A few more, Annapurna Conservation Area, Nepal

Halchowk, Nepal

Devis Falls and Mahadev Cave, Pokhara, Nepal

The Seti River winds through Pokhara, mostly in the narrow canyon it's carved for itself, thin and deep. Devis Falls is where it undergrounds itself for a time, and Mahadev Cave is where you can go down underground and see it!

Also, in proving that American Christians have no monopoly on religious silliness with Jesus-on-a-tortilla and whatnot, Mahadev Cave has a Hindu Shrine within because--I kid you not--there is a permanent dark "shade" that looks like a cow. Alas, it's forbidden to take a picture of the Cow Shade, and a Nepali man sits in a chair to enforce the policy, so all I can provide is a picture of the sign.

Boats, Pokhara, Nepal

In the Annapurnas: Addendum

Of all things, drawing helped. I went that night to a bar/restaurant called the Busy Bee, mostly because I had heard in Kathmandu—from other travelers—that nights in Pokhara always seem to end up there. But the Busy Bee is not my sort of place—the upstairs doubles as Pokhara's motorcycle bar, and while it's a big place it does have two tvs playing two different satellite sports channels, and a generic cover band in an alcove filled with cushions and low tables. I would really like to make some pronouncement like You Haven't Really Lived Till You've Heard a Nepali Cover Band Mangle the Words to Tom Petty, but really, you have. So mostly I sat at the Busy Bee at a table that occasionally smelled of gasoline leaking from the squadron of motorcycles parked before the stairs down, and doodled on the back of a pink flyer for rafting, perhaps, or kayaking, or one of the many tourist services in town. I drew shapes, the same shapes I always draw, and left the flyer on the table.

I drew more at the Noble Inn, this time circles, thinking of an artist friend-of-a-friend who does the same. And it helped, though shapes: they were like rock, solid and tangible and indifferent, especially indifferent.

Date and time information to be changed so that the addendum doesn't appear oddly before the mass of the article...

In the Annapurnas

This is not a plea.

I went to Pokhara because the Kathmandu Valley was starting to get to me: the incessant, insistent honk of car and motorcycle horns, the mobile-to-mobile outages, the fuel shortages, the water rationing—indeed, in my apartment at current there is no municipal water; not to mention the stray dogs barking and howling and fighting through the night, the isolation of language, the persistent 8 pm coughing spell known as the Kathmandu Hack. I can't say that I expected Pokhara to be much more than different, but that was alright; it was problem-solving by distance, perhaps. Pokhara, now, borders Phewa (or Fewa) Tal, the second-largest lake in Nepal. The tourist district is Lakeside; old Pokhara is farther inland. Lakeside more resembles a resort town than it does Thamel, its Kathmandu counterpart: Here there is little traffic; the taxi drivers solicit fares more quietly, motors off; a small herd of gray-brown buffalo wanders lazily through the streets and then laces between beached, colorful tourist and laundry boats to drink from the lake. In the early morning it's crows and roosters that rouse you, and the streets and yards are bright and green. It was in this Pokhara that I slept through the night for the first time, perhaps, since I left home.

Nevertheless I left for the Annapurna Conservation Area almost as soon as I arrived. I wanted to see Himalayas, for from Kathmandu all I had gotten was one cloud-shrouded morning of Ganesh Himal; I wanted isolation of my choosing; I wanted trail companionship and megafauna.

Endurance exertion plays funny tricks on your moods, on your hormones, and even at low elevation, taxing yourself can make you moody, drastically: elation, hope, contempt, resolve at whatsoever your mind might cleave to, sometimes all within a lone and lonely hour. You feel angry, but at what? Nothing, nothing at all, and it evaporates to leave only a residue of itself, a memorial.

Everyone, I think, is a little different, but I tend to get competitive—with requisite frustrations about minor injustices and bad luck—and then calm and calculating and confident, and the first day, from the town of Lumle at about 1600 meters elevation down to Birethanti (1050 m) and up to Naya Thanti (2400 m) was this not quite in epitome, but close to it: revolving feelings of sports-cliche determination to make towns along the trail said to be much too far, and anger at the Nepalis who said a 30 minute walk would take an hour and a half.

This is actually commonplace in the Annapurna region, but even by the end of the first day I hadn't quite learned this lesson yet. I made Naya Thanti, after five different settlements calling themselves Ban Thanti, at about 6:15 and spent the night there, the only town I went through on the way to Ghorepani without electricity. A sign upon entering said Ghorepani was an hour and a half away, so I estimated an actual hour and when night came swiftly just after 7 went to bed thinking I had made a good decision.

It took me 34 minutes to reach Ghorepani the next morning. At dusk, even with the surity of the small flashlight I packed with me, it would have been a trying and worrisome 34 minutes. Still, that was perhaps the second genesis—the eukaryotic (?) moment of my realization of the depersonalization of the Annapurnas; I began to feel that here I was and am still not a person but a wallet. When frustrated, my frustrations bloomed: I hated, hated the culture and circumstance¹ that values more the 30 rupees' profit to be made by deceiving travelers into stopping for a spell and buying a Frooti or a Mars bar than one that values cooperation and trust, the honest exchange of information.

For that second day, even with its tribulations, I was in a good mood. Or, more accurately: for the most part, I was in a good mood. The day started cool, overcast with cloud cover high above even the Himals, and the ridge out of Ghorepani had a soft, welcome breeze from the north. Indeed, other than the climb out, the first three hours were a clean downhill path through the twisting trunks of rhododendron trees blooming pink and red, and then alongside the waters of a gurgling, growing Himalayan stream of huge boulders of striated granite and glacial shist.

Two times, however, I was again angry at little, or nothing other than Nepal itself. The first, just a few minutes after a hill blocked the pickup-stick pile of homes and guest houses of Ghorepani from view, came at more or less a five-way trail junction, totally unsigned. The irregular dirt-covered stone steps I had been climbing paused for a dry and eroded streambed, then six feet higher continued again to the right; just before the steps swung to the right again high above, an unlikely trail covered by fallen leaves and discarded and discolored rhododendron blooms branched away to a wash opposite the steps. Back at the first intersection, a hard-packed, smoothed dirt trail branched left, then split again into two equally likely paths. Three good choices, then, a poor choice, and the way I came. I went right, following the stairs, though this was only a marginally more likely path than that to the left. For all my indecision—and severe annoyance at so much as posting a simple sign—the paths met later, near the crest of the hill.

Worse, though, was the descent from Tadapani—a dozen stone houses on the nose of a hill 6500 feet above sea level—towards Chhomrong, a walk that by signage was to be five hours. When I left Tadapani, hurtling down the step stone stairway at the town's retaining wall, I had five hours of daylight left. Almost immediately the path became leaf-covered and hidden, twisting between oaks and more, flowerless rhododendrons, sometimes hustling down cowpaths and then disappearing altogether. Every once in a long while I looked down into the loose, chalky-textured dirt to see the partial imprint of a hiker's book: proof, at least, that some else had been lost this way before.

But four paths converged in a meadow where three black cows lazily grazed, three paths trickling down from the hill and the fourth hopping a knoll, passing a pair of ragged, person-sized banana trees, and coming squarely to a solid, closed gate—two posts, two runners and a crossbeam, and beyond a house with a sizeable yard and large picture-windows.

So: the wrong path. And yet I traced the two new paths from the meadow and returned, at different points, to the path I came down the hill on.

It was at this point that I became aware of my own helplessness, my Nepali limited to daal bhaat and dhoka, the words for lentils with rice and door.² I had seen no one since leaving Tadapani an hour and a half before, with easily a half-dozen significant possible trails I had passed over; and I had no way to ask for help. Even the map I had was Nepali and poorly surveyed, missing some settlements and misplacing others by far enough, in distance or altitude, that I wouldn't be able to located myself without a compass, the hills next to and behind me obscuring the Annapurna Himals.

And all this completely unnecessary. These were not-insignificant trails, and a minimum of signage seems common-sensical—unless keeping people from getting lost would discourage the hiring of guides.³ And indeed: A Dutch woman named Rihanna I lunched with in Tadapani told me that the other trail out, to Ghandruk, was equally confusing and difficult. So: more trails than I could walk down all of in the rest of the afternoon, two days of shopkepers calling out, “Sit down, look at menu?” or innkeepers telling me I couldn't get as far as even the next town, a nearly-worthless Nepali-made map, needless difficulty, and no communication ability past gestures and drawings.

*

Here I am going to summarize, to compress (or re-compress) time. I climbed over the gate and trespassed to a path skirting a low stone wall on the other side of the yard; saw a Western tourist far down the hill; descended to find yet another closed gate, but this one with a painted sign pointing to Tadapani one way—not the way I came—and Chhomrong the other, over the gate; walked through an eerie, abandoned settlement with half-fallen brick huts and collapsed thatch roofs, with only a couple of goats bleeting from the dark, cool spaces within; and treaded downwards until I found the tourist and his guide cheerfully resting at a guesthouse—at which I did learn the Nepali word for help, tagaro.⁴ I made Chhomrong in a very slight rain around 5, woke up the next morning to see Annapurna South from my bedroom window, then made a long, exposed, humid, nearly windless trudge—on a major trail not on my map, no less, and only told to me by a Tibetan refugee I made friends with in Chhomrong—to the standard bus and tourist drop at Naya Pul, where I immediately caught a bus and tired, sweatly, and still on my feet, was quoted twice the Nepali rate for the bus ride. And then, in Pokhara, went from the buspark to Lakeside in a cab with a crooked meter.

*

As I said, endurance exertion plays tricks with your moods. I went to sleep in Chhomrong looking forward to coming back to Pokhara, taking a warm shower, and—to be honest—listening to the Mountain Goats and Billy Bragg, to being relaxed in the guest house room, to finding three days' worth of messages from friends and family, to a small measure of peace and calm and relaxation before another cramped and twisting bus trip back to Kathmandu. Even though the walk to Naya Pul was physically trying I had a goal, something to look forward to; as well as good memories of the Annapurnas and of rhododendron forests—of goals accomplished.

Somehow the bus ride—sitting on a bench near the open door and smoking driver as we climbed and descended in turn—changed my mood. It was hot and cramped, I was unable to sit up straight because of some piece of padded machinery in a padded gray box above my head, and because the only place for my feet was right over the engine, I had to hold one shoe off the floor, then the other, to keep from burning my feet through two pairs of socks. At one point the bus stopped for the busboy—the conductor, more or less—to add more oil, at another point, the bus overheated briefly—or we stopped to keep it from overheating, I'm not sure which—and at another so that the driver and passengers could get out to pee, and smoke. And as we came over a little rise near Kande dutifully honking, hurtling towards us was another overstuffed passenger bus, and as both swerved my stomach dropped, for for that moment I expected we would go off the road, past the stone barricades and somersaulting down the hill.

Back in Pokhara, and alive, I got some of what I wanted on the trek from Chhomrong: a hot shower, yes, and music, but still little companionship. I washed a shirt in the wastepaper basket of the Noble Inn and went out.

My email had one personal message, about Wrench Nepal.

^{1 I am of course part of that “circumstance” by perpetuating a Western-tourist-based economy in ACAP, but I don't have to like it.}

² Ok, not really. But the others, except for ek (one) are all loan words: avatar, chakra, internet, lama, namaste, etc. None of these were going to help me.

³ Just to be explicit, this should be read not as a grounded accusation but the description of a state of mind. Even if true, the fairness of this requires an analysis not within my scope here.

^{4 There may be some aspirations in there I didn't pick up, so the word might actually be thagaro or tagharo or something else altogether.}

Annapurna Conservation Area, Nepal

The Dhaulagiris and a Blooming Rhododendron

Annapurnas I and South through the Haze...

Rhododendron Blossom, Annapurna Conservation Area

I spent much pretty much the whole last week in Pokhara--200 km west of Kathmandu--and the Annapurnas...and am now the possessor of nearly 1 gb of fuzzy and hazy pictures. Sigh.

A big essay is coming, probably Monday--I'm not going to have time to type it up before then. So, as a consolation, here's a picture that did come out:

In Kirtipur

Kirtipur, south of Kathmandu and sitting on a hill still in the valley but rising as it approaches the rim, was something of a disappointment. Workers were laying down new paving stones throughout much of the old town, so walking was a slalom of gravel piles, bags of unmixed concrete from India, and stacks of irregular, flat, sedimentary stone. The triple-tiered Uma Maheshwar Temple, the most visible structure in town,was covered in bamboo scaffolding, new carvings for the braces haphazardly piled nearby. In the main square the back side of the towering temple was painted and scored by graffiti, and on Naya Bajaar in the newer and poorer part of town--the parts built outside the old wall after the city was conquered in the 1700s by Prithvi Narayan Shah, who ordered the noses and lips of all the city's men cut off for resisting his siege--a storekeeper tried to cheat me out of 50 rupees.

But at Chilanchu Vihara, as I wandered and took pictures, a man came up the long stairway from the rural valley below and began asking me questions: Where are you from?, First time in Nepal?, the standard questions you expect after only a couple of days here. These questions often end in a demand for chocolates or one rupee--when from children--or the attempted sale of trinkets or a guided tour, so I half-heartedly prepared myself to let the man down.

He spoke English, however, much better than the typical Nepali, and asked further questions: Where in California was I from?, What did I do for work?, What was I doing in Nepal? In return, he told me a little about Kirtipur, when the new Thai Buddhist temple was built, that the villagers spoke Newari instead of Nepali, that the only restaurant I had seen was also the only restaurant worth eating at.

He told me a little bit about himself as well, that he had no job, that he spoke Newari and Nepali and English, and some French and Italian. He had done a little exterior housepainting and cooking, but now those jobs were over.

When I asked him what he would do if he could get any job in the Valley, and he said he would do any job that would pay him and was regular, it struck me that in his heart of hearts he was looking not to sell me trinkets but was hoping for me to give him a job. A porter, a Nepali tutor, a didi, whatever: a job.

And I could have. 1,000 rupees per month is a decent wage, enough to live on with a little extra, and is 200 dollars--per year. I am unaccustomed to being this wealthy, to be able to throw money at people because the amounts are so insignificant, to have a man in a blue pullover and lighter blue pants ask me, roundabout, for a job, any job, and justifiably.

When there was a lull in the conversation I wandered away, then waited the man out. I am not proud.

Near Naya Bajaar, Kirtipur

Chilanchu Vihara, Kirtipur

Jal Binayak Temple, Chobar Gorge

Mahendra Park, Balaju

Every city contains within it several metaphors for itself; one of my favorite ones for Kathmandu is Mahendra Park, in Balaju.

The suburb of Balaju sits just outside the Ring Road, though really it's all one contiguous and continuous urban area now. About a kilometer or two north of the Ring Road is Mahendra Park, back in the 1700s a pleasure garden for the Queen but now filled with Nepalis picnicing, hanging out, and using the modern, full-size swimming pool. The flat at the bottom of the park is the formal garden, and paved paths climb the hillside with almost-Japanese curves and contours. There's a fair bit of litter, but this is Nepal and there's trash pretty much everywhere, even in the corners and passageways of Buddhist gompas; up at the top of the hill is a pretty clear campsite for the homeless.

Down at the bottom, the grass is unhappy and grows wearily; the old Malla buildings are crooked and cracked. Nepali teenagers roam through the park, either making out under the tree canopy on the hill or making fun of the statues and temples, their laughter crackling and derisive.

If you didn't know the basic history I've laid out, the park would be, well, just a park in Nepal: spottily maintained, ill-treated, taken for granted. But with that little bit of information there is another park inside, for it's not hard to imagine flowering formal gardens, with the peace of birdcalls and the wind rustling the tall, skinny trees on the hill; it's not hard to imagine choosing a pool--not green and algaeic, as now, but then clear and reflective, perhaps koi within--and meditating by it, or simply swirling the water with your ankles; it's not hard to imagine the gardens as they were once, what the organization and beauty and elitism they have faded from.

Recreating is much easier than inventing, of course.

Old Durbar Square, Kathmandu

Durbar Square, Patan

Around Durbar Square, Patan

People in Patan

On Sneaking in

It's Nepal, so sneaking in is easy.

As a foreigner, you're supposed to pay for pretty much everything in the Kathmandu Valley: entering Kathmandu's Durbar Square is 200 rupees, as is Patan's; the Temple atop Swayambo on the west side of town is 100, and Pashuputinath costs 250; 100 rupees to see the Stupa at Boudha; and just to enter the old town of Bhaktapur is 750 rupees. Converted, it's about $3.20 to enter the Durbar Squares, $1.60 for Swayambunath and Buddhinath, $4 for Pashuputinath, and $12 for Bhaktapur. Nepalis get in for free, of course, and the fees are greatly reduced for visitors from the other SAARC countries: India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives.

I snuck into Bhaktapur with 3 other expats for Bisket Jatra, the Nepali new year, which involves (in no particular order) a ceremony of moving a lumbering, rickety chariot across town with a very stupid Hindu god tied up inside; a giant tug of war between residents of different sides of the city; and the felling of a giant lingam, which is a huge pole with fronds and ropes attached—it's something like 45 meters tall—stuck in a millstone-shaped stone called a yoni¹.

The ceremony of pulling down the lingam first involves teenagers from the town trying to climb up the ropes until someone reaches the very top—not just where the ropes are knotted, but then a clamber past the crossbeam and a bear-hug shimmy to the very top. Everyone cheers, the climber revels in it for a moment, then makes his way back down.

Next everyone grabs the ropes and pulls: the lingam sways unstably like a palm tree in a hurricane, first this way and then that, and the crowd gasps and cheers when it looks like it's going to come down. As the lingam rebounds away from one group—it is wood, after all, and flexes pretty mightily before it will break—those on the ropes closest to the lingam tend to get pulled up into the air, often 20 feet or more. Usually these are tweens or early teens, who seem to have great fun being pulled into the air and then sliding down the ropes again.

At some point, though, the lingam begins to fall, and as many ropes on one side get closer to each other, ropes on the far side also go taut, to keep the lingam from falling too fast or hard. When the lingam finally comes down, there is a great pop of flashbulbs and the sound of cell phone cameras making imitation shutter sounds; then a great melee follows that looks, from inside the crowd, like little else than a massive religious experience: convulsing, stomping, shouting, hands waving, singing, bodies bumping and colliding and bouncing of each other.

If this all sounds recklessly dangerous, well, it is: climbers up the lingam regularly fall, often to their deaths, and in Kathmandu this year the lingam hit a microbus that was passing by. To western eyes, it's pretty incredible, but Nepalis have a sense of humor much more slapstick than ours—while waiting for the lingam part of the celebration, a chubby woman in a bright orange and yellow sari fell almost straight backwards, her feet out from under her and body directly into a folded, sitting position, and hard. Her reaction? To laugh at herself.

But all this is something of a digression, for what I'm interested in—the question I can't yet answer, more or less—is whether sneaking in is, in the end, acceptable². What follows is less an argument than a cascade of related thoughts, for the interplay of problems is rather complex.

To some degree, not paying for entry is intentionally depriving a Nepali of income. And indeed, the income is considerable: the value of those 750 rupees is much higher to any Nepali than it is to me. At home in San Francisco, I can earn the value of 750 rupees in an hour; even for a Nepali with a better-than-decent job, it's something like two weeks' worth of pay. Past that, it is to some degree replaying the worst aspects of colonialism: a white foreigner comes in, takes what he wants, and leaves without contributing to the community. And indeed, whatever money I spend here will likely be circulated through the Nepali community at least a few times; whatever I save will circulate only at home, where it can do much less.

And yet what I'm taking, of course, is naturally free. Bhaktapur will be there whether I visit or not, whether I pay or not; there is in reality no good or service that some person has provided to me. Bhaktapur is a living place, and it's hard to argue that making a single person pay more is fair—is my “cost” to the town infinitely higher than a Nepali's?

Beyond that, changing prices based on nationality is also problematic. Imagine for a moment that you walked into a grocery store in San Francisco, and everything had 3 prices: one for Brits, one for Mexicans, and one for Americans. Even if tomatoes were priced on per-capita national income—the British paying the highest price, then the Americans, then Mexicans—it would still be a very poor version of a sliding scale economy, and hard to argue that anyone had an obligation to follow it.

It's hard to even reason that you should buy a ticket on a self-interested basis. There is essentially no risk for not paying to enter Durbar Square or the like—the worst that happens is that you wander near a ticket booth, a police officer comes out and asks to see your ticket. If you don't have one, you can either lie and say you're part of a group—the police don't speak English with anything approaching fluency—or you can just pay then. It's not that you're going to go to jail, or even have to pay a fine.

Finally, you could make very much the same argument against bargaining in the developing world as you would make against sneaking in. At heart is a difficult power imbalance: even though I am not wealthy for the first world, I can live like a king in Nepal. As such, I wield a lot more power in most transactions. Basic issues of fairness—it's not fair to cheat me!—make the idea of paying more for consumer goods pale in comparison to the difference in wealth solely attributable to my nationality. The basic idea is: There but for the grace of God go I. We each have no control over the circumstances of our birth, and for the vast majority of us, for our upbringings as well; and yet even outside of choices I've made, I am much wealthier for something I did not do and something neither I nor the Nepali I bargain with had control over: that I was born in the US. That's something that is, in the end, fundamentally unfair to the Nepali. Just like in not paying the entrance fee, I can choose whether to bargain: Buying a kilo of apples at 80 rupees instead of 70 makes little difference to me, but those ten rupees—16 cents—are a fair bit to Nepalis. At what point should you pay more since you can pay more? Should I, then, actually bargain the apple-seller up, till I am paying whatever I would be willing to pay for a kilo of apples in the US?

Again, there but for the grace of God go I.

*

¹Lingam and yoni are in fact words for the male and female genitalia, as many of you no doubt remember deep in your brains from exposure to New Age crystal healers, yoga groupies, and the like. The words were certainly in my brain, in any case.

All I can say is that when feminist deconstruction hits Nepal, academics are going to have a field day with Bisket Jatra.

²I am intentionally going to lay aside here the issues of whether you have a moral obligation to follow the law; much less follow the law in a country that doesn't recognize any sort of agency from those who are not its citizens (which is pretty much every country, though possibly not Hong Kong) nor even the citizenship of those born there of parents born there and who are not recognized as citizens by any other nation (i.e., Nepal).