A quickie

I don't have a whole lot of time to write much of anything right now, but since questions had begun to arise about my health I thought I'd just share a couple photos and announce that I'm still alive.

I made it back to India on the 6th and have been in the city of Varanasi since. Directly on the river Ganges, this is considered a very (the most?) holy place for Hindus. There's so much to say about this incredibly powerful and frustrating and beautiful city but, like I said, I'm about to run off so that'll have to wait for another time. In any case, this is one of those places that you "feel" more than you can "see" and describing it in its personal significance to me, I imagine, would be a real task indeed.

I'm going to be starting a Vipassana course in a few days then trying to catch a boat to the Andaman Islands (wish me luck), so it'll probably be after the new year before I can give a proper update. Until then, I hope you're all healthy and happy!


Here are some photos of things that I saw since I last wrote.






This explosion of color is at Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha. The back lawn area has been overtaken by a million prayer flags. This is a guy who wanted me to take his photo after I showed him a photo I took of a little girl that was also there.








Blue Lassie. Oh man. This is the place to be in Varanasi. Yogurt and fruit drinks (lassies) is all they serve here, with the exception of a delicious desert that comes only in the night. The best in town, and this fellow here is watching the magic in action.






















This massive golden door is at a temple in Sarnath, the town where the Buddha gave his first sermon after his enlightenment. The temple in question is not actually the one in the place that the town is famous for, but immediately next to it. It's a long story, but I wound up never actually making it inside the gate. Oh, well.









And, finally, back in Varanasi and on a ghat along the Ganges, is a man performing some sort of puja. He was actually in a group of about four or five, but this was my favorite photo of the bunch.

A million stone staircases and pashmina for days

The mosquitos are out and they're out in numbers. I'm talking squadrons. Platoons. Real organization. That said, this post might end abrubtly and at a really strange time if I decide that the blood loss is too great. I may not make it through. Pray for me.

I slipped out of the mountains yesterday and hopped on a bus to Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha, where I'm writing from now. The other computers are all being operated by crimson-robed monks. I have thoughts and a couple bizarre photos that I want to share, but I'm going to hold my tongue for now and talk a minute about the most recent trampoose, to the Annapurna massif.

After a lot of trying to find trekking companions in Pokhara (read, muddling about), I decided to try and set off on the so-called 'Annapurna Sanctuary' trek, passing by both the Annapurna and Machapuchhre base camps, alone and just turn back if things got dicey or if I decided that I do actually need a guide to do this. You never know, but experience has told me that if you take your time, and talk a lot, you rarely need a guide for anything. Then you don't have to stop and listen to tedious lectures. Or, better, you _can_ stop. Even when there's no lecture prepared.

I indulged in a ripoff Leki hiking pole with all the money I imagined I was saving by employing neither guide nor porter and didn't even feel like an old man when I used it. Walking sticks are great. You can go forever with that tap, tap, tap. This one was named "Best Friend," on Rachel's suggestion. Tied to the handle was one of my cat finger puppets, the pink one named Guide. And so Guide, Best Friend and I set off early in the morning and climbed the first (massive) staircase into the hills above Phedi to the first of a series of wonderful mountain cottages.

The trekking in this area is known as tea-house trekking because you're actually walking through tiny, remote mountain villages the entire way. I don't know why it never occured to me before but, of course, people live in the Himalaya. In the Annapurna Conservation Area, I mostly met Gurung, Sherpa and Tibetans. Most of the economy has to do with catering to the steady traffic of foreign trekkers passing through all year long. You can buy apple pies and sleep in guest houses every night, all the way to the Annapurna Sanctuary (usually a 10 day trek in all). That, however, does not mean that this is just a little light walking. These are serious trails. Doable, yes. But beefy. I thought the hike around Macchu Picchu was bad... I thought climbing up a couple Aztec temples was bad. Oh, god. This was a walk up a million stone staircases to the roof of the world. A billion stone staircases. The stairway to heaven. And, holy shit, is heaven high.

It's hard to decide what aspect of the trek to write about so I'll just try and explain the story alluded to in the first photo below.

Like I said, I began the trek alone. This was great. I like spending time alone anyway. People, noise, pollution, &c. are a little too much for me to deal with all at once sometimes. Here I am, wobbling my way over the first in a series of passes, excited and full of energy. The cherry trees are exploding with pink and with life and the sky is perfect (eat your heart out, Cloud Appreciation Society). I part ways with this guy I had met as he arrives at the village where he lives. I had been carrying his axe for him while he gathered cow patties for fertilizer and we both speculated on the origin of my walking stick. Obvious ripoff, but from where? He said he liked Americans because he once owned a maglite flashlight and it was great quality. He attributed this to California. Good man.

So. We parted ways and I arrived soonafter at the ACAP checkpoint where they assure that you've paid for the privilage to trek around the Annapurna Reserve. I had paid and was waiting for the guy in front of me to be processed so I could sign the log book and be on my way but it became clear really quickly that, this time, it wouldn't be a quick formality. The guard was howling and laughing. The foreigner, draped in a huge red fleece and a huge, bright yellow backpack with no stomache strap, was embarassed by the unexpected attention. I was summoned forward.

"I'm going to make him wait, so you go first," the guard announced, "because he's been giving me a headache for four days now!" Hey? Brandon, dude in question, had just been found. He didn't realize it until then, but he was official lost. Had been for four days. His friends ,who had been panicking all week, were now anticipating his arrival at Landruk, a hill station a long day's walk from where we now stood. He had fallen ill and was unable to meet them where they had arranged that night. Or the next, or the next. He was reported missing. Finally healthy enough to walk again, he was back on the trail. By the simple fact of my being there, the guard announced that I had "found" him and asked me to escort him to Landruk. I wasn't sure if he was joking, so I agreed. What the hell. Not that this guy needed an escort, but I could use the company. And so I fell in with the reunited group of four with the same trekking plans as myself for the rest of the trampoose.

I could go on for ages if I tried since everything is still so fresh in my mind. But I won't. Just one last, quick description of the Annapurna Base Camp/Sanctuary. Imagine being in a grove of enormous redwood trees, or mahogany or some really big tree. Totally surrounding you. Now turn those trees into some of the tallest and some of the steepest mountains in the world. A narrow valley of giants with a tear right through the middle of it where a glacier passed through ages ago, leaving the ground there just a river of sand and pebbles, totally barren to this day. The cloudline, when it's not snowing, is in the lower part of the valley, so you can watch the clouds pour in and out of the mouth of the pass in a single afternoon like waves creeping ever so slowly onto the beach and receding into the ocean. Cairns everywhere. One, at the snowline, of a giant A, which I think stands for "Andy."


It's always really hard to choose which photos to put on the internet and this time I'm not even posting a good closeup of the snowy mountains. So if you want to see them you'll either have to ask me for one or look it up online.. Fair warning: everything looks fake, anyway, like a gargantuan movie backdrop strung up over a really long distance.








Shortly after being reunited, near the beginning of the trampoose in question.

View from a hill. Poon Hill at sunrise, last day of walking. And what a day it was. Massive decent from the ceiling of the world in one day makes for some seriously sore legs - and knees.

Still another sunrise. What an early riser I must be!

It's lonely at the top... And really, really cold.

Husked corn dries, hanging from a Gurung family's ceiling like a hundred color-challenged bats hiding from the day.

Kathmandu, round two

Yep. That's right. I still haven't left Kathmandu.

I told you, it's a black hole.

In my defense, I've been sick. Seems like everyone in town has got a cough and I caught it. I've paid for my room and told the guy that I'm leaving first thing in the morning three or four times now. Not knowing if I was ever still in there or not, I had three people walk into my room and wake me up last night alone. I guess that'll teach me to lock my door.

One of the first things that kept me here was a benefit being put on for SathSath (sathsath.org) that a friend of mine was going to be performing in. At first I had just wanted to be around for it, then we started planning a shadow puppet show (I bought three ridiculous cat finger puppets) to introduce his act. It's a long and tedious story. I tried telling it once and didn't do an especially good job, so I'll skip over it mostly. The punch line is that the show was shut down mid way through at the encouragement of the guy who basically runs the neighborhood. His businesses were suffering for the night because everyone wanted to go to this benefit with entertainment and all-you-can-eat food. So my friend never got to play, except for a small group in a guesthouse room. It had been a good night until the owner of the place hosting the event was carted off by the police and the crowd was threatened for booing and jeering the police. I've been boycotting all of the businesses owned by the jerk in question. (There's a lot more to the story than I have space to elaborate here.) Which, today, means trouble finding a place to fill up my water bottle so I've been drinking tea, etc. all day :P

Then there were the ever-present Maoist protests. The Maoists just split from the government coalition not too long ago because their demands weren't being met and have been holding the country ransom since. They're picketing the government offices from 8am to 5pm (business hours), so the government has instructed their people to arrive at 5am so they don't cross the lines. It's been like this -- peaceful protests and nobody -really- wanting to step too hard on the toes of the other. There was a major (planned) protest yesterday that shut down transportation on the highway heading to the airport, which is also the biggest highway in general and is the route to most nearby towns. Supposedly they may be shutting down the borders at random intervals soon, so leaving the country will be a little like a game of "red light green light." A protracted wait and then a dash for the border town. In any case, it seems like both sides are pretty keen on leaving tourists out of it and things, though politically tense, seem peaceful enough.

I had agreed to go and help paint a nearby school/orphanage that some friends are working at today and stayed in town longer so that I could go and do that (not that there was any transit operating anyway), but I had trouble sleeping last night and wound up waking up after everyone had left this morning. So I'm cutting my losses and finally bought a ticket to get out of here first thing tomorrow.

My strength is returning, and now I'm back on the road -- this time to Pokara, the seat of the Himalayas.

For now, a couple photos:

I finally made it to the "Monkey Temple" that I mentioned before. This is a baby monkey that is about three seconds from being tackled by a much larger monkey.

Another from the same place, these are just two photos I liked.

In nearby Patan, I was loafing around in the main Durbar (Palace) Square and noticed three flattened bottle caps wedged into an old crack in the temple floor that I was sitting on. Imagine my excitement. Sitting there, toying with them, this kid and another little girl not in the photo come screaming by, throwing flattened bottle caps at random targets. Then, without my saying a word or motioning to him at all, the boy walks right up to me and holds up this enormous stack of caps as if to brag. I gave them one of the ones that I had found as a reward for making my day.

This photo is of the bus park that is normally _packed_ with screaming, honking buses. I mean scores of them. On the day of the protests I mentioned earlier, only Maoist-flag bearing buses were allowed through barricades. They would pick up bus loads of people and shuttle them to the protest. Great idea, no? Why don't we ever do anything like that?

And here are a couple banner-wielding Maoists walking through an eerily quiet street in the center of town.

OM MANI PADME HUNG

I've been in Kathmandu for a series of Groundhog Day-feeling days that are making me feel a little crazy.

So today I made my first minor break from the gravitational/time warping fields of Kathmandu that rival any co-op living room I've ever wasted hours of my life in. Just as I was ready to give up on deciphering which of the buses flying by, maniacly wailing on their horns, was the one I wanted to flag down, somebody helped poor little illiterate me aboard a bus bound for Bodhnath, a Tibetan enclave about thirty minutes away. Since it seems like the entry to Tibet for Americans in Nepal isn't just expensive but really, really expensive, Bodhnath is probably as close to Tibet as I'm going to come. I loaded a photo of the main stupa below. I'm still trying to process my thoughts so I can't really speak to the experience except to say that it was every bit as beautiful as I had been promised.

Tomorrow I'm going to wake up to the same '''om mani padme hung''' chanting music in the streets, the honking of motorcycle horns and another round of battle with my stomache demons and attempt my fourth trip to Swayambunath Stupa, the "Monkey Temple." Then I'm putting a package in the mail, trying to figure out how to pay for a library book I forgot to return (if you want to help me I'll love you forever! -- it's mostly just a time zone problem for me.. 14hrs makes phone conversations with Berkeley really hard) and then I'm finally skipping town.

That's not to say that Kathmandu isn't a lovely place. At times it borders on magical. Everybody has been so friendly, etc. The pollution I had been warned about isn't anywhere near as bad as all the hype -- think any South American city. Definitely not worse than Delhi. The skies here are blue, in Delhi they're perma-gray. And I can certainly imagine worse wake ups than walking into a 1960s hippy flashback on Freak St. (named for all the hippies that hung around there in the 70s) with chanting and clouds of incense wafting by. It's just that I feel like I'm being sucked into a black hole and if I don't leave Kathmandu immediately it'll be at least another week or two before I can pull myself out, which I don't think is something I'm quite yet ready for.

The Tower of Power -- a pyramid of lightbulbs in a temple. You may ask yourself why?

Kissing Cowsins - I found these two tramping around in a square full of thousands of rock doves (vulgarly/commonly called 'pigeons')

Bodhnath is the largest Tibetan exile community in Nepal. This stupa is right in the center of it all. So many prayer flags and kaleidoscopic painted walls that it'll make the cones in your eyes bleed all kinds of psychedelic and leave you hopelessly colorblind for a minimum of two weeks. I'm not exagerating.

Stacks of butter lamps - always a spooky favorite!

Hope everyone is peachy. I miss you all!

If you want to phone up the Berk. Library and be my angel, I need to buy this book that I didn't return before the fines on it add up over six months and totally bankrupt me. I'll bring you back your own sacred Indian cow if you help me! Promise! Just send me an email asap and we'll figure something out... It may require fronting me a little cash -- but maybe not? BUT I'll love and honor you for _ever_.. and you get a cow!

And finally... If you've got time left to troll around on the web, you should go check out the beginings of ravenfacts.org -- this really made my day. If you already know about ravenfacts.org but haven't checked it out, it's worth it. If you don't, it'll probably be really confusing --- but still worth it.

The Rotary Chapter

Within a day of arriving in Bangalore (lovelier and greener than expected), our eight person Delegation was at our full glad-handing capacity and hard at work.

We visited/evaluated 32 schools as a team within two days. I personally flew by over 20. This meant -loads- of meetings with headmasters, teachers, students, and so on. I had a score of flower garlands draped around my neck, walked through more than a dozen rows of girls throwing flowers and flower petals on me, sat on just as many stages in front of waiting audiences, met no less than three "His Holiness, Swami-Ji"'s, attended a couple inaugurations as guest of honor, a wedding, ..... you get the idea. Nearly every meal was accompanied by a meeting of some sort. But, damn, did we eat well. I put on about five pounds in the last week alone. Part of this may have been that physical activity beyond shaking a million hands was nonexistant. I spent a lot of time in the backseat of one of our several vans. A lot.

Despite my skepticism before leaving, it really seems like the work being done here through local and international Rotary clubs is legit. Beds have been purchased for girls at a deaf school, "Comfort stations" (toilet blocks) have been/are being built to help female retention in primary and secondary schools, two ambulances have been made available for mobile clinics, kids are sitting in desks in some public schools instead of on the floor and a pilot program testing the CLE (Concentrated Language Encounter) teaching method in Indian schools is underway.

The success of most of these programs is being measured in terms of being able to land jobs and kids leaving rural communities for "something better." There are, as I see it, a number of potential problems with having this final goal but, in an impoverished community, who am I to say that there's anything more important than being able to feed your family and support yourself? Goals and politics aside, good is being done. And by people with clout. Real clout.

I'm not just talking big, beautiful houses, servants, and all that. It's connections. I've never seen the cell phone of somebody with real clout in action before but, I tell you, it's something to behold. Things get done. And quickly. This is the Owning Class amongst its own. And yet the common thread among these people -- or, at least, a major part of it -- has been an honest dedication to serving their communities in some way. Is it selflessness or the pursuit of the image of Benevolent Leader? Does it even matter? Of course the answer for any one person will be a totally unique one and I won't really get into any of it more than that for now except to say that it's been yet another good lesson in the Gray Spaces in life. There are no "Evil Capitalists," etc. Each of us is truly multifaceted.

Having been dropped in Central Delhi by a private driver, I'm on my own and turning to a notably new chapter in this journey. I left my dress clothes, except for one button-up shirt in Bangalore until February. As David Littlejohn might put it, I'm back in my regular rags for now. I hope my reception from here on is half as warm as it has been. And less awkward.

The mystery smell is making me sick so I have to go. Hope everybody is doing marvelously.

Tickled Pink: an Intro

So,

I figured that instead of blasting random groups of people whose emails I happen to have with the occasional (and potentially long winded) email about what I'm up to I would give this whole blog thing a shot and you can check in on it whenever you want! There. One less junk email for the ones I love. You're welcome.

This will be my, eh, Public Mouthpiece (?), but I still hope to be sending (and receiving!) individual letters and emails.

I'm writing from Delhi, in a crowded Bazaar wedged between the New and Old parts of the city. Lots of foreigners. Heavy smell of lacquer thinner making me a little dizzy. Temperature is great, though. All the smog and cow shit must have a beneficial effect on the atmosphere. This is my first day on my own, the Rotary Thing finished for now, to be resumed in February. In a couple hours I head to Gorakhpur, the first stop on my way to Kathmandu, Nepal, from where I'll try and weasel my way into Tibet before beginning the long trek back southward. In a sense, I still feel like my "trip" has yet to really begin. I've been running all sorts of errands trying to prepare to leave India this morning. That includes visa info, train ticket, a padlock and chain for luggage securing on trains (not sure this is actually necessary, but I've been warned enough that I'll give it a try), a Nepalese guidebook, and so on. I've got at least two solid days of buses and trains ahead of me, and as many as four or five, so wish me luck.. I'll be incommunicado for a spell.

I'm now officially a part of the World Wide Blogosphere. Tickled Pink. Truly.

And You,
You are my loyal readership. Aren't we mod?

(I blame any weirdness in this or the next post on the lacquer thinner-doused room I'm sitting in.. I'm definitely starting to feel a little loopy)

Testing, testing...

Holy hell, I have a blog..