ALL CHANGE AT KATHMANDU (1989)
Old timers have so many journeys to choose from. Cycle touring on the continent the year before O levels made me the first family member to be bitten by the travel bug. Emigration to Canada on graduation from Imperial College left me with a love of wide-open spaces and an intolerance of long cold winters. Walking with a young family in the snow along part of the Offa’s Dike path led to the first of several holidays backpacking the long distance footpaths of France. But it wasn’t until 1989 that we first tried backpacking in the Lonely Planet sense, and that introduced us to an enthralling, economical, mode of travel. I had dreamed of Nepal, ever since Everest was conquered in my last year at school.
The opportunity arose from the unusual luxury of a month’s vacation, shortly after all three kids had left home There was little time for pre-planning except the purchase of the appropriate Lonely Planet (LP) - still slim volumes of essential information needed by real travellers! Joan got physically fit at the local gym. We were determined to jump in at the deep end without even booking a place for the first night. As it happened it was the inaugural flight London - Kathmandu piloted by the king’s nephew, and champagne was served even to economy class.
The moment we passed from the airport to the street we were unleashed into another world. A mad throng of touts attempted to snatch our attention, all offering accommodation. ‘Come with Me, Looking is Free.’ Overwhelmed but still determined to do our own thing we lifted our rucksacks into a crowded service bus and sat on the engine compartment. We had a vague idea that an area called Thamel was to be our destination, though god alone knew how we would recognise it if we saw it! Not only could we not understand a word, we couldn’t read Nepali script either. Give me the deep sea, a compass and a sextant any time!
But just as the bus was about to depart Shyam, one of the youngest and most enterprising of the hustlers, jumped on knowing he had outwitted the competition. And so we ended up in a large bare room for two at Nepal Peace Cottage, adjacent to Thamel, for the princely sum of $10 a night (five times the going rate for backpackers, who operate in local currency anyway). But it did include breakfast on the roof overlooking a small rice paddy and Kathmandu city. Almost immediately the manager set about selling us a trek with guide and porters, but we wisely resisted the hard sell until we had got our bearings.
Narrow unmade streets packed with exotic colour and life, street markets, cows wandering as they pleased, a herd of goats climbing the steps of a footbridge across Kathmandu’s only dual carriageway to reach their fate at market. Scary red meat butchered and sold on blood-cleansed doorsteps in narrow streets. Mouth-watering displays of sickly cakes covered with flies. Slops thrown from the wooden balconies of carved houses to the street below - positively Elizabethan. Boys rummaging through the evil smelling detritus in steel skips searching for reusable plastic bags, whilst men pee-d against the sides.
‘Peel it, Boil it, Cook it, or Forget it’, is the traveller’s motto. We had never seen hygiene like it and wondered how to survive. For the first day we lived on bananas. I even struggled to peel them one-handed without contaminating my right hand, like any true member of the Indian continent. But how do you build up resistance without exposure to sensible amounts of infection? Gradually we relaxed to rediscover the enhanced taste of traditionally reared and cultivated food. The intense taste of real eggs and chicken scarcely remembered from our youth. The marvellous quiches and lasagne sold for a pittance in Narayan’s Italian restaurant, buffalo steak, vegetable Biryani, Tibetan food, Freak Street, cakes and tarts in Pie Alley. Food cooked to tempt the western pallet was a happy leftover from the hippy invasion of the 60’s.
But it was company as well as the food that led us to these backpacker haunts for they were full of the most interesting adventurous young people. In comparison to today backpacking was still a minority activity. For networking - these were venues par excellence. They were the streetwise explorers - we were the uninitiated oldies. But they did concede, ‘I just can’t imagine my parents doing this’. Few were over thirty and very few under twenty-one. We vowed to try, their way of travelling and their guest houses next holiday.
If they hadn’t been trekking then they were currently planning to go. Several had luxuriated in personal service on a Kashmir houseboat for £1 a day. Some had been to Tibet, which was still difficult to enter. Almost all spoke highly of the friendliness, ease of travel and wonderful food of Thailand, still largely unknown in Britain. India we learned was difficult but the initial loathing soon turned to loving. Nepal by contrast was so relaxing. Their talk inspired us to go and explore the north, east and south of Thailand over several holidays, then mainland Malaya and Sarawak on Borneo. On retirement we spent extended spells in India and Sumatra before rheumatoid arthritis threw us off course for several years. More recently Osama Bin Laden has emphasised the attraction of the Catholic countries in Central and South America - Peru and Mexico so far.
Desperate poverty was something we had never previously encountered. Yet there is something very colourful, very picturesque, very human about it. But beggars, their arms and legs eaten by leprosy, penetrate the conscience of even the most hardened tourist. They spent the day in the most unlikely places. But who benefits from your charity, the leper, the carer, or owner of a meal ticket? Who places him in the full sun on top of a bridge from which he could not escape in a month of Sundays? Never had we experienced hassle like it from the street sellers in imperial Durbar Square. Trinkets, ornaments, jewellery, trumpets, prayer wheels, drums and swords were for sale everywhere. We dare not take a speculative interest in anything, let alone ask its price, for the certainty of being pursued for hours with desperately reducing prices till the salesman was near tears, thinking we had mislead him.
It was easy enough to find the bus station from the map in the LP, but there were twenty buses to choose from and the destinations were written only in Nepali script. LP in hand we approached a driver and pointed to the Nepali script of our intended destination. So it was we found our way to the neighbouring town of Patan. Bhaktapur, temple full and hassle free, was easier - there aren’t so many trolley bus routes to choose from.
By now we knew that we would like to trek the so-called Annapurna Round. But having just twenty days left, not quite enough, and having no idea how we would cope with altitude, we opted for the easier half, up the Kali Gandaki gorge to the Hindu shrine at Muktinath, thus just avoiding the high 5200 metre pass at Thorung La which connects the two halves. (Joan, now mobile again thanks to artificial knees, finally reached that height in Peru last year.) We were certainly in no mood to spoil the trip of a lifetime by carrying heavy rucksacks uphill all day and down almost as much the next, for this is not ridge-walking country.
Finally we opted for a package with a guide and two porters at 40% of the original asking price.
We left Kathmandu by bus for the 200-mile journey to Pokhara, and then hired a taxi to take us to our first camping spot. We will never forget first light, peering out of our small tent at the snow-white double peak of Macchapuchhare (Fish Tail) glistening in a clear blue sky. Later in the day the peaks would all disappear in a brilliant white cloud of evaporated snow.
Santabir, our guide could speak enough English to explain the essentials of the journey, but non verbal communication was all we could manage with porters Zantara and the teenager Lalbadu, who like us was setting out on his very first Himalayan trek. Imagine a teenager carrying a 40kg basket from a wide strap around his forehead. I could hardly balance, let alone walk, but even that was easier than carrying over 60kg of full beer bottles in a steel crate backpack, or the delicate task of manoeuvring five-foot fluorescent tubes for days up to the homes and teahouses on the Tibetan plateau. We were following a donkey trade route, rice up and wool down, and we soon learnt to keep out of their way, for they stopped for no man, and the gorge was at times a mere thousand metres below.
After a few days it was becoming obvious that Santabir, preferring the easy life, had no intention of taking us to Muktinath, so we stressed that we did intend to go and now needed to walk hard all day. Extra funding was required so that we could stay in teahouses, and there would be no time for Santabir to demonstrate his incredibly fine outdoor cookery skills. From now on it would be Dahl Bhat, boiled rice and a miniscule helping of curried beans. What was left on your plate went to the children of the restaurant; nothing was ever wasted, reminiscent of my childhood in wartime Britain.
One evening as it started to rain we pitched our tents on the turf of a flat roof because there was no room at the inn below. It turned out that a crowd was expected that night for a funeral service for a five-year old boy. They invited us to join forty or so family guests, but warned we would have to stay until the end, since the room would be sealed to keep the spirits out.
The high priest of the animist mountain religion took the service. He chanted, held up and thumped his attractive homemade drum all night. Women sat to the right on carpet mats or lay on mattresses, many breast-fed babies or toddlers, men sat solemnly on benches to the left, with ceremonial raising of sickles. Small clay models of dogs guarded thresholds covered in white powder, which was examined for footprints at regular intervals. The boy’s brother was made to cry in what seemed a heartless fashion, but perhaps it was an aid to help him grieve. A small drop of blood was taken from a live chicken and sprinkled on each step of a skywards pointing ladder, (we scaled a similar notched tree trunk to get to our tent on the roof). Next morning’s breakfast feast was a vividly coloured selection of rice flour spaghetti, eaten before the before a dignified, men and drum, funeral procession to his grave on the steep wooded slopes leading down to the Kali Gandaki.
What we would have given for a working knowledge of Nepali so we could have understood, rather than merely conjectured on, the significance of that unique ceremony. A lesson learned. Linguaphone taught me to speak, but not read, basic Thai before going the next year, and it greatly enhanced our understanding and the ability to make contacts.
On the return journey a few days later we passed the man of the house as he returned wearily home at dusk with his plough on his shoulders. We stopped and stared. We hadn’t the language to speak - but it didn’t matter, for we instinctively exchanged a thumbs-up sign, probably something he had learned in a Gurkha regiment. The contact was deeply felt. Something of our soul was left in those woods. We dare not go back for fear of spoiling a precious memory, but now almost seventy we backpack on.
BRIAN CORBETT
Old timers have so many journeys to choose from. Cycle touring on the continent the year before O levels made me the first family member to be bitten by the travel bug. Emigration to Canada on graduation from Imperial College left me with a love of wide-open spaces and an intolerance of long cold winters. Walking with a young family in the snow along part of the Offa’s Dike path led to the first of several holidays backpacking the long distance footpaths of France. But it wasn’t until 1989 that we first tried backpacking in the Lonely Planet sense, and that introduced us to an enthralling, economical, mode of travel. I had dreamed of Nepal, ever since Everest was conquered in my last year at school.
The opportunity arose from the unusual luxury of a month’s vacation, shortly after all three kids had left home There was little time for pre-planning except the purchase of the appropriate Lonely Planet (LP) - still slim volumes of essential information needed by real travellers! Joan got physically fit at the local gym. We were determined to jump in at the deep end without even booking a place for the first night. As it happened it was the inaugural flight London - Kathmandu piloted by the king’s nephew, and champagne was served even to economy class.
The moment we passed from the airport to the street we were unleashed into another world. A mad throng of touts attempted to snatch our attention, all offering accommodation. ‘Come with Me, Looking is Free.’ Overwhelmed but still determined to do our own thing we lifted our rucksacks into a crowded service bus and sat on the engine compartment. We had a vague idea that an area called Thamel was to be our destination, though god alone knew how we would recognise it if we saw it! Not only could we not understand a word, we couldn’t read Nepali script either. Give me the deep sea, a compass and a sextant any time!
But just as the bus was about to depart Shyam, one of the youngest and most enterprising of the hustlers, jumped on knowing he had outwitted the competition. And so we ended up in a large bare room for two at Nepal Peace Cottage, adjacent to Thamel, for the princely sum of $10 a night (five times the going rate for backpackers, who operate in local currency anyway). But it did include breakfast on the roof overlooking a small rice paddy and Kathmandu city. Almost immediately the manager set about selling us a trek with guide and porters, but we wisely resisted the hard sell until we had got our bearings.
Narrow unmade streets packed with exotic colour and life, street markets, cows wandering as they pleased, a herd of goats climbing the steps of a footbridge across Kathmandu’s only dual carriageway to reach their fate at market. Scary red meat butchered and sold on blood-cleansed doorsteps in narrow streets. Mouth-watering displays of sickly cakes covered with flies. Slops thrown from the wooden balconies of carved houses to the street below - positively Elizabethan. Boys rummaging through the evil smelling detritus in steel skips searching for reusable plastic bags, whilst men pee-d against the sides.
‘Peel it, Boil it, Cook it, or Forget it’, is the traveller’s motto. We had never seen hygiene like it and wondered how to survive. For the first day we lived on bananas. I even struggled to peel them one-handed without contaminating my right hand, like any true member of the Indian continent. But how do you build up resistance without exposure to sensible amounts of infection? Gradually we relaxed to rediscover the enhanced taste of traditionally reared and cultivated food. The intense taste of real eggs and chicken scarcely remembered from our youth. The marvellous quiches and lasagne sold for a pittance in Narayan’s Italian restaurant, buffalo steak, vegetable Biryani, Tibetan food, Freak Street, cakes and tarts in Pie Alley. Food cooked to tempt the western pallet was a happy leftover from the hippy invasion of the 60’s.
But it was company as well as the food that led us to these backpacker haunts for they were full of the most interesting adventurous young people. In comparison to today backpacking was still a minority activity. For networking - these were venues par excellence. They were the streetwise explorers - we were the uninitiated oldies. But they did concede, ‘I just can’t imagine my parents doing this’. Few were over thirty and very few under twenty-one. We vowed to try, their way of travelling and their guest houses next holiday.
If they hadn’t been trekking then they were currently planning to go. Several had luxuriated in personal service on a Kashmir houseboat for £1 a day. Some had been to Tibet, which was still difficult to enter. Almost all spoke highly of the friendliness, ease of travel and wonderful food of Thailand, still largely unknown in Britain. India we learned was difficult but the initial loathing soon turned to loving. Nepal by contrast was so relaxing. Their talk inspired us to go and explore the north, east and south of Thailand over several holidays, then mainland Malaya and Sarawak on Borneo. On retirement we spent extended spells in India and Sumatra before rheumatoid arthritis threw us off course for several years. More recently Osama Bin Laden has emphasised the attraction of the Catholic countries in Central and South America - Peru and Mexico so far.
Desperate poverty was something we had never previously encountered. Yet there is something very colourful, very picturesque, very human about it. But beggars, their arms and legs eaten by leprosy, penetrate the conscience of even the most hardened tourist. They spent the day in the most unlikely places. But who benefits from your charity, the leper, the carer, or owner of a meal ticket? Who places him in the full sun on top of a bridge from which he could not escape in a month of Sundays? Never had we experienced hassle like it from the street sellers in imperial Durbar Square. Trinkets, ornaments, jewellery, trumpets, prayer wheels, drums and swords were for sale everywhere. We dare not take a speculative interest in anything, let alone ask its price, for the certainty of being pursued for hours with desperately reducing prices till the salesman was near tears, thinking we had mislead him.
It was easy enough to find the bus station from the map in the LP, but there were twenty buses to choose from and the destinations were written only in Nepali script. LP in hand we approached a driver and pointed to the Nepali script of our intended destination. So it was we found our way to the neighbouring town of Patan. Bhaktapur, temple full and hassle free, was easier - there aren’t so many trolley bus routes to choose from.
By now we knew that we would like to trek the so-called Annapurna Round. But having just twenty days left, not quite enough, and having no idea how we would cope with altitude, we opted for the easier half, up the Kali Gandaki gorge to the Hindu shrine at Muktinath, thus just avoiding the high 5200 metre pass at Thorung La which connects the two halves. (Joan, now mobile again thanks to artificial knees, finally reached that height in Peru last year.) We were certainly in no mood to spoil the trip of a lifetime by carrying heavy rucksacks uphill all day and down almost as much the next, for this is not ridge-walking country.
Finally we opted for a package with a guide and two porters at 40% of the original asking price.
We left Kathmandu by bus for the 200-mile journey to Pokhara, and then hired a taxi to take us to our first camping spot. We will never forget first light, peering out of our small tent at the snow-white double peak of Macchapuchhare (Fish Tail) glistening in a clear blue sky. Later in the day the peaks would all disappear in a brilliant white cloud of evaporated snow.
Santabir, our guide could speak enough English to explain the essentials of the journey, but non verbal communication was all we could manage with porters Zantara and the teenager Lalbadu, who like us was setting out on his very first Himalayan trek. Imagine a teenager carrying a 40kg basket from a wide strap around his forehead. I could hardly balance, let alone walk, but even that was easier than carrying over 60kg of full beer bottles in a steel crate backpack, or the delicate task of manoeuvring five-foot fluorescent tubes for days up to the homes and teahouses on the Tibetan plateau. We were following a donkey trade route, rice up and wool down, and we soon learnt to keep out of their way, for they stopped for no man, and the gorge was at times a mere thousand metres below.
After a few days it was becoming obvious that Santabir, preferring the easy life, had no intention of taking us to Muktinath, so we stressed that we did intend to go and now needed to walk hard all day. Extra funding was required so that we could stay in teahouses, and there would be no time for Santabir to demonstrate his incredibly fine outdoor cookery skills. From now on it would be Dahl Bhat, boiled rice and a miniscule helping of curried beans. What was left on your plate went to the children of the restaurant; nothing was ever wasted, reminiscent of my childhood in wartime Britain.
One evening as it started to rain we pitched our tents on the turf of a flat roof because there was no room at the inn below. It turned out that a crowd was expected that night for a funeral service for a five-year old boy. They invited us to join forty or so family guests, but warned we would have to stay until the end, since the room would be sealed to keep the spirits out.
The high priest of the animist mountain religion took the service. He chanted, held up and thumped his attractive homemade drum all night. Women sat to the right on carpet mats or lay on mattresses, many breast-fed babies or toddlers, men sat solemnly on benches to the left, with ceremonial raising of sickles. Small clay models of dogs guarded thresholds covered in white powder, which was examined for footprints at regular intervals. The boy’s brother was made to cry in what seemed a heartless fashion, but perhaps it was an aid to help him grieve. A small drop of blood was taken from a live chicken and sprinkled on each step of a skywards pointing ladder, (we scaled a similar notched tree trunk to get to our tent on the roof). Next morning’s breakfast feast was a vividly coloured selection of rice flour spaghetti, eaten before the before a dignified, men and drum, funeral procession to his grave on the steep wooded slopes leading down to the Kali Gandaki.
What we would have given for a working knowledge of Nepali so we could have understood, rather than merely conjectured on, the significance of that unique ceremony. A lesson learned. Linguaphone taught me to speak, but not read, basic Thai before going the next year, and it greatly enhanced our understanding and the ability to make contacts.
On the return journey a few days later we passed the man of the house as he returned wearily home at dusk with his plough on his shoulders. We stopped and stared. We hadn’t the language to speak - but it didn’t matter, for we instinctively exchanged a thumbs-up sign, probably something he had learned in a Gurkha regiment. The contact was deeply felt. Something of our soul was left in those woods. We dare not go back for fear of spoiling a precious memory, but now almost seventy we backpack on.
BRIAN CORBETT
