The Wormlips Scrapbook

Day One

At our rafting company’s 8 a.m. rendezvous at the Busy Bee Café, I found it odd that the Nepali guides kept asking if we were sure we had enough rum. Once enclosed in the bus I realized that at least one had enough last night, judging from the toxic breath.

Our bus (a “video coach”) was made of cardboard-thin tin and the kind of glass that shatters into daggers. The seats were packed so close that our knees didn’t fit even when we turned completely sideways. Worse, the bus was painted Barbie pink.

No, actually: worst of all was what was blasting from the TV screen up front. It was my first real introduction to Bollywood — inane Indian pop music sung by women with shrill voices and beautiful writhing bodies. As the girls did their synchronized pelvic thrusts, their clumsy counterparts jerked their limbs around like John Travolta on Ectasy.

We passed a head-on collision whose gruesomeness didn’t put a damper on the driving technique of our captain.

I was sitting next to 18-year-old Simon from England and trying to tell him from which UK town my grandfather had hailed, but all I could remember was that it began with a W-A, and the only name I could think of was “wanker,” which is not correct.

Speaking of “wanker,” this is the first group trip I’ve been on that didn’t have any. Except for the guides, I mean. The only weird thing was that my young companions, none over thirty, didn’t quite know what to make of me. They’d swear at something, and then wheel around and look at me, gasping and apologizing as though I were the Queen Mum, unaware that I’m probably the one who made up the word in the first place, before the dawn of time.

Lila, nineteen years old and from Canada, had just returned from the trek that Cheryl and I are planning to do next month. As she described ascending thousands of feet of stone steps, I expressed concern about my own ability. “Oh, don’t worry,” she reassured me. “There are people even older than you up there — I mean, really old, with grey hair and everything.”

One of the Israeli guys tried to teach me the two sounds of Hebrew that give the most trouble to native English-speakers. I could “ch” up a storm (that guttural, phlemmy one like in Channukah) but the “r” threw me. You’re supposed to stick the middle of your tongue against the middle of the roof of your mouth and roll off the “r” like so many marbles. My version sounded like I was drowning.

I also learned a Yiddish curse: “You should be a calendar so they hang you on the wall and each day they tear a little piece off of you.” Influenced by the Brits, I started saying “knackered” and “WICK-ed” and “innit” (as in “There’s a lot of rum in there, innit?”)

En route to the river we drove through village after village, adobe houses painted with ochre skirts and thatch-roofed huts on stilts. In one town a woman sat with a burlap sack by her side, which gave me a start when it started to oink and wiggle. In another place, a sari-clad mother lay asleep  in the middle of a street with two sobbing toddlers by her side.

It took us two-and-a-half hours to get to our put-in spot where half a dozen starving dogs joined us on the beach as our guides laid out sandwich fixins. One sweet old rottweiler-lab found pleasure in our scrap bucket until one of our guides starting throwing rocks. Apparently that’s typical here. Many Nepalis are not sentimental about animals, unless they happen to be one of the sacred variety. The poor hound yelped in pain and ran off, but hunger kept bringing him back.

Our first rapid, Little Brother, was a Class Four+ and we aced it.

Next was Big Brother, where six days ago an accident claimed two lives and badly injured fifteen. I was grateful our guides decided to portage that one.

Local boys perched on a giant rock overlooking the rapid, observing us. One spoke sweetly to me: “Hello, tourist.” I’d thought they were cute until the horrifying moment that a kayaker crashed upside-down and out-of-control through the rapids for too many seconds without breathing, and then was catapulted head-first into a boulder before slipping out of sight into the waves.

The kids burst into wild laughter. The guy lived but sustained significant injuries.

The Nepalis aren’t shy about staring, even when you’ve crawled way off behind some potty bushes. One English girl with me observed, “This is a rather exposed wee, innit?”

My Facebook friend Laura had warned me that the Kali Gandaki is icy. What I didn’t factor in was the wind-chill once you’re soaked and tearing down the deep and sunless canyon. By the time we reached our campsite a few hours later, I was tinged a shade of blue that went well with my eyes.

As I focused on getting warm, the guides pounded down bottle after bottle of rum and started hitting on all the girls — well, except for me, at twice their age. Actually, one was so drunk he must have been blind because he made a few feeble attempts on my attentions. Before they totally lost control they finished preparing excellent dal bhat.

Day Two

Particularly on the misty mornings you can see why places like this gave birth to Shangri-La legends.

When we broke camp, we found we’d been camped on the nest of a certain creature which Simon immediately befriended. He kept trying to throw it at me, but I can run faster than you think.

Unaware that the first few hours of the day would be the wildest whitewater, I innocently took my place at the front of the raft, jamming my toes as tightly under the tubing as they’d go. If you know from rafting, you know this is where you sit if you like to spend most of your time eye-to-eye with roiling water into which the raft is either diving or which is plummeting on you in a powerful wave. It’s also where you get tossed around the most. Have you watched what happens when current hits the spiny creatures that are rooted on a rock in a tidepool? You know how they twist and stretch and tangle and generally look very uncomfortable until the turbulence stops? That’s what my backbone did: whooshing in every direction with each plummet into or climb up a wave. I didn’t realize how bendable and posable I still am at my age.

From morning to night we heard a steady shrill way up the canyon walls. It was like crickets but without the modulation, so it sounded more mechanical. One of my Israeli companions maintained with absolute conviction that it was the sound of water whistling through pipes. Never mind that there are no pipes up there. Only at the end of the trip did he allow as to the possible flaws in his theory. It was crickets — just not very musical, creative ones.

Around lunchtime we pulled up to a beach where an enterprising woman was selling goods to the tourists. My team picked up another half-dozen bottles of rum. I bought two chocolate bars.

By sunset I felt like I’d spent the day on the heavy-duty cycle of an industrial washing machine. I hobbled off alone with my chocolate to explore the surroundings beyond the camp and, in near darkness, could just make out the silhouettes of three rhesus macaque monkeys frolicking along the opposite bank. I saw a single lightning bug and many drunken Nepalis hitting on 20-year-old women. Bored again, I went to bed. But some idiot had thrown my so-called mattress into the river so it was drenched. I took an Ambien and hit the hard, cold ground.

Day Three

Practicing patience, local boys eventually got the benefit of our breakfast leftovers.

It was a quiet day on the river with only three mediocre rapids and a few miles of paddling along flat, still water above the dam. Some schoolkids watched us from a high bridge and I was grateful they didn’t decide to spit — or if they did they had bad aim.

I swam the last few hundred feet to the confluence of a smaller river whose turquoise water interlaced with the Kali Gandaki’s glacial turbidity.

Then came the inevitable five-hour bus ride, as hair-raising as all the others. Today’s delay was caused by a likely-fatal accident involving a truck over a cliff. By the time we got there the truck was inching its way back up the embankment, pulled by primitive, hand-rigged contraptions.

Back in Pokhara the guides suggested we meet for a farewell dinner at The Love Shack, I suspect as a final, subliminal encouragement to any of the girls who had not yet been won over by their libidinous charms. As my rivermates engaged with glee in drinking contests, I got to talking to the only guy who wasn’t leering: a sweet young man named Ram whose life couldn’t be more different than mine. He grew up with nothing in a tiny village on the Kali Gandaki. I grew up with plenty in an affluent city with potable water and filet mignon. So we spoke politely about nothing. But suddenly and accidentally we stumbled on a mutual experience — a very funny one. We went into hysterical laughter, made more delightful and uncontrollable for its unexpectedness. Eventually everyone at the table wanted to know what we were on about, but we couldn’t even try to explain it.

Leaving my youthfully spirited companions I went home to my hotel, managing for the first time not to get lost on the dark walk. Up in my room I tossed back the covers and found a cockroach waiting patiently for me on my pillow, upper legs crossed behind its head, cigarette dangling from the corner of its mouth. I relocated it. As I drifted off (after examining every square inch of sheet and pillow) I heard the screams of low-status dogs being attacked by gangs of superiors.

I woke up at 1:00 a.m. and every fifteen minutes thereafter with an increasingly sore throat. Up for good at 6:00, mad at my cold but thrilled with the view from my hotel room. The pointy peak toward the left is Machhapuchhare (a.k.a. Fishtail), which I’m planning to visit up-close in a month.

Wanting to make the most of my unexpected day in Pokhara I perused the guidebooks, but all the walks I chose had warnings: “Not safe for single women.” So I hired a cab to take me around for some exploration — a bargain at $20 for five hours.

My driver, Vishnu, first took me to a bridge over the Seti River gorge into which people throw white garments once worn by their dead loved ones, and where a few people have thrown themselves, to ill effect. An 85-year-old woman there gave Vishnu and me tikas. I was embarrassed because I don’t belong in a tika. Do you know what’s even sillier than a white woman sporting a tika? A white woman who has been wilting in humidity all day so that the tika melts and gathers in the wrinkles on her brow.

While looking into the dense vegetation there on the cliffside, I learned my first Nepali word: makura (accent on the first syllable) which means spider.

We drove through the old bazaar where locals shop, and passed a wedding in progress. You wouldn’t think it’s anything other than a cluster of people in fancy dress, except for the blare off a dozen brass horns out of tune.

Most houses around here have prayer flags hung out front. When they’re strung along a string like a banner, that means a Buddhist lives there, says Vishnu. When sewed end to end, that’s a Hindu household.

We visited Mahendra Cave, named after the recently uncrowned king: a sacred place for Hindus, with little shrines tucked here and there and bells for ringing their prayers Heavenward. As Americans name stalactites for Disney characters, so do Hindus for their many deities. At one point Vishnu shouted back to me, Don’t step on Shiva!

(That second picture, above, is of Vishnu.) Nearby was Bat Cave, with thousands of fat little black tzameros (accent on second syllable) overhead.

We visited a Hindu temple where we were accosted by a Vishnu’s noxious friend, who calls himself a guide. He did me the favor of getting my Stupid Tourist Experience out of the way early in my trip, by demanding way too much money for a service I hadn’t wanted.

My favorite part of the day was visiting Devi Falls, which is similar to Semuc Champey in Guatemala, where a violent river vanishes all of a sudden into a hole in the ground. We walked down fifty steps into another cave nearby, and I thought my lungs would explode on the trip back up. Doesn’t bode well for my trek 12,000 feet higher.

We also visited a Tibetan refugee camp, a relatively upscale place with cinderblock buildings and pretty grounds. In one large room a bunch of women wove beautiful rugs.

One woman was singing a lovely song in Nepali. I asked Vishnu what it meant. “She is asking for a boyfriend.” Every Nepali I’ve talked to here, including Vishnu, has expressed resentment at the Tibetan refugees, saying that the Nepal government is helping them too much, that the Tibetans are already “wealthy” from international aid, and that Tibetans are taking jobs that rightfully belong to Nepalis — echoes of our immigration controversies in the US.

We went to a small village that perches above the Seti River where there was, as usual, a cremation in progress.

Our scheduled stops completed, Vishnu asked me if I wanted to see where he lives. Reticent at first because I am a suspicious person — why would he offer this? — I assented. We drove out of town on ever smaller and funkier roads, finally parking on a narrow dirt-and-rock road from which we followed a little trail between walls. His house is a long narrow shed divided along its length into four rooms, the biggest about 10 x 15 feet. He and his wife and kids live in one, his father in one, and two of his brothers with families in the others. When we arrived, his father — ancient at only 58 and sick with all kinds of things including high blood pressure — was asleep on his bed wearing only shorts. But he soon joined us in the next room, fully dressed including hat. In seconds the room was full with Vishnu, father, brother, brother’s wife and four kids, welcoming and curious about this visitor who had no idea what they were saying. One of the young boys spoke a little English so he translated. The little girl kept dancing around and climbing all over me. I had no intention of bringing my camera out, but when the girl saw it she wanted her picture taken, brandishing something small in her hand. “She wants her picture taken with the SIM card,” her cousin explained. I obliged.

Vishnu taught me one more Nepali word: sapuna (accent on first syllable) meaning a dream. People take them seriously in Nepal, he says. As we said farewell (and I’d given him the gy-matic tip I’m guessing he hoped for) he asked me not to tell his boss (the manager of Hotel Raraa) that he had taken me to meet his family. I complied.

At six I met with my rafting mates (after a terrifying two-block ride on the back of the motorcycle of one of the guides), a lively bunch, none older than my children: 5 Israelis, 7 Brits, 2 Canadians and 7 Nepali staff.

Afterwards I wandered through the market stalls in the dark, past smoky little ceremonial fires built against stone walls, again enduring traffic hazards, fumes, recorded om chants and cries of Namaste, Ma’am. Will you let me try to sell you something? I paid too much money for a barely padded sleeping pad for my trip, bought chocolate, walked half a mile past my hotel just like I did last night, and finally made it back, cursing my lack of navigational skills. One good thing: Pokhara has the fastest Internet speeds in all of Nepal.

I awoke from a nightmare that Obama had been defeated in a landslide, led by Delaware. Coffeeless and in a groggy state of despair I started to gather my stuff for my river trip. At 6:30 Bhim arrived and transported me to the bus station — again, courtesy of Thakur — where we found the big bus full, so I was assigned to a van designed for something other than comfort or safety.

While waiting, an ascetic approached the Chinese guy I was talking to, smiling and offering him a teeny weeny orange flower, no doubt in exchange for a giant fee. The Chinese guy flipped out and scuttled off, telling me over his shoulder, I’m afraid of that religion.

It was an hour of screeching brakes, choking fumes and toodlie-oodlie-oodlie horns before we got out into the countryside. A while later we rounded a corner and my heart I think really skipped a beat when I got my first glimpse of the Himalaya: huge beyond imagining. Words and pictures won’t work here. Nor will they work for any of the other sights we passed. Rather than try, I’ll excerpt an e-mail I sent to my friend M this morning:

It’s everything you’d expect — thatched houses on tree-limb frames, emerald terraces of rice, live goats bouncing along on roofracks, brilliant tropical flowers, roosters pecking at trash in the streets, dusty people in bright clothes, and endless folds of mountains. What’s different is what happens when you step into that predictable picture. The tiny street kid in a dirty frilly party dress runs over over to where you’re sitting and leaps without warning into your lap, sliding down your legs like you’re playground equipment…

Passing by all this stuff that’s totally new makes me feel like a three-year-old, with little control over my fate and with endless “whys?” It’s good for me, I think, to have such a different perspective. I don’t understand much of what I see. Do people live in that building on stilts? Why are those boys holding a rope across the road so we can’t pass? Why do people hang dried ears of corn like curtains out their windows? What crop is that on that cliffside? What are those towering bamboo tripods for? Why are we stopping? Why are all those people running down the hill? What do those people who look like walking haystacks do with all those grasses they’re hauling? What are those bright orange lacey things drying on people’s roofs? Why is that crowd of forty men clustered around that car? Are Krazy Cheese Balls as good as the signs say?

As we careened along mountain roads with precipitous drop-offs, I decided it best not to look. Our driver continually passed even the biggest buses on blind corners at top speed, oogling his horn as though that made a difference. At one point my seatmate gasped and I made the mistake of looking up. We were racing down the the wrong side of the road directly at a speeding concrete truck adorned with colorful, glittering tinsel on its windshield. I read its brand — TATA — which might well have been the last word in my brain, had we not veered with millimeters to spare. For a while we got stuck in a traffic jam in the wake of a bad accident.

For part of the trip I sat next to a Dutch woman who, when she learned I was American, told me stories of her encounters with my people. ”Yesterday I met another single American woman. She asked me to go with her to buy condoms.” “I’m  not that single!” I interrupted. Apparently this American had such an appalling lack of dignity and respect that she asked the Nepali salesmen which brands were more pleasurable. I am so embarrassed. People often ask where I’m from and, with our reputation in the US as it is now, I cringe a little. Several Nepalis have tactfully commented, “Oh, very powerful country,” to which I once responded, “Yes, we do like to invade people.” Quite a few Brits have openly acknowledged the rudeness of Americans they’ve met in Nepal. I’m hoping I can change a few minds.

Finally, after eight hair-raising hours (the same as the number of legs I saw on the creatures suspended in air by the side of the road) we arrived in Pokhara where the usual cluster of aggressive cab drivers waited to whisk the unwary traveler to hotels of dubious quality. I looked around for someone holding a sign with my name. Nobody except a miniscule man clutching a miniscule creased slip of paper to his chest. When encouraged to unfold it, the tiny-lettered word “Jinna” was revealed.

I put my bag into the June-bug sized cab and aimed at the Hotel Raraa, which I can’t help but pronounce like “Siss Boom Bah,” which is not correct. It’s a couple blocks from the end of Lake Fewa at the quiet end of the hopelessly touristy Lakeside district.

My room is clean and has the basics — a bed and a pillow — but lacks certain desirables like soap and toilet paper. I’m glad I thought to bring my own. But the view of the Annapurna range out my window more than dwarfs any deficiencies.

As instructed yesterday by my rafting company, I called their office in Pokhara to find the meeting place for our 6:00 gathering tonight, and raced through dinner to arrive promptly. No one there, until eventually a Nepali man appeared, settled into the chair next to me, sighed, and asked, “So. How long do you plan to be in Pokhara?” Not a good question. He has delayed my trip by a day. That’s okay, I guess. I just wish he’d told me sooner.

At that point I think the jet lag really hit. I kept twisting my ankle in holes on the dark street on the way home. I craved chocolate so kept stopping along the rows of stalls to see what people were selling. They all asked exorbitant prices. “I don’t want to bargain. All I want is a piece of chocolate,” I whined to myself. After haggling I finally secured a nice bar of Toblerone (still for too much money). Minutes later it propelled itself out of my bag and into the gutter. Stupid tourists kept pushing me into traffic. I stepped in a fresh patch of sacred-cow shite. I was wearing sandals. I went to bed.