Jet air travel and the internet are the wrecking balls of discrete space, time and place.
One moment we are home in familiar Woodlawn, taking a last look out towards the pines and shade gardens, throwing our still too heavy packs in the car, locking doors.
The next day we are south of Vancouver, walking the Crescent Beach seashore with friends Bernice and Don, me replaying 1950s memories of growing up in this place: hearing the rock and roll rhythms of Good Golly Miss Molly, hanging out around Greasy Greeks just so I could get first girlfriend Maggie to stretch over that counter with another tray of fries.
Today … strolling through the abundance and peace of our friends’ vegetable garden, then savouring that delicious B.C. lake trout caught earlier this summer.
Back to the airport in Vancouver, a 13-hour night of cramped, restless catnaps, then another airport (Hong Kong now) and another 13 hours ‘in transit’ in the spaceless mirror-and-high-gloss Hermes-Guccified malls of clothes, bags, cases, perfumes and tech gadget shops … a universe of fetishes: the ogling and fingering of the objects themselves as well as the needy display of brand, including the heavily branded shopping bags placed out front of luggage carts pushed by the exceedingly high and shiny heeled. And a mechanized, factory-like universe as well: the continuous tracks – escalators, moving walkways, luggage tracks – cross and crisscross, everything, everyone is on the move on tracks. Overhead, echoing blurred voices from the skylights beckon us to gate this and that, as if this is the last place anyone should to be.
Nightfall, in the air again, another six hours ... then touchdown, and sign out in the night, WELCOME TO KATHMANDU, and we step down into the tropic’s damp heat and take a traveler’s drive into the unknown city at night. A “traveler’s drive,” a traveler’s arrival through a shadowland of the mostly unseen and unknown, guided by a hotel driver who (thankfully) is home.
At first, the promise of a familiar well-lit, double-laned highway. Then that sharp turn into a rubble-built pot-holed unlit lane, our headlights suddenly useless. Everyone and everything now emerges from the dark, but only at the last moment, momentary ghostly shapes, then gone. A grey-black buffalo rummages through the day’s garbage. Goats munch in mounds of peels and plastic. A dark-clothed cyclist veers between our bumper and a water-filled pothole. Dogs sniff and yelp and chase each other. Motorbikes, thick ant-runs of them, squeeze through spaces that can’t exist.
Then suddenly a gate opens. We have arrived at Hotel Ganesh Himal … a friendly personable welcome, the kind that creates familiarity amidst the unfamiliar. Suddenly the shadows feel behind us – here, hours later, halfway around the world.
The following morning … on the streets (alleys, laneways really) in old Kathmandu which are thick with people walking, motorbikes and cars and cyclists; thick with sharp voices trying to reach over the din; thick with sharp beeps and honks at our backs, each one a surprise as we begin to anticipate the next, wait, nothing, get distracted, then suddenly the piercing honk honk again at our shoulders. All this is laced with the thickening humid exhaust and dust that fills these canyon alleyways, people clearing their throats, spitting, people washing, brushing their teeth, honk honk beep honk beep beep …
In these first hours, our refuges are what we enjoy most. The garden eating area at the hotel, the serene Paradise Garden behind high walls, the hidden corners at the edge of temples, our earplugs at night (let the dogs howl), a rooftop meal overlooking the frenzied din of Kathmandu’s streets, the chaos finally distant, muted, observable.
One moment we are home in familiar Woodlawn, taking a last look out towards the pines and shade gardens, throwing our still too heavy packs in the car, locking doors.
The next day we are south of Vancouver, walking the Crescent Beach seashore with friends Bernice and Don, me replaying 1950s memories of growing up in this place: hearing the rock and roll rhythms of Good Golly Miss Molly, hanging out around Greasy Greeks just so I could get first girlfriend Maggie to stretch over that counter with another tray of fries.
Today … strolling through the abundance and peace of our friends’ vegetable garden, then savouring that delicious B.C. lake trout caught earlier this summer.
Back to the airport in Vancouver, a 13-hour night of cramped, restless catnaps, then another airport (Hong Kong now) and another 13 hours ‘in transit’ in the spaceless mirror-and-high-gloss Hermes-Guccified malls of clothes, bags, cases, perfumes and tech gadget shops … a universe of fetishes: the ogling and fingering of the objects themselves as well as the needy display of brand, including the heavily branded shopping bags placed out front of luggage carts pushed by the exceedingly high and shiny heeled. And a mechanized, factory-like universe as well: the continuous tracks – escalators, moving walkways, luggage tracks – cross and crisscross, everything, everyone is on the move on tracks. Overhead, echoing blurred voices from the skylights beckon us to gate this and that, as if this is the last place anyone should to be.
Nightfall, in the air again, another six hours ... then touchdown, and sign out in the night, WELCOME TO KATHMANDU, and we step down into the tropic’s damp heat and take a traveler’s drive into the unknown city at night. A “traveler’s drive,” a traveler’s arrival through a shadowland of the mostly unseen and unknown, guided by a hotel driver who (thankfully) is home.
At first, the promise of a familiar well-lit, double-laned highway. Then that sharp turn into a rubble-built pot-holed unlit lane, our headlights suddenly useless. Everyone and everything now emerges from the dark, but only at the last moment, momentary ghostly shapes, then gone. A grey-black buffalo rummages through the day’s garbage. Goats munch in mounds of peels and plastic. A dark-clothed cyclist veers between our bumper and a water-filled pothole. Dogs sniff and yelp and chase each other. Motorbikes, thick ant-runs of them, squeeze through spaces that can’t exist.
Then suddenly a gate opens. We have arrived at Hotel Ganesh Himal … a friendly personable welcome, the kind that creates familiarity amidst the unfamiliar. Suddenly the shadows feel behind us – here, hours later, halfway around the world.
The following morning … on the streets (alleys, laneways really) in old Kathmandu which are thick with people walking, motorbikes and cars and cyclists; thick with sharp voices trying to reach over the din; thick with sharp beeps and honks at our backs, each one a surprise as we begin to anticipate the next, wait, nothing, get distracted, then suddenly the piercing honk honk again at our shoulders. All this is laced with the thickening humid exhaust and dust that fills these canyon alleyways, people clearing their throats, spitting, people washing, brushing their teeth, honk honk beep honk beep beep …
In these first hours, our refuges are what we enjoy most. The garden eating area at the hotel, the serene Paradise Garden behind high walls, the hidden corners at the edge of temples, our earplugs at night (let the dogs howl), a rooftop meal overlooking the frenzied din of Kathmandu’s streets, the chaos finally distant, muted, observable.
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