The Peace Correspondent (38 page)

There is still a lot of weirdness in Kathmandu, and Kipling's oft-quoted saying is as apt today as it was in 1895 when he wrote the poem In The Neolithic Age.

“Still the world is wondrous large--

seven seas from marge to marge

And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;

And the wildest dreams of Kew

are the facts of Khatmandu (sic) …”

This hermit kingdom was not even open to the outside world when Kipling composed the poem. Even up to the middle of the 20th century, there was no road to Kathmandu, so barefoot porters hauled everything -- crystal chandeliers, solid Victorian furniture, even luxury limousines, up the mountain path from India.

Half a century after it opened to the world, Nepal marches to the beat of a different maadal (drum). Its national flag of two juxtaposed
triangles is the only one in the world which is non-rectangular. Its time zone is out of synch with the rest of the world, 15 minutes behind India and five hours and 45 minutes behind Greenwich Mean Time. And it even has odd-numbered currency denominations, with 25-rupee bills.

The Nepalese capital is still rustic, with the air of a farm village in the shadow of the Himalayas. Cow dung on the roads is as great a pedestrian hazard as the relentless hawkers selling everything from Buddhas to Tiger Balm. Livestock wander the streets past cyber cafes offering full Internet services; goats graze on garbage outside temples; and clucking chickens peck at the ground in small courtyards. Daniel Wright, a surgeon based with the British residency in the 1870s, described the city unkindly as “… a dunghill in the middle of latrines.”

As I ponder these harsh words, a Gurkha soldier slides his kukrit (large curved knife) out of its sheath and says, “Twenty dollars,” startling me from my reverie. These Nepalese mountain mercenaries can reputedly decapitate an enemy with a swift blow of their lethal trademark blades. But when he asks “How much?” I realize the soldier is selling his weapon.

The incident is frightening because of the setting. It is in the 15th century, in medieval Nepal, and fresh blood glistens on the cobblestones from animal sacrifices. Or it could be the 15th century, until a Japanese man comes into the cobbled courtyard, and shoots the soldier -- with his Sony Handycam.

While still messy and rubble-strewn, Kathmandu charms the most jaded of travelers. I first visited in 1969, when Nepal had been open to outsiders for just over two decades, and the city is still identified with that time. Nepal's attraction for the early hippies, the later freaks, and contemporary backpackers is readily apparent: the capital city is cheap and exotic, with a tolerant attitude to foreigners' foibles.

In the late 1980s, 20 years after the hippie invasion, writer Pico Iyer stayed in Freak Street, anticipating the last stronghold of the turbulent hippie era. “I had great expectations for Kathmandu
-- subject of Cat Stevens songs, longtime Mecca of the hippies, sometime colony of the professional idealists of the Peace Corps,” he writes in Video Night in Kathmandu. He was disappointed in his quest. After exploring Kathmandu's bizarre streets and alleys, Iyer grumbled, “I could have easily found all this in Washington Square.”

Despite Iyer's comments, Kathmandu still seems to be a throwback to 30 years ago -- although it is now much more than just a hippie haven. “The old Freak Street was for hippies, for hash heads, hash cakes and hash potatoes,” says a local hotel operator. Then the Kathmandu Guesthouse opened in nearby Thamel, and the district took over as the travelers' center, with restaurants, hotels and tour operators who offered trekking trips, whitewater rafting and jungle sorties.

“Thamel is the Left Bank, the Greenwich Village, the Soho of Kathmandu,” exclaims author and local character Dubby Bhagat, with his writer's vivid imagination and the outsider's love of his adopted home.

My wife, Marnie, and I have joined old friends Jug and Bunny Suraiya and their school friend Dubby for lunch in the Patan Museum garden cafe. Jug is a senior editor at the Times of India in New Delhi, and the couple visit Nepal frequently. We hadn't seen them, our only friends in the entire Indian subcontinent, in many years. Then, week earlier, we ran into them in the Shangri-La Hotel coffee shop in the town of Pokhara in western Nepal, and shared many beers and memories there and back in this city. Another wild dream is made a fact in Kathmandu.

The Suraiyas had also visited Kathmandu in those heady, hippie days. For travelers then, Kathmandu was a destination for buffalo burgers and apple pie. “We used to go to the Vishnu Chai and Pie Palace and the Eden Hash House,” Bunny recalls from her early visits.

“These aren't hippies, they're trippies,” she adds, referring to Kathmandu's current crop of travelers. And they are trekkies as well. The biggest difference on the streets now is the bright blues,
reds, yellows, greens and purples of the trekkers' outdoor clothing, set off against the vivid orange and magenta of the ascetics' robes as they mingle on the crowded streets of Thamel. As Iyer noted more than a decade ago, “And as surely as the eighties had eclipsed the sixties, so trekking seemed mostly to have usurped questing. These days, more people come to Nepal to improve their muscles than to expand their minds.”

And they are wealthier. “Backpackers today all have a wallet full of credit cards,” says an adventure tour operator living parttime in Nepal.

At the museum cafe, Marnie orders the Nepali set lunch and I get a biryani, while our Indian friends eat sandwiches and hamburgers. Over lunch, I get Dubby to sign his book, Peak Hour, which we found in a bookstore earlier. Bunny had edited the book about flightseeing tours along the Himalayas, and Jug and Bunny had named it.

“Dubby's book, Peak Hour, gives a vicarious grandstand view of the spectacular panorama that unfolds for passengers who take the 60-minute flight from Kathmandu winging past the grandest sight on earth: 21 peaks, of which six are over 8,000 metres …” Jug wrote in the review on the back.

Teeming Thamel's restaurants cater to all tastes; Old Vienna Inn Austrian Restaurant, Alice's Restaurant, San Francisco Pizza, Euro Pub, La Dolce Vita Ristorante Bar Italiano, and Spam's Space for “hygienic food and varieties of drink,” as though hygiene was an exception. Aging hippies and young trekkies loiter in the Fire and Ice pizzeria and ice cream parlor or the Pumpernickel Bakery. Earnest backpackers gather at the Maya Cocktail Bar, Jesse James Bar, Memory Lane or the Hollywood Restaurant which shows current movies for free.

The ice ax-and-crampon set favor the Rum Doodle Restaurant and its 4,000 1/2 Foot Bar, named for W. E. Bowman's amusing satire on mountaineering, The Ascent of Rum Doodle. The spacious, two-floor restaurant with its a garden and terrace is one of Kathmandu's most renowned establishments. National flags,
photographs of craggy mountain men and dozens of oversized cutout footprints with names of trekkers and climbing groups decorate the quaint second-floor bar.

Out on the street, young travelers cluster around phone and fax service offices such as Global Net Communications, many no doubt calling home for more money. The Cyber World Cafe sits next to an office for the Holistic yoga ashram and another outlet, advertising ear and nose piercing.

Although Iyer was disappointed in not finding the last haven of the 60s, there is still ample psychedelia (which originated in Asia, at any rate) around Kathmandu. The scent of incense and charcoal smoke fills the air, and the sounds of flutes and cymbals, and wavery, warbly, druggy sitar music seeps from shops selling Asian artwork. The posters of blue-faced gods and elaborate Buddhist thankas (scroll paintings) that once hung in “crash pads” are evidence of just how much the 60s borrowed from the East.

Gaudily attired new wave hippies haunt the streets and coffee shops, the men with matted, dreadlocked hair. Women with shaved heads wearing Mama Cass Earth Mother dresses and rainbow-colored hats plod by, carrying crocheted hippie bags, like home economics knitting projects gone wrong. The Flower Trouser Shop sells retro-60s fashions -- batik bellbottoms and crazy hats, remnants of the Summer of Love.

On Durbar Square, enough trappings to furnish a colony of crash pads are spread out for sale: Tibetan rainbow bags, chimes, masks, psychedelically-patterned bedspreads, brass statues, wood carvings, prayer wheels and puppets. Flute hawkers carry the plain bamboo instruments around on a kind of flute tree, dozens of the instruments sticking out like denuded branches.

One afternoon, just a few blocks from the tourists' ice cream-and-apple pie area, a river of red gushes down the gutter from a freshly sacrificed goat. Small boys splash and play in the blood. Late evening, the restaurants and shops close and Kathmandu goes to bed early. The streets fall deathly quiet, except for the whir of our bicycle trishaw wheels on the cobblestones, and the
dark, shadowy alleys turn ominous, spooky. With the unusual architecture, the ancient temples, tiered pagodas, stupas and shrines pressing in all around, the eerie scene seems medieval.

Later, over grog (a local drink) in the K2 Bar in Baber Mahal Revisited, a renovated palace, Dubby educates us about his adopted city. Although Nepal remained isolated from the outside world for hundreds of years, the local people, the Newaris, were amazing craftsmen, wood carvers and architects. The Kathmandu Valley, with its three ancient cities of Kathmandu, Patan and Bakhtapur, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with seven monuments on the World Heritage List.

“Chinese pilgrim and writer Fa Hien visited Kathmandu about 400 A.D.,” Dubby says. “He marveled at the architecture. He'd never seen anything like it in China.” Much later, Nepalese architect Arnikot introduced the pagoda roof to China, and from there it spread all over Asia, according to the author.

“There's a one-eyed yellow idol/to the north of Khatmandu,”

wrote J. Milton Hayes in his 1911 poem The Green Eye of the Yellow God. The writer seems a kind of subcontinent Robert W. Service, and this work, once frequently recited at pubs, is more barrack room ballad than poetry. Still, this was the first thing many people learned about Kathmandu.

In Hinduism, everything in nature is a god, so the religion has a multitude of idols. Some claim that Nepal, a Hindu-Buddhist nation with a strong dose of animism and shamanism, has 33 million gods and goddesses, far more than its 20 million people.

Kathmandu, Hindus have been worshipping at Pashupatinath Temple, one of their most sacred shrines, since 400 AD. Devotees take ritual dips in the fetid, but holy, Bagmati River, a tributary of the Ganges. Sadhus beg for alms and ill-tempered monkeys scamper around demanding banana baksheesh (tips).

A temple hanger-on follows us around, telling us about Pashupatinath in vain hopes for a tip. “There is a sadhu here who has had nothing but milk for many years,” he tells us. “Would you
like to see the milk man?” The late afternoon of our visit, a family prepares a body for cremation, wrapping it in marigold-hued winding sheets, and stacking firewood on the ghat (steps leading to the river), while hundreds of locals line the riverbank looking down on the activity, like spectators at a sports match. The fact of Kathmandu is, a cremation here is more commonplace entertainment than CNN or MTV.

And you won't see that in Washington Square.

Jasmine Blossom and the massive, squinty-eyed, one-horned Indian rhinoceros face off for several tense minutes. Then the rhino backs down and trots off through the dense bush. No wonder. Jasmine Blossom (Champa Kali) is a five-ton elephant carrying 700 pounds of humanity -- a mahout (driver) and four passengers -- on her back, while the tank-like rhino weighs in at a mere two tons.

This drama is played out in the Royal Chitwan National Park in the Terai, a 360-square-mile subtropical forest in southern Nepal. This Hindu kingdom of yak and yeti (a mythical hairy humanoid), of craggy mountaineers climbing craggy mountains such as Everest, and of maharajahs and memsahibs on elephant safaris pursuing Bengal tiger through the jungle, is an adventure travelers' dream. With the world's highest mountain range, the Himalayas, to the north, and forested hills, rivers and tracts of jungle to the south, Nepal, wedged between China and India is a prime playground for trekkers, climbers, naturalists and nature lovers.