Honey: Selected Journals from the Years Away
From Book V: With The Salarymen
2.3.17 to 4.3.17: Kathmandu, Nepal (Part I)

 

Kathmandu was dusty, and had lots of white people walking around. I don’t believe these two features were related. There were more foreigners than in India; maybe because it’s easier to get a Nepalese visa, or maybe because India is so big that the foreigners are all spread out. Part of the reason for this new demographic was that I’d chosen to stay in Thamel, the area Lonely Planet referred to as the “backpackers ghetto,” which is one of those terms I can’t tell whether I’m offended by or not. So Thamel was teeming with travelers, most of whom were either coming from or heading off to trek in the Himalayas; the slim streets were lined with chic restaurants, souvenir stores, gear shops – pretty much everything was off-brand imitation wear. And then guys in polyester zip-ups sidling up beside you, mumbling about weed, hash, mushrooms; and then coffee shops with leather couches and European outlets and pour-over and wi-fi and white kids running around like they weren’t in Nepal right now.

The only thing that felt remotely authentic, then, was the dust: swirling up in the wake of cars, carried through the streets via an incongruous wind, leaving a fine layer of grey covering all surfaces. You’d wipe your face with a napkin and it’d come back caked with dirt. I’d be pouring it out of my army surplus bag by day’s end, my notebooks looking all abandoned. It was like, for all the effort to westernize the place for modern trekkers, there were still some things you couldn’t transform.

The main reason I’d come to Nepal was kind of stupid; it was because I’d seen this movie Doctor Strange a few months back. In the film, Doctor Strange gets his precious doctor hands broken in a real bad car accident, and so he goes to Kathmandu in search of some mythical cure for his terrible nerve damage. So in the movie they show this sweeping view over the homogeneous city, like they always do, and then they show Steven Strange wandering around these dirt roads looking all harried and curious. Eventually he comes to a dark alley and these four Nepalese guys start beating the shit out of him. This is the sort of thing that never really gets any backlash but is pretty terrible. Like the dude’s been in Kathmandu for five minutes and already he’s getting robbed. What kind of message does that send about the place? I mean it’s clearly a plot device – so that his wizard friends can rescue him or whatever – but still, it shows no respect for the country. So after I saw that, I realized Nepal wasn’t very far away and I could actually go have a look for myself, and prove that dumb movie wrong for trying to pull that shit.

The day after I arrived I walked up to the Monkey Temple, which was west of Thamel atop a large hill overlooking the city; to get there you went through the local parts of Kathmandu, past roadwork sites and general stores – and then near-empty storage lockers with endless prayer beads hanging from wall hooks, the merchant sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor. Over a putrid river congested with trash, people sitting on loose lumber beside their tin shacks.

The temple was actually called Swayambhunath, one of the most important Buddhist pilgrimage sites – but the foreigners had taken to calling it the Monkey Temple, on account of it being overrun by diseased-looking monkeys. To reach the top you had to ascend this huge staircase, and then pay Rs. 200; most tourists took a taxi or private bus around to the back entrance. The stupa itself was a large white mound with a gold spike on top, and then four sets of Egyptian-looking eyes painted on, facing each direction. This stuff gets sort of confusing even for someone with a basic understanding of Eastern religions – because there was a bevy of Hindu iconography around too, and then lots of Indians praying. This in itself isn’t that surprising, considering – and I’m really, really simplifying this here for us laymen – Buddhism purportedly sprung from Hinduism itself (Buddha originally being an Indian prince and all – but this is really an unnecessary, if interesting, digression). But it’d be like seeing a Star of David in a church, and everyone being okay with that – which is pretty cool when you think about it. Anyway, so there were some people praying, and then a lot of white people taking pictures of those people praying. To the east you could see all of Kathmandu, a wide and dense block of colorful compact buildings – the kind of rooftop setting you could imagine Jason Bourne being chased across. Around the perimeter were vendors selling maps and trinkets, prayer flags and little brass pieces: stuff I was deeming junk, which I felt sort of bad about since it maybe had religious significance, even if it was being sold to tourists at inflated prices. They were also selling these glittering knives with intricate sheaths, and I was really curious i.e. who was buying these things and transporting them home. Anyway, I didn’t stick around long, there not being much to see except the view and then this kid chasing off monkeys and pushing around a stray office chair that was up there for some reason. It was only 2PM, and Lonely Planet said the sunset was quite beautiful; so I figured I’d check out the nearby Natural History Museum and kill some time.

Lonely Planet had the museum listed in their Quirky Kathmandu section, which basically meant: Hey, wanna see some shit? Which: Yeah, I did. So I walked down the back road as the cumbersome private buses wheeled their way up the turns, and came upon the rusting iron fence of the abandoned-looking museum compound. The grounds were overgrown and dead-looking; the Natural History Museum was a one-story rectangular building with a single plastic chair at the entrance. On the lawn were a couple dozen school kids in red blazers standing in a haphazard line; the teachers, also in blazers, kept trying to get the kids to perfect the line with little success. Teachers did the same thing when I was a kid; they’d spend so much time trying to get us in a perfect line instead of just teaching us. Like you’d be standing in some line for a half-hour and you wouldn’t even be going anywhere. I’m pretty sure it’s just a tactic to waste time. Anyway, I went to the entrance and paid an old lady Rs. 50 to get in.

The museum was straight up deserted. I could tell almost immediately that it was a pretty depressing place. It was just a big room with a ton of dead animals in it. So it was pretty clear that the place was less “quirky” and more “underfunded,” and that Lonely Planet taking potshots at a struggling Nepalese museum was kind of a dick move. The animals were not well preserved. They seemed to be decomposing in real time, with certain limbs hanging off, the glue holding it all together now peeling. They had this big alligator with a tail that looked as if it was just a bunch of brown strings tied together. The weirdest part was that all the eyes of the animals were offset, as in one often higher than the other, which made it look like their faces were melting; and then some of the animals had completely collapsed, just a pile of body parts and paper nameplates. They had a lot of glass jars holding baby animals, floating in a clear liquid. It was altogether very creepy. Particularly the massive snakes in these elongated topless tanks, their mouths wide open; it wasn’t entirely clear whether they were dead or just not moving, waiting to attack. The whole thing was really spooking me, which is generally not the vibe a museum wants to give off.

Mostly, though, I just felt bad. Because the place was a shithole, and the blazer kids had probably been like: What the fuck am I even looking at? Or worse, they’d been like: Wow, that was awesome! And meanwhile kids in America at actually good natural history museums were like: Yeah, who gives a fuck. It just seemed shitty that because of a country’s GDP or whatever some kids got great museums they didn’t even appreciate, and other kids got places like this. So I was feeling more depressed by the museum than scared – but like still kind of scared.

I went outside and was sitting on the plastic chair, just relaxing, when this girl walked up. She worked at the museum and had been eating lunch. I asked her if she could tell me a bit about the museum, and she said alright. So I asked her: Do a lot of people come to this museum? She said: Yeah. I asked if all the animals were native to Nepal, and she said: No, some of the animals were gifted to us. But she said the massive snake was found in the southern jungles. When they’d found it it’d been badly burnt for some reason. I didn’t really have any more questions. I mostly wanted to know: What the fuck is this place? Like what are we even talking about? But she didn’t seem to get that this was a really shitty museum, and I wasn’t about to tell her. I’d expected her to say something like: Yeah, we’re underfunded, and don’t have the resources for the museum’s upkeep – but she didn’t say anything like that. So I figured maybe she thought this was a perfectly fine museum, and the fact that they had a miniature clay model of a T. Rex with only one arm was normal.

I asked if there’d been any earthquake damage here, and she said not much, just a couple of glass cases were smashed. I asked if she’d been here, and she said she’d been at home. She’d been in her room studying when she’d felt this shaking. I was like: Were you scared? and she was like: Yeah, totally. Her house had been fine, but she’d run out onto the street and full buildings had just been gone. She said for days afterwards there had been aftershocks, and then another big shock a few days later. She said there’d been one a few days back. I was trying to fathom what it’d be like to have the literal ground beneath you shaking – like what would I do, where would I go? To a big open field or something? She said it was a really terrible thing that had happened to all their buildings.

I knew what she was talking about. In 2015, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 ravaged Nepal, drawing international attention – the kind of attention that dries up after a few weeks – and affecting the local population endlessly. So obviously the country entered a state of emergency, with thousands dead and injured, 3.5 million left homeless; now, nearly two years later, you could see they were still recovering – crumbled buildings with only a solitary staircase intact, entire roads dug up from massive infrastructure damage. Nearly every advertisement was for cement: tough, impenetrable cement. The museum girl wasn’t talking about any of that. She was talking about the buildings: the important ones, the historical and spiritual ones. The damage was most observable in Durbar Square, where I’d been that morning: this centralized consortium of temples and buildings that was considered a Must Visit in Nepal. A lot of backpackers skipped it, mostly because they were charging $10 USD to get in to an area that was free to the Nepalese – and it was pretty boring, just a bunch of old dateless structures and then tour guides with lanyards preying on you.

At first you couldn’t really even discern the damage. There was a big platform of debris that had clearly been destroyed, but everything else looked okay. Three shrub-like temples, the entrances boarded up with graffiti-covered wood; couples sitting on the steps taking selfies, women tossing birdseed out to large swaths of pigeons. The main thing about the Square was that there seemed to be no general blueprint – just temples built right next to each other with no intended layout. There was a big White House-looking building, the interior a cobblestoned courtyard manned by two soldiers with machine guns and a guy waving an enormous Nepalese flag. The whole place looked unkempt, but ultimately functional – like any well-meaning eastern UNESCO site. But pretty soon it became unavoidable. Some of it was obvious: like one monument beside the shrub temples had its crown-like top knocked clean off and was leaning against the base; or a series of crisscrossing wooden planks that were nailed to the White House walls, literally holding them up. The biggest thing, though, was when you got closer to the buildings you could see thin cracks, tons of them, etching all across the walls – like fissures in a poorly constructed sandcastle. This is the type of stuff that’s difficult to repair, and extensive. The very skeletons of these buildings were crumbling, held precariously together post-earthquake.

This is what the museum girl was referring to, and it’s sort of hard to understand. Because for a place so deeply rooted in culture, tradition, spirituality, history – the destruction of these buildings hit something deeper than mere worldly concerns. There really isn’t an analogy that can be made re: us and them – because our history doesn’t even go that far back, and also we’re generally apathetic to matters of patriotism and culture unless it involves flags or football or guns. Maybe a New Yorker could understand. It’d be like if a sinkhole swallowed up Central Park: there’d be the loss of the physical park, but then also the loss of all that it stood for. Buildings and temples like these, such a source of pride for the Nepalese people – they were reduced to rubble, or barely standing. That’s the type of thing that’s difficult to fathom. That there might be something more important than losing your own shit: losing something you can’t even put a name to.

Outside of the White House was a sign that said the building was currently being renovated with financial support from the American government; and I immediately thought: Okay, well, that’s going to go away real soon. Maybe it’d slip through the cracks, but it seemed fairly obvious that Trump and his administration, and maybe even the American population, would say: Why are we spending money on rebuilding some shit in Nepal? Look at our buildings! And also people are getting killed in Chicago! And that made me really sad, because when you stood before these buildings, and these people, it felt so apparent, obvious that they needed our help – and we were going to let them down, again, just like we always let everybody down.

So I thanked the girl and left the museum, feeling definitely more depressed than when I’d entered. I walked back up to the Monkey Temple, but it was only 3PM and the sunset wasn’t coming along for at least another hour – and at that point I didn’t feel like sticking around to see “the sun reflect off the gridlock of Kathmandu,” or whatever. So I walked down the hill, back past the bead-selling storage lockers and the trash river, and back into the swell of dust eating up the city’s center.

~~~

I met Yasmin at breakfast on my first morning in Kathmandu. We were at the hostel’s top-floor restaurant, this carpeted atrium with a greenhouse roof. We were sitting at adjacent low-leg tables, cross-legged; we were eating the same breakfast. So I said: “Good choice.”

The nice thing about Yaz was that she was always a talker: you could say something as innocuous as: “Good choice,” and she’d start up on how the breakfast – toast, which she was dipping in chai – was very Indian; she was part Indian, her mother’s family originally from Gujarat – but she herself was from the UK, born and raised. So you didn’t have to do much work to chat with her, which is always nice. If I was being honest, I’d really only started talking to her because I thought she was cute – which was the reason I talked to most people, male and female. She was tall, and incredibly thin; her skin was a light shade of caramel, her cheeks freckled; her eyes were set close together – but wide, full of life; her voice was loud, harsh, British. Pretty much the whole thing was a turn on. I’d overheard her the previous night talking with some amorphous group about how she’d been working at a bar in New Zealand for a while, and she’d been lucky if she made five quid in tips by night’s end.

The hostel we were staying at was called Alobar1000, a towering quirky complex that crammed backpackers in and tossed them out just as quickly; the whole place was transitory, like any cheap accommodation in a country’s capital – but the hostel seemed to be barely hanging on to any semblance of order. Floors 1 and 2 smelled almost exclusively of sewage; the showers were heated by these gas-fueled metal boxes that had some sort of flame growing inside; for some reason my room had a pile of peanuts wrapped in newspaper stashed in the corner. The weirdest thing, though, was that the walls were lined with a mish-mash of American signage printed on half-sheets: a poster for The Matrix, the In-and-Out Burger logo, a Time Magazine cover with Yoda on it. Maybe it was supposed to make us all feel at home, but the lack of any unifying theme made me uneasy.

The real attraction of Alobar was the rooftop bar/restaurant, where you could meet fellow travelers – and, more importantly, trekkers. Joelle had recommended the place to me for this very reason. She’d met her trekking partners online, but she said that on the roof everybody was looking for people to head up the mountain with, and all you had to do was ask around. This was essentially a nightmarish situation for me, having to interact with people for brief, casual spurts before blurting out: “Would you like to climb a mountain with me?” It was like speed dating, except it didn’t even end in sex. The thing was, I didn’t even really want to trek – hadn’t intended on it, ever – but once I’d arrived it seemed like you’d be a fool not to while in Nepal. So the whole scene had this First Day of School in the Lunchroom feel that I wasn’t digging. Namely: I needed them, for more than just companionship. You could head out on a trek alone, but it wasn’t advised – since you could break a leg or fall off a cliff or whatever; or you could join a tour group, but they were ridiculously overpriced and just, like, lame. So there I was, trying desperately to Meet People and potentially trek with them, saying dumb shit re: breakfast, like: “Good choice.”

It turned out Yaz was doing the Annapurna Base Camp (ABC) trek, which was the one I’d been thinking about; it took between seven and ten days, reached a height of 4130m – started in Pokhara, some nine hours by bus to the west. It seemed like a viable alternative to the Everest Base Camp (EBC) trek, which took something like 17 days and had to be reached by a rather expensive flight. Yaz was actually doing it with her mom, who was flying in from England – and I was just about ready to pounce on their mother-daughter trekking date, but you sort of have to Play It Cool at first. So I waited patiently and let Yaz talk: she’d been traveling for 15 months, five of them spent bartending in New Zealand – and then Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, the Philippines, probably a whole host of others. Oftentimes people start rattling off countries like basic statistics, and it makes travel seem a lot more complex and intimidating than simply hopping from place to place; I’d been out for nearly nine months but had only racked up India, Japan, and Nepal – I always felt somewhat inferior to those who were in the double-digits. This was Yaz’s final stop before home; she was hoping to then move to Canada with her boyfriend to be social worker; after the trek she was spending two weeks teaching computer skills to kids in some remote village, then flying back to home.

Probably the most interesting thing communicated in the barrage of information Yaz was laying on me was that she’d grown up traveling. As a kid she hadn’t gotten birthday presents: her parents had just taken her and her brother on trips around the world. So she was no novice to the whole thing – it was engrained in her, which differed greatly from myself. This was all new to me. I was learning in real time, all the time, trying my best not to be terrified. So all I said to Yaz was that I was thinking about the ABC trek as well, and then asked about Myanmar – which I hadn’t intended upon visiting, but was hearing a lot of great things about.

So after I returned from the Monkey Temple the following afternoon we were all sitting around at the rooftop restaurant: myself, Yaz, this German guy Jacob who had dreads and seemed perpetually high, this guy with glasses from New Zealand, this Scottish tree-trunk sized guy with a massive beard, and then this shifty-eyed balding guy who didn’t talk so much. We were all doing that thing that travelers do where they swap stories so quickly it seems like no one is intaking anything, just remembering their own tales. Like my country list, my arsenal wasn’t exactly stacked: I had the River in Hampi, the Joseph Murder Plot, and then various party stories that pretty much everybody had. Big Beard seemed to have the best stories, or at least was the most forceful in telling them: he’d spent four months working on a fishing boat in New Zealand, getting all sorts of hazing from the other fisherman – including being made to bite the head off a raw fish – before they finally accepted him as one of their own and he became their “brother.” He’d been out there for months, no land in sight – which maybe accounted for him clearly having a screw loose, enough to bite the head off a fish; he said you could make $25,000 USD for three months’ work, which made everybody perk up real quick. I asked: How does one go about getting a job like that? He said: You just walk up to the boat and ask. I went back to doing the Sudoku Yaz had given me. The main thing about Big Beard was that his thick Scottish accent was hard as hell to understand, which obviously hurt his storytelling ability; and then also he was clearly looking to drink that night, with literally anyone, subtly saying stuff like: “So anyone up for a drink tonight then?” with no one really biting, no pun intended.

I told the group I was a writer, and showed off my journal, which everyone said looked like code, which is what everyone says; and New Zealand Glasses said he was a doctor, so we spoke about Narrative Medicine. Whenever I meet a doctor I start talking to them about Narrative Medicine, which Abby was always interested in; I do this because A) it is a pretty important trend in the health profession, B) it makes me sound smart and knowledgeable, and C) I imagine it’s refreshing for a doctor to reveal that they’re a doctor and not have people immediately asking them about a toe wart or whatever. So Doc, Yaz, and I started talking about that – Yaz’s interest stemming from it being tangentially related to social work and all – and Big Beard sort of slowly retreating from the conversation, him I guess not being interested in Narrative Medicine so much. And eventually I asked the question: So anyone trekking? Turned out Doc was interested in doing ABC as well, and Yaz said: “You looking to come along then?” meaning with her and her mother; and I was like: Yeah, sure. Doc was like: Yeah, I’d love to. And so it seemed that quickly, perhaps too quickly, we had a group going: Yaz, her mom, Doc, and me.

I think about this a lot, the processes by which people meet. Like when I left Carmen and Lily back in Darjeeling, I was thinking to myself: Who am I going to meet next? Am I going to meet anyone next? The latter question is one of those unjustified fears – the fear of wandering a vast landscape alone, that the meaningful human connections are behind you – because it’s relatively certain that someone is coming down the pipeline towards you, someone you will most likely become intimately close with. The bizarre thing is that those people are out there, and they’re not waiting for you: they’re moving along their own trajectory, set to collide with you. And, if you don’t believe in Fate or God, you can see that there’s no reason behind any of it – it’s an unaccountable phenomenon. And then what’s even more bizarre is that you could miss those people, if you moved a day earlier or later – but then again, you could have met other people, people you’d have been even more intimately close with. The whole thing is very complex and awe-inspiring, considering that even though we’re all writing our own life’s narrative we’re not really in control of any of it. And then eventually those intimate people will be gone too, off into the ether. I allow them to go, let them pass into the abyss – I’ve always allowed it. Sometimes I find myself hoping these people are on their way to me, but it’s not a thing to hope for. There’s no logic – which is what makes it one of the great mysteries, one of the unfiltered joys, of an already astounding adventure. One couldn’t know that this chance encounter, seemingly insignificant, was about to unfold thusly: I didn’t know: I didn’t know I’d come to love Henry and Yaz. I certainly didn’t know, then, what was going to happen to us.

So I spent the next day gathering supplies, considering I had literally no trekking gear with me. I bought two pairs of North Face socks, a hat and gloves; then I went to the trekking company next to Alobar and rented a pair of boots for a dollar a day. The attendant rolled out two dusty suitcases filled with shoes and I started searching for a set; they were all caked with mud, had strings withered down to their innards. I asked the attendant: what else do I need, budget, etc. The whole thing felt relatively ludicrous to me: people spent months training for these treks, planning them out; I hadn’t even known it was happening until 48 hours before we were to set off. The attendant said: Plan to spend between $25 to $30 USD/day. He said it was a good idea to get a sleeping bag, jacket, maybe poles – but you could rent all that stuff in Pokhara. I pictured myself traversing a mountainside, a pole in each hand, the snow gleaming in the razor-sharp sun. Nothing seemed further from my personal aesthetic.