*I'm fast-forwarding through many details of the ride now. From now on I'll stick to the bigger events, rather than highlight something about every part of the ride.
I’m overwhelmed. Again. Riding into Kathmandu was like
being a sapling carried off in an avalanche. As soon as I rolled onto the first
major street, I was engulfed by legions of motorcycles, cars, and cargo trucks kicking
up clouds of dust and mixing it with exhaust and smoke. The only difference
from India was the diminished number of cows. The chaos was just as frenetic,
just as erratic, and all of it was ringing with one prevalent message:
You
are nothing but a mere bit of detritus in the sloughing mountainside.
A great part of my discomfort with being sifted into
the throngs of Kathmandu is that it destroyed my illusion of self-importance.
We, the western, “independent” traveler, operate under the Homeric idea that we
are undertaking some odyssey by coming to places like these, places that we
have misinterpreted as “wild” (i.e. developing. i.e. poor. i.e. different). We
construe the journey as an adventure, we profess great learning, we think we’re
better than those who stayed home. You are reading evidence of this phenomenon
right now. I’ve succumbed to all of these pitfalls in the last five hundred
words. It’s the premise of this whole damn blog. It’s a philosophy rife with
error.
But there’s hope. Yes, potential for “great learning”.
Because Kathmandu doesn’t give a shit about you.
There’s too much going on. Even if I had a functional
map, it wouldn’t matter. I pointed myself toward what I imagined was city center
of the sprawling behemoth and I rolled with the masses. When they zigged, I
zigged. Their zags were my zags. Were they headed where I was headed? No idea.
But moving with them was all I could do. Breaking from the fray would mean
standing against the avalanche; I’d be buried or killed (see, there’s that
Odyssey byline again). I had to move with them, become one with them.
Of course, this Zen philosophy led me nowhere. I found
myself on the opposite end of the city, far away from any place that could be
considered a center. Apparently, Kathmandu is circumnavigable by a ring road. To
follow the masses means to circle around and around, passing the same sights (I
swear I’ve seen that concrete building before – That pile of bricks looks
familiar – I definitely know that goat) until ultimately you have to abandon
the pretext of Zen asceticism and aim for the center of the metropolitan
merry-go-round.
Thamel. Not quite bullseye, but for all intents and
purposes, specifically those of the western tourist persuasion, Thamel is a
neighborhood that operates as basecamp in Kathmandu. It’s where you can sign up
for a trek, watch a culture show, buy not-really-brand-name North Face
outerwear at “best deal” from a hundred different shops, and spend five times
the price on a chicken dal baht than you would anywhere else in the city. In a
word: touristtrap. And it got its claws around me.
Thamel promised three things that I couldn’t argue
with despite my vehement loathing of such places: one- a reprieve from being on
the bike, two- a restaurant that served hamburgers, three- a restaurant that
also served a good beer.
Oh how easily I slipped into being that American tourist. At an adjacent table
in an expensive restaurant, a British couple who had just ordered from the
Nepali section of the menu (“Right. One mutt’n tie-lee, and a side a crisps.
And one chicken curry, not spicy. And
a diet Coke.”) scoffed at the single American ordering “A hamburger and a beer,
please. Kolsch.” I can imagine the conversation later: “Came all the way to
Nepal just to eat an ‘amburger.”
Damn straight. After a year’s worth of chilies, cheese,
rice, potatoes, and Druk 11000s, I felt like I earned that hamburger. And the
recent nine-hour ride made the kolsch that much sweeter.
The trouble with my hedonistic excuse is that it
carried over for four more days. Such is hedonism, I suppose. Americanos at the
café down the street, Cesar chicken wraps at a lunch spot on the corner, blueberry
cheesecake at another café, sizzling chicken and chocolate momos at a
restaurant that I convinced myself wasn’t overpriced (at least by American
standards). I was repeating the profligacy of Thimphu. I gorged, read, gorged
some more, wrote a bit, and by the end of the fourth day I realized I needed to
buy a trekking permit and a pass into the Annapurna range. I needed to do
something other than stuff myself. I came out of my sweet and fat induced
catatonia and got down to business.
The next stop was Pokhara, again, a tourist trap by
all descriptions. I promised myself I’d stay there one full day before I’d head
to a village to volunteer at a school for a few weeks.
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