Day after slippery day passes in Kathmandu and I have become, as a man once said, comfortably numb. I'm anticipating a package, mailed from The States via that socialist institution known as the US Postal Service. I've been awaiting its arrival for seven days, using it as an excuse to linger here, letting my days drift by amongst the revolving crew of friendly, half-stoned travel-junkies that frequent the rooftop balcony of the Hotel Silver Home. We trade musical and literary recommendations, pass joints, ponder problems both deep and shallow, wander the city widely, tracing long and winding routes between temples and cheap restaurants, each providing the others with another fleeting friendship which can be casually enjoyed then easily left behind, everyone happy with the exchange. I could get used to this; a pleasant existence, waking up with no commitments or destinations. It's not rewarding. It doesn't help anyone in any way, but perhaps it doesn't come as much of a shock that there's something disturbingly appealing about this life.
It'll end soon enough though. My package arrived in Kathmandu today and it should complete its arduous journey to me in no more than another day or two. With no more excuses to stay at the Hotel Silver Home, I'll be volunteering after that, most likely teaching, with one of several possible local instutions. I'm anxious for the next adventure, anxious to try something new again. Still, I can't say I'm too depressed about the prospect of a couple of more days of this life...just a couple.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Life in the Dorms
Last night I had an early dinner and went to bed at 9:30 with Walden and my flashlight. At 12:30 my Chinese dorm-mate came home, noticed that his entrance had woken me, and advised me in his limited english that he requested the pleasure of my company for some drug smoking. I hesitated for about a half a second before getting up and joining him as he rolled joint after joint. It turns out that we both love Radiohead and the films of David Fincher. We smoked, listened to Hail To The Thief, and rejoiced when we located the gift of the granola bars, both of us savoring their apple flavored crunch as if it were caviar. My new friend, upon finishing his second granola bar, remarked with satisfaction, "I love the dorminy!" Me too, brother. Me too.
Seven Thousand Five Hundred Fifty-Five Dollars and Twenty-FIve Cents
I was given a gift. She told me it was just some leftover granola bars, but when I looked inside there was also an envelope with 20 USD and a note. Knowing my budget, she regretted the fact that she hadn't offered to let me share her taxi when we met after The Trek. She wanted to make up for it, although she had already bought me dinner the night before. She knew there was no way I would have accepted it, but now she's gone. I wish I could thank her.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Sustenance
As anyone who as ever started a new budget or decided to go on a diet can tell you, it takes some time for the new lifestyle to sink in. In my efforts to drive down my cost of living, this was true for me on several levels. First, generally speaking, when I arrive in a foreign land with an unfamiliar unit of currency, it usually takes me at least a week to know without calculation what's expensive and what's a bargain. Fresh off the plane from Dubai, I walked into a restaurant around lunchtime, looked over the menu, and ordered some chicken fingers at a price of 300 rupees. This was in the middle range of the prices on the menu so I trusted that it was not exorbitant. In contrast, after a month in the country I now know well the value of my rupee and yesterday found a sandwich stand that sells gigantic veggie burgers for 30 rupees. In addition to internalizing the value of my money, there is also the significant issue of impulse control that must be dealt with. I am a man who likes a nice beer with his eggs in the morning. I like a well appointed restaurant with a menu that excites the imagination. I like to look over a wine list and find varietals with which I'm familiar. This is the life to which I have grown accustomed and I find it oddly challenging to tell myself: "Stan, I'm sorry, that's just not your life anymore."
One month later, I find I'm getting better at this. In the mornings I wander the streets, drawn pleasantly away from the tourist highways, alert for moment when the perfect bakery will present itself, one that will offer me a gigantic pastry, the like of which I've never seen, baked fresh, and served to me standing at the counter with a hot cup of tea for the price of 0.40 USD. At lunchtime, I delight in wandering into roadside shacks in which not one word of English is spoken and arranging with minor difficulty for a few samosas or chapati at a price of less than 0.50 USD. For dinner, if I'm particularly hungry that day, I make the walk down to my favorite Tibetan restaurant that serves Chicken Chili Momos for 1.25 USD and am served a heaping bowl of delicious, healthy, beautiful sustenance that leaves me wondering why again I thought I needed a nice rare rib-eye steak served with a Napa Cabernet.
Of course, I still love to have a drink in a bar with a friend and I find I value this simple, silly little affectation too much to let go of entirely. A drink in an enviting atmosphere costs as much as a night's stay in my dusty hotel, but last night I bought two of them with no hesitation because I had the good fortune to share those drinks, and the time and conversation that was included in their price, with a rare and lovely person who I will likely never see again. These moments are too dear to me to give up and although the voice of my newfound ascetic temperment might attempt to challenge the value of that exchange, I can't bring myself to count it as a fault.
One month later, I find I'm getting better at this. In the mornings I wander the streets, drawn pleasantly away from the tourist highways, alert for moment when the perfect bakery will present itself, one that will offer me a gigantic pastry, the like of which I've never seen, baked fresh, and served to me standing at the counter with a hot cup of tea for the price of 0.40 USD. At lunchtime, I delight in wandering into roadside shacks in which not one word of English is spoken and arranging with minor difficulty for a few samosas or chapati at a price of less than 0.50 USD. For dinner, if I'm particularly hungry that day, I make the walk down to my favorite Tibetan restaurant that serves Chicken Chili Momos for 1.25 USD and am served a heaping bowl of delicious, healthy, beautiful sustenance that leaves me wondering why again I thought I needed a nice rare rib-eye steak served with a Napa Cabernet.
Of course, I still love to have a drink in a bar with a friend and I find I value this simple, silly little affectation too much to let go of entirely. A drink in an enviting atmosphere costs as much as a night's stay in my dusty hotel, but last night I bought two of them with no hesitation because I had the good fortune to share those drinks, and the time and conversation that was included in their price, with a rare and lovely person who I will likely never see again. These moments are too dear to me to give up and although the voice of my newfound ascetic temperment might attempt to challenge the value of that exchange, I can't bring myself to count it as a fault.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
On Hustlers And My Pampered Western Life
Today, back in Kathmandu after a not unpleasant 8 hour bus journey, I found myself once again staying in the neighborhood of Thamel, a tourist base-camp of sorts, which attracts, in turn, a proportional camp of hustlers. One develops a certain equanimity to the hustle after a few weeks on the road and it can tend to fade into the background unless one encounters a singularly interesting practitioner, as I did today.
Having just finished some basic laundry and grocery business, I was beginning the hour-long walk back to the visa office to collect my freshly re-stickered passport. As is not unusual, I was called after and followed a few times with various offers of goods and services, but all were ignored except one persistent voice at my elbow. A boy of about twelve, by the name of Raman, was chattering brightly in fairly solid English about the various U.S. presidents, their number in the sequence, and some commonly known facts about their lives. I, in turn, waited for the hustle to be made clear. He told me he could name every capital in the world. I tested him, using capitals I knew from South America and Africa, rather obscure examples that I prided myself on being unique in knowing, but he nailed every one without hesitation. I continued to wait for him to play the next card. I asked if he went to school and he claimed he did, but that it was a holiday and continued to chatter and ask me questions. I asked if he intended to follow me all the way to the visa office. He said no, and at this point decided to play his ace: He wanted to know if I would buy milk for his brother. No money. Money is bad. Just milk.
Knowing this hustle as well as its many cousins (the lost soccer ball, the pen and pad for school, in each case the child returns the item to the vendor and splits the amount paid) I waived him on his way. Still, I found myself uniquely impressed by his abilities. Here was a child of notable intelligence trying to get ahead in an environment where that task is almost impossible, his destiny tied to this little community of tricksters and smooth talkers. As I considered this, I found myself renewing a line of thinking that I seem to follow fruitlessly every time I am in a country where poverty is everywhere you look. It involves the things that we tend to think we deserve in life. Most of us believe (or allow ourselves to believe) fervently in a fallacy that we all arrive at fairly naturally. It goes like this: I have earned everything that I possess, through either hard work or natural ability, and the luxuries I enjoy are the just rewards for my labors. When confronted with a hard working genius like Raman I tend to laugh at myself for believing I "deserve" anything. After all, Raman, who is probably smarter and more ambitious then I ever was at his age, has about as much chance of traveling the world and blogging about his experiences as he does of playing professional soccer, which is to say, almost none. Doesn't he deserve the same chances I have? Hasn't he earned them?
Of course the fact is that we, the ones with high quality educations, the ones with money and cars and televisions and computers, were each born in the right place at the right time. We work hard, just like everyone else. The difference is that our work produces such excess that we can buy new clothes and airline tickets, simply by virtue of our location and circumstance. Most people's work barely feeds their family, even if they work twice as hard as we do. Every exception the free-market optimists will point to as proof of the possibility of the "up by the bootstraps" world of opportunity is crushed by the weight of the billions of stories that prove what we all like to forget: Our lives are to a large degree defined by the conditions we are born into.
I don't know what to make of this most times. It tends to be a sobering, even depressing thought and I never get over it too quickly. What I come back to in the end that gives me some peace is that I can't go around feeling sorry for myself for being born lucky, but I sure as hell can stop whining about not having every pleasure that I see is available. I often find myself saying on this trip, "It's been a long day. I deserve a beer." or "Wooo, I've done a lot of walking. Let me sit down in this nice restaurant and reward myself." It's the kind of thinking that's so ingrained in my lifestyle that I sometimes forget to question it. Before I know it I'm rewarding myself for getting out of bed in the morning, finding the bar I that I was looking for, or for just being a decent human being. That road leads the opposite direction from the simplified life that I'm (somewhat casually) seeking in my travels.
But there's always something like this: On the final day of The Trek, I met a familiar trekker at a town about 30 minutes from the main road. We were both exhausted and she told me she planned to eat a big meal there and catch a taxi back to Pokhara immediately afterwards. I asked her how much the taxis were, found they were about 20 USD, and told her I'd be sticking with my plan to take the bus for 2.50 USD. As I stumbled up the ugly town road thinking about another crammed local bus, I noticed myself finding more and more value in the taxi which would take half the time and be twenty times more comfortable. I grabbed a cab driver and bargained him down to 12 USD. I rode back to my hotel doorstep in relative luxury. Had I earned that luxury through my labors on the trail? Realistically, probably not. Was it worth every penny? Yes. A thousand times, yes.
Having just finished some basic laundry and grocery business, I was beginning the hour-long walk back to the visa office to collect my freshly re-stickered passport. As is not unusual, I was called after and followed a few times with various offers of goods and services, but all were ignored except one persistent voice at my elbow. A boy of about twelve, by the name of Raman, was chattering brightly in fairly solid English about the various U.S. presidents, their number in the sequence, and some commonly known facts about their lives. I, in turn, waited for the hustle to be made clear. He told me he could name every capital in the world. I tested him, using capitals I knew from South America and Africa, rather obscure examples that I prided myself on being unique in knowing, but he nailed every one without hesitation. I continued to wait for him to play the next card. I asked if he went to school and he claimed he did, but that it was a holiday and continued to chatter and ask me questions. I asked if he intended to follow me all the way to the visa office. He said no, and at this point decided to play his ace: He wanted to know if I would buy milk for his brother. No money. Money is bad. Just milk.
Knowing this hustle as well as its many cousins (the lost soccer ball, the pen and pad for school, in each case the child returns the item to the vendor and splits the amount paid) I waived him on his way. Still, I found myself uniquely impressed by his abilities. Here was a child of notable intelligence trying to get ahead in an environment where that task is almost impossible, his destiny tied to this little community of tricksters and smooth talkers. As I considered this, I found myself renewing a line of thinking that I seem to follow fruitlessly every time I am in a country where poverty is everywhere you look. It involves the things that we tend to think we deserve in life. Most of us believe (or allow ourselves to believe) fervently in a fallacy that we all arrive at fairly naturally. It goes like this: I have earned everything that I possess, through either hard work or natural ability, and the luxuries I enjoy are the just rewards for my labors. When confronted with a hard working genius like Raman I tend to laugh at myself for believing I "deserve" anything. After all, Raman, who is probably smarter and more ambitious then I ever was at his age, has about as much chance of traveling the world and blogging about his experiences as he does of playing professional soccer, which is to say, almost none. Doesn't he deserve the same chances I have? Hasn't he earned them?
Of course the fact is that we, the ones with high quality educations, the ones with money and cars and televisions and computers, were each born in the right place at the right time. We work hard, just like everyone else. The difference is that our work produces such excess that we can buy new clothes and airline tickets, simply by virtue of our location and circumstance. Most people's work barely feeds their family, even if they work twice as hard as we do. Every exception the free-market optimists will point to as proof of the possibility of the "up by the bootstraps" world of opportunity is crushed by the weight of the billions of stories that prove what we all like to forget: Our lives are to a large degree defined by the conditions we are born into.
I don't know what to make of this most times. It tends to be a sobering, even depressing thought and I never get over it too quickly. What I come back to in the end that gives me some peace is that I can't go around feeling sorry for myself for being born lucky, but I sure as hell can stop whining about not having every pleasure that I see is available. I often find myself saying on this trip, "It's been a long day. I deserve a beer." or "Wooo, I've done a lot of walking. Let me sit down in this nice restaurant and reward myself." It's the kind of thinking that's so ingrained in my lifestyle that I sometimes forget to question it. Before I know it I'm rewarding myself for getting out of bed in the morning, finding the bar I that I was looking for, or for just being a decent human being. That road leads the opposite direction from the simplified life that I'm (somewhat casually) seeking in my travels.
But there's always something like this: On the final day of The Trek, I met a familiar trekker at a town about 30 minutes from the main road. We were both exhausted and she told me she planned to eat a big meal there and catch a taxi back to Pokhara immediately afterwards. I asked her how much the taxis were, found they were about 20 USD, and told her I'd be sticking with my plan to take the bus for 2.50 USD. As I stumbled up the ugly town road thinking about another crammed local bus, I noticed myself finding more and more value in the taxi which would take half the time and be twenty times more comfortable. I grabbed a cab driver and bargained him down to 12 USD. I rode back to my hotel doorstep in relative luxury. Had I earned that luxury through my labors on the trail? Realistically, probably not. Was it worth every penny? Yes. A thousand times, yes.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Notes From The Trail
(Seventy Six Twenty, Sixty-Five)
On the morning of the 28th of December I took a disorienting bus ride, sitting then standing, possibly overpaying, unsure when to disembark, to the cluster of shacks known in these parts as Phedi, where I was to begin my trek into the Annapurna Conservation Area. I jumped off the bus when instructed, dragging my pack from underneath the woman who was sitting on it, looked around, saw only the standard wood-scrap constructed shops on one side of the road, and a sheer mountain wall rising up from the other side. A shop owner offered to sell me some water. I declined. He then offered to sell me a walking stick, revealing to me that I was indeed in the right place.
"Annapurna Base Camp?" I inquired. He pointed to the mountain wall, on which I now noticed there were an approximation of stairs leading up into the forest that clung to the mountain. I breathed deeply, shouldered my pack and started climbing, telling myself that I didn't really expect it to be easy.
My journey took seven days in total, four up and three down, covering around fifty miles and climbing to about 13,500 feet. There are several options available as far as routs go, but they all essentially start on the edges of modernization and then retreat from it. Nothing within the Conservation Area is accessible by road. There tends to be a settlement every two hours or so, but as the trail progresses further from where motor vehicles have ever been they tend to become increasingly small and spartan. It took about a day and a half before I was past the point of the last permanent settlement of Chomrong and on to little clusters of guest houses that survive only by serving the trekkers and their guides, along with a little bit of farming. Everything that comes to these towns is either made there or brought in on the backs of porters. It tends to put the price of your egg fried noodles in perspective once you've seen a sixty year old man straining under the weight of eight metal crates, each filled with live chickens and strapped to his back, walking slowly up the same hill that you're climbing for pleasure.
Most of the other tourists had guides. Many had porters to carry their bags. It's not all that expensive and there's nothing wrong with it, but I took a certain degree of pride in "covering my own sector". If there was an unmarked fork in the trail I waited and asked for advice. My pack was heavy, but I looked with a bit of contempt on those tourists shouldering mere "day packs" while their porters carried impossibly heavy loads.
The trail experience was one of quiet, working solitude, with periodic welcome bursts of human interaction. Most times, without a guide or a companion, I was alone as I walked, pondering life, remembering, planning, thinking about the miles I've covered and the miles still left to go. In the evenings, if I was lucky, there was a friendly campfire or dining hall (with a gas heater blazing an open flame beneath the table) where I could share stories, play some cards, and pass the time with other trekkers. If the trail had been particularly grueling that day, I found this was especially important. More than any other, Day Five found me near breaking, on my way down but a long way from finished, heart racing at a disconcerting pace with every up hill step (because there's still plenty of up on your way down. Oh yes.) stumbling half dazed into Deorali, where I recognized to my delight The Hilarious Aussie Girls. They brought me tea and blankets and warmed me with their care and concern, all while telling me how very impressed they were at the distance I'd traveled. God, I love those girls.
Views: Fantastic. Mountains: Unimaginably Huge. Weather: Cold. Altitude: A bit of an issue.
I'm back in Pokhara now. I think I've lost about 20 pounds. I'm sore in all sorts of places. I never want to carry that pack again, but tomorrow I've got to catch the tourist bus to Kathmandu and renew my visa and check on a volunteer opportunity. Today I plan to eat a lot of samosas and take it slow and easy.
On the morning of the 28th of December I took a disorienting bus ride, sitting then standing, possibly overpaying, unsure when to disembark, to the cluster of shacks known in these parts as Phedi, where I was to begin my trek into the Annapurna Conservation Area. I jumped off the bus when instructed, dragging my pack from underneath the woman who was sitting on it, looked around, saw only the standard wood-scrap constructed shops on one side of the road, and a sheer mountain wall rising up from the other side. A shop owner offered to sell me some water. I declined. He then offered to sell me a walking stick, revealing to me that I was indeed in the right place.
"Annapurna Base Camp?" I inquired. He pointed to the mountain wall, on which I now noticed there were an approximation of stairs leading up into the forest that clung to the mountain. I breathed deeply, shouldered my pack and started climbing, telling myself that I didn't really expect it to be easy.
My journey took seven days in total, four up and three down, covering around fifty miles and climbing to about 13,500 feet. There are several options available as far as routs go, but they all essentially start on the edges of modernization and then retreat from it. Nothing within the Conservation Area is accessible by road. There tends to be a settlement every two hours or so, but as the trail progresses further from where motor vehicles have ever been they tend to become increasingly small and spartan. It took about a day and a half before I was past the point of the last permanent settlement of Chomrong and on to little clusters of guest houses that survive only by serving the trekkers and their guides, along with a little bit of farming. Everything that comes to these towns is either made there or brought in on the backs of porters. It tends to put the price of your egg fried noodles in perspective once you've seen a sixty year old man straining under the weight of eight metal crates, each filled with live chickens and strapped to his back, walking slowly up the same hill that you're climbing for pleasure.
Most of the other tourists had guides. Many had porters to carry their bags. It's not all that expensive and there's nothing wrong with it, but I took a certain degree of pride in "covering my own sector". If there was an unmarked fork in the trail I waited and asked for advice. My pack was heavy, but I looked with a bit of contempt on those tourists shouldering mere "day packs" while their porters carried impossibly heavy loads.
The trail experience was one of quiet, working solitude, with periodic welcome bursts of human interaction. Most times, without a guide or a companion, I was alone as I walked, pondering life, remembering, planning, thinking about the miles I've covered and the miles still left to go. In the evenings, if I was lucky, there was a friendly campfire or dining hall (with a gas heater blazing an open flame beneath the table) where I could share stories, play some cards, and pass the time with other trekkers. If the trail had been particularly grueling that day, I found this was especially important. More than any other, Day Five found me near breaking, on my way down but a long way from finished, heart racing at a disconcerting pace with every up hill step (because there's still plenty of up on your way down. Oh yes.) stumbling half dazed into Deorali, where I recognized to my delight The Hilarious Aussie Girls. They brought me tea and blankets and warmed me with their care and concern, all while telling me how very impressed they were at the distance I'd traveled. God, I love those girls.
Views: Fantastic. Mountains: Unimaginably Huge. Weather: Cold. Altitude: A bit of an issue.
I'm back in Pokhara now. I think I've lost about 20 pounds. I'm sore in all sorts of places. I never want to carry that pack again, but tomorrow I've got to catch the tourist bus to Kathmandu and renew my visa and check on a volunteer opportunity. Today I plan to eat a lot of samosas and take it slow and easy.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
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