aversion have their uses in purely simple evolutionary terms. For example, if it wasn't genetically instinctive to run in fear from a lion, the organism carrying this "no fear" gene would be quickly wiped out. Similarly, an organism that naturally craves food will eat when it gets food, and so will survive.

Now, here is the problem. While craving and aversion may have their uses, according to the Buddha they take over the mind and become habit patterns which then control us. When our minds are dominated by cravings and disgust (even, and often especially, unconsciously), we do not see reality as it truly is. We remain attached to fantasies, sensations, desires, disgusts, etc, and ignore the transience of reality, its ever-changing nature. This means we become "out of tune," so to speak, with reality, and this causes us to suffer.

A practical example to illustrate this. Westerners are fed a steady diet of media images of young and beautiful people. Internalising these images, many of us pursue them. And so fifty year old women get breast implants, men take testosterone, and people of all ages obsess about their weight. The Buddha would say that our aversion to change and aging causes us to cling to the illusion that youth can be prolonged, which puts us profoundly out of tune with our bodies and our world. We suffer by wasting time and energy on the pursuit of illusions, ignoring more important things. If you have seen the movie American Beauty, you will see a perfect example of how the pursuit of illusion is destructive.

Buddhism holds that reality is impermanent, always changing, an insight which coincides nicely with modern physics. Subatomic physics sees the Universe as composed of energy which takes different forms, and sees solid matter as a kind of illusion that works on a particular (human) scale of perception. Buddhism, btw, is totally compatible with modern science.

The foundation for Buddhist practice is "shila" (morality-- doing good, and avoiding evil), along with "samadhi" (awareness of self-- you develop this by breathing, and focussing on breath). Once you have these two, you start vipassana.

The Buddha's insight-- according to the Theravada (Hinayana) tradition, of which Vipassana meditation is a prime practical example-- was that YOU HAVE TO EXPERIENCE REALITY DIRECTLY AT A SUBTLE, NON-MENTAL LEVEL TO "GET INTO THE MOMENT" AND SEE REALITY FOR WHAT IT REALLY IS. This is what vipassana meditation does. You close your eyes, sit, and focus on breath, and then bodily sensations. You don't visualise anything, you don't "listen" to anything, you just sit and observe your inner personal sensory reality. Sensations as simple as breath in the nose, or sweat on your back, or wind in your hair, need to be experienced directly. You STOP THINKING and START OBSERVING PURE SENSATION.

According to Vipassana tradition, this experience of direct reality allows the body to stop creating "sankharas" (negative behaviour patterns). The aim is to just "observe" a sensation. If your legs hurt during meditation, feel the pain, but don't respond to the pain by moving your legs. Accept it. If you itch while meditating, observe the itch. Watch it arise, and pass.
The idea here is to train the mind to observe, and not react to, things it "sees." According to the Buddha, training the mind to behave this way (during meditation) allows you to do achieve two things outside of meditation--

(a) it should allow you to "observe" feelings rather than instinctively reacting to them. For example, you get insulted. Instead of flying off the handle and cussing back, you observe your anger and accept it, meanwhile not freaking out. You accept the feelings, but do not let them rule you. It's called "philosophical detachment." You are in the moment but not prisoner of your behaviour patterns. You act rather than reacting.

(b) it should allow you to see yourself and reality more clearly. Since you are observing and accepting yourself at a purely physical level, you learn to really know yourself. This allows you to see personal patterns, interaction patterns, etc, more clearly. And this self-knowledge, combined with philosophical detachment, allows you to deal with the world in a balanced and positive way.

OK. This writing is long and it is late and everybody is tired. Go home, look at porn, fire up MSN, go to bed, whatever, or DO YOUR HOMEWORK! You can look at the link to the Vipassana society, or google buddhism and see it in its various forms. Later, more on my experiences.

Bhavatu saba mangalam!

apologies

2005-03-02T10:29:00.001+05:30

OK. I have to say sorry.

First of all, there is nothing wrong with hippies in general. I wish to apologise to all hippies for having-- in any real or potential way-- desired or advocated their harvest and consumption. SAVE THE HIPPIES.

Second, Israelis. I want to tell everybody that Israelis-- even when they invade another country, illegally occupy it for nearly 40 years in defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions, murder its inhabitants, and then whine to the international community that the occupied people's resistance is "terrorism"-- and even when groups of Israeli hippies set up a hookah and do bong hits despite local shopkeepers' pleas to not do so, due to cop-hassles-- even despite all this, Israelis are fine.

Third, Spanish hippies. What can I say. Sorry. You breeng your weeemen, eet eees gooood you breeng weeemen. SALVEN LOS HIPPIES ESPANIOLES!

Actually, screw that. Kill the hippies. I know I'm generalising. As a matter of fact, I prefer it.

go up, go way, WAY up

2005-03-02T10:29:00.000+05:30

OK. Today's topic is trekking. I met up with folks I'd met in Varanassi-- a couple of Germans-- and two Brits who sociable Yours Truly met in the cafe at the Hotel Long Island.

Day 1: Maneybachang-Garibans 21 km, climb appr 1100m (3500 feet)

We catch an ancient Land Rover (aluminum body, "spare tyre on bonnet", etc) to Maneybachang. There are times when I look out the side window and am seeing straight down about 1500 feet. We are so close to the edge that I can't even see the road.

The road to Garibans might take a jeep, and climbs into the clouds. Beside us are lastyear's cornstalks with this year's peas starting their own climb, and clusters of cardamom plants. We stop for tea at a farmhouse whose interior is beautifully done in dark wood, mixed weirdly with a brilliant orange table, skylit, and odd blue plastic panelling. The Nepalese enjoy beauty-- all of the houses we see, even those of the very poor, have plastic-bag flower pots.

Jane coughs mightily, and it is after tea that I notice Maddy wearing sandals. We are off to 12,000 feet and I wonder how her feet are going to enjoy gravel and mud. maddy also hasn't a pack, but rather a duffel, which she tump-lines on her head, giving her the appearance-- with wrapped Nepalese shawl-- of a kind of hippie Nepalese porter with shockingly blue eyes.

We stay at Garibans, aka Home of Nepalese Hottie. The cook, all 4' 7" of her, is a sight for sore eyes in her tight pants, and with a magnificent smile. She beams at our arrival, then frowns, and finally heads up the hill to find another chicken for the pot. An older Brit couple arrives, staggering. They complain about the filth, the walk, their legs, the food. Funny how one person's complaint is the thing that I'm all psyched about. Dinner is the usual mass of Indian food, along with my first meat dish in a month-- fragments of chicken which are mostly bone. The 18 year old porter for the creaking British couple and I try not to stare. The problem is, the cook is hot, single (!) and sociable. Nepalese women have taken to wearing tight jeans (combined with saris shawls and other more traditional clothes), which fashion development is welcome. I wonder if she would consent to being my cooking and sex slave. She would fit into my pack. Oh, and did I mention she plays a mean hand of gin-rummy?

Day 2: Garibans-Sanakhpu 12 km, climb 1000m (3200 feet)

We leave the hottie to her fire and begin the, uhh, sustained uphill walk. Marian and Barry, the older Brit couple, have a strategy-- the walk 100 meters, then collapse for five minutes. Julia and I leave the Brits behind and wander up into the clouds. Below us are walls of mist, fragments of sun, and occasional views of Kachenjunga to the north. We hear the tink of cowbells and wood choppin in the mist. Every 5 km or so, we see the Indian Army at their border posts. We fill out the forms, smile, and hope they havn't been drinking (too much).
Garibans (4000m or so) has yet more hot Nepali women. It is a cluster of shacks shrouded in cloud.

Dinner with the older Brits is entertaining, in the way that watching somebody experience Chinese water torture is entertaining. They have been married for 35 years. This is what the religious right wants to preserve gay people from:

Me: "Amazing they can drive a Jeep up that road."
Barry: "Yeh. I saw quite a lot of car parts on the road."
Marian: "There 'e is. A'ways lookin' down while it's me what's lookin' at the scenery an' all."

(a cow farts outside)
Me: "Lovely. Too bad they can't burn that for heat."
Barry: "Right-- we'd need a science of flatulence. And professors to teach it."
Marian: "And you'd 'ave THAT job, you would."

(one of the Brit girls' batteries doesn't work)
Barry: "Let me 'ave a look then."
Marian "Always fiddlin', 'e is, never still."
Me (exasperated): "And a lucky woman you are for it!"
Barry beams at me.

We eat noodles, treat ourselves to charas, and pass out, exhausted, at 8 p.m.

Day 3: Sandakhpu to Molley and then Rimbik 42 km climb appr 500m and descend 2000 m (~6500 feet)

Sunrise is astonishing. Garibans is an island of rock in a sea of cloud that stretches to all horizons. Red and orange bands of fire in the southeast bounce fierce light off the Kachenjunga massif in the north. At 12000 feet we are still less than 1/2 the height of the big K (the world's 3rd highest). All is still. It is so cold I can blow smoke rings without having a cigarette.

The Brits bail. A Jeep slogs up the road to haul their lazy asses down the mountain, along with Steffi, who's insomniac and so somewhat low on energy. I can't imagine retreating with a Jeep-- that would be like pulling on gear on a freeclimb. Awful. We traipse through what the moon would be like if it had clouds and grass. North, we see Everest and Nuptse, blinding in the light.

After the afternoon fog swallows us, we have lunch in Molley, an Army outpost and trekker's hut. The Molley soliders are playing shuffleboard. Empty bottles of whiskey roll on the floor. One soldier is babytalks Nepalese to a pair of puppies. The commander wears-- wait for it-- neon blue socks, orange flip-flops, Adidas track pants, a kurta, a toque, and over the toque a turban. He smiles at us and we communicate in broken Hindi. The tea has floaters.

After Molley, it is downhill, a meat-grinder of a descent that makes Slesse seem a cakewalk. Julia is nearly crying as we stagger the 2500 m down through fog. A Nepali woman and her nephews (each carrying a kid ont heir back) waltzes past us. After informing us that we are lost, she pulls the Mom card and directs us. We collapse ar Sari Khola for tea, and are hugely relieved to face an UPHILL walk to Rimbick, the trek's end, so sore are our muscles.

In Rimbik, we speak with an Indian man who gets angry with me when I ask questions about politics and corruption.

"Canadians, Americans, same difference. Foreigners and you are all judgmental."

"Yeah," I say, "but I'm judgmental about me and my own culture too."

This isn't good enough for him so the room becomes silent. Whatever. With some people, you can't win.

The next day we have another slow and terrifying Jeep back to Darjeeling. My legs are nearly immobile with stiffness. Darjeeling-- still, smoky, cool-- floats in the clouds.

That afternoon, we go to the zoo/Himalayan Moutnaineering Institute. The zoo has all kinds of cats. Amazing how much noise a leopard can make. The wolf pen, though massive, is denuded and stinks of piss. The zoo is doing a great job, though-- msot of the enclosures anre natural, and huge, and the Very Nice Big Kitties have lots to play with. Like I said, I think they must feed them hippies.

The H.M.I. is fascinating, too-- they have old school tools, expedition photos, mementos etc. SOme of the standouts include Tenzing Norgay's gear (including fur climbing boots), a pair of toeless boots-- straight out of Dali-- made for a Swiss mountaineer who lost his to frostbite, and some hilarious photos of various Brit officers on mountaineering expeditions, wearing their Bermuda shorts and Hitler moustaches whilst having tea in blizzards, at tables and on folding chairs, on glaciers. This is what I hear:

"Right then, Roger, shall we have a go at the peak?"

"I'm afraid we're fresh out of kippers, sir."

"Bloody 'ell, man, wot 'ave we got?"

"Bangers and mash, sir, and whiskey."

"Lovely! Three portions of food and ten of whiskey for each man and off we go."

(etc)

The thing about Darjeeling is, the people. The Nepalese are quiet, constantly laughing, laid-back, they don't bargain, their food is clean and tasty, and the women are both beautiful AND approachable, unlike their Hindu and Moslem sisters down on the plains, who seem to basically be objet's d'art or whatever. The men, who wear wool suits, rubber boots, and a variety of weird hats, are friendly and funny. With some regret, I say goodbye to my trekking partners and grab a Rover and train for Calcutta.

For the next ten days, I do mental houscleaning-- a Vipassana silent meditation retreat. Here's the rules. If I don't break down and run screaming from the temple in search of conversation, sex, wahtever, I'll be back around the 12th of March.

Peace be with all y'all!

negative gain

2005-02-28T18:32:00.000+05:30

Damn, life is good sometimes, especially when things don't happen. When I got to Darjeeling,
this is what failed to occur:

-- twenty touts did not mob me.

-- the hotel I wanted did not not exist.

-- nobody bullshitted me about prices.

-- I did not step into cowshit.

-- I saw no hippies. After seeing the very well-fed large cats at the local zoo, I understood. They feed the hippies to the cats. Hippies are cheaper than good cuts of meat or live game, and easier to catch. All you have to do is wave something colourful and woolen at them.

-- I did not need an immediate hit of Salbutamol to open up diesel-fume choked lungs.

-- I did not get my foot run over by a guy on a phone, driving a motor rickshaw, trying to do a 180 into ten "lanes" of oncoming traffic.

the road to Darjeeling

2005-02-24T12:37:00.001+05:30

I was recently accused of editorialising too much. So I will accomodate the good Bonita's suggestions and present-- with no changes whatsoever-- the signs on the road from New Jalpaigur to Darjeeling.

Life is precious; save it.

Don't gossip-- let him drive!

Hurry burry spoils the curry.

If you are marraid divorce speed.

Anytime is safety time.

Don't fly but ply.

Donate blood in the blood bank, not on this road.

Enjoy your ride not suicide.

Enjoy the beauty of hills at low speed.

Slow has got four letters and so has life. Speed has five letters and so has death.

the no-fun guy

2005-02-24T12:37:00.000+05:30

So, "when in Rome" and all, I'm readint Mohandas Ghandi's autobiography. This is the first part, written in 1927, after his South African and Indian reformist experiences, but before his Big Project.

This guy's entire life basically involved eliminating things.

He started by being born hardcore Hindu, so his religion had eliminated meat. Eat and cow and potentially chew on granny, is the deal.

Next up was dairy products and eggs.

The evening his father was dying, newly married Mohandas-- he hadn't yet been "afflicted" with the Mahatma {great soul} appelation-- was so in lust with his wife that he went off, woke her up, and had a go at her. During the five minutes or so this took, Dad kicked off. So young Mohandas got himself a third son, along with a whole lot of regrets, which led him to decide in 1906 eliminate sex. He doesn't explain what his wife thought of this but he is gracious enough to declare that "the Hindu wife is the very essence of grace, toleration, and patience."

He then decided to do without clothes other than the dhoti and kurda, and frequently went without shoes. He gave up pulses for awhile, sticking to only fruit and nuts, and then, for some weird reason, developed every nutrition-related malady you can imagine. Rickets, dysentery, exhaustion. You name it, Gandhi had it. He dealt with these by-- what else-- eliminating food altogether for long periods of time.

Later, he would try to reduce his use of tea and water-- he drank his own urine-- and he also dispensed with first and second class train travel (now *that* takes guts in India). All his life, he questioned whether his motives in satyagraha ("passive resistance for change"-- a word he coined, there not being such a one in Gujarati) were really pure, and he struggled to eliminate his sense of selfish involvment in the struggle.

Finally-- what the hell-- he decided to eliminate the British from India.

Nice work, Mahatma. But you have to wonder. Did he ever have any fun? Did he ever laugh? He was once taken to a whorehouse by a well-meaing ship's captain and stood there, horrified, while the woman in question showered him with abuse and then the contents of her chamberpot. Or was he a secret womaniser, drunk etc who wrote a hugely one-sided autobiography?

hippie for breakfast

2005-02-24T12:17:00.000+05:30

On my last day in Varanassi, the motel owner and I took common cause and went hippie hunting. The larder, after all, was bare.

We found some hippies on the banks of the Ganga, communing with something or other. Hippies are easy to harvest. Their women are easily scared off and the men "aren't into" violence and so are not difficult to collect. Once you have clubbed the hippie into unconsciousness, his dreadlocks or ponytails make an excellent handle, which you can use to hold the body while you carve off the relevant bits.

The only disadvantage to hippie is that hippies tend to run somewhat skinny, so one needs either quite a lot of them for a good dish, or one must combine them with, say, a nice tomato tofu soup.
;-)

Kill the hippies.

2005-02-20T15:57:00.000+05:30

I got it. I was all worried last post about oil, food, etc. But I have the answer--

There are two main kinds of hippies here (there was a Rainbow gathering last week-- the "progressives" get together, destroy tonnes of ozone by all flying here, and spend a week getting wrecked in a country that can't stand public use of alcohol or drugs, sexual displays, or nudity).

Spanish hippies are skinny. They have long hair, wear tank tops, are malnourished (silly "vegan" diets that include all of the things that no sensible vegan would touch, like hash and booze and sugar and lots of caffeine), drip necklaces and wear trendy rimless sunglasses. Their women are more of the same, but fewer in number.

Israeli hippies by contrast have all been three years in the Army, so they have a bit of meat on them. Some of them shave their heads. The rest look like Spanish hippies. I can't stand Israelis as a group. They are the new Germans-- obnoxious, arrogant and they come in packs-- and you don't dare argue politics with them. There is a kind of horrible historical fatalism to their conversation. Too bad Palestinians don't travel much. There would be some good debates.

We could eat the hippies. Roasted, baked, broiled, or chopped and stir fried, hippie would make a nourishing dish. Since many are skinny, they would probably work best as stew dishes. This apparently happens. The Rough Guide says that a couple of travellers per year disappear in Varanassi. Perhaps the local Hindus like the odd bit of meat every now and again...

Varanassi dreaming (2)

2005-02-20T15:01:00.000+05:30

Today's topic: energy.

Everybody in Varanassi is building. Growing. Out away from Gaudalia (the old city) this means new houses-- Western style where possible, with air conditioning, lots of appliances and a car-- and in old city this means opening more markets for export. You buy carpets from Kashmir, silk saris and cotton lungis from U.P. villagers, load them into trucks and then trains and ships and planes, and send them away.

And Varanassi is overrun with the thing that overruns the rest of the world-- the internal combustion engine. Only the old city is immune. Indians are opting more and more for cars, scooters, motorcycles and autorickshaws. As Varanassi goes-- and even more so-- goes the rest of the country, and the developing world. Not only urban life, but everythign else, depends more and more on fossil fuels. Farming is becomign more productive-- but only because of oil-based fertilizers that keep depleted soils producing. And growing mech farms need highways and trucks to move their goods. Exhausted marginal lands are abandoned, and people move to cities, where they live off the supluses created by the big farmers.

Tourism is down. Tsunmai, political problems in Nepal, and the crashing U.S. dollar-- along with Americans' belated realisation that a lot of people in the world hate them-- mean that there's fewer tourists. The crashing dollar means fewer exports, and less remittance money from home. Gas prices are up, and they ripple through the economy. A strong Euro helps, but the fragility of an economy reliant on fossil fuels is all too apparent.

Last year, China's energy demands grew by almost 15%. India's followed at around 10%. Energy prices rose by about 30% mostly as a result of this. At the same time, the five largest oil companies-- for the first time in history-- spent more on looking for oil and natural gas than they will be able to make by extracting and selling it. It is now cheaper to find oil by buying somebody else's reserves than to drill for your own. Last year was also the U.S. peak for natural gas production, on which more than 70% of all U.S. electricity production depends.

In short, the world is either in, or fast approaching, what is called "peak oil", which is the point
where-- no matter how much oil (and natural gas) is left-- the amount we can extract begins to drop (or rise more slowly than demand). The effect of this will (in the short term) include things like way more expensive gas, inflation and probably something like permanent recession, where an awful lot of people either don't have work, or have marginal work.

The question is, how will this affect us in day to day life?

In old Varanassi, people might be OK with a bit of slowdown. Many of them still walk and use cycle rickshaws, and they still have stone houses appropriate for the climate. Indian people also don't drive hundreds of kilometers for work, holidays, or family visits-- they live locally. The "charming" old city may ironically have a kind of future.

But out at the edges, which I visited yesterday near Sarnath, the story will likely be a whole lot uglier. Increased petrol prices will increase food prices. The very poor will suffer first, longest and hardest. They will starve. The wealthy-- in western-style gated communities-- now rely utterly on fossil fuels and agriculture to sustian themselves. Many of these communities are reached by driving through or over shantytowns. How will the newly hungry and unemployed poor react to the sight of Land Rovers with fat Indians (yes, fat-- upper class Indians ape their American counterparts) purring by? How will weathy Indian respond to gangs?

It occurred to me that the difference between India and North AMerican society in one sense simply has to to do with relative dergree of poverty-- the Western poor simply have more stuff than their Indian counterparts. But the Indians do live closer to the land, and neeed (and use) fewer resources, and don't need parkas in winter. When-- not if-- energy costs go up, there will certainly be long-term hell here, but nothing compared to the West. Why? Because all of that "stuff" that we in the West have really represents energy, cheap energy. And we use an awful lot more of it than Indians-- or Europeans-- do, per capita.

How will we in the West cope? What would your life be like if gas cost $3 a litre and there were no useful public transport cos you lived in the suburbs? What would you do if there were 35% unemployment? How will your ailing Grannie get to her twice weekly physio if government revenues-- and hence health care-- drop because the economy flatlines? What if you didn't buy oil stocks, and your job dies. What are you going to heat your massive (but slowly depreciating) house with-- your E.I.? What would you rather do-- a menial agricultural job, or start a gang and rob the rich? Are YOU ready to live in Varanassi, selling turnips, on $3 a day? Do you have a Varanassi to live in? If you had to build one, could you do it without cheap gas, oil, cement, asphalt, steel or electricity?

Once again I hope I'm just dreaming and that soon I will wake up to a much nicer reality. Everybody, tell me I'm wrong!

Hindi cinema (2)

2005-02-19T22:24:00.000+05:30

The rules of Hindi cinema:

a) no kissing on lips and no t'n'a

b) you can do anything (anything) you want except (a)

c) if you have a narrative problem, try one of the following

-- have the hero slap the heroine or villainess
-- start a dance number
-- introduce Matrix-style combat to save your hero.

From another point of view

2005-02-19T22:22:00.000+05:30

"Hi. I'm a 2000 lb bull and I'm just going to sit here in this road."

Hindi cinema (1)

2005-02-18T13:51:00.000+05:30

So we wanted to go to the movies. So, where are they? We get three sets of directions from live humans and one from the newspaper.

The cinema doorway has a thick cloth with "SPECIAL" hung across it. That's our first clue. Our second is that the cinema has only men in it, all of whom stare as three white women and I find seats. The third clue comes after a few minutes of Hindi style expository dialogue, which goes directly to the camera. The story-- about a girl named Bobby, who, very much against her wishes is being married off by her overbearing father to Ricky, a tall handsome wealthy man. Her real love, though, is Rocky, a streetwise romantic.

After the dfatherly lecture, Bobby heads outside, where she meets up with Rocky on hismotorcycle. They drive to a parkade, parkt he bike, and make out. Hindi music is blasting. They remove clothes but stop at underwear. No kissing. During the scene, Bobby's underwear changes colourfrom white to red and Rocky's motorcycle transforms from Honda into a Kawasaki.

When the scene ends, the usher comes aroudn the theatre with his flashlight. The scattered patrons are either asleep or masturbating, and he throws a few out.

Next scene, we see wedding preparations, and Bobby's flashbacks to "sex" on rooftops, in pools, and on cars. She is married. But there is a problem-- she does not love her husband.

The problem is solved while the two are on vacation. While Bobby disrobes on the beach, an old man sees her and falls in love. Later, a short, low-caste man in a retaurant also falls in love with Bobby. Her husband beats this short man, and later the older man. After this, we are almsot set. But still she resists. At this point, Hindi cinema steps in to save the day. Just as in The Dukes of Hazzard all problems can be solved by jumping a car over a river, in Hindi cinema all you need is a song-and-dance number. She falls in love with him.

During this scene, a couple of men come and sit very close to us-- this in a mostly empty theatre. One lights a cigarette.

In the next scene, we see the narrative's final problem-- Ricky can't get it up. Apparently, as we don't really see any of this directly. The problem is solved with a motherly and sisterly lecture to Bobby and some more song and dance. Pfizer and psychologists-- take heed. Hindi cinema may one day give you a run for yoru money.

How you say__________?

2005-02-18T13:31:00.000+05:30

"Me hindi sikna chata hu."

I wander around Varanassi saying this to people who wear both shoes and glasses, figuring these are signs of wealth and knowledge. Every person you meet and ask questions about Hindi has a different answer, so I'm going to the source.

My first teacher is Uday Singh. He is that rarity-- an unmarried older Indian. His affection goes to his nephews and hsi parrot, whom he has taught Sanskrit (the Latin of India). The parrot shrieks and mutters while we have conversations like this:

"How do you say `How do you say?'?"

"Yes, how you say."

"No. How do you...nevermind. OK. How do you say `Are you married?'?"

"Ap ki sadi hui he."

"OK! Sukhria. Thanks. Ap ki sadi hui he?" I ask.

"Yes. Ap ki sadi hui he," he says.

"No. I mean, I want to know, Ap ki sadi hui he. Are YOu married? Ap ki sadi hui he?"

"Yes very good you learn quickly. Ap ki sadi hui he."

Next up, I meet Prandit Prakash. This is the hardcore grammarian.

"I understand grammatical. Hindi grammatical," he says. "Present progressive, imperfect subjunctive, noun genders. First, we begin with the structure of the Hindi verb."

After an hour of this, I now know the first rule of transformation fo Hindi verbs. This costys me $3.

Next up is Dr Abishnav Misha, who has his Ph.D. and who, hopefully, can blend Prandit and Uday into something like comprehensible USEFUL input. Wish me luck.

a short one

2005-02-16T16:10:00.000+05:30

india is the anti-canada. loud filthy messy disorganised. as i write pounding earsplitting mind numbing (that's the point) hindi devotional music blares. and a water buffalo is staring at me. too bad i don't have 30 kilos of alfalfa in my bag.

the price of transformation

2005-02-16T15:34:00.000+05:30

"Nature does not know extinction-- all she knows is transformation." -- Werner von Braun

I like the smell of cremation in the morning. So I went to one of the burning ghats. Twenty or so fires burned the colour of sunrise, bodies lay wrapped in silk, and a man said "no photo" to me. This is a holy ghat, and photography is disrespectful to the dead.

Hindu tradition holds that those who are cremated by and then sent into the Ganges achieve release from the cycle of death and reincarnation. It's not how you arrive-- it's how you leave. But, as Rajwar says, since "India is a money country-- you have money you can do anything," this proper departure is not an easy feat for all.

Three hundred kilos of banyan tree wood @ R$200/kilo = R$4500
Three kilos of sandalwood chips R$6000
Dressing of the dead R$4000-6000
Transportation of the dead to Varanassi R$1000-4000
Assorted other costs R$2000-6000

Death, done right R$17000-25000 ($400-600 U.S.)

Average per-capita income in India $60 (U.S.)/month

Outside the ghat, a child sells postcards. They are pictures of cremations. Five rupees.

Varanassi-- dreaming?

2005-02-15T14:34:00.000+05:30

Varanassi, the "city of light," looks like this: http://www.etravelphotos.com/india/varanassi.html

On the Ganges, in the blue light of early evening, families cluster around the burning ghat-- the temple where the Hindu dead are burned and their ashes put into the river. According to Hindu tradition, we are incarnated energy, and on death, we release the soul, transforming the body back into energy. A family stands around embers, and the father reaches in with a pair of bamboo sticks, and pulls out an arm and a hand. These are thrown, hissing, into the water.

Later, there is music. At an instrument store that doubles as a concert palce, Jose and I hear a raga for tabla and sitar. Carnatic music-- despite its open C# tunings and omnipresent background drone-- is incredibly complex, a kind of improvisational classical music. Beginnign with the "alla" (declaration of scale-- a kind of unstructered noodling) the melody begins. The brotherly team takes a few minutes to get into their groove, but, once they do, the results are stunning. The evening's second raga-- a slower flute and tablea number-- is interrupted when a generator and sound system sets up outside. It is the festival of Sarasoti the goddess of wisdom. She has come for two days to Earth and yesterday she departed.

Hindu sound system...start with a cycle rickshaw. Put the largest efficgy youc an of Sarasoti on this rickshaw. Add lights, incense, and forty dancing boys. Wire this to a second rickshaw, which ought to be a wall fo Marshalls, or (even better) a flower-cluster of ancient gramophone speakers. Turn up the Hindu techno as loud as you can get it. Wire this ricksahw toa third, which is your generator. Drink as much alcohol as you can, lock up your women, and parade.

The streets are impassable with sound systems, goddesses, hordes of dancers, spectators, cows and motorcycles. Your ears ring. The air and the concrete shake. The air has an electric charge, even blocks away from the festivities.

Back at the hotel, the owner asks me what i think of the festivities. I tell him it's bit too early to say.

"Do not try to explain this," he says. "Foreigners like to rationalize."

There's good news, and there's bad news

2005-02-15T03:00:00.000+05:30

The good news: In India, you can put an animal, person, vehicle or any other object wherever you want.
The bad news: In India, you can put an animal, person, vehicle or any other object wherever you want.

The good news: Indian women are far more beautiful than Western women. ;-(
The bad news: Indian women are far more beautiful than Western women. ;-)

The good news: Hindi is a grammatically regular and Indo-European language.
The bad news: Hindi is an awful lot like German.

no Agravations 13 feb 2005

2005-02-13T11:48:00.000+05:30

This is my India trip blog. I'll update it whenever I can. If I can add photos without too much expense, I will do that. I left Canada on 6 Feb, spent four days in Delhi, and now I'm in Agra.

Agra at night is thick with blue diesel smoke pierced by endless horns and the occasional headlight. I spent an evening with a Brit named Samantha and we decided to share a 5:30 a.m. auto-rickshaw to the Taj. When knock on my metal door comes, we face one problem-- the night man is nowhere to be found,a nd we are locked itno the hotel's courtyard. We climb ontot he roof, drag the ladeder up, climb down the other side, and slide the ladder back under the gate. It is at this moment that the night man appears, angry.

"Why you make problem?" he says, "you bring thieves, bad people, very bad." He's actually shaking, he's so annoyed. "Not break rules, please."

Our driver is also nowhere in sight, and so we catcha ride in a cycle rickshaw. The driver, a wiry ninety-pounder, has to stand on oen pedal and, with all his force, pull up on the 'bars to force the pedal down to move these over-milk-fed giant tourists. Lance Armstrong might consider this as a training tool. In Agra, at six in the morning, people hauddle around fires, cows blink dully, and people shit into gutters. The barber is open. So is the liquor store. Our driver stops at a bhang shop and returns with a golfball-sized gob of green slime. He crams it into his mouth, chases it with water, and smiles. This is pounded marijuana, sold by the Indian government. We duly take note.

The Taj Mahal-- after we leave the hordes at the south gate, taking flash photos and waiting for the perfect shot you've all seen of the main complex and the approach avenue-- is indescribable. It is the tomb of Mughal Shah Jahan-- and his (favorite) wife, Mumtaz. Marbled, round, floating in the dim blue light, it is "a tear of the face of eternity," as Tagore said, or "a translucent dream almost materialised" (Levi-Strauss). You can't quite focus on it. The light plays, the marble surface deepens and flattens, the colours shift. A horde of monkeys comes form the forest and swarms across the west terrace, and the imam wails across the river. Birds shriek. And then comes a man in a neon green cycling jacket, brightest thing i've seen yet in India. You can see him from five hundred meters away.

Later, we visit Agra Fort, where we splurge-- $2 U.S.-- ona guide, a charming old Muslim man whose son and grandson are also guides. This massive red sandstone fort was used by pretty much everybody, fromt he Moghuls to the Brits and now the Indian Army. Shah Jahan-- a man who threw one of his political opponents off of the fort's walls to kill him, conquered most of India duringthe day, and enjoyed poetry and poainting in the evening-- was later imprisoned here by his son. That must have been at least tolerable. They had water-circulated air conditioning, pools, a sophisticatyed ventialtion system and, more to the point, a system of secret tunnels which allow you to pretend you were dutifully asleep whilst visiting whichever of the 370 odd women (or the "manservants") that the fort's owner had in his harem. Our guide helpfully points out the women's prison, into which harem members having issues with each other were thrown to cool off. The old part of the fort is red sandstone-- looks quite climbable, actually-- perhaps there's an article there-- buildering in India, anyone?-- and the newer section which Auranganzeb made, is the same ethereal marble of the Taj.

We catch an evenign rickshaw with a man who is a few sheets to the wind.

"I drinking man," he says, "problem?"

NO, no problem. On the way, we pass a priate school. Staff parking contrains only motorcycles. We stop and speak with a teacher. He makes R$15,000/month (about 350 U.S.), meets parents on Saturdays, and enjoys life. The teenagers studyign English cant' speak a word of it, although they are quite adept at answering questions put to them in writing. The future bureaucrats of India.

Two blocks away, we buy powdered bhang, and then Foster's from a nice man who goes on at length about how awesome his marriage, wife, children life etc is.

"She does not eat when I not there. I come home, she always touch me, love me. Very good woman!"

He wants to open a bar, but the cop bribes are too much hassle and expense, so he hunches beside his three fridges, squinting out into the dusty smoke of Agra through the brown lenses of bottles, dreaming of his wife. We emerge with beer to find our driver glugging his own ball of bhang. Whatever.

The bhang tastes like a mix of salt, flour, gravel, medicine and shit. It kicks in during dinner, when Sam and I become somewhat self-conscious as we mmmm and "ah that's so f**king hot" our way through South Indian food in the Indian version of a gentrified neighbourhood. There are too many waiters, and when they all line up with nothingto do, and impassively stare at Sam, both us us giggly stupidly. The sweet coconut dish tastes liek heated candy, but the spicy vegetables are superb. The "espresso" is Nescafe. Indians speak English. Everybody *must* be listening to us. A man with two burkha'd wives anbd a charming young boy come in. I resolve to NOT STARE at the women, and find them staring, unashamedly, at me. The husband gestures at them, and at the boy, pats his gut, and grins hugely at me. We leave our porn names-- Kitty Holmes and Butch Hillhurst, of Uzbekistan-- in the register.

Our driver has taken the last 20 ruppees worthof ride money and gotten a bottle of somethign that smells like you would clean your drain with it. he falls off his rickshaw, so we bid him goodbye. "hello, my friends, hello," comes his voice as we walk awya into the murky wamr night.

It is Saturday, adn there are Hindu weddings aplenty. The processions start with a huge silk banner, followed by a double or triple conga line of the grooms friends, jumping and yel;ling, singing, swigging hooch, carrying flashlights and torches. The groom-- often all of what looks like 18-- sits, dazed, ona white horse, and following the horse is a wagon with a massive flashing coloured lights and the Sound System, blasting Hindi tunes. These processions wind through the city, and end at grounds prepared for the weedings, where have been erected corridors of lights and silk, tents, and the usual wedding tabels and music (Hinu style). Outside are cows, men with machine guns, generators, beggars, SUVs, vendors and all the usual smells.

We arrive back at our hotel, and the owner asks us

"Were YOU the people who hired that drunken driver at Agra Fort?"
"..."
"Well don't ever tell a drunken man you are staying here. You will bring me many problems. He will come, with hsi friends, They w\ill be drunk, and want my customers. Very dangerous, drunk man in rickshaw."

Behind him, glaring at us, and grinning, is the night man. We are clutching four biggies of Foster's and are pie-eyed on bhang as we nod demurely at him, and trudge, busted, to our rooms.