Things I Learned in Nepal

(Quick synopsis: I recently went on a three week trip to Nepal. The pictures I took are available at http://nepal.baz.org/ -- these are a few of the many things I learned or was reminded of while there.)

Nepal is a hell of a long way around the world. Even broken up by stops and layovers, the sheer amount of travel involved getting there and returning is really impressive. That one can move that far around the world faster today than ever before is neat, to be sure, but it's still surprisingly wearing on one's body -- more wearing than I expected for what basically amounts to sitting in a chair for about a day. Maybe we've got compasses on the brain, maybe we share some critical genes with homing pigeons, but there's a deep down feeling of being FAR FROM HOME, no matter how short a time it took to get there.
English is, for better or worse, the lingua franca of air travel. Condemn it or take comfort, as you see fit. I was perfectly able to understand that oxygen masks would come from the ceiling if I needed them on every airplane ride involved in the trip.
In countries other than our own, airline food carries spice and heat that would likely provoke lawsuits in our blandly cooked skies. A welcome relief for those of us who prefer food with taste, though.
Despite preconceived notions to the contrary, the international terminal at Abu Dhabi contains the same duty free Versace, Chanel, Givenchy, et al, shops as every other major airport I've gone through. I guess I was a little disappointed -- the blue and green ceramic tiling was really nice, and the architecture made different assumptions than in cooler climes, but there were no "Sharper Bedouin: Supplies for the Discriminating Nomadic Wanderer" shops to be found anywhere.
The yogurt served with meals, starting with the flight from Abu Dhabi to Kathmandu, continuing through our stay in Nepal, and ending with the flight back to London from Abu Dhabi, was simply the best yogurt I've ever had, bar none. Tangy, lively, clean in the mouth and refreshing on the palate -- this was stellar stuff, and I'll miss it.
As many pictures as one takes of Kathmandu, one will not be able to truly communicate a sense of the city to someone who hasn't been there until one can bring back the smell of the place. It's a city in a bowl-shaped valley, and while it's not as determinedly smoggy as, say, LA, the sheer variety of smells is bewildering to unaccustomed noses. Lots of diesel fumes, of course, from the aging fleet of three-wheeled, two-stroke "tempos" which act as short haul taxis, school busses, and commuter lines for Kathmandu. (Editorials in the local papers are strongly clamoring for them to be outlawed, but no dice yet.) Cow dung. People dung. Cardamom and turmeric, frying oils and fried samosas. Sweat and spunk and patchouli, gun oil and motor oil. The fumes are bad, and make your sinuses feel not just dirty but somewhat abused -- but all the smells combined make a perfume very different than any "first-world" city I know. You might like it, you might hate it; I've never smelled anything else quite like it.
Nepal goes to bed early by western standards. Even the bustling Thamel neighborhood, which caters to tourists (also preys on them, begs from them, and attempts to sell them everything it can) closes its shutters around 9:30 every evening.
Anything that the royal family does provokes a holiday. Banks were closed on the day after we arrived because the King was leaving for a state visit to China. There was another one when he returned. I wonder if people look back on the Kennedys' Camelot days so fondly because we'd secretly love to have a royal family here in the U.S., sometimes.
In Nepal, the price for everything is negotiable. Everyone haggles, nobody gets particularly heated about it, and once a price is set, it's set. It's not something westerners do easily, but once one gets over taking prices for granted and gets a feel for what things are actually worth, it's a fun game to play. On the way home, tired and feeling all my cultural habits smearing together, I very nearly started bargaining over the price of a bottle of water with an unsuspecting Brit at Heathrow.
Jet lag can creep up on you at unexpected times.
Nepalis use the horns on their vehicles in a far wider variety of ways than we do. They honk before coming around a blind corner. They honk if there are pedestrians, slower moving vehicles, livestock, children, or an inauspicious configuration of dust on the road in front of them. They honk to announce that they're about to violate every traffic law and pass the slower-moving bus/pedestrians/buffalo ahead of them. Friends honk to each other. I did not once see a Nepali driver take his or her hand off the horn button while driving. The rhythm and motion of driving are faintly reminiscent of vehicular square-dancing; I remain convinced that if the horn on a car breaks, the car cannot be driven until it's fixed.
Motorcycles. Based on engine size and observed carrying capacity on the bikes in Kathmandu, it's clear that I have been woefully underutilizing my motorcycle's passenger space. I saw 125 cc bikes carrying four people, where my 650 cc machine usually only carries one. Women passengers ride sidesaddle, sometimes holding an umbrella over themselves and the driver, in many cases carrying a sleeping child over one shoulder. Children stash themselves wherever possible.
I saw, no joke, not a single working traffic light in Nepal. Not one. The hairier intersections in Kathmandu will sometimes have police officers lackadaisically directing traffic, but it's an inconsistent offering at best. Most of the time, traffic Just Sort Of Happens.
Indian television, especially bizarre teleplays involving classic Hindu stories and special effects seemingly done on an Amiga, provides a very surreal counterpoint to waiting for a plane at 6 a.m.
On Nepal's internal, short-haul airlines, one gets offered cottonballs (as earplugs) before the flight takes off, and cups of Pepsi poured from a single 2 liter bottle while underway.
Even if one has a lifetime's habit of not scratching mosquito bites, one will occasionally do so in one's sleep and wake oneself up. This is not a recipe for a good night's sleep.
They say that after you take the third leech off you, you pretty much stop caring about whether they're on you or not. This is patently untrue. It takes four. They leave brilliant red rings for several days under the skin near the bite.
"Yak cheese" is a misnomer. Yaks are male -- the female of the species is called a Nak. So the phrase "Yak cheese" is pretty funny to Nepalis, though most restaurants still call it that to avoid confusing the westerners. As a Peace Corps volunteer repeated to us: "It takes a Nak to milk a Yak." Nak cheese, though, is really, really tasty. Sharp, salty, and creamy.
Getting away from the neighborhoods and streets specifically for tourists is critical, if you want to see anything but the schlock put on display for you. We went wandering through neighborhoods where we were amusing oddities, rather than walking wallets, and it made a world of difference. Children laughed and talked to us rather than begging.
Livestock, especially in the mountains, walk with bells on. Unlike the clanking cowbells I grew up around, these actually tinkle and ring. They're gorgeous.
Altitude sickness can creep up on you in unexpected ways, and weirdly inconsistently. Matt got sufficiently altitude sick at 3000 meters to be well and truly miserable for an afternoon and an evening's acclimatization, while I remained unaffected all the way up to 4500 meters, the highest we went.
Altitude sickness aside, hiking up a steep, switchbacked trail at 4000 meters requires perseverance and pacing very different than at lower altitudes. Your heart pounds easily, and you can observe yourself stopping to catch your breath more and more often as the altitude increases. Part of this, to be sure, was due to our naively aggressive attempt; both of us, several days later, thought that we could probably have made Thorung La Pass at 5416 meters if we'd taken several days to go up more slowly.
4500 meters (14800 ft) above sea level is pretty freaking high up. Sitting inside a dark grey cloud (and realizing a fantasy I've had since the first time I flew through clouds in an airplane), one realizes that it's very, very quiet inside. The tinkling of goat bells farther downslope came up only faintly, like a dream of grazing livestock.
Chang, a traditional Sherpa beer brewed from rice or occasionally millet, tastes like watered down yogurt mixed with grain alcohol. I doubt it's going to be a big seller in the States.
Yak, at least the nugget of dried yak I tried, was salty, meaty, gamey, and required about 5 minutes of chewing to soften up. I doubt this'll catch on quick, either.
Nepali tea, locally called "Milk Tea," is a fabulous way to kickstart the day. Really good tea (Nepal is directly next door to Darjeeling), a little spice, whole milk, and lots of the light grey, large crystal sugar that was ubiquitous on every table we saw -- the triple whammy of caffeine, fat, and sucrose started every day very nicely.
I'm coming to believe that most cuisines in the world have some form of dough-wrapped-filling-style dumplings; momos, the Tibetan version, are both fabulous to eat and challenging to make.
Having a dark, smoky kitchen full of Sherpas laugh at the ugly momo you've just hand rolled is just a wee bit humbling. (I tried to get some tips from the daughter of the innkeeper who'd just made 8 flawless momos in front of me -- even with her help, my momo turned out like ... a lump. They tactfully didn't even bother serving it to us.)
Along the western third of the Annapurna Circuit, it's not possible to pay the 50 Rps/minute (about US$0.80) for a dialup connection to the internet, as it once was. The Maoist rebels blew up the telephone repeaters some time back, now.
If your hiking boots get soaked through and through, hanging them by their laces from a rafter directly underneath a ceiling fan (should you have one) will, eventually, dry them out. Try to avoid having to do this.
Many, many loads in Nepal are carried on the backs (and heads) of porters. We saw men carrying roughly 20 five foot long 2x2s by single straps across their heads. We saw lone men carrying beams up the trail -- beams that Matt and I doubted we could have hefted together. (Karma, our guide, estimated some of these at 140 kilos.) Most of the men carrying these loads were doing so in flipflops. I'm not sure of the long term implications of carrying heavy loads on one's head, but carrying my own bag that way was surprisingly comfortable.
Do not give postcards to begging children unless you have enough for every child in a mile-wide radius.

An exchange I didn't expect to have:

   Adam: 

   Matt:  WHAT?

   Adam: I SAID, WE'RE IN A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY AND WE JUST TOOK A
   DIFFERENT RICKETY WOODEN BRIDGE THAN OUR GUIDE TOOK. 

         <points to our guide taking the modern looking metal bridge 10
         meters upstream>

   Matt: OH.

All dogs in Nepal are asleep. That's all they do, sleep. Any four-legged creature covered in fur which moves or makes noise, no matter how unlikely its shape, is either a cat, a cow, or a dopkyo, the sterile offspring of a cow and a yak. No dog walks around, and they certainly don't bark.
If a hot spring is sufficiently hot, dipping your legs into it up to the calves will feel really good all along your feet and ankles, and then leave inexplicable pink scald marks only at the place on your legs where the surface of the water lapped. Why the parts of our legs actually immersed in the water didn't appear pink and parboiled, I don't know.
No matter how many stomach remedies you bring, no matter how much Immodium and Ciprofloxacin and Pepto Bismol you've got handy, if you're both reasonably careful and lucky, you won't need to use a single one.
Beyond flies and mosquitoes, insects and their close cousins tend to not bother you if you don't bother them first. We shared one room with a thumb-length cockroach strolling around the bathroom while we showered in the dark, and another with an approximately thumb-length scorpion (we didn't check all that closely) sitting motionless, high on a wall, which inexplicably vanished while we ate our dinners. No harm, no foul.
Sleep more than you're used to, and you'll remember more of your dreams than you're used to.
I've forgotten most of my algebra. One day on the trail, Matt and I attempted to work out in our heads how to inscribe a circle inside another circle such that the area of the inside circle is the same as the area of the donut outside it... 10 minutes later, we both realized that what would have been a trivial problem 11 years ago was beyond us now, at least without pencil and paper. Knowledge passes through us and moves on.
Nepal typically sees fewer tourists during the monsoon season. Making things slower, they're currently in the midst of an internal struggle which is deterring even the italians and spaniards who usually come during the monsoon. Traveling during this very, very slow period had its pros and cons. On the upside, the trails are blessedly free of people and there's no problem getting a room in one of the teahouses. On the downside, in the Kathmandu valley, the trinket vendors and beggars target you all the harder and all the more persistently. It's wearing.
The jet engines hanging from the wings of a Boeing 767-300 do not hang as rigidly as one might expect. They dangle a little pendulously and bob a bit in turbulence, like long earlobes.
Traveling west for 31 hours, 19 of which are at jet speeds, creates two bewilderingly long time periods: one interminable night, and a day where the numbers of meals eaten, books read, notes taken, add up to strange, imaginary numbers in one's mind. Returning to my starting point felt like falling down the hole to Wonderland, odd little sensory impressions flitting past me like marmalade jars: another jet flying close enough to us to see their contrail, the custom sleeves UAE passport-holders seem to all carry, british exits all saying "Way Out," and everyone's suddenly becoming much, much taller.
The poverty we've got in here in the western hemisphere pales before the scale and scope of poverty in the (optimistically-named) "developing countries" I've seen. We gave water to a man who barked and cringed away from the housewife who shooed him from us; I bought milk for a 10-year-old Indian girl who then brought her infant sister, eyes kohl-rimmed, to thank me; I watched a man giving 1-rupee notes to every beggar who asked, and noticed my American-nurtured suspicion of beggars ("what if they spend it on booze or drugs?") give way in the face of the lepers, sleeping in the hot sun, their bandages grown grey amidst the practiced people stepping over them. 27 people died as a result of flooding just during the 4 days I was back in Kathmandu, most of them as a result of their shanty-towns being swept away or buried. As we walked the trail, as we walked the streets, we were water bugs barely dimpling the surface of the lives the Nepalis are immersed in every day. Simply by virtue of the money in our pockets and the passports that would take us home, we were gadflies. It was no wonder the jewelry sellers targetted us so fiercely.
Now, 2 weeks after returning, the day to day activities in my "regular" life still have a faint strangeness about them. Little things I've done for years seem unfamiliar and habitual, both -- drinking water from the tap, lingering in the shower, talking in conversational tones to the people I wrote postcards to while sipping milk tea in Jomsom -- and I can feel myself resisting, on some level, sinking back into the routines I left. I've come back unsettled; this was, in a lot of ways, the point of going away in the first place.

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