Yes We Kathmandu

Nepal was always the center piece of this whole shebang. The genesis of what eventually became two and a half months of living out of a backpack was when Chris told me he wanted to go back to Nepal, and I didn't have anything better to do. The time we spent there formed the zenith temporally also- it had been about four weeks since we left the US, and after we left it'd be about four weeks until we got back. Nepal was also the only place we spent more than about eight days, and the only place where we did anything of particular use. So when we flew into Kathmandu International Airport (the only international airport in the Kingdom of Nepal), it was with a certain sense of anticipation. This would be the pinnacle of our trip, followed by a long downhill slide through Europe.

The airport itself can be best described as charming and quaint. There is no terminal- you step off the jetliner onto the tarmac, then take a shuttle bus the fifty yards to the actual airport building. There are two luggage claims, one of which was broken, and a middle aged man sleeping next to a metal detector which is not on. The visa process was equally relaxed- there is a row of computer kiosks which you use to fill out your information and take a picture. Due to technical difficulties, the best picture I got was of the top of my head, which I was assured was plenty good by a Nepalese border agent who I'm pretty sure was trying hard to stifle his laughter. He gave us a stamp after we gave him forty bucks, and after that, you're outside in Nepal.

Kathmandu is really pretty and really confusing and really dirty, depending on what perspective you currently have. Confusing was the primary one on the night we arrived. The city was built long before the idea of urban planning, and still hasn't really caught up to urban infrastructure, so it is primarily composed of narrow, winding, unpaved streets traversed by the cattle and copacetic feral dogs that are the mark of a Hindu country (turns out that the same cultural practices that lead to cows wandering the streets also applies to dogs and, excitingly enough, snakes). We had been accepted by a volunteer organization called All Hands to do work in the aftermath of the two earthquakes that devastated Nepal earlier this year, but arrived too late that night to meet up, so we found a hostel (easy enough in a tourism dominated economy when all the white people are scared off by seismology) and crashed out.

The only straight road in the whole city

Early the next morning (ten thirty) we shouldered our packs and wandered to the hostel building that All Hands had commandeered for a headquarters in the wake of the disaster. All Hands' model is to immediately head to the scene of a major natural disaster, set up food and housing and use free labor to attack the most prominent physical challenges- we spent a lot of time clearing rubble in Nepal, but they also dredged flooded buildings in Brooklyn and helped demo destroyed buildings in the Philippines. The up shot is that you end up with a large group of people (a hundred in the hostel, with 2500 on the waiting list) who have flown thousands of miles to voluntarily work sixty hour weeks doing hard labor for food and shelter. Add to this the enterprising Nepali man who had set up a beer and chips shop ten yards from our hostel, and you have a pretty entertaining scene.

The down shot is, even though I was here for most of a month, my Nepali experience was pretty monotonous. If you don't count the day I spent wrestling with the Indian visa and the two days I spent deliriously ill (it is possible to become so sick that all solids and liquids you consume leave immediately, unchanged, through the same exit), I only had three days off there. Which was fine by me- I love doing hard labor for no money (see my resume for examples), but you dear reader may have a poorer read for it.

The days start at seven, with breakfast from six til. Then we gather our tools, find our teams according to the whiteboard we filled out the day before, and hop in our transport. Like everything else, our transport was re-purposed tourist gear- we hired vans and suvs from trekking (Nepalese for all outdoors pursuits), so you either got to ride in a posh ten passenger or the back of a Scorpid. The back was more fun- they never let you bring beer in the vans. We then stop at a little chai shop to pick up local volunteers and people who didn't want to stay in the commune, and head out to site- between a half hour and a hour and a half commute, depending. The two big projects were either clearing rubble so people could start on another house, or erecting (hehe) temporary shelters for the monsoon season.

See if you can guess which is which

Rubble was mainly clay, since most people out in the rural areas use bricks of pressed, unfired clay coated in plaster as a primary building material. The temporary shelters are sheets of woven bamboo wired to a frame of bamboo poles, and cost about 80$ a pop, because guess what Nepal has a lot of. 

Lunch is an on site affair- the homeowners are paid per person to cook, and we don't have to bring our own meals this way. The only food the Nepalese ever seem to eat is called dal bhat, which translates as lentils and rice. It also generally includes some potatoes and a couple of hot peppers, and you will be gently mocked if you fail to eat less then two huge plates of it at a sitting. They will keep serving you until you force them to stop, sometimes by hiding your plate. It's a beautiful culture.

We'd make it back to base by five, have dinner and drinks (that guy with the beer stand is a fucking genius) and a nightly meeting, then head to the bunks. It was kind of great.

Kathmandu is basically a wizard city- full of tall, multihued buildings set against a backdrop of breathtaking mountains, with ravens and hawks constantly circling by the hundreds. Every other street is filled with ancient temples and monuments, and it always smells like nag champa. Well, among other things.

Wizards!

Kathmandu, and Nepal in general, is also working with the same level of infrastructure as the mages of yore. As a true third world country (they were apparently just on the cusp of developing before the earthquake) everything takes longer to deal with. There is no national emergency number- if you need help, you flag down a car and have them take you to the local hospital or the tourist hospital, depending on what your passport says. A grocery trip involves a dozen different shops, and if you break a pick or a hoe, you gotta talk to a blacksmith. We actually had a major problem getting handles to fit our tool heads, because there's no supply of function-made handles- all of our picks had handles carved or lathed from studs or branches by a guy in a shed somewhere.

The Nepalese are a famously nice people, and while that's not untrue I think they would be more accurately described as endlessly benignly bemused. The home owners seemed mildly amazed that a bunch of white people would show up and do free work, but not so much that they didn't try to gently manipulate as much labor out of us as they could, from expanding their farmland to child care services. Shopkeepers would cheerfully gouge you, and would have no bitterness or remorse when called on it. The Nepalese sense of humor seems to revolve around saying something ridiculous with a straight face, and then laughing about how ridiculous the statement is. Chris has described it as surrealism without sarcasm. I call it confusing yet endearing. 

All countries have something of a two tiered economy- one for the tourists and one for the locals- but Nepal has the most extreme example I have yet to encounter. What my supervisor at All Hands refers to as the blanc tax was between 500% and a thousand percent. When one of the Nepalis helping us went for supplies, they got it at first offer for a fifth of what the Americans haggled hard for. A co volunteer from England would regularly get stuff for a fraction of what I could because his parents are from Hong Kong. I once got a copy printed for forty percent less than Chris in the same shop, which he puts down to my tan.

Alcohol is by far the most extreme example of this, with a tall beer coming in at 180 rupies (at a hundred to one exchange rate to the dollar, the math is pretty easy) at the corner store. That's not much in the grand scheme, but mind that a cup of milk tea is fifteen. One of the big reasons for this though is that beer is really just for tourists- locals have their own ways. 

Not that it's without its charms

The two popular drinks for the Nepalese are chang (no relation) and roxy, both made from rice. Chang is fermented, and costs about twenty rupies for a cereal bowl in the back room of some guy's house, and roxy is distilled and costs about 150 for a liter water bottle filled up at the local corner store. Both taste like water rice has been boiled in, and neither one makes for an early start the next morning.

Chris spent the first week with me, and then headed up the mountains to find Buddha. On July fifth, we both headed to the airport to carry on to India. The preference, obviously, would have been to overland, but here's the thing about India's visa system- it's really dumb (you heard me India). The standard visa takes two weeks for approval, two trips to the Indian consulate, an exact itinerary of your trip (bwahahahahahahahahaha) and a hundred and forty dollars. They have, in recognition that they'd like some people to actually visit, created an expedited version that takes a day to get online and costs sixty. The catch is that it's only applicable at certain international airports. So it was with heavy hearts that we headed back to Kathmandu Int'l for the one hour flight into New Delhi.