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Up early and we escape the germ ridden mosquito infested hot and humid town by horse and cart to the border of India and Nepal 2km away, then another 2km to a Nepalese town. The customs said the rate was 1 Indian Rupee but the lad tried to hassle for 7.5Rs each and was promptly shouted at.
We get a bus from the Nepalese town to Kathmandu which winds up continuous S bends every 400 metres and seems to be doing a U turn. Very tiring and Joy has developed a very bad cold or flu, I hope it isn’t malaria. I think bad stodgy food and too much travelling has lowered our resistance. We only have two stops in the 12 hours of winding road and at the end of the journey we are happy to be hussled to Lagan Lodge Hote 12 Rs double room with plywood walls separating Dennis and Don, two travelling companions next door.
We rest and hobble around the town for a short time. Quite a good evening meal. Joy has bad cold and I am still ill.
Up early and feeling better. We hire bikes for a few pence and cycle to the post office to get my letters from mum and Kev, thanks a lot. What bike have you got Kev? Some people have come here by BMW bike from Germany and Holland. We met an English couple on a Honda CB250 in Herat in Afghanistan. I used to have one and wouldn’t have been comfortable riding from Carlisle to London on it, but there are all sorts of travellers having their own sorts of adventures here. Congrats on the Beetle Pauline, will we hear from you sometime? Dad, well done but slow down the weekends and a new world will open up for you. Hope Bon & Merv manage to get a suitable home.
Trekking news was disastrous. To go to Everest we can walk. That takes 6 weeks adn with preparation and recovery time we need in total 7 or 8 weeks in Nepal but our visas only last for 4 weeks and to extend our visa costs £3 for 1 month. That’s not too bad but to get it extended you have to buy Nepalese Rupees at the rate of $5 per day to guarantee to spend your money in the country. So for one month we would have to spend $150 each, $300 and if we don’t spend it all then we can only exchange $30 back into dollars, the rest must be changed to Indian rupees.
The trekking permit costs £9 for 6 weeks, a lot. Porters cost 20-30NRs £1-£1.50 per day and you provide food for them only if you feel kind. A bus goes towards the start of the trek to Everest for 45p but from there it is 6 weeks trekking there and back. A plane flies to Lukla below Namche Bazzar and a 7 day trek reaches base camp but it costs 500NRs £22 and you can only take 35kg baggage. A plane flies to Paphlup which is 2 days walk before Lukla for 12NRs but only 5kg baggage with no more allowed under any circumstances.
So for 2 months in Nepal a big wadge of our budget would disappear.
We have limited funds but unlimited dreams of travel. We want to climb in the Everest and Annapurna region. We think of going back to the Kulu vallety to ski. We want to explore India from the Himalaya in the north to the mysteries of the south.
We have a serious intention of island hopping from the south of India via Indonesia, Bali and others to Australia and maybe get to New Zealand to see the Alps there and meet Joy’s uncle and aunt there. When I resigned my maths and science teaching job at Nelson Thomlinson School in Wigton my leaving present was a book called “Island Hopping to Australia”. So stretching our finances to match our dreams explains why we sometimes lived too cheaply and suffered illness, though there is so much illness around that it is difficult to avoid it.
We intend to get a plane to Lukla but we have to wait 1 week for a booking place, then we walk 7 days to Everest and 10 days back to Kathmandu. [Eventually these plans changed for the better]
I hope our feet last out and I wish we had brought some loop stitch sox. I’ll just have to buy some local ones and use meths to harden my skin.
[Our equipment was definitely not suitable for mountaineering. I had all the mountaineering gear boxed up in UK ready to be posted for our Himalaya climbing but when I arrived in Delhi I found the customs import duty was so huge and a bond was needed so it was financially impossible to bring them. Consequently I had only my size 11 Doctor Martens air sole boots with no ankle support, some cotton hippy trousers that laced up at the ankles to keep the insects out and a pair of rough cotton long johns. Various local shirts and my trusted quilted micro fibre jacket that also served as my pillow justified bringing it through deserts to the snows. We did have sleeping bags that were excellent for some conditions but a disaster in others. Joy had a Mountain Equipment Redline with genuine Chinese Eiderduck down and it kept her warm even down to below minus 20C but was hell in hot places. I had a Snowline version which was better in cool places but terrible in the same very cold conditions. The balaclava was thick wool and served me well. Cooking was on an old primus stove which took local dirty paraffin and our pans were thin steel ones that I chose for durability but which later proved useful for the lid was used for cutting steps in the snow. ]
We discover a pie shop. In many of these countries you eat your main course at one restaurant then go to another one for cake and tea. The cakes are lovely and reasonable at 12p each so we are finally in cake heaven, or is it cake nirvana, with coffee, lemon meringue, sponges of peanut, chestnut, coconut, coffee, cashew nut, pineapple, apple and cinnamon pie and other pastry pies. You can put sweet yoghurt on and wash it down with hot lemon or lemon tea. What a difference to the meagre food we have survived on so far.
Our cycle rides around Kathmandu are a very relaxing way to cover ground because it quite a flat city. On every cross roads is a square and in it a sort of wooden mini pagoda with sculptured elephant gods and other carvings all liberally daubed with red ochre which I suppose is part of the religious belief.
There aren’t too many cows in the streets and few cars which is just as well because once we got out of the wide modern central roads there are not many roads for the cars, only walking tracks for porters and it was like being back in the dark ages. The streets in Kathmandu are like the old lanes of Carlisle. The houses are brick with wooden pillars like Tudor houses. The first floor overhangs the street and other levels rise up to 5 levels high. The fronts of the buildings are beautifully carved wood and sometimes ornate cast iron fascias. The window have louvre shutters. Old men and babies and their mothers peer from them, sometimes spitting from them into the street (at least there are not spitting at us like we suffered in Iran!) or throwing the slops of their food preparation or cooking or washing down into the street where cows will later eat the peelings, or the slops may find their way into the open sewer at the side of the road.
To be fair, there are few open sewers to be seen, not like Tehran, but the gutters look like they could do with being flushed out. It’s quite a new hazard to be walking or cycling down a narrow street and have to look out for falling slops! I suppose it is just like medieval England but at least everything is biodegradable. I wonder what will happen when the plastic packaged world meets their balanced bio-recycling tradition?
Our visas are extended without the officer looking at our bank statement for the evidence of us buying Nepalese Rupees but we still have to cash $200 of travellers cheques to pay for the flight to Lukla 500NRs each and when we check we find the idiot at Royal Nepalese Airlines has not given us full information. In fact he tried to con us into paying 500NRs £44 each when the flight should be less than a third of that price! We decide to ignore the flight to Lukla and go to a tiny airfield four days walk south of Lukla that will bring us up the Dudh Khosi on a route very rarely used by westerners. It will then be 7 further days to Everest base camp.
We expect that food will be bare rations of dhal bhat, rice and lentils so we eat until we are fit to burst, hoping to build some fat reserves (or just greed, so what). There is a place called Joe’s Cafe and we have enchelados, spring roll with noodles and chicken, beefburger and chips, soup with veg and egg dropped in and of course the cakes.
I was having a nice sleep in but our nights are getting troubled. Last night Joy suddenly woke and shouted “Pete, something’s trying to get in my sleeping bag”. I had visions of dirty men again but it was a mouse. The place is infested. Above us the ceiling is covered with newspaper and earlier we saw something scurrying around above the suspended newspapers and we expected it to fall through any moment. Maybe this was the newspaper mouse and when we put the light on there were mouse droppings all over the bed. Joy went back to sleep with dreams of her face covered with scabs. We noticed two more mice crawling around. No doubt they are attracted by the rather mature Yak cheese we buy. It’s like Edam but mature and great taste so I don’t blame the furries for trying to nibble.
The other night time problem is mosquitoes. I have been nibbled, eaten and chewed up and regurgitated by them every night since Greece. It is not uncommon to wake up to find me hitting myself where I think they are landing. It’s not nice to be woken up by someone slapping your face, especially when it is yourself doing the slapping! The latest punishment some version of the flying bugs inflict on us is to swoop in on a low level bombing run and “buzz” us during the night. These ones don’t bite, they just torture us by waking us so we can await the inevitable attack but it doesn’t come until you are asleep, it is torture. It doesn’t matter if you have a mosquito net or cover yourself with clothes and sleep fully dressed and swelter in the heat of the night, they will find a weakness in your defences and “zap” they’ve got you again. We eventually found that smouldering mossie coils see to work though I dread to think what sort of chemical warfare we are inflicting on us.
We are in the pie shop now and have given in to every vice known to Nepalese man, yes it’s the fancy cakes again. I confess now that one of the cakes has currants in that are a solid lump of something, oh dear they are cannabis. Actually we steered clear of the dope on offer in cakes, ice cream and for smoking because we noticed some awful sights of westerners who had become dope heads, the word dopy comes from the lethargic waste of space dossers who get so laid back from getting permanently drunk/high that they don’t actually do anything with their lives out here, just get stoned. The Shel Silverstein song “I got stoned and I missed it” sums up the wasters here. We don’t want to waste the time here and the experiences on offer so good old occasional beer and fattening cakes and pies will do us; we ain’t going to get stoned and miss anything in Nepal and the Himalaya!
Most embarrassing today. My runs have continued now for nearly 2 weeks and I go to the hospital to have my stools examined. I pushed to the front of the queue and within 5 minutes they ask me to perform. I’s supposed to have dioreah but I can’t perform! Here I am at the hospital, broken hearted because I spent ten rupees but only farted! Is this the lyric to a new song or my occasional experiment with the local vegetable that’s making a dope out of me?
Guess why the Ganges is so called, yes it’s from Ganja which means spirit or higher place which the local holy men with saffron robes and long pigtails and scraggy hair are seeking or are stoned in while they smoke their ganja to get to their higher plane … They also beg which we find annoying. Why should we pay to help them get to their stoned holy plane says Joy. We are trying to get there ourselves without the drugs.
That may sound selfish but I don’t think she really means it, we both agree with helping the needy and we think it’s good to help others because in that unselfish process you get nearer along “the path”, as it were, to self evolution just like the Transcendental Meditation that we both do in our spiritual search and the Christian attitude which we are both brought up in, the getting to know the “right” feeling of action that leads to good action. But I think we should get there under our own steam in the bodily sense, even if we pay our gurus or spiritual (and political) leaders. So bodily the beggars should work to keep body together and if they must spend full time with a guru to learn how to tell us heathens how to get there, ie teachers or monks, then let’s support them. But the beggar holy men are anathema to our hard working protestant ethic of our country ie good hard work is Godly work.
But in this country when only 40 years ago they had not gone through their industrial revolution, in fact they have not approached the same evolution from agrarian to industrial society. They have 90% of their population engaged in the fields and agricultural related work. Even here and in Raxaul and other small towns we have passed through we see hand to mouth existence. I mean from the allotment sized family holding to their mouths while at the same time having to work for others on the fields. So to give an extra handful of food from their larder to an old man who has worked and given his body and labour for the society is no big deal to them, it’s all nature’s bounty, now he goes in search of peace. Great, it’s a retirement worth giving your younger years for if you get “enlightenment” at the end of it. That’s the Indian Hindu way of life and I can accept it as valid in their society but they mustn’t infringe on ours nor us on theirs by giving tourist money to them or we will encourage men in search of Holy Peace to become professional beggars.
There’s a lot of Buddhist Europeans and Yanks about with shaven heads except for the topknot which is a thin tuft of hair so that they can have their soul pulled to heaven at the last moment??? We even saw a woman with the shaved head and topknot dancing in the street in a state of …. (stoned) she was French.
Oh yes, back to the journal. When we were coming to Kathmandu around the ZZZ roads the bus tyre went suddenly BANG – and there’s hairpin turn and a huge drop. Oops. Fortunately it’s a rear tyre and they are double tyres. Within seconds the completely bald spare is put on to replace the puncture, as smooth as a pit stop. I think it must happen regularly. We all get off the bus. I try to help. The holy man sits down and calmly lights up a huge chillum full of dope, that’s the way to really help mend a puncture, get the vibes from the higher plane. Actually all I did to help was to try to lift the punctured wheel back onto the roof of the bus because all the locals are smaller than Joy and really scraggy.
Oh yes, nearly forgot, when we stopped for tea on the 11 hour bus journey from India / Nepal border town of Raxaul to Kathmandu we were really gasping for a cuppa and about to slake our thirst when Joy saw her tea being strained through a can with holes punched in the bottom of it. Great initiative you would think but the label was still on the strainer can stating “RAT POISON” so we hastily moved to another tea house.
An interesting and intimate way of eating is to share a plate of dhal bhat and veg and only eat with the fingers of the right hand with each others fingers chasing the bits around the plate.
The road climbing up to Kathmandu with its ZZZ bends reminds me of the similar windy road to Kashmir where the road signs need some variety from the Z warning. So there are signs saying
“Be gentle on my curves”
“Speed kills”
“Slowliness leads to safeness”
“Think of the children”
I’m feeling more sober now so excuse the rambling from yesterday. I’ve just taken a sample to hospital and saw beautiful snow covered mountains. Time to get focused and motivated. Someone tried to sell Joy some cocaine and she got really mad with them. You can get any drug here. In the pharmacy I asked for indigestion tablets and they didn’t have any normal anti-acid but offered me some highly potent durg for “stimulating stomach enzymes” it had written on it take only on doctor’s direction” but they insisted that I try it.
The problem is that the “pharmacists” are not qualified and do not speak much English so hand signs and charade acting is not a good way to communicate medical situations and they get drugs that are left behind after expeditions return to their countries and do not take all their gear; medication would be out of date and not useable under regulations in countries of rich western climbers but in a country with no money any drug seems better than none. I did not buy the medicine and had a hot lemon drink instead.
The main drug of choice for westerners wanting the Eastern experience is canabis and 10 grams would cost 30NRs about £1.30 and is openly sold on the street and smoked in cafes or put in cakes, even though signs said we shouldn’t, and we didn’t.
We had a lovely meal, a huge bowl of soup full of veg for main course with fruit salad of mangoes, guvas, special apple and banana curd.
My sample is negative but doctor says it could be a dormant phase of an amoebic type of dysentery and I get some pills in case it is. 2 lots of pills, test, consultation was £2. Joy does some washing and hangs it out of our window but some local upstairs casually throws dirty water into the street and it hits her clean washing! A local bookshop buys in second hand books at half value and sells at slightly more, like paying a library with a huge selection of every language and some classic and some serious books and I start working my way through Solzhenitsyn Gulag Archipelago about the political prisoners in Stalin’s time and Gunter Grass and Dog Ears about Nazis and … it’s great not to have distractions and get some serious reading done.
A beggar with a club foot with open sores looking like gangrene upsets us, nothing is hidden and in turn our emotions and reflections about what the world is and what is our place in it is exposed, nothing is hidden, not even our reactions to imponderable situations.
Why can’t they have cleanliness and hygiene? Is it lack of common sense or of education. We see later in the villages how in the typical one roomed house the lady will tend a fire fuelled from burning yak dung which she places on the smouldering pile with the same hand as preparing the meal and the smoke rises everywhere inside the room because there is no chimney, I suppose it would let the heat escape and also it takes extra expensive stone to build and maybe the smoke rising to the thatched roof puts smoke tar in the thatch to waterproof it or deter the insects and mice from living in the thatch. But we cannot expect them to be scientific about it when the lady’s eyes stream with tears from the smoke and she wipes her eye with the dirty hand that is handling fresh and smouldering yak dung. Conjunctivitis is very common in Nepal. We also noted on the Everest trek that the locals don’t have sense to crap downstream of where they drink their water. So culture, hygiene, tradition, education are all linked and what we call “common sense” is a combination of all of them.
We have just read “The Naked Ape” by Desmond Morris and wonder if Nepal is a society that has stagnated in not caring for its health, hygiene or diet. I think we are still talking about India, Nepal is on the whole cleaner. Perhaps we are getting jaded by the third world standards of living that we are immersed in.
We are getting bored with the city. It’s beautiful and interesting but not stimulating for us. We need activity and mountains. I don’t know how these people just fester around the cities, but I suppose I once did for a few months in London before I felt stifled in soul and body and decided to hitch hike around Europe, but that’s another story.
It took 300NRs £12.50 to buy dehydrated food such as porridge, muesli and tinned fish, nuts etc. It was much more expensive than Kashmir. An extra 100NRs £5 bought the inevitable extras like the water carrier etc. I needed new socks but £1 would only buy local rough wool socks with bits of twigs in them.
We have purchased maps this time so we shouldn’t get lost. It’s also the busiest route in Nepal so we’ll be bumping into people all the time.
It’s raining! And it has been raining all night. Joy did the washing yesterday and it’s wet but we depart at 7:00am on a plane to Lamedanda and we must store some clothes. I hope the stove can dry them in time. This is supposed to be the good weather period!
I’v just had some light cotton trousers made with drawstrings around the waste and ankles and look like Andy Pandy, they were £1 made to measure! Good for trekking to keep things from crawling up my legs.
We’ll fly to Lamidanda and walk 9 days to Everest. We should be in Namche Bazaar for Saturday. We’ll be back in Kathmandu in 3 or 4 weeks and hope to hear from you then.
Love Pete & Joy
Just recd your letters from post office as I post this one. Thanks for the letters Dad Mum Glen. Am returning overland. Am sending for money from my bank, I have £170 remaining in it. We’ll last until January I hope and will work at Kulu valley. We’re OK for money and very happy together. Haven’t read your letter yet, no time, bye for now.