Unfinished monkey business

Monday, 03/12/2012 – 172 A.D.

This morning I stepped out into the corridor and asked a fellow guest for some toilet roll. I didn’t know he was a fellow guest when I asked him, but he was milling around in the corridor saying, “Good morning,” and all that, so how was I to know? I don’t think he was too offended, but he did walk away. So, we did not get our bogroll, which is lacking because the maids have not been in to clean our deluxe twin room since we’ve occupied it. At breakfast we were told that the cook was currently out of Cornflakes, but not to worry because some had been ordered and would be arriving shortly. We weren’t that hungry this morning, so weren’t really bothered. But when they arrived the staff virtually insisted that we have those damn Cornflakes, “…because they are ready.” No thank you, we are not hungry!

We have a dilemma – how we’re going to get from Nepal to India. Crossing the border isn’t a problem, we’ve got our visas, but at this stage it’s not as simple as hopping on a high speed train. For one, Nepal doesn’t have trains, and if it did, they would certainly not be high speed. And the electrics would go down at every station. We are heading to the Nepalese town of Pokhara tomorrow, and three days later we’ll be bound for Delhi. These are our Pokhara-Delhi options:

1.      Get the bus from Pokhara to Delhi. It takes 36 hours!

2.      Get a private car to take us 6 hours to the border. Cross border. Get a 3 hour “jeep” journey from the border to Gorkaphor. Take the train from Gorkaphor to Delhi, which takes about 16 hours.

3.      Return to Kathmandu and fly to Delhi.

In terms of cost, and the Grayboys ethos that you should never go back, we’re trying to ignore option 3. For obvious reasons we’re not keen on option 1. That leaves option 2, which looks like a lot of faffing about, but it’s the type of faffing that we’re used to. It would all be so much easier if everyone in the world had a personal rocket-powered backpack! But until those days come, we’re stuck with jeeps and the like. So, unfortunately we spent a lot of the morning surfing the web and trying to work out how we could pull off option 2. At some point during these proceedings the door to our room was opened by an old man holding a curtain rail. He stood there staring blankly for a few seconds as we both looked up at him, before walking away without a single word of explanation.

Next order of the day was for Tim to get on the phone to Barclays, tell them what idiots they’d been for stopping his card, and get it operational again. Our efforts to find a. a payphone, and b. someone who understood the concept of an English-speaking operator, had failed, so Our Kid bit the bullet and headed to an Internet Café where he could dial his bank on an international line. And he was able to get through and get the job done. He even made the clerk in the place write him out a receipt for his time on the phone so he could scan it in and bill it to Barclays. I suggested he add an extra nought or two to the total.

[Tim returns to the 1930s to make his call in a private wooden booth.]

Upon returning to the hotel room (power out, surprise-surprise!), the view from the balcony hit an all time low when we went out to see a guy wiping his arse in the allotment. Yet they still grow crops there! Our research had turned up an agency in Kathmandu that seemed to have an official link to the Indian Railways booking system, meaning we could go down there and book tickets on the Friday sleeper train from Gorkaphor to Delhi without running the risk of turning up on the day and finding them all gone. Remember that terrible trip we had in the overnight seats from Nanning to Guangzhou in China? We might not even get that! And so out we went, into the T-shirt weather of mid-afternoon Kathmandu in December…

…did we find the place? Did we heck! Instead we came across another travel agency in the vague vicinity of the one we wanted, so we thought we’d take our chances with them. After giving them the details of the train we wanted, they looked on the computer and told us there were no seats available. Oh dear. Now, we know that sometimes agencies only get a certain number of tickets to play with, so if they say that no tickets are available, it may just mean that they have no tickets available themselves, not that all the tickets have gone completely. But you never know, it might mean there really are no tickets, and if that’s the case then our plan for Option 2 is severely screwed. Hmmm…

We tried not to worry about that, instead continuing our long walk east across town to Pashupatinath Temple. Bikesh had told us about this place and it is one of the most significant sites dedicated to Shiva in the whole world. Upon arriving we were asked for 500 NPR to get in, which seemed a bit steep, but we had to mark this day with some kind of productive visit. So we paid, and were stopped about ten metres later saying that only Hindus cold go into the temple. I said to the guard that I could be a Hindu. He replied, “Maybe in another life”. Well what did that leave us with? A 500 NPR stroll around a courtyard? There were plenty of monkeys kicking around, but we’d already been there and done that.

[The gate at which we were turned back - yellow Hindus-only boards.] 

Just when we thought we’d been swizzed, we found a proper route through the complex, one which took us down to the banks of the Bagmati river. Once upon a time you could drink the waters of this river, coming down from mountain valleys as it does, but now it is far too polluted. We ignored “pilgrims” coming up and telling us bits of information about the place (and then asking us for money for acting as a guide) and saw what looked like two bonfires by the waterside. Not so, these were in fact the remains of bodies that had been cremated earlier in the day.

Bikesh told us that tradition states ten bodies must be burnt every day, and if they do not have ten recently-deceased people, they will use fake bodies. 

The one who was about to be lowered into the water above was definitely not fake as a zoom from Tim’s camera showed a face (the guy with his hands crossed behind his back got in the way for me!) People would come down to the edge of the water and wash their feet and hands, paying their last respects to the departed. I’m sure there was a lot more involved than simply that, but we were too far away to see up close, despite the zoom, and once again it was Hindus-only on that side of the river. Guess we should have gone with those unofficial tour guides after all!

The ceremony was taking a long time and, not knowing how long it would last, we went higher up the site. Sitting up here was a sadhu, roughly translated as a wandering holy man who has eschewed material possessions in favour of spiritual devotion. Kinda like me. Anyway, I used to joke with Asha in the office that I was a sort-of Sadhu, and it was one of my missions on this trip to have my picture taken with one. I decided I would offer him 50 NPR and see if he was up for it, but as soon as I approached he simply said, “Photo?” It’s like he knew beforehand, maybe having seen into the future! Or maybe he just has his picture taken with tourists all the time. So I gave him the 50 NPR and posed for a couple of pictures as the sadhu blessed me and wished me long life, happiness, etc. It’s funny, but I felt a strange moment of calm as I was sitting next to this guy – would his blessing change our luck on this difficult day?

After the photo the sadhu reached behind him and held out a handful of 20 cent coins (Euro). He told me to take the change in my own currency because the price for a photo was 10 NPR. Having no use for cents, I told him to keep the 50. Then I realised that I could get a photo of Tim with the guy, kind of like a buy-one-get-one-free sadhu shot. And so I did, but Tim told me that as he went to walk away the sadhu said to him that the price was 100 NPR! Why should it cost him ten times that which it cost me? Let’s just put it down to some mystical spiritual logic…or else the fact that the guy could see we were happy to pay over the odds and would chance it with Our Kid. Tim gave him 20 NPR and kept walking.   

We walked to Durbar Square, hoping to time our arrival with sunset, from which point onward the square is free to enter. And it was, yet because it was after dark it wasn’t easy to see the sights, given the lack of Kathmandu street lighting. Oh well, some things just aren’t meant to be! We entered the square via the small road known informally as Freak Street. This is where the hippies first came when they arrived here seeking enlightenment and/or cheap dope, but now there’s only a few restaurants and none of the original funky shops.

There have been many moments on this trip when I felt as if I live on Freak Street, despite technically being of no fixed abode!