on the road

my shadow is defined by rocks. Sue, walking in front of me, puts her feet down. I put my feet down. I ascend. I look up, there are mountains. I look down, my shadow, rocks, my feet, Sue's feet. Duncan, ahead of Sue, puts his feet down.

behind me, yaks. their bells ring and they are taking the cabbages to market. I am a yak. I am 60 years old and I am carrying all my cabbage to market, wearing my thongs. You are a trekker.

today we saw Everest through the trees. It's still there. I say to Duncan, as I sit in the dirt like a small child, "We've seen it now, we can go home." He laughs. Then Basu says, "Ready?" and we get up obediently and put our packs back on.

last night a large black dog slept outside my tent, guarding me. I asked Dilli this morning if he paid the dog. he said, no.

people feed me. I feel incapable of taking care of myself. the altitude makes my head fuzzy, as if it's full of cabbages too. I have eaten unrecognizable vegetables. It's all good.

the song in my head - "You Can Call Me Al." It comes to me as I'm walking across a bridge, Roy saying that was how he felt in Indonesia:

A man walks down the street
It's a street in a strange world
Maybe it's the Third World
Maybe it's his first time around
He doesn't speak the language
He holds no currency
He is a foreign man
He is surrounded by the sound
The sound
Cattle in the marketplace
Scatterlings and orphanages
He looks around, around
He sees angels in the architecture
Spinning in infinity

Last night the Sherpa lodge - real toilets! Hygiene has suffered. The outhouses are getting more and more primitive as we get further away from Kathmandu. The standard now is a shack with a hole in it. Try not to pee on your shoes.

There is a big dining room here, and it was full of trekkers, and they have the internet. For a price. I have a room to myself. A hot, sweaty room, but it has a bed. My red bag full of stuff is being carried for me by a porter. I hope he is an adult but to me he looks about sixteen. I vow big tips at the end. We are spoiled, brought tea and hot water for washing, fed and cared for, even down to our drinking bottles being filled with boiling water at the end of the day so that we can warm our toes while we sleep.

Today I'm happy to wake at six. Basu and Vishnu bring me tea and hot water. Breakfast is rice pudding, and we discuss walking up to the Everest View Hotel. A majorly steep climb up vertical cliffs, then a walk along the edge of the cliffs, and the view starts out breathtaking and only gets more so as we climb. At one point Arthur ventures out onto a big rock to take a picture - we are all shouting at him to come down. Will says something sarcastic and I'm giddy so I start to laugh, and then realize I can't catch my breath and am on the verge of passing out. Oops.

Arthur gets down safely, I retain consciousness, we soldier on. The Everest View has the promised vista. We have tea. I try not to laugh too much. On the way down, the view is all-encompassing. I put Eric Satie on my Ipod, because I have drifted away from the others, and it almost makes me cry. I wish Dad was here.

Monjo

It took us about five minutes this morning to figure out what day it is. I think we're right, but possibly not.

Lots of tea. And the smell of yak dung. The hat I bought in Kathmandu, while impossibly touristy, is comfortable and doesn't make my head sweat. My backpack is not too heavy and I'm not blistered at all yet. Magic boots and socks. And the sun keeps shining and my solar charger works, so I can recharge my Ipod. All the planets are aligned.

We went on an altitude acclimatization walk this afternoon, climbed another 300m or so up the valley we're camping in - then came down again. I feel pretty good so far. Hopefully that continues.

And I continue to be amazed by the surroundings, the life, the air, and the sheer experience of BEING HERE.

Ghat

So here I am in my tent in Ghat.

Sometimes I feel paralysed, I can't speak up for myself in a strange culture. I'm scanning the eyes of passers-by for contempt. I don't see it, but maybe it's there.

We spent the morning getting to Lukla, by Twin Otter, and then waiting for lunch. Cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

This afternoon we walked along rocky paths above the river, making our way towards Ghat, and donkeys and yaks and porters carried things around us - we were keeping pace for a while with two teenage boys carrying giant loads of plywood. They stopped to rest a lot.

At one point we came around a corner and a wizened lady in traditional clothes came out of her house into her little garden, lettuces and chickens, with the mountains and a flowering tree in the background, and I thought, I'm really in the Himalayas.

After hardly being able to eat in Kathmandu, I'm eternally hungry again. The kitchen staff are cooking outdoors on primus stoves and it's amazing to watch them get the food ready, food for us, and for the porters; huge pots of rice and daal. We have 25 porters, a cook, kitchen boys, four guides, a leader, and sirdar, who is in charge of ops. Lots of people to feed.

One of our group has very hairy legs, and today he was wearing shorts and gaiters. A group of schoolgirls in red skirts, four of them walking home arm in arm, overtook him, pointed at his legs, said something in Nepali, and ran off in gales of laughter.

Everywhere there are teahouses and lodges. We are self-contained, mostly, though, with our camping.

Some of the lodges have solar panels, but I think they're powering the internet to be rented to tourists - and a few lightbulbs. There are no cars here, everything goes by foot. Vegetables are growing in the fields.

Going to Kathmandu

What can I say about Kathmandu? I felt so dragged out, coming in. The plane ride from Hong Kong was almost more than I could bear, five hours of torture. I kept falling asleep abruptly and darkly, and waking to find I hadn't even the wherewithal to keep my own mouth shut. Not a nice feeling. We arrived in Kathmandu, I was told, at 10:30pm but as a time it was meaningless - I had flown 13 hours from Vancouver to Hong Kong and crossed twelve time zones. And then flown to Kathmandu via Dakar. I think.

My trepidation coming out into the darkness at Kathmandu airport, after having navigated the visa-getting process, was alleviated by two young men holding a big red "World Expeditions" sign up against the glass wall that keeps non-passengers out of the airport. I smiled at them and nodded at the sign, and they popped out from behind the barricade and said, "Catherine?" I agreed.

They put me in a sort of tin minivan, and drove me off, one of them told me, towards the Radisson, through dark streets. The one who spoke English explained that there was a power outage. There was supposed to be power between 6pm and 1am but it didn't always happen. There seemed to be storefronts or something with roller doors on all the ground floors, but above there were the occasional lights in windows.

He also told me not to drink the water, but that the Radisson would provide bottled water. And he said I would be safe to walk around by myself, in the morning.

At one point, he was driving straight towards an oncoming car - and he turned to me and said, "This is a one-way street". In fact the better idea would perhaps have been to let the other fellow drive, as the driver kept turning around to talk to me, the whole trip. I wasn't capable of much more than occasional assent or interested noises.

When we arrived at the hotel, it looked like any nice hotel anywhere, even though it was situated at the bottom of a narrow alley and surrounded by buildings in various states of being built or dismantled, it was hard to tell. I got my room keycard and went up, had the usual "How the hell do you wokr this?" thing. When I finally got the magic green light and let myself in, I put my bags down, the door closed behind me, and I was in total darkness. I found a light switch but nothing happened when I pressed it. Which seemed odd, as the lights were on in the lobby and the hallway. Tripped over my bag, sprawled on the floor, got up and said, out loud, "Fuck this", stripped off my clothes, found the bathroom and used it, found the bed and got in. A hard bed, but I slept like the dead.

When I woke up in the morning I felt much better. Anxious in a way, but physically better. It was light in the room when I opened the curtains, but the light switches still didn't do anything, and I grabbed the wrong little bottle in the dark bathroom and washed my hair with the bubble bath the hotel had thoughtfully provided. Man, did that stuff foam.

I wandered downstairs and found some coffee, then went out into the early morning and walked around the Royal Palace walls, feeling strange and adrift. I had nothing official to do until 4:30. I went to Thamel and managed to buy a towel, but that was pretty much it for my courage. The traffic started building up, all the inhabitants of the city seemed to be buzzing about on motorcycles or in little beat-up cars - lots of honking and as there were no traffic signals, lots of chaos. People were walking, too, but nobody bothered me. A little lady even helped me to cross the road, I was standing there waiting patiently for a break in the traffic, and she came up next to me and said, unsmiling, "You want to cross the road?" Then she just stepped off the curb and held out her hand, and everyone stopped, and we crossed.

In the afternoon I went upstairs to the pool on the roof and had a swim. I got talking to a man named David, who had been medivaced off his trek to Everest and was waiting for his friends to return from their trip. We drank beer and had a late lunch, and for some reason he asked me to go with him for dinner at his friend's house.

He actually did me a huge favour - his friend was Nepali and the food was home-cooked and lovely - the other members of my trek went to a restaurant together and some of them got sick from the food. Well, two favours, even, he told me that in order to get power in your room you have to put your room key in a little plastic card reader on the wall. Arrgh.

I realized today that I was very lucky when I went to Thamel by myself - maybe in my jeans I didn't look like a tourist.

Today we went as a group to Boudhanath, a Buddhist temple, and Pashupatinath, a Hindu temple, where funerals were ongoing - I still have the sweetish smell of cremation in my nose. Boudhanath was very clean, being polished by ladies with whisk brooms, and we went round the bottom and pushed all the prayer wheels.



Anyway. This afternoon we went back to Thamel to look for some gear, and I saw what really happens to tourists there, we were constantly accosted. Tiger Balm, my lovely necklaces, ma'am, flutes, even 'smoke' which I took to be drugs.

I got a good hat, some sunscreen, and a purple pouch to keep my camera in. I'm set to go. Gotta pack my bag tonight so we can leave for Lukla tomorrow morning.