Walk to the sea through narrow streets; little Renaults and old Mercedes as much a part of the architecture as the sun-drenched white stone Catholicism and the roses. Pass the brown, buddha-shaped old men, waist deep in clear green waves standing still, giving thanks for the perfection of everything that is while their wives sun themselves on the rocks like tired seagulls. This morning in a cafe the man at the next table asked ’Are you from Kenya?’ and I realized I’m about the same color as my espresso, from mornings of playing tag with schools of tiny rainbow fish in a fluffy neon seaweed forest and finally giving in, letting the salt water precipitate me back out onto the hot, bleached pebbles of the beach. My great aunt serves the main meal of the day in the afternoon, and then everyone sleeps full of beer and fish and family until it cools off enough to wander back outside, where my nieces practice Spanish guitar for the stars and for each other.
My first Hrvatsko words were ’beautiful’, ‘ice cream’, and ‘I’m going swimming.’
In London, tucked safely into my ludicrously expensive hostel!
The first segment of my flight here was packed entirely with Nepali men traveling to Bahrain to work. The flight attendants fished the six westerners out of the back of the plane and settled us into the completely empty first class cabin… so I floated over listening to Vespertine, in a seat roughly the size of the oil tankers below. Economic disparity is weird. And so is jet lag.
Pre-script: Denny handed over care packages, and I spent a bunch of time sitting speechless and looking absurdly happy. Dear friends and family, you are so wonderful to me! (And somehow you all seem to understand my fondness for dark chocolate. ) Thank you! Getting hit with a huge wave of love from home healed over all the little scrapes that I’ve collected so far, and I’m ready to keep adventuring now.
——
I realized, trying to write a day-by-day account of the last few weeks, that there’s too much beauty for me to sift through to come up with anything coherent. We’ve been back in a city for three days now, engaging bravely in “operation pizza and beer”, but scenes from the mountains keep drifting over me at surprising moments, in pieces, carving themselves over the cars and flowers and fruit carts. So.
-We started the Annapurna circuit with an eight hour bus ride out of Kathmandu and into luscious green valleys and jungle-wet heat. Escaping the bus, into tropical rain and the Annapurna Conservation Area, we walked circles around baby goats splashing in the mud puddles, and by dinnertime made our way across a few suspension bridges to a guest house by a river running high and loud, fringed with palm trees and the smell of new flowers.
-Lunch under a pink Bougainvillea draped with prayer flags, stone steps next to us pointing the way of our week: up! up! And the valley below dreams its rice in green stairways down all the way to the river. Perhaps if I breathe deep enough my shell will stretch to match the rice-stairs, and leaping down I’ll skip the house-sized boulders one..two..three… left after some long-ago glacier lost its game of marbles with the valley and the sun, and retreated. It has to be at least 100F here.
-Stopped walking early, as the first of the Ten Plagues of Egypt struck Denny. I think food poisoning is the Nepali equivalent of the welcome leis they hand out when you get off an airplane in Hawaii.
-Soon the rain will start sliding down the roof of the world in sheets, millions of bells rushing into the gong of the waterfalls. I don’t really even believe the waterfalls here – they come in handfulls, today we passed at least six, and each one starts halfway up the mountain and crashes through the jungle all the way to the bottom of this valley. My brain could perhaps accept one waterfall like this, but to come across them every half hour? We climbed stairs for hours and found an inn, in a village by a lake. Outside our window another waterfall comes down to the lake, and in front of it a herd of ponies with colorful wool blankets and jingling harnesses are clustered in a green meadow.
- Miles from nowhere, surrounded by 1500 m rock faces and the shadows of 7 and 8 km peaks. We walked all morning through pine forests, the patches of sunlight smelling exactly like summer vacation in Sunriver walking to town to buy ice cream, until the wind comes up and changes the smell to snow and rock. It even tastes like snow, and it shakes back and forth through the valley and everything in it, pours through branches of the apple trees, slides under the doors and through the walls of the houses and mostly-deserted hotels, and straight through most of the residents of this ghost town. Space outposts at the end of the world…
-I keep thinking this is what death will be like – not hot or cold, no sound but the wind and your own footsteps, walking and walking until around the next bend… what? I can’t shake the image of slow footsteps in a treeless valley. The silences of these mountains out the windows of our room soak up the entire world, and I’m a little lightheaded from the elevation and from standing so close to all this shocking blue sky. At one point, a few hours since the last person we saw, I set my pack down and took off running down the trail
in the weightless air with the griffons impossibly huge and the mountains just watching like patient village elders at this girl who will maybe someday grow wings. It only took a minute or so of sprinting that way through the dust before my body felt so light and disconnected that I might as well have been one of the birds.
-The clouds today swirl the same shades of grey and blue as the peaks. Where they tangle together it becomes a seamless wall, sky and mountain together from the ground arching over everything. It’s like walking through an enormous, bright cave, with a whole village inside. And at the end of the village, a teashop, where I sat this morning and watched one of the unconsciously stunning village women and her dirty, beautiful son make flatbread. She rolled out the dough, sliced three fissures in the top,
and dropped it in the oil, and he wielded the tongs to make sure it puffed up and browned evenly, gold and warm and cirspy outside, soft, bright white chewy middle. And sweet tea, of course.
-Denny has altitude sickness, and a truly astounding cough that we’ve nicknamed “the baby alien.” The guidebook was perhaps under-exaggerating when they said “it is not easy to get a flight out of Humde”. Went to the airport at 6 am. Got a plane ticket at 8 am. Flight canceled at 10 am. New flight possibly arranged at 12 pm. At 3:30 pm, we are waiting for a refund and new tickets for the flight supposedly leaving tomorrow at 7 am.
- If I jumped high enough I could catch a handful of these stars, or keep a piece of the milky way to paint with later, in all the colors one could ever need. In a few hours, at sunrise, the mountains will be too bright to look at.
-There are tiny purple flowers growing out of this rock.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Denny, kathmandu, nepal, things that are too awesome for anything but punctuatio
So you know that feeling when your best friend in the world flies to Nepal to meet you for some coffee and a walk?
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yep. That one.
(Aside to the care-package senders among you: His luggage needed a little extra adventure and went to Taipei for the night, but it’s supposed to show up this afternoon. )
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: death, kathmandu, mangoes, nama, nepal, Shanti
The old man died, and yesterday my host took me back to see his family.
They took all the furniture out of the front room of their house, leaving the white walls, a white sheet spread across the floor, and the old man’s five sons, in seamless white shirts, white scarves over their freshly shaved heads, white sheets around their waists, woven sandals and copper drinking jugs the only color in half the room save the dark shocking earth of their faces, their eyes, and their hands. For thirteen days after his death, they sit together in this room, sleep and wake together on this sheet, eat together from plates made of leaves stitched together with twine. They touch no one. Visitors come and sit across the room, lined up facing the brothers, on a red carpet: The world of the living, of color and sound and the memory of rain, staring across the floor and conversing with the world of the dead. Their wives brought us plates of sliced fresh fruit, and we ate mangoes under the picture of a dead man, surrounded by ghosts.
By the time we got home and sat down to eat rice the sky growled chalk and gravel shades above the porch and, soon enough, made good on its promises and let out the rain, first one drop, then two, then fistfuls broken with faraway thunder and the forgetfulness of a window against its frame. Everyone else went inside, so I did too- went in, put on a swimsuit and snuck up alone to the roof to watch the purple lightning snap fleeting jagged rivers across the clouds, as the lights in the city went out one block at a time. Five storeys below me, women in white saris and jeweled sandals ran home through the mud.
