3. Nepal: Kathmandu

As the trip date appeared closer, there was practically no chatter on the email system. The system was humming like a well-fed Nepali. The day arrived, we met at the San Francisco International Airport. The baggage was checked in. The inevitable butterflies in the stomach came alive. It was hard to sleep on the flight. We found ourselves standing around at the common areas and coming to terms with the enormity of the hike. After a seemingly unending sequence of boarding and alighting exercises were were in Kathmandu being garlanded and received by a bunch of friendly faces. I had no idea who the guide - Tika - was. Before long, they loaded our things in to a rickety van and all of them started asking us for money. This is when Tika asserted himself and told us that we need to pay $10 to one of them and that was it. Miraculously they all heeded his word and as soon as the money was handed over, they vanished in the Kathmandu Airport parking lot. The van took us through the streets of Kathmandu and everything looked so similar to the streets in India. I was surprised to see that many Nepalis, especially the ones in the trekking business, speak better English than Hindi.

The guesthouse in Kathmandu was called Kathmandu Peace Guesthouse. Nepalis seem to like to use the word peace to be added to guesthouses, restaurants and the like. While the intention is noble, Kathmandu is no place to go looking for peace. It is a vibrant, modern city. The constant flow of western tourists has had a significant influence on how people live, eat and dress. The city has a touristy center called Thamel. However oppressive it may seem to a tourist who wants to get away from the western style of eating and living, Thamel is really the place where one can still get a decent coffee, buy magazines that one can read, ask for directions to practically any place in the world, make travel arrangements etc.

A walk at night after a heavy downpour was a pretty harrowing hazing ritual. The drains were clogged and the water collected on the streets. In very little time we were in shin-deep water. The fancy Gore-Tex of our recently acquired hiking boots were no match for this kind of treatment. Off came the shoes, and we started wading through the water praying all the time that we do not step on an abandoned razor or into a manhole whose cover was doing double duty elsewhere.

A meeting with Suman Dahal, the owner of the trekking company that got us our permits and insurance was another noteworthy event. His goal was to get more money out of us. His modus operandi was to talk us to boredom and get the money out if only to shut him up. The plan almost succeeded. Most of us, jet-lagged, started nodding off. But not Rick. Suman railed about how he had to hire more porters, about the Maoist extortion money that he had to pay and so on. We did not pay him anything extra, but the whole episode left us with a very negative impression of Suman.