Confused Understanding

The sign on the Embassy was just for show, so after one last day of Kathmandu we slept on the pavement again. This time we blatantly demonstrated our ability to learn lessons and slept comfortably in our sleeping bags with heads perched on down coats like clouds. After picking up our ludicrously expensive and obnoxiously hard-to-get stickers in our passports, the journey begins. Night bus to Sonauli, morning Sonauli to Gorackhur, afternoon Varanasi and 27 hours after Kathmandu we're smack in the heart of India.

India is plastered on everything from textiles to newspapers to philosophies. The name invigorates the mind just by its sound. Ideas of its mystique still misguide millions. The fountain of the wisdom of the East lines the minds of most, but defies true understanding. Any individual's conception of this place, many would agree, is mere illusion. And among travelers especially, ideas of India are trapped in minds still not wholly able to comprehend, yet visibly awestruck. "You're going to Varanasi? Magic. Just Fucking Magical. You're in for it..."

And all of it is true - we are here in the heart of irrationality. A land where perhaps thousands of sacred cows sleep on main streets as rickshaw drivers struggle to move their hundreds of pounds of cargo around them; and where pigs rummage through city trash. The urinals here are open to the street; and more often than not a gutter will do just fine. But more than a dirty, uncivilized city, Varanasi is simply a different mentality. When a Westerner arrives and says "ugh...how could you live like this?" he should really look for the antithesis of his reality. How can HE live so clean? Why must he have his neatly arranged culture, with its monotheistic snobbery and its "pure" water clear of pollutants? To challenge the very idea of your existence, drop yourself in India.

However, a brief sojourn on the banks of the Ganges will try the most open soul. Dead cows, pigs, goats float by. A quadrapolegic corpse decays on the banks near the drinking water intake. At the burning ghat, piles of wood barely conceal sizzling flesh on bodies returning to pure carbon to be thrown in the current. Sewers empty the soiled discharge upstream from bathing worshippers. You see, the Ganges is holy. It is pure in a purely Eastern sense though the epitome of impure in our Western minds. We see only disease, filth, decay, and the end of life. India sees a gateway, a ghat, to a new world. It sees rebirth and a cleanliness of the divine. Rationality has no place in Varanasi, so please leave it at home while you bathe with corpses.

However, the challenge remains to cross the rift of philosophies; and to cross one must first truly want to cross. I, however, have perhaps an overdose of rationality embedded on my mind. That, along with stories of other travelers feeling more violently ill than they've ever felt just for a drop of the Water Ganga in their mouths, means I will not partake in the local ritual. I will not be among those lucky souls said to attain Nirvana by losing their lives in this holy city.

After our first dose of cows and cremations, we lost ourselves in the Islamic section of town and were quickly sucked into a silk factory. We sat on a mattress with the owner as he threw silk cloths of all colors and designs across the floor in a flurry of sensory overload. Blues, greens, purples, reds flying across the room like a technicolor dream screamed to our eyes that we were where we thought we were going after all: India. Of course, the India of silks and spices is only one of many misconceptions of this land: evidenced by the fact that curry as an all-encompassing term does not exist here. Rather, it is a British invention.

In fact, it is both easy to ignore and hard to forget that the British ruled this land for centuries as English cars still honk their way through glowing wedding parades drumming in the night streets. Thus, it seems interesting to us that we might enter this sub-continent of confusion on Thanksgiving: the day celebrating British in America alongside the natives. Let's be perfectly clear: How many Indians did YOU have your thanksgiving dinner with this year? Check and mate.

Onward we go...

Privileged White Folk Don't Have to Spill Blood for God

The last entry was rushed a bit, if you couldn't tell, so let me fill in a minor point.

We arrived at the embassy of India at 1:00 in the morning, where we were the fifth and sixth people in line to drop off form #1 to acquire a visa. Around 2:30, there were close to fifteen, one of whom was an obnoxious German man who wears a beret and a blanket over his shoulders like one would don a shawl. He immediately begins bitching and moaning about every detail of "the list," which is now in the charge of the Chinese man in spot number 1. "It's too small." "There are people on it who aren't here right now." "Why is he so anxious to get it back after I put my name on it?" At one point, I considered calling him the List Nazi, but thought better of it out of respect for the most probable of his family heritage (if I ever run for president, please omit this line from any press documents).

Anyhow, he eventually left everyone to sleep on their staked out section of icy concrete slab; only to open the mic to the new moaners arriving every few minutes. In fact, by 7:00 there were over 70 or 80 (we stopped counting, really, as they'd no chance in Lucifer's abode of getting their forms in at that point) people in line - and every last one of them seemed incapable to talk (read: bitch, moan) about anything but the visa process at the Indian Embassy. Whine whine whine whine whine whine. The worst of it? The vortex is nearly inescapable - before long, you too are enjoying your cheese desert in Paris. You're one of them.

Talking to Jenny, she brought up a great point - it's something we have in common, so we talk about it. True. Except, of course, that the entire point of traveling is to get so far away from anything with which we have in common we can't even remember what it's like to be around the similar. The Indian Government, it seems, has taken the visa process to a new level by not only robbing travelers/tourists of valuable dollars for absolutely no reason; but by robbing travelers of a week or more of the extraordinary. A week or more of movement.

Determined not to let the sovereign entity of a billion people in South Asia cramp our style, we firmly stomped our feet in its face with the purchase of an airline ticket. Take that, India. We'll see you in a week - on our terms.


First, though, we drop by the US embassy to fetch a letter of "no objection" - "The United States Government has no objection to Michael Lane with passport number...to travel to..." - However, the consular section of said embassy is not at said embassy but at the Yak and Yeti hotel. Wondering at this bizarre turn, we arrive at the hotel to see a small army surrounding it. We're literally waved through just by saying that we're US citizens. Waved through, that is, to the first steel reinfoced door leading to the security point leading to a bullet-proof window where your purpose is verified and you pass through steel-reinforced door number two. Inside lay seven windows (all bullet-proof, of course), six of which we walk by on our right, with perhaps 50 Nepalis waiting in the area on our left. Looking like complete trash after our night on the street, we feel awkward zipping to the front of the line; sitting on our pedastols like over-privileged goons. While our request is processed, the woman at the next-nearest window drills prospective visitors to our homeland. "WHY do you want to go...yes, but WHY?" "How will you AFFORD this?" "But you have no real PLANS!" "Your English needs HELP!" And right there, watching all those Visa denials; seeing the sentiment, "it is very difficult to go to the US" manifest to reality, the revelation is complete: Mike and Jenny, quit your sob story about the line at the Indian Embassy, you little white pricks. Oh boo hoo, you have to wait a few hours to go wander around India. The injustice. Oh the humanity.


Afterwards, we walked out of the modern Sinai and into the airport. After waiting an hour or so, the flight is cancelled. Apparently, Gorkha airlines can't afford the fuel to fly today. So we waste an afternoon back in Kathmandu again while we hold out hope that Gorkha Airlines will sit out on the road with a little cardboard sign to get enough gas for us to fly the subsequent day. No go.

Instead, we jump a bus to Gorkha - back West. Somehow by this point Jenny and I are both sick in our own special ways, and we both feel like crap. Nevertheless, we awake and meander up the nearby mountain to the palace at home on its top. The most eventful part of the fortress must have been the orange salesman outside, from whom we devoured a total of 15 oranges almost all at once. Moreover, it was during this orange extravaganza that we met a group of Nepali students out to Gorkha for the day. They stuffed me full of Daal Baat down below, while Jenny looked on in ill agony. Afterwards, they solicited relationship advice a-la-third grade "see that girl over there, I like her. NO don't tell her" despite their being our peers.

Soon after we left them, we ran into Sobin and Sobin, and spent the afternoon with them as Sobin #1 was an, of course, English student nearby anxious to talk of any and everything - such as how Maoists are a miserable people, and how he doesn't really blame the Royal System either and he thinks the political parties need to get out of the way, anyhow (they are pretty terrible, too, from what I hear). Eventually, we duck away for respite and rest, but only to return an hour later so they can cook us dinner - what else but Daal Baat? Interesting about Sobin is his versatility in English - he refuses to relegate himself to tour guide English as so many others do, and instead forces us into English games in which he's the talk show host and we the participants. Bizarre though it was, I do believe it was beneficial to him.

We bang on the gate at our hotel as we are past the curfew of 8:00 imposed on this town in the heart of Maoist influences, and pass out. In the a.m., we plan to hike to Manakamana - about six hours away walking. On the bus to the "trailhead," however, we find that we have somehow swapped our illnesses and switch gears to a different trailhead that only takes two hours. When we arrive there, our illnesses are enough to persuade us away from that option as well and toward the Gondola. Read that one more time. Yup, you got it. Gondola. Like Vail, Aspen, Beaver Creek...such is Manakamana, but sans snow.

In fact, this ancient holy pilgrimage site is now similar to Disneyland. One emerges from his steel cage 3 kilometers and 1000 vertical meters away from his beginning, and into a land where a temple on a postcard can be purchased at every turn. A land where one can have his picture emblazened on a dinner plate. Where he can toss a beachball and buy a keychain. He can eat ice cream and drink beer. And, of course, he can sacrifice a goat to the God Manakamana so that she might fulfill his wishes. (No, the 130 ruppee fee to lug a goat up the Gondola is not a joke)

In fact, this morning we witnessed hundreds of followers with offerings in tow - and we witnessed their final destination. Head bent back, the screaming "baaaaaaa"s abruptly end with a swift fall of the Khukuri as the blood spurts toward the drain. The head is placed in front of the shrine with flowers atop it, then moved to a platter to transport it to the temple - the home of Manakamana herself. Just how large the pile of goat-heads inside could be we may never know - "Hindus Only allowed to enter."

Now, then, what should one do after one sacrifices one's goat to one of one's many Gods? Why not take a photograph alongside the only white people in sight. But who will start it all off? How about the thirty middle school students with their principle. That's right, they hounded us, and then the rotations began. Often without so much as a word exchanged, locals would stand next to us while their friends captured this once-in-a-lifetime experience on film. Just when we thought we were off the hook, another would come. Some would leave email addresses, some would take ours, most would act as though we were old friends. Mostly, though, they just wanted pictures along white folk. We realized here that being famous is bunk, and that Eminem's lyrics are wholly justified.

While hundreds of people piled up in line during the 2 hour intermission (only Vishnu knows what Manakamana could be doing in the temple for all that time), we bought a keychain and hopped back in the Gondola and touched on the impermanence of life while watching goats zip by unknowingly toward their deaths. -- Is it better to kill a goat for your stomach or your God? Is there really any difference? Perhaps only one thing was decided for sure - such a temple would suffer innumerable protesters were it located in the land of the free.

Then we solidified the impermanence of our time away from the Indian Embassy with a ride atop a bus with a bag of dried yak meat; followed by a taxi ride to the embassy gates, where a sign has been convenitently placed. It reads "please do not line up here early in the morning." The guard seemed to shrug off the very idea of a line as if to say, "that's for stupid white boys." Instead, he insinuated that we should show up at 9:30 and push our way through the masses in true Indian style. So here we go...

200 Miles of Zen Buddhist Germans, et al

After realizing that the reason the bus had left from Kathmandu fifteen minutes early was that we were not on the bus that we'd paid for, we forked over for three fresh tickets rather than risking waiting on the roadside until the proper bus came by. After all, we can't even read the writing on the things, and there's no way we would've known which one to hail. In any event, the second bus was cheaper, so at least we got a deal on one of them.

A few hours later we arrive in Besishahar to see the seedling of the spectacle that was to become our lives for the following weeks. Hoards of "trekkers" readying themselves and their gear and their porters and their guides for a trip of 200 miles around one of the world's great peaks (measured by distance from the sea, the world's 9th greatest), where neither porters nor guides are even remotely necessary save for the most inept of tourists. That said, there was a plethora of inept tourists. Particularly from France, not that that means anything...

But rather than bore you here with detailed accounts of every peak towering above the valley floor in a manner previously inconceivable; and rather than try in futility to describe them so that you understand the magnificence, the magic of the place - after all, everyone's seen pictures and you still don't understand. Even if you think you do, you don't. The only way to know the place is to stand under the Nigliris as they turn pink in the sunset miles above, with Dhaulagiri brushing off its rank as the fifth highest while shrugging behind you calmling observing, "do you really think I care about such petty things? Leave it to humans to try to classify what they can't comprehend..." - yes, rather than bore you with endless details of the Himalaya, I'll just provide a snapshot: duality, dichotomy, contradictions.

Oxcarts plowing fields and four star resorts with helipads. Workers (probably what Marx had in mind when he wrote of peasants) hammering away with picks and shovels at sheer rock walls and throwing boulders into the abyss below in their quest to open the region to access by roads, while trekkers trot past them to get to the next town with the next good view and the "german bakery" so they (we) can enjoy apple pie. Prayer flags flying buddhist mantras alongside shrines to Vishnu, Shiva, and the rest of the Hindi crew. When thoughts of the western world creep into mind, the dichotomy enhances: the 21st century versus a lifestyle stemming to before christ.

And, of course, geography. The trek begins in the tropical heat of Besishahar only to climb steadily past throngs of tourists retreating from the unseasonable depths of snow leading to Thorong La Pass. In fact, we ditch the tropics for the alpine and affirm the claims - about 3 meters of white bliss has fallen on the pass. As a little preparation, I lead my father up toward Ice Lake - at 15,000 feet, we have to post-hole most of the way; and we never even found the stupid thing. Little worry, though, for the view of Annapurna III, II, and Gangapurna makes the turnaround at just under 15,000 feet well worth it. Then, we truck further toward the apex. On the final morning, my father is gidgety but we successfully dissuade his ridiculous mention of a porter and prod him skyward. We leave Thorong Phedi "Base Camp" at 7:00 am, 3.5 hours after the first crew of inept French people. After passing them and most of the rest of their kin who reminded me continuously of the Everest disaster of 1996, we arrive at the pass somewhere near 11. So there we stood, one woman who had her ACL replaced six months ago, a man who was born in 1942, and, well, me - all in a row. A row 18,000 feet above the sea in snow up to our waists. Not bad....

Then the final duality - we descend into the depths, where Annapurna I and Dhaulagiri stand as gatekeepers above the Kali Gandaki - the deepest gorge in the world.

All the while as we alternated between intense experiences and relaxing Tuborg Beer, Chhang, Racksi, and apple brandy sessions, we always had something to keep the mind busy. And we always reveled in the moment, and the opportunity at every encounter to simply love life.



Oh, and Maoists. The dicotomy doesn't dissolve with thoughts of Maoists, it enhances. Nepal is a country engaged in an all out civil war. Military road blocks line the "highways" and hype is endlessly exaggerated. However, soldiers rarely have ammunition, we think, and many have rags stuffed in their WWII era rifles. On the trek, one forgets entirely about the travel warnings and the terrified Americans in their society of fear who repeatedly plea that "you can't go to Nepal now, it's not safe."

Though many areas through which our route passed were supposed to be through areas controlled by communist ambitions, we only encountered a Maoist "checkpoint" on the final day. Even then, the procedure is less than intimidating - two small unarmed men flash a pack of receipts and, mostly to avoid a lengthy discussion, we hand over 15 dollars each and move on with proof of payment in hand. Of course, one must think of the atrocities committed by such interests in the past years and of just where this money will be spent; but alas, to pay the park fee to the legitimate royal government is to support corruption which robs people of rights and of life perhaps as frequently. Not to mention the taxes we pay at home - where does that money go? Go check out this week's newsweek for a clue, and follow up with a phone call to John McCain to ask him how supportive Bush has been of his bill to ban torture by the US armed forces. Bush, or if you prefer a more party-neutral approach - Washington, and the Maoists may not differ so much in their stances on human rights as many might believe.

Anyhow, we emerged back into civilization, sort of. (but not before running into Steve Gore - a high school classmate of mine - six years out of GWHS and as far away from Denver as possible) We spend a day in Pokhara, then back to this capital city to jettison my father and spend a night sleeping on cold pavement outside of the Indian Embassy to get the first of two visa forms submitted in the morning.

Today, we head to Tumlingtar in Eastern Nepal - partly to kill time while our forms are processed at the ever-more-ridiculous Indian Embassy, and partly to get well off of the tourist track and see what's in the middle of nowhere Eastern Nepal. We've packed peanut butter and cheese, so we should be all set.

Yet again Asia strikes and I'll be out of touch for a week or two. Happy Thanksgiving to all, and Retox - leave it to you to discount all your previous knowledge of the world in exchange for what was learned on a single rock climb. Perhaps the rest of humanity has something to learn from you.