300. Katmandu, Nepal

Katmandu, Nepal: I find a nice cheap small hotel, and-- right down the street-- a Chinese restaurant. 

I eat a great meal (Isn’t Chinese food always good?) and finish it off with a snort of rum! (Happy birthday to me!)


Morning: the birds rouse with gusto—crows “Aagh” at each other and lesser fowl twitter in chorus. I like it a lot better than an alarm clock!


Katmandu is high, cool and dry. The air feels fresh and clean for a change—very different from sweltering India! I stroll out to watch the antique town awaken. Old brick and wood buildings overhang the narrow dirt streets. Every wood surface is fancifully and intricately carved.


And everything looks centuries old.


Ancient women are sweeping the streets. Girls, teenagers I suppose, very tiny in stature and neatly wrapped in orange saris, glide by in pairs. Porters trot by carrying towering back loads of firewood or cleverly balanced baskets of fresh produce. There is no motor traffic at all. On every corner is a temple and everyone stops to ring one of the temple bells or visit their altars. Fragrant incense perfumes the morning air. The whole town seems neat, clean and healthy.

I really like this place!

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299. Bus Torture

Back on the bus. 

We top the mountain ridge and are treated to a wonderful view of distant peaks-- then we plunge into the central valley of Nepal. We pass an occasional stone farmhouse painted red to the windows, white above the windows and roofed with thatch.


Rest break: more food shacks in a meadow. A woman picks lice from another’s head. The second woman nurses a baby from her shapely breast. I buy and eat a tasty deep fat-fried breadstick from them.


More torture in the bus-- and at sunset we rattle into Katmandu.

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298. American Stomach

I have a bus ticket-- purchased from a dealer in Roxaul-- for a trip from the border to Katmandu in a bus advertised as “Luxury Class”-- but I would hate to see the "Common Class" because this wooden-seated machine is about the least comfortable contraption I have ever ridden in and I have ridden in some doozys!


The road is also about as bad as a road can be: 156 kilometers of ruts, holes and switchbacks. The hills and mountains are green and gorgeous but my bruised and aching butt keeps my mind on my suffering instead of the natural beauty we are passing through.


Lunch stop: some women in a shack perched on the mountainside above a stream sell us some scorching homemade curry and rice. We are served bowls of the food without any means of getting the stuff into our mouths but this is no problem for my fellow travelers. They scoop the chow into their faces with their hands. Fastidiously, however, I produce my own spoon and dine like a gentleman!


One of the cooks up-ends her baby and cleans its bottom with her bare hand. A few minutes later I see her serving my rice with the same bare hand. Oh, my American stomach!

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297.Roxaul, India

Roxaul, India

About noon the train arrives in this small town. A man at the station invites me to try his hotel, which he claims is clean and inexpensive.


It is OK so I rent a room with bath. I bathe; lay on the hotel roof in the sun for a while, and then I walk around the town to see what I can see.


There is nothing much to see and very little for sale in the shops. I buy a few small oranges to eat for dinner.


In the evening I re-read part of the only book I have, Solzhenitsin’s “The First Circle”, and then turn in early. In the middle of the night I am awakened by the noise of a party in the next room—laughter and singing. It sounds like so much fun I smile too.


Dawn. I am up and heading to the nearby border of Nepal in a horse-drawn cart. No kidding! -- not for a touristic lark but because there are no motorized taxis or busses!


In front of the Indian Customs House at the border the horse lies down in its harness and won’t get up. The angry driver jumps from the cart and beats it with a whip until the animal staggers to its feet and pulls us on across the border.

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296. Robbed

It’s cold.

 I reach for my blanket.

Zounds! 

The bottom backpack compartment zipper is open.  

I’ve been robbed! 

My blanket and my Mickey Mouse tee shirt are gone! No doubt now covering the brown body of one of my companions of the night voyage! Pretty good thieving considering that I was lying on top of my pack—trusting soul that I am! Still he missed my pants and sweater in the same compartment, so he lacked the perseverance of a really dedicated workman—he didn’t “go the final inch!” (I would give him the tee shirt in exchange for a photograph of him wearing Mickey Mouse!)

Still, he’s warm and I’m cold.

The brakeman comes and clears all us sleepers out then locks his vacant train car-- so I am standing alone in the cold waiting for the sunrise and not for the first time either.

When it is daylight I locate the train coaches that are going to Roxaul, India, the Nepal border town. My train will leave at 9:30 this morning. I find the right coach totally empty and  open so I get in to wait. A tough looking pair follows me in and lowers all the window shades nice and cozy. I think about last night’s robbery and decide I won’t wait to see what they are up to. When the train starts to move I jump out of the still-empty car, run to another car with some passengers inside and climb in. Why tempt the tough two?

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295. Corn and Onions

Back in Long Wait Station, I buy a few bananas and eat them. Children pick up the skins I throw away and gnaw away any remaining fruit and toss away only the paper-thin yellow part of the peel. They seem as famished as the eggshell-eating African children I encountered during my bus trip in the desert of Nigeria. Hungry kids everywhere: I think of all the kids dumping uneaten sandwiches and desserts in school cafeterias back in the states.

Some have too much and some have none. This is not good. This will be trouble. This IS trouble!

When my train arrives, I shove aboard with the mob and fight my way to a seat. A pretty young woman in an orange sari flirts with me—the first smiles from a female since I hit the Moslem countries months ago. Hooray! Sadly, she gets off at the next stop. Crowds come and go and the sun sets pink.

The night is very dark. There is no light in the coach, and the countryside is dark too. I guess there is no electricity out here. At the frequent stops, candles and lanterns glow. At one stop a youth crawls in my window shoving a candle-lit basket of food, cooked corn and onions, ahead of him. It smells good but I resist since eating it would probably kill me. By the light of his candle, I see that the passengers in the coach are now shaved-headed, bearded men wearing white sheets.

When there is room in the baggage rack overhead, I climb up into it with my backpack and sleep wrapped in my coat.

The train stops and goes. About four a.m. it stops and stays: it’s the end of the line.

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294. Dream Realized

.

The train starts moving again.


Damn! It’s going back the way it came! I am trapped by the new crush of people and can’t get off until the next village when I have managed to force my way close enough to the door to jump from the slowly moving train car.


An English-speaking young man greets me in the road as I walk into a village near the train tracks. He is a bureaucrat, an employee of the Department of Agriculture. He escorts me to a breezy teashop. Prints of blue-faced Krishna, wearing a crescent in his hair and with a snake necklace, take the place of pinup girls on the walls.


We talk of peace and war, crops, poverty and so on as a crowd of farmers gathers to see the white phenomenon visiting their village. My host is surprised that a simple teacher like me can afford to travel the world—even third class! Teachers here earn less than thirty dollars a month, so they stay at home, he says.


The first train going my way which stops near the village is a freight with no passenger coaches. Never mind, I climb aboard on the front of the engine with a dozen other freeloaders and so fulfill another boyhood dream by riding on a choo-choo engine!

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293. Here We Are

A junction and I have to change trains. Another struggle but I make it. For platform entertainment there are dogfights featuring a gang of yellow curs vs. a three-legged white mutt. They all lose.


There is an incredible crush on this new coach. There is literally no place to put my feet so I hoist my body and my backpack into the luggage rack above the seats—not exactly a Pullman berth, but not so bad either. Such creative traveling!


The train arrives in another station. There is a three hour wait while passengers in the coach seem to come and go. I have plenty of time to observe them from my perch and I have never seen a dirtier and more repulsive lot, but here we are and I wonder what they are thinking of me!

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292. Different Strokes

After a long wait the train pulls out of the station. The coach is packed full. The trip to the border will last a day and a night, which is not pleasant to think about. The windows are sealed shut for some unknown reason in the stifling heat. It seems that everyone chain-smokes here and there is lots of silvery dust drifting in the air too.


When the train stops, the passengers swarm out to relieve themselves but there are no rest rooms—not even a station. No problem. They squat and do their business right beside the train. We are just a herd of human animals, shitting and spitting without any civilized inhibitions—it’s a sanitation nightmare; a regular bacteriological warfare zone, and, of course when I return from the rest break, an old woman has occupied my seat. It’s hopeless. I stand.


For food, I buy curry from vendors served on a practical disposable plate, a large green leaf, and boiling hot tea which I get them to pour directly into my own plastic cup.


Slow going. All day it’s stop and start. Most of the people are ugly and dressed in rags, but one or two of the younger ones manage to look neat, even pretty. All the female children, babies too, wear sexy black eyeliner and lipstick—such a difference from the uptight Moslem world I have inhabited for the last few months!

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291; Ticket Line

At six a.m. a guy comes around yelling. It’s reveille!


My drug salesmen must have gotten bored and left because I am alone with only about a thousand other Indian train station bums.


I immediately line up in a rapidly forming queue. Cursing and snarling, I hold my place and buy a ticket to the Nepal border—it’s as far as the train goes.


It helps to be big and mean in these queues and I am bigger than most of these people and, by now, experienced enough to act as mean as a professional wrestler.


I buy my third-class ticket and, after a bewildering search in the railway yard I locate my coach and grab a seat.


The usual circus of side-show beggars soon arrive, but instead of arousing my compassion, their theatrically emphasized deformities arouse my disgust and anger, which my struggle in the ticket queue has pushed to a dangerous level. I manage to keep my cool, but mentally kick several of the misshapen, whining, persistent bastards right through the coach window.

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290. Delhi Station

Delhi Station.


Mob scene!


One determined guy grabs me and won’t turn loose. He promises a clean, cheap hotel. He drags me out of the crowd and puts my backpack and me on his motor scooter taxi for a two-rupee ride to the hotel. Oh, it’s a dirty hole of a place with the same stoned European freaks I have seen at every stage of this old silk and modern drug route to the mystic east crashed all over the filthy floor.


I walk out of the place and, eating an apple, find my way back to the railway station.


I am back at the train station by midnight. A gang of young men follows me around suggesting I buy their drugs. They say they “have everything”. I try to lose them but can’t. Finally I throw down my backpack, roll up in my blanket and join the hundreds of sleeping forms on the floor under the hopeful eyes of these youthful drug salesmen.


I sleep well.

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