The Olympian bus ticket collector

Ahead of us, through our van windshield, a youth runs down the road after a moving bus on which, it turns out, he works as a ticket collector. 

Moments before he had jumped off the bus to pay a local road toll. Now he chases and outruns the bus, grabs the lower rung of a rear ladder that reaches to the bus roof, clambers up the ladder, nimbly runs forward along the bouncing, swaying rooftop over and around mounds of bags and bundles, lowers himself down the front side of the bus, perches on a window edge, then swings through the window, ready again to check people’s tickets.

Leeches and rock and roll elephants

Chitwan National Park, southwest of Kathmandu on the road to India. The last days of the monsoons, The skies pour – Here, take this cloudburst, and how about this one! they seem to say with each mucky step we take through the forest. Last days of the monsoon season? Not so fast. Is our karma really that bad? 

Between downpours, we are poled downstream in a dugout canoe. Kingfishers, brilliant blue and orange, perch in branches overhead watching for prey. Flashes of the yellow-backed sunbird. A heavy-headed Great Pied Hornbill just ahead. 

We tramp exhausted along muddy leech-infested trails, one moment slopping in mucky jeep tracks, the next whacking through thick bush and several metre high elephant grass so dense that the only visible wildlife are the out-stretching, twisting leeches latching onto, then sucking blood from our toes, hands, legs, crotches. Oowww! Get the hell off you blood sucker! Where the hell is it? I can feel it but can’t find it. The voices of people tramping through leech-infested muck. A guide shows us how to use the rough surface of a leaf to extricate the little blood-suckers. At a viewing platform, the men and women separate on two levels for a leech-search up and down and inside our pants. Bloodsucker! Chitwan gives new energy, new power to the word.

Another day. Our steady-footed elephants rock and roll us between tree branches high above the elephant grass. The pleasure, way up here, of finally seeing animals other than leeches: spotted and barking deer, a mongoose, red plumed and green tailed junglefowl, a pair of wild peacocks roosting high in a dead tree, another grazing through the grass. Along the river, a one-horned rhino bathes in the muck, and gharial crocodiles lay their slender elongated snouts along the sand, a bulbous protuberance rising from the end of each snout like a pot - ghara refers to local pots.

Between times we rest in our garden hotel and stroll through the quiet village nearby. None of the city's snapping putputput of auto-rickshaws – or their exhaust.

Sensate, talking rags

We had spent the day visiting several much venerated and visually impressive Buddhist and Hindu sites in and around Kathmandu. But the experience that keeps returning to my thoughts again and again several days later is this …. 

We had arrived in Pashupatinath, Nepal’s most important Hindu site – devoted to Pashupati, Lord of All Animals, Protector of Animals, associated with Shiva – its temples and cremation ghats sited along the holy Bagmati River, now green-black with pollution and mountain run-off. We pass Shiva figures red with the tika powder fingerprints of the devout. Someone has placed a sprig of evergreen over Pashupati’s brow. Pilgrims, mourners and tourists are offered garlands of marigolds, incense, conch shells, beads, glass phallic lingams, ancient-looking coins ... gifts for the gods, karmatic amulets and bric-a-brac. 

The sign on a low-rising red brick building, factory-like in outward appearance, names a home for the elderly poor. Opposite, groups of old women, seated and folded in saris, talk together, waiting, we are told, for vacancies in the bricked “home.” 

The old and the poor arrive here towards what they feel is the end of their lives. Family members bring their dead to be cremated. And now tourists by the bus load are brought to view the activities of this holy place and the passing of life through death to life. The sacred here is also a spectacle. I find myself embarrassed and fascinated.

Across the ‘holy’ fetid yellowgreengrey river, smudgy funeral pyres, tended by men in white, smoulder against an ashy blackened world of brick and metal scaffolding. On this side, at the edge of death, holy men counsel grieving parents, partners and children. Fortune tellers sift the detritus of pieces of string, flowers, remnants of clothes, rice kernels and other food stuffs. Fake photo-me sadhus, in their faded orange robes and ash-treated dreadlocks and faces, look the image of wisdom for the tourist photographers and their rupees. Earlier a grey bearded holy man (real or fake, it is impossible to know) berates a woman who has taken his photo but not given rupees to his out-reached hand. An elderly stooped woman, clothed in worn, faded rags that might once have once been red or maroon, reaches out her long weathered palm. 

Then I notice it ... a metre or so from my feet … a small mound of twists and flaps of grey-brown rags, filthy, left here by someone for later use, or simply dropped and forgotten. Then I think I see the slightest movement, then hear the faintest moan, indecipherable but vaguely verbal, an appeal. Then – all this in one long quick moment – one fold in the rags seems to stretch and reach towards my feet. Another moaning appeal – sounds so distantly suggesting words, making me unsure, anxious.  But yes, it is a human, voiced call, indecipherable but I get its meaning – an appeal for money, for help, for recognition. 

The voice makes me look, the rag mound makes me look away. Disturbing, uncanny, this speaking rag heap ... not possible to associate with what I have thought of until now as human being. 

Is it/he/she an amputee, a dwarf, so emaciated, a limbed human now twisted back around itself like those rags? I resist accepting that that so faintly intelligent moan, that plea, can be human, that a human can be reduced so totally, like refuse that might be swept up and thrown into a refuse can this very night. But there she, there he is, undeniable. I feel queasy, look there and look away again, stop, hear that voice, close my eyes, still see that rag heap, walk again but not towards the voice, further on, away, still hearing that appeal. And still hear it now, days later. 

And I sometimes wonder … what was it like, inside that sensate rag heap, to see that well-dressed passerby, another of many, to call out, to see how he slowed down, hesitated, stopped, stared, curiously voiceless, hesitant, then walk on?

In transit into shadowland

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.

Momos, pagodas, shy mountains: first days in and around Kathmandu

The momos, perogy-like, their backs textured like leaf veins or fish scales, the insides filled with a finely chopped mix of curried vegetables, sit in a circle, head to toe, on the plate. Already a favourite.

The never-ending grating cacophony of car and motorbike horns mixed with thick exhaust; people on cellphones yelling over the racket or across bad connections; the voices of trade, construction, friendship. The “streets” – alleys, lanes actually, often pot-holed, often garbage-stewn – of old Kathmandu.

A skyline – one lunch time – of two, three, even five-tiered red tiled pagoda-roofed Newari temples in Patan, temples that are now Hindu, now Buddhist, but mostly an ancient interlacing of both, along with other strands of local gods, customs, spiritual practices. These temples with their delicately carved, weathered wood panels, struts, doors, bringing to life the many-faced gods and goddesses, with their posturing, fights and love-making. How the profile of these many-tiered roofs echoes the nearby mountain skyline, an architecture of place, seeming to celebrate the joys of being here and here only.

We are walking pathways along the forested ridges east of Kathmandu city. A woman stirs a huge cast iron cauldron of homebrew. Men and woman work crops of hilled potatoes, rice, greens we don’t yet know. A granny swings her rod through the high grass, gathering up loose chickens, a grandpa sits sleepily beside several grazing goats. Below us, through the pines, the distinct bright greens of the paddies out of which rise, here and there, the stacks of brick-making plants. 

Those shy Himalayas. We have left the city at 4:30 a.m. to (perhaps, maybe, if lucky) see the Himalayas at sunrise. We climb by car east into the valley’s foothills, up and up to Nagarkot town which sits on a pinnacle at the edge of the high ranges. We then climb up flight after flight of stairs to a hotel rooftop, where a small group of Chinese tourists soon arrive, signalling across to their fellows perched on other rooftops, taking pictures of one another from perch to perch, storks with cameras. Across the northern horizon are the Himalayas … out there we are told, just behind the thick late monsoon clouds. The sky brightens and we begin to see how high we stand above the deep surrounding valleys. Again we search for snow-covered peaks, examine the rooftop diagram of where Everest, Cho Oyu, Gauri Shankar, Annapurna rise, 6,000, 7,000, over 8,000 metres high. We again look along the northern horizon. The highest snow-covered peaks in the world. Brilliantly white this early morning. Somewhere. Out there. In the thick grey clouds. Kabi our guide has attempted to keep up our hopes. I say the mountains seem shy today. They want to stay veiled. He smiles. We take a few more cloud pictures.

“Where you from?” The question we strangers get asked – immediately and always, again and again. It feels like some primal locating, identifying, connecting-relational gesture, something our modern Western sensibilities find abrupt and invasive, its repetition annoying. Sometimes, in touristic places like parts of Kathmandu, the question is the marketer’s handiest opening gambit. Sometimes it might be the one phrase in English or some other tourist language that a Nepali has at hand. Sometimes it seems prompted by genuine curiosity. Sometimes is feels like it has its roots in old habits of human location: your home place, your family, your caste or class, who are you, are we related? And what does it feel like being asked Where you from? forty, fifty, sixty times a day? By midday, really, really irritating.

Our welcome – after the increasing weariness of several days of airline catnaps and airport transit – by the personable, helpful staff at the Hotel Ganesh Himal. The quiet and breathable air (serene, given that we are in Kathmandu) of the hotel’s garden-eating courtyard. If only we have many such welcomes and retreats along our way.

The drive along Kantipath from Patan into Kathmandu in rush hour. But no, this was not really a “drive.” Rather, several lanes of cars (but there is no driving in actual “lanes”), and some six, seven, eight “lanes” of motorcyclists, auto rickshaws, wheeled carts and cyclists all jostling and scrabbling for position, for some advantage, invisible to our eyes, in a sludgy flow of metal, rubber and exhaust. (All that grumbling about rush hour traffic on Ottawa’s Queensway now seems exceedingly petty. Kantipath Road – here’s reason to gripe!)

Our guide Kabi Raj smiles, says “good one” and gives me the thumbs up when I say Raj is a royal name. Turns out he is very conscious of his “senior caste,” as he tells Betty. He has led our way along country paths east of Kathmandu. Over the day he has moved along the pathway in such a way that, several times, an approaching person – sometimes elderly, sometimes carrying an awkward and perhaps painfully heavy load – has been forced to move to the side of, even off, the pathway. On the bus, he sets his shoulders and knees rigid, obstructing the efforts of an older woman to move into the inner seat beside him (she does so anyway). Along with the smiles and inquisitive chatter with us is a practiced contempt for those ‘lower’ than himself – and on this day, moving though hill villages, there are many who are ‘lower’.

Follow our journey: Kathmandu ...

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