Karen Swenson

Arriving in KTM I met with my travel agent, Satish about my credit card problem and then spent several hours trying to straighten out the mess, not at all enabled by Skype connections so bad that after 10 calls one woman suggested I call my personal bank manager.

I called S in New York, who as usual had no memory of me, but at least said she would get on it. It then turned out that I have been assigned a personal bank manager, someone I’ve never heard of and whom I suspect is a phone/internet entity, not someone from the office at 666 5th Ave. The American genius for depersonalizing relationships is spreading like a dangerous mold.

I gave up and went to bed to be awakened around midnight by a resounding thunder crash, followed, I’m sure, by heavy rain but I was back asleep too fast to be cognizant of it.

At breakfast I put my room key and TLS down to claim an empty table. When I returned from the buffet, I found a smiling, slightly chubby man had taken a seat across the table. He was from Lebanon, which explained his cheerful intrusion into my space. I learned years ago that the idea of privacy is not the same for Moslems as it is for us west of Suez. But he seemed nice.

We talked, or rather he talked; he had an enormous number of opinions on everything. I was interested to discover that he was in Kathmandu because he arranges for Nepalis to go to Lebanon to work. I do not know what the reputation of the Lebanese is toward imported workers but I could not help but think of the leading role the Arabs had in the slave trade until the US and England over took them in that market.

At 9:30, a bit before in truth, X my Barcelonan friend and her husband showed up. They had already hired a taxi to Pagan. Her husband is a photographer and like all good photographers lugs about a small but heavy backpack.

In Patan, after the usual misdirected wanderings, we bought a 1,000 Rupee, 10 US, ticket for the palace. There has been and is a lot of work going on to reconstruct and repair the quake damage. The palace looks largely finished, but the temples in the square are still being worked on. The palace is brick with wood carved ornamentation. Woodcarving is a Nepali specialty. Unfortunately many exceptional pieces deteriorated before local people recognized how unusual their art was. The exquisitely carved King’s bath, stone not wood, with its gold faucet is a bit more pond scummy than I remember.

There are three floors of museum, full of fabulous images. If I’d been alone I would have spent more time. They have organized the images according to the gods, which is a good and an entertaining way to do it. I hadn’t realized, until I had looked at eight Ganesh statues in a sequence, that he always has a bowl of sweets in one of his many hands. That is why he is a fatty.

We then, not knowing where to start, began looking for someone to supply me with replacement leaves for the bronze, hanging lamp I bought years ago in Patan that I have in my bedroom in Barcelona. We crossed Durbar Square and wandered into a dirt alley. Before us was an antique shop and it seemed to me I might as well start here. I went in and asked, showing him the leaf I had brought with me for someone to copy, explaining that I needed five such leaves.

The shopkeeper was an older, stout man with white hair. He immediately led me across the alley to where a cross-eyed man, with heavy silver earrings at the top of his ears, was selling bits of things from a small table. The man explained to the cross-eyed man what I wanted and urged him to accept the commission. Although I could not understand the words I could hear the encouraging tone. The commission was accepted. I agreed to the price, which was probably a little high. But I was so fascinated by this act of charity by the shopkeeper to the less able, poorer, probably illiterate street seller that I couldn’t help but contribute to it. It seemed to me that the shopkeeper would be in charge. I had him sign a receipt with the price and the date the leaves would be ready and left feeling fairly sure all would be well.

X’s husband was seduced on our way back to the car by a brass door handle in the shape of a mermaid and bought it. Patan is the town that has historically been the center for brass and bronze manufacture.

We taxied to Barbar Mahal Revisited, the stables of an old Rana palace that has been turned into a series of charming shops, restaurants and beauty salons to have lunch at Carolina’s, excellent but considering local prices, a bit high. Then we looked at the new hotel, which has been built onto Barbar Mahal by, I understand, the descendants of the Rana’s who once owned the palace. I saw it last year and it is an entrancing boutique hotel. However, on second glance it seems a bit tightly packed for privacy. If it were full I wonder if I wouldn’t feel as though I was living in someone’s lap.

X and her husband dropped me at Durbar Marg where I went to see Yasmine’s Studio. Yasmine is an old friend and a superb designer. But my friend S who is usually at the shop was very ill with influenza and not there. On the walk home to the Kathmandu Guesthouse I noted that the usual women beggars with their children were not there but had been replaced by a man with leprosy.

At the guesthouse I had a banana smoothie and watched the black and white resident cat performing her ritual blackmail mew among the dinners.

The above juxtaposition between the man with leprosy and the banana smoothie is a loud signal that I am writing about a third world journey. The sad truth is that it takes very little time to make that transition from leprosy to smoothie fairly effortlessly.

The next day I had coffee with my friend Abhi Subedi, professor, playwright, poet and lover of good coffee. We went to his favorite coffee house. The owner wants to name one of the rooms after Abhi. It is where he and his friends meet to discuss their lives and their nation.

It is always fun to go about with Abhi. He is not a short Nepali but a bit over six feet with wildly curly white hair, kind eyes and a superb smile. He is supercharged with energy and beaming with happy enthusiasm. He wears a floppy cotton hat which ties under his chin and for some reason, is it this hat, the women street sellers of little purses are convinced he’s a tourist and plague him with their wares.

He told me about his older sister who died recently at age 85. She had been living in his house. She was, apparently, a determined woman even when young. When she disapproved of her husband and his family, Abhi did not reveal over what, she moved out. I would love to know what it was that she disapproved of.

We talked about his new play on the theme of forgiveness, an important idea in Nepali life in the aftermath of the Mao civil conflict. I asked him why Patan’s Durbar Square has almost been completely renovated and Kathmandu’s remains in ruins. He replied memorably, “The one thing that unites Royalists and Communists is stealing public money.”

Having a cappuccino after breakfast the next morning I watched a monkey family—Mom, Pop and the twins gazing down speculatively from a low neighboring roof at the Kathmandu Guest House garden. They were obviously considering a visit but, I think, finally decided that there was an excessive human presence.

Sarosh picked me up; we took a cab and made the long, long drive to his house through the endless dusty chaos that is Kathmandu. I tried to concentrate on what was being sold shop by shop but it was such a muddle of things I lost track. Finally we got far enough out so that there were breaks between buildings; rice fields appeared at the edge of the road, the darker spears of the leaves rising protectively over the plumes of grains curled down into themselves.

Sarosh’s area, which used to be country, is sprouting houses. Sunil, his son, in a Bob Marley shirt, Sarosh is

partial to Marley having a backpack with his face on it, was watching endless Indian cartoons. Sarosh commented that these are slanted to make the Indian’s superior.

Nilam, Sarosh´s wife, made us lunch but did not eat with us. It was very good chicken with rice, potatoes, greens and dahl. When we left, the house, which is just the usual concrete block affair, but is charming
because it is covered with vines and surrounded by flowering plants, we walked down the road toward the temple by the river I have never taken a picture of. We came to the bus stop and I climbed into the one Sarosh indicated.

As we stopped and started along our way we picked up people, many women in holiday clothes of green and red or green and orange, with tikas on their foreheads in red but also in yellow and once or twice in gold. It will be Daisain soon.

The bus was so crammed that it was time to fit three people into a two-seat space. I offered to take a little boy to sit between me and the girl, very prettily dressed, next to me. He was about six and a little alarmed by the pale, pale foreigner, although he was all admiration for the bus boy in his Che Guevara tee shirt, calling out the stops and pounding on the bus’s side to let the driver know it was time to leave. His

mother, however, was all for this arrangement. I grabbed him around his substantial middle and heaved him up on my lap where he perched uneasily until with main force I settled him.

When he and his mother left, she in a sparkling green outfit with shimmering silver trim, she tried to get him to say goodbye. He did give me a nod, but was really concentrating on his exit through the mass of adults.

We squirmed out at Bodhnath, where I didn’t have to pay an entrance fee. The stupa has been magnificently restored after the quake which damaged its top but little else. I stopped by the window of a store that had an excellent painting in the window of a god I don’t know, fat, cheery with a rat in the crook of his arm. It was full of warmth and gaiety. I think he may be a version of the God of Wealth. None of the paintings inside the shop, while well done, came close to the spirit of this one. Around Bodhnath I saw this god several times.

In the shop was a Westerner in the dress of a Tibetan monk, lecturing the shopkeeper and his friends both Eastern and Western about the spiritual value of having a partner.

We climbed the stupa’s steps continuing our walk

around it. This is more Tibetan than Nepali as many
monasteries have their temples and monks’ cells
around the stupa. Coming around we found ourselves looking down on a film crew, the actors we could see mostly women in filmy deep blue or peachy orange outfits, very graceful. The color combination was striking.

From there we took a minibus on an awful rocky ride. I had to be careful because I had a monk in front of me and we are not supposed to touch. He had a big black satchel so he was on business. I love the perceived anachronism of monks with cell phones.

Once I saw some young monks on the terrace in front of their cells in Tibet with a toy machine gun thoroughly enjoying themselves. We alighted on one of the biggest of Kathmandu’s roads to take the lane down to Pashupatinath where I was allowed to look at Nandi’s brass or is it bronze bottom but not enter the temple.
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I was saddened to see that the old folks home with its towers sporting Shiva tridents and winding bronze ribbons had not been renovated after the earthquake.

As we approached the Bagmati Riven it began to rain. We took shelter under the eaves of a shrine and

watched the rain river down the steps on the opposite shore. People were making puja in this area for departed parents. I love hanging out here and at the
ghats where, when the rain eased we went. Despite the rain the two bodies that were being cremated were burning cheerfully. As we walked monkeys romped around us but kept their distance. We stood and watched the cremations for a while, an activity I find imbues me with serenity.

Leaving Pashupatinath we took another bus that brought us close to Durbar Marg where the traffic was stopped, no one was allowed over the pedestrian bridges because someone important was coming. There was a lot of bantering with the young
policeman who kept us off the bridge, all of it on either side very good humored.

Once walking again, Sarosh lead me through a neighborhood in Tamil near the KTM Guesthouse but one I have never been in before. It is full of Chinese hotels and restaurants, all signs in Chinese, all advertising in Chinese exclusively. I presume this is for the Mainland tourist trade, which is enormous. Interesting but probably not good.

I spent the evening packing my backpack for Tibet and my last trip to Mount Kailash.

After finding myself exhausted by the train trip to and from Chiangmai last year, I decided to fly north this year. Not as much fun. Not as scenic, but easier on the aging person. I arrived at the airport too early, due to confusion, another side effect of aging. The flight was full but they served lunch of which I ate just enough to curb my hunger since I was hoping for better things to come.

M met me when I came out of baggage claim, which was dear of him. No one likes going to an airport. We found a taxi to this year’s hotel, The Rich Lanna House that is on the Old City side of the moat. It is very nice, spotless but does not have the black sticky rice for breakfast that the previous hotel had. The room was large, looked out on trees, had stained glass in the bathroom windows and an abundance of hot water. It was on the top floor, an interesting climb punctuated on each landing by “collections”—Burmese lacquer work, Thai carving, a cabinet full of those things families acquire overseas including a shot glass from Niagara Falls– but this altitude ensured quiet and less pollution from the moat road which snarls and growls with motorcycles and trucks.

The young man on the desk was totally idiotic, answered eagerly questions we hadn’t asked and didn’t notice those we did. I suspected he didn’t understand as much English as he pretended to know.

After the formalities were taken care of and my bags were up stairs, M and I started off with his map, my Nancy Chandler map from 1985 cheerfully illustrated with people and wats, and my new, only slightly understood Kindle, none of which preserved us from confusion.

M had asked about a place for lunch and been told to go down Ratchaphanikai which we did, stopping at Wat Chiang Man which we came to almost immediately.

Chiang Man is the oldest temple in Chiangmai built by Phaya Mengrai in 1296, the King who was killed by a bolt of lightning; the memorial of this event is not far away. The wat has the oldest Buddha image in town dating from 1465. Its handsome old chedi—a structure that is a sort of adaptation of the Indian stupa, very like the Tibetan chorten–holds sacred remains or other holy objects buried within. This one has elephants around its base. We were here last year and I hope will visit next year. It might take 10 visits before the surroundings become familiar, since form and iconography are alien.

We did stop for lunch on Ratchaphanikai but it was not very good, a C lunch. My pork was tough and the seasoning without subtlety.

Heading for Wat Sam Pao we never made it. The clouds gathered, although we had no rain. It was

getting late. We stopped at a nice looking place for a
smoothie for M and yoghurt for me—too much sugar in the yoghurt–and I went home to the Rich Lanna to do emails.

The next day we did a sort of crash course in wats. The list included Wat Duang Dee, Wat U-mong Mahatera Chan, Wat Pan Ping (isn’t this a character in Verdi’s Turandot?), Wat Sam Pow, Wat Phan Tao, Wat Chai Phra Kiat and Wat Chedi Luang. That may not be a full list and I cannot guarantee that the details I will tell you about are always linked accurately to the right wat. We sort of followed our various maps. M’s sense of direction is even worse than mine, although I was the one who got us into trouble at the end of the day.

Wat Duang Dee was small and neglected with a derelict but beautiful old structure, lacy teak decorations painted red along its eaves. In some places these were missing like gone teeth. There was a hurricane fence and a locked gate, so we could only stand outside and look up at its faded crimson curves and curlicues. Trees sprouted out of its front gate.

The stone fence that surrounded the entire wat had low arched entrance gates some of which had been heaved into a tilt. The serpent stair rails of the small temples were splotchy with lichens.

Wat U-Mong Mahaterachan was in much better shape with newly painted and gilded stair serpents looking more like iguanas than snakes. Between their front feet they each protected a gilded baby iguana. In the back is an old rosy brick chedi, sprouting baby ferns and mosses above its wrap-around apron in blue, yellow, red and white striped cloth. Its gold finial shimmers overhead.

Wat Pan Ping, I think it is Pan Ping, was not as interesting, although the chedi had an unusual metallic tile top in poor condition with gaps among the tiles. I think it was at Ping that I came out of the lavatory to be greeting by amiable smiles and short shrieks of laughter from a man dressed decorously in mourning. The Thais are still in mourning for the King who will be cremated in Bangkok on October 26th. The man was, sadly, insane. I had his shrill gasps of hilarity for company until M came from the men’s john, uncomfortable but not sinister.

Wat Sam Pow may or may not be the place where there is, to the left of the entrance, a small, pale stucco building with intricately decorated shutters and doors. It is the recently renovated library of the monastery. The building is striking because, despite the complexity and delicacy of its decoration its pale color has a monochrome calm unusual in Thai buildings.

On the corner of Phra Pokklao and Ratchadamneon is the monument to King Mengrai who was, on this very spot, struck by lightning. The sign in Thai and English apologizes for the smallness of the monument that is a little arched receptacle with what looks like a gold plume in it. On the walls behind it are bas-reliefs of incidents from the King’s life.

Opposite this corner is supposed to be King Mengrai’s spirit house but I could not find it. This was annoying because I am a fan of spirit houses. I almost bought one to bring back and install on the terrace of my then apartment on 54th St. I’m sure the local spirits would have appreciated it. These are small houses of wood or concrete on pedestals into which everyday you place offerings for the spirits from whom you are borrowing you living or cultivating space. It is an excellent reminder that your relationship to the land you are on is one of tenure not ownership.

I had lost my New York City hat in the BKK airport, so was delighted to find a flowered replacement in a shop where I felt the King’s spirit house should have been.

We moved down the street a little to Wat Phan Tao where renovation is in progress. The main building has a peacock and dog on its front. The peacock stands proudly in full display with the dog curled at

his feet. These are the personal symbols of an earlier king who built this part of the wat.

One window, possibly at the back of this building, is straight out of Cambodia. Rather than just being open, as a Thai window would be or having bars in it, it has vertical wooden dowels such as one always sees in Cambodian temple windows. Nearby is a temple whose roof ends spring up into two-dimensional gold serpents.

The last wat of the day was Wat Chedi Luang. Under a tall tree that only bushes out at the top, is a neat multi-roofed house, home to the City Pillar. Interestingly, since the City Pillar in Bangkok is not only open to women, but houses the deity to whom you offer eggs if you want to get pregnant, the City Pillar of Chiangmai doesn’t like women and they are not allowed to enter his temple.

I remember this wat from the 1980’s when it was in very bad shape, dusty and disheveled, although it certainly had its worshipers, but they had no money then. They have made up for that drought lavishly. The main temple is brightly painted with black and gold stencils on the pillars of trees, birds perched on branches, squirrels and mice running up and down them. All this looks very recent. There are sparking, crystal chandeliers in a long row overhead. The

standing Buddha looks newly gilded, as do his companions. The ceiling is deep scarlet with gold medallions. Flowers were everywhere, I would guess because of the King’s impending cremation.

Behind this is the old chedi, a small mountain of earth and rubble covered with brick that dates back to, I think, the 10th century. It has been repaired, not remade, meaning that the top part, which caved in who knows when, has been bricked up for stability, but not rebuilt. The elephants around the base have been repaired as well. They all have new ears that look like some lovely, grey veined fungus. There are modern gilded Buddhas in the niches at the top who seem rather garish and too new. The serpent stair rails, blotched black with damp are many headed.

There is a superb grey wood chapel to the left of the chedi. The area over its door is set with mirrored gold and blue glass tiles. Inside, behind the image of the Buddha is a gold and teak wood backdrop. The nagas, water snakes, which adorn the eaves, have been carved in tight coils of grey wood. The surrounding garden is vibrant with green and any orange robed monk wandering there becomes a brilliant bloom in his own right.

Another chapel near by has a Buddha, a short cube like Buddha with no neck, carved from stone with a

five headed naga arched over him to protect him from sun and rain as he meditates.

Sometime in the midst of all this we had lunch at the Champor Lanna Boutique Resort, an island of green with old-fashioned houses around a compound. We, and some Thai girls who ate surrounded by their luggage, were the only customers. The food was superb. I had an unfamiliar, exceedingly hot chicken soup and an equally hot shrimp salad both excellent but they totally did my intestines in, now accustomed to Catalan bland.

By the time we were at the grey chapel at Chedi Luang the sky was blackening, rain was immanent. With superb misplaced confidence, I took us in what I thought was the direction of the hotel. A half hour later in slackening rain I had to confess myself lost. We went into a barbershop but their English wasn’t good enough to help us much which caused them, this is very Thai, to dissolve into giggles. M, bless him, called Uber and a cheery young man arrived in about ten minutes to rescue us from my hubris and drop me off at the Rich Lanna House before taken M home.

The next day as a change of pace we focused on museums, having last year been to the Lanna Crafts Museum which is a beauty both in its exhibits and in its own construction. We started with the Cultural

Museum, which was closed except for an exhibit dedicated to the Queen’s support of the northern tribal textile industry. This consisted of locally woven fabrics made into patchworks and then embroidered with scenes and people, the Queen frequently among them always immediately recognizable because of her string of pearls. More charming than the people were the embroideries of pigs, chickens and buffalo.

The gift shop was tempting but I only bought five appliqued squares in red, white and black.

On to the history museum next door, which makes clear how separate the north feels from the south. In the welter of names the only one I´ve managed to retain is Mengrai and that is probably because he was struck by lightning.

Both England and France, as colonial powers respectively of Burma and Laos, took bites out of northern Thailand in the 19th century. However, the Thais were clever enough to keep those territorial gluttons at bay. The Burmese did invade in the 19th century, before they were overwhelmed by the British, but the south pushed them out and united the two parts of the country for the first time.

Underneath the museum is an archeological site, a

damp site, with bricks of an old wall and some delicate ceramics—a jug with an oval belly and a tube top. A pale beige to cream plate painted with flying brown birds.

As we went down the street I recognized the shop of the man I had bought postcards from last year. He had told us he was going to move his shop to a new location. I asked what had happened. He said he now had two shops but he was going to close the new one because his rent on the old shop had been doubled to 20,000 baht a month, about seven to eight hundred US. He told us he wanted to work for five more years before retiring to travel with his daughter. He then dropped a bomb on us. He has two autistic children. What a catastrophe. But there he is selling postcards, cheesy souvenirs, stamps and old coins, quiet cheerful behind his counter.

We needed a bland lunch because of my burnt out stomach so we went back to the museum café for a bland Caesar salad, all right but not exciting. As we were finishing and the café was emptying, two young men with guitars came in. They looked alike enough to have been brothers. They played, to a decreasing and disinterested audience, American songs that were vaguely familiar of the soft and sentimental variety.

Our plan was to go on to the insect museum. I struggled with my Kindle, which was not being helpful, Nancy Chandler was too dated to be of assistance, and finally figured out that the museum was outside the Old City and a half hour, at least, walk away. So we skipped that and walked to Wat Phra Singh as the sky darkened for evening rain.

I don’t like the main temple of Wat Phra Singh finding it garish and rather modern Burmese. Also the main Buddha does not appeal to me but there are chapels that do. Behind the main temple, continuing the garish theme is a “solid gold chedi” with half an elephant sticking out of all four sides. It looks as though it has been wrapped up in some sort of rather heavy, unwieldy, gold wrapping paper through which the elephants are attempting to escape.

To the left of this oddity is a chapel where the Buddha sits inside a niche before a superb backdrop of scarlet and gold. The walls are covered with murals, relatively old ones, maybe 19th century. Some are damaged but where they are not people fly, sit, converse, stride through a world that is most mysteriously a lovely, peaceful shade of blue.

Another, larger temple had wax figures of former monks sitting in meditation. They are so life like that I had to stare hard at their chests for movement.

We took a tuktuk back to the hotel driven by a handsome young man who had done to himself all the things I loath most that the young do to enhance their appearance. He had tattoos, big rings stretching his earlobes, various piercings.

M and I had a coffee and a smoothie at a café next door to the hotel and said goodbye until next year. In the morning the hills were scarved with mist as they are every morning but this time there were white boas dipping down into the valley.

I had a woman cab driver to the airport. On the plane back to Bangkok the Chinese woman next to me started a conversation while she put the main part of her lunch in its plastic container into the throw up bag from the seat pocket and then into her handbag to be consumed later. As the conversation progressed I discovered that she had a gay friend, a man she used to work with in the town she comes from in southern China, who lives in a town outside of Barcelona. I made various suggestions about how she might locate him and gave her my email. The world is an odd place and getting smaller.

Arriving in Bangkok I made it to the Paragon to food shop but was delayed going home by a monsoon rain so violent that they closed the exit doors of the mall. Women cleaners were mopping up what came running in under the doors. You had to leave through

a passage taking you to the Siam Center. The rain made the phrase “a sheet of rain” ridiculous. This was a grey wall of water. But I wandered the shops until it let up and went home to the A One.

Returned to Bangkok on a long flight via Finn Air in which the only thing of interest was the round and rubicund, white haired woman next to me, 60’s to 70’s, who, when spoken to in Finnish replied that she was capable of English or Swedish. After that it was all Swedish. However, I was awed by the size of her breakfast, which included everything available out of which she only ate what was sweet.

I have to confess my delight when my cab driver from the airport, having judged me as, “Oh, ho hum yet another Western tourist,” delivers me to the A One sees me greeted as a Conquering Heroine, my bags in their multiplicity removed by the local cab drivers from the trunk and the A One staff shinning in the door with smiles and greetings. My vanity puffs up like a deep fried puri and my mental voice says to the astonished driver, “See. Not just another Western tourist.”

My first task after wheedling enough hangers out of the management and getting myself arranged, was to go to see Mr. Thai on Rambutri Road to arrange all my various flights, to Chiangmai to see my friend there, to Kathmandu and back, and to Hong Kong and back. Yes, he is cheaper than the internet. He is also a lot more fun.

I took the Sky Train which since it’s path is at the height of second to third story BKK gives one a chance to access just how boring modern architecture is in this city. At the last stop, Taksin, the name of an important Thai King before it was the name of a dubious Thai Prime Minister, where there is usually at least one woman with a child begging, I transferred to the express river bus, my favorite form of transport in Bangkok.

The journey is always fascinating because of the river traffic and because of the houses, warehouses, temples and unidentifiable by a Westerner structures.
There are tiger boats, long banana shaped vehicles painted with narrow stripes and powered by V8 engines. These originally were left overs from the Vietnam war, the little, humble cross river boats who are tossed like brides’ bouquets on the wakes of the arrogant tigers, the chugging express boats, the get out anywhere tourist boats, and the muscular little tugs, four in a row, in jellybean colors, pulling with cheerful determination a long string of rice barges up country to be filled. The barges are often gay with laundry. Their crews sit on the roof watching the shore pass.

As I arrived at Mr. Thai’s office, a slot in the wall before you get to the Rambutri Village Inn, I realized I had forgotten my calendar, which had the exact dates in it. This meant going back and returning, not a terrible fate considering it meant two river trips, but definitely exhausting.

Last time I saw Mr. Thai he was planning to open a guesthouse. He is the organizing genius of his family none of whom do anything on their own initiative. He now has his guesthouse, he would like to see me as a guest, which his sister runs while she looks after his brother’s son. I am not sure what the brother does but it is undoubtedly something Mr. Thai has instigated, even if it is merely errand running.

If you don’t remember, Mr. Thai is the man who is missing all his fingers on his left hand, the work of a shark. He just has his thumb. I explained my dereliction and headed right back down river after giving him what I could remember of the dates. Each trip is about an hour and a half.

On the trip back down there was a Thai-Caucasian couple in front of me– the Caucasian middle-aged, muscular, bearded, probably American, and horribly dressed, the Thai, tall, cute, with no muscles and a hole in the back of his black tee shirt. The Caucasian was very eager to show off his knowledge of various things but only mildly interested in listening to his, much younger, Thai companion’s soft voiced explanations of buildings and sites. Perhaps he was too busy caressing his palm as he embraced his shoulder with his other arm.

Thai Buddhism is a non-touch culture. The Thai received this attention passively and a bit diffidently but with warm smiles. I do hope he gets a new tee shirt out of this at the least.

At one landing a woman came out of a restaurant to dump something, I couldn’t see what, from a basin into the river, which is the color of chicken gravy, causing it to erupt in a boiling of water and fish with silver flashes of fins and flanks.

Back at the A One I called Mr. Thai and gave him all the dates knowing he would have the tickets set up by the time I arrived back at his office. There I found him rebooting repeatedly and swearing in Thai and English—a lot of f-ings and sh-ings but no damns—and getting nowhere. I sat around for a while gazing at his familiar frustration—at one point he said mournfully, “I want to kick it.”—but after an hour or so I left, knowing the express boat ceases sometime past 6 pm. He would get the information to me somehow. He did.

I returned to Taksin as the sun was going down. I was mystified by a woman on the boat carrying a large, clear plastic bag full of artificial white roses. I found a seat, no one gives up their seat to the elderly in Bangkok any more, on the Sky Train to the Paragon Mall. It is almost impossible not to become a mall rat upon coming to BKK.

In the Gourmet Market, as I took a little cart, I skidded across their shiny white tile floor. In the seconds of this incident I saw a man’s arm within reach and thought, “I don’t care what he thinks. I´m grabbing him. I can’t go to Kailash with a broken leg or hip.” I grabbed, which while it didn’t completely save me, broke my fall. He didn’t reach out to help, just went rigid. I was not surprised. Someone had spilled water and ice on the floor.

I was helped up by a number of people, including the Thai man I’d grabbed, and asked how I was. The management sent three people to enquire after me.

I did my shopping, then realized I was starved. I had had breakfast on the plane, not too bad croissant, scrambled eggs, baked beans, turkey sausage and yoghurt. I avoided the baked beans and turkey sausage after a bite of each. While waiting for Mr. Thai’s uncooperative computer I had a whole bag of preserved banana chips and some kind of fruit drink on Khao San Road, followed by a cappuccino and a Belgian waffle thing at Starbucks.

There are interesting but not cheap food counters in the Gourmet Market. I picked the one offering food with truffles and had salmon on spinach with shitake mushrooms, little scallops and no truffles accompanied by a salad of rocket, tomatoes, parmesan in slices, balsamic dressing and truffles. The salmon was excellent but, as often happens, the truffles in the salad were not particularly flavorful. It may be because they were dry. Anyway it was all delicious and wonderful after no real food all day.

Of the next few days, all I can remember, exhaustion having closed in on me, follows. I had lunch with my Thai woman friend T at one of the superb Thai restaurants hidden away in green sois, going to Jim Thompson and to the gym where, because of my erratic schedule, I am paying by the day.

The lunch was heaven and totally repaired the damage caused by an supremely foul Thai lunch, the worst Thai meal I have ever eaten, in Karlskrona, Sweden some months before. We had eggplant salad with shrimp, green chicken curry with tiny, tiny eggplant, something I thought was egg and meat but was some kind of white starch and, I think, turnip, and a mix of apple, cashew and shrimp that was superb.

T and her husband, W will be taking his mother, who is Chinese, to Hong Kong at about the same time that I will be there. We are now planning a gastronomic reunion in HK at a restaurant that serves goose as its specialty.

Sadly, things have changed at the gym, which is in the Anantara Hotel on Ratchadamri Rd. This used to be the Four Seasons Hotel and before that a long list of distinguished hotels in succession. I couldn’t find the razors, or the cream they usually provide for shaving. I thought the new management had cut back on amenities. I asked one of my Thai friends, who was eating rambutans at the coffee counter. She told me that the hotel can no longer put things out because the clientel has changed to customers who steal them, the shoe horn, the clothes brush, the wash clothes and other things that used to be provided. She told me not to leave my sneakers out when I take a shower. Hers had been stolen. So now I lock everything up. This is very sad.

After the gym I wandered through my favorite unaffordable store at the Anantara, The Lotus: Arts de Vivre. There was a super shell sporting a superb dragon and a long tray with a fog on it, which, should I have money at the end of the trip, I would like to buy. The trouble is I never do have the money at the end of the trip. But the best was a pair of earrings, in the thousands beyond my abilities—wings cut out of either abalone shell or nacre of some sort with the animal head in gold and stones on the inside point near the ear. They were magnificent, small works of art. There was also a wonkily shaped little bracelet of Japanese lacquer with a tiny, diamond-paved frog on it.

Going home, I stopped to take out money from the ATM putting in my credit card rather than my ATM card. The machine proceeded to eat my credit card. I have been trying to get a new one ever since. I will not bore you with the multitude of phone calls or the misdirected replacement cards. It has been a total horror show and I am still casting imprecations upon HSBC, which doesn’t seem to be able to get me a card to Kathmandu, Nepal.

One day I walked from the Anantara down to Kai’s atelier. He had just come in from walking around Lumphini Park, which he seems to be doing frequently. He told me that in Lumphini, “there are very pretty girls standing around” who get into cars that stop for them. The car is followed by a motorcycle, in case the girl screams. This is the quintessence of Bangkok life.

One day I had a blood test at N’s hospital to see if my white blood cells were increasing. They aren’t but they are different than from the last test. This is confusing and unnerving.

I had lunch with T, W and T’s sister, my old dentist, at Bua—not the best but near the hospital where N works. W was disappointed because there was a Chinese restaurant he wanted to introduce me to. N went back to the hospital. W went back to work and T and I managed to get me a Thai sim so that I can now call people.

The next adventure was to get to my dressmaker. They have changed location again and are operating out of their factory, which may also be their home. I tried Googleing the address they sent me, thinking I would be able to find my way there. Goggle couldn’t find it.

They, Moon and her sister, picked me up at the Sarasak Sky Train station by the escalator. Both Moon and her sister are tiny Thais. The sister has various pillows under her so that she can see over the steering wheel. We ended up in a neighborhood totally new to me, residential and green. I think I can find it again.

The house is full of women, half draped mannequins and bolts of fabric. There is lots of bustle, concentration, little noise or conversation and no men. They were disappointed that I did not bring them more things to make, but it is an undeniable truth that I have enough clothes.

They are having a difficult time because, I think, they are paying off the debt incurred by one of the men in the family when he borrowed a large sum from the bank using his business as collateral and then blew the money on women, gambling and general high living just as his business failed. Moon said to me half jokingly, “Look for material when you travel and bring things back so we can make you clothes.”

I felt sad for them but also proud of the way they just get on with it. They took me back to the Sky Train and I went home to pack for the flight to Chiangmai.

In the Lhasa airport I ran into the amusing Philly-NYer who was also headed back to Kathmandu. By her arrangement we sat in the same row with an empty seat between us on the right as you face front. This turned out to be the Everest side.

It is many years since I have seen such magnificent views of Everest from the air. Everyone was excited. Philly-NY had a young friend from her tour group, a professional photographer. She yelled over people´s heads in her best NY-hailing-a cab-voice, “Daryl! Daryl! Get up here!” Indeed, Daryl came, took lots of photos, including one for me, much better than I could have done on my own.

Once back in the KTM Guest House, where to my relief I realized that the blood scabs in my nose were disappearing, I emailed her asking if she wanted to go with me to Babar Mahal Revisited and then did all those necessary things—handed in laundry, got out the blocked blog, etc. Sarosh came to visit and I gave him my walking sticks to hang onto for next year. I´m not likely to need them in Spain and I am tired of having to talk them onto every flight I take.

When I told Satish that I thought I would try to circumambulate Kailash next year, doing the pilgrimage, he said nothing but I saw a satirical gleam in Sarosh’s eye which means he thinks I may not be able to do it. I have to say that I agree. I may not.

At breakfast the next morning an Australian man, in my age group, shouted excitedly across the garden to his wife, “Emily, there are omelets and they are free!”

Philly-NY and I went off to Baber Mahal. She was entranced with the place and I was delighted to show it off, taking us around the shops and lunching at Chez Carolina. I took her down a passage I had been in before I went to Tibet leading to a tranquil patio with pools with water lilies. It seemed to me it had to be a hotel but before I hadn´t had time to look around. However, she is really good at this sort of adventure, and on her initiative we saw, I think, every single room in the new boutique hotel that is not an old structure but a new one built in the old style by brothers, descendants of the Rana´s who owned the palace. It is a luxurious place, expensive, small but it would be the perfect place at the end of a Tibet trip.

Coming out of Tibet after doing the Kailash pilgrimage in a tent is usually, for me, a gradual return to comfort and even luxury. First KTM with hot showers, a first shampooing of my dust filled hair, (it takes two shampooings to get all the dust out), better food, followed by BKK with a better shower, a facial, excellent food, materialistic temptations and finally HK with a luxurious shower, facial, manicure, pedicure, equally good food and materialistic temptations on a very high level.

We took a taxi to Philly-NY´s hotel because she was enthusiastic about it but I found it a bit dark compared to the KTM Guest House.

The night before I left KTM the Thai King died. Philly-NY kindly emailed me the news so I was prepared. I am so grateful she did this. I arrived in BKK in time to go to the Paragon to buy food for breakfast. Most people were in black or black and white, even foreigners. That didn´t mean that legs, arms and midriffs were covered. But what impressed me was that throughout the Paragon—Chanel to Prada, H & M to Zara—ALL window displays were in black—dresses, suits, shoes, purses. All the many TV screen and digital displays inside and out I found the next day, all over BKK, showed only pictures of the King at various ages against a black background or a message which I presumed was a eulogy. This was also against a black background. The TV screens in the Sky Train showed a loop of the King at various ages.

People were subdued and serious, not frightened, although a bit worried. The government had acknowledged the Prince as the King´s successor. Recent pictures of him show a man who looks ill and a bit disoriented at times. Unfortunately he will like sitting on the throne wearing lots of jewelry and the pretense of power, but only the pretense.

My landlady’s comment was, “He´s a man and they have to ask the man first.” She sounded resigned but disgusted by this necessity. I could almost smell the hunger for the Princess and the feelings of trust and stability she brings with her. In the newspapers, the left hand, front-page column was often about the Prince but the right hand column always told of some altruism of the Princess.
I told T and W about the Ganesh mask and asked if they would help me purchase it. To my great excitement they agreed. For lunch, this is not a complete list, we had, deep fried banana blossoms, eggplant and squid with chili, green curry with fish balls, chicken roasted in banana leaves, tiny deep fried fish (heaven), somtam with something. I´m missing one or two dishes. For dessert there was a fruit I didn´t know (I´ve been going to BKK for 30 years plus and still find fruits I have never eaten) durian and sticky rice with coconut milk and bananas fried in pastry.

We drove to the Paragon, which was angelic act one on their part since, particularly in the rain, the traffic was glutinous, then up to the 4th floor, angelic act two since with the rain the Paragon was crammed. As soon as W saw the Ganesh in the widow his face lit up and I knew I hadn´t been wrong about the quality of the mask. The owner was there without his son and being accompanied by T and W made for a different experience. Before the starting price had been 50,000 Baht. Now the price was 40,000. W and the owner talked about how expensive it is to have a shop in the Paragon, how they would like to turn it into a restaurant as their son is a chef, about how much it would cost to rent a kitchen. While this went on, Thai words swooping around me in their tones, I tried to look intelligent, walked around, occasionally suggesting a lower price. The store is a sort of attic, an eclectic collection of some good things—pieces from old temples, Lladro figurines, some very fine Thai china, and bits of total junk. We finally agreed on 38,000, which was spectacular since I had been hoping for 45,000. The wrapping up process was ceremonial and took a long time but it was important that it be done right.

We then investigated a part of the Paragon where W is going to take classes in digital design. This is not due to necessity, just curiosity. They are such wonderful people.

I flew to HK the next day on Hong Kong Air. The food was gruesome—pork with noodles in a sauce like mucous.

I came in early enough to go to the new gym that has taken over the space of my old gym. When paying the bill I just closed my eyes and grit my teeth. Everything in HK is much more expensive than any place but London and New York. I then went on down hill to Great Food in Pacific Place, a grocery store that has been characterized by a friend as, “Fast food for the rich.” That´s a fair definition.
To go from Tibet to HK is to journey from the intently spiritual to the massively materialistic. I come here to play with my friend Sue, an English woman married to a Chinese man with two sons, one married to a Chinese woman, the other involved, in California, with an American.

I find HK a bit unreal. People have money on a scale that is to me incomprehensible. Also they enjoy flashing it. Stand on a corner in HK and count Rolls Royces. After a while you may want to break them into two categories—those with gold flying ladies and those ungilded. I presume we are talking about gilt, not solid, but I could be wrong.

Sue and I had a lovely ten days together, frequently getting rain sodden. I arrived in time for the end of one typhoon, through which we fought our way to an audiologist as I had a malfunctioning hearing aid. The next day, rain still pouring down I had a luxurious and thorough manicure-pedicure with Kitty, the best in her field on three continents as I listened to news of her tuba playing son, now a college graduate who has moving on to Germany either for employment or more education; I am not sure which. We waded through puddles to the Luk Yue dim sum restaurant for lunch, an old and revered institution whose waiters are usually cross, as though they all have painful feet, but that day they were all immensely cheerful and supplied two kinds of mustard with smiles. Since our feet were soaked through, our trousers baggy with damp, the dim sum in hot broth was very reviving.

The next day in a continuous downpour that left the windshield totally obscured between wiper swipes, we drove to the Heritage Museum in the New Territories. It was disappointing that their old tearoom has been replaced by an awful western restaurant, all surfaces glaring and nothing but burgers and pizza.

We spent hours, Sue is very patient with me, on the Cantonese Opera floor. It turns out that Cantonese Opera is comic and, therefore, looked down upon by Beijing Opera fans. The comedy is of the Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy variety—the drunk official pretending to be sober while swaying at unlikely angles. Having gymnastic talent can be important. As in Western opera the voice production is trained and artificial. It is the first time I´ve had even a slight grasp of Cantonese Opera.
Since neither of us were interested in burgers or pizza, Sue drove us to Sai Kung, where in a seaside restaurant, in pailfulls of rain, under a sort of tent of clear plastic we gorged on seafood, shrimp and vegetables, clams, scallops, and crab. Unfortunately, Sue´s good umbrella was coopted by some mean, light fingered customer. The waitresses were so appalled that one of them gave us her excellent umbrella. We returned it after picking up the car.

We spent most of the next day without rain but with friends, first Naomi from Kenya who is about to go home for a visit, with whom we wandered around the endless interconnected malls of downtown Hong Kong. Then we drove out to see Diane, an American, who lives outside central Hong Kong in an apartment with an amazing view across bays and islands.

The following day was totally eradicated by a force 8 typhoon. This meant I was incarcerated in the Helena May, a 19th century mansion which was turned into a women´s residence at the wish of its owner when she died at the turn of the century. The HM is across from the American Consulate in a sort of trough formed by Cotton Tree Drive and Garden Road. That sounds rather bucolic, doesn´t it? In actuality those two roads are four lane highways roaring with traffic. One of the pluses of the typhoon was to stand at my window in utter silence only occasionally interrupted by a private car or taxi, no buses, trucks, school buses.

There was very little staff at the HM and food was restricted to scrambled eggs and toast or sandwiches. There was no question of going outside, although one American woman in residence thought the whole thing was foolishness and that it would be all right to go out. However, a man was killed by flying debris that day. In our trough we were not open to the winds that were whipping around Hong Kong but the rain was heavy and incessant. We were taken care of by Anna who came in although she has children at home and two men who managed to come to work.

I spent the day on my blog, mourning the massage, facial and Mahler concert that the typhoon was depriving me of. The silence was eerie.

The next day a Saturday was bright and sunny for our trip to Stanley Market that is still a diverse place but not the bargain it once was. We had lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant, so busy it was like eating in the middle of an airport, but the food was heavenly. Part of the fun of eating with Sue is she will try anything. We had a couple of experimental dishes that were a success, although I can´t remember now what they were. From there we went to Michael´s on Square St. behind the old Man Mo Temple where I looked at about twenty embroideries trying to find the right piece for a friend. I finally decided on one that would have been hung in a door. It celebrated a graduate in the family with cocks crowing and butterflies of happiness dancing. Michael´s wife kindly came down 20US.

We went from there to the building that houses the Mandarin Hotel. There is a shop in one of the corridors that we always look into but never has either of us bought anything there. It´s owner sets prices very high and then waits for the customer who ”has to have it.” We spent a number of years gazing at a hand-carved, wooden, articulated dragon who was amazing but hugely expensive. Finally a woman from New York took him home.

To our surprise the owner was there with his wife, usually his son is on duty. A cloisonné lock, it must have been a lady´s boudoir lock, with exquisite blue and white patterns, which I have wanted to buy for years was there as always, waiting for the person who would spend $500 for it. I have given my son a lock every year for about twenty years. I would love to give him this one but not at that price.

The owner took me around, showing things he was particularly proud of. One was a piece of old jade with a cat and kitten carved into it. Another was a necklace of old white jade “pebbles”. These, which do not look particularly “white,” are not polished or shaped but have their natural pebble shape with imperfections, lines and cracks. I fell for them. The owner quoted a price that seemed reasonable rather than his usual over-the-top quote. My ears and my acquisitiveness sensor began to vibrate.

Sunday is, in Hong Kong, the day all the Philippine maids have off. They have no place to go, nothing to do. Therefore, they set up camp all over Hong Kong, on streets, on walkways, under pedestrian bridges out of the sun and there they do each other´s hair and nails, share food and talk. They were all along Cotton Tree Drive except at Saint John´s, a protestant church, however, at St. Josephs, a Catholic institution, just above the HM they were camped out all over. I watched them at the grotto of the Madonna as they brought flowers and prayed. Meanwhile the Rolls Royces sped in silent elegance down Garden Road.

I talked Sue into going to the zoo because there is an orangutan there I am fond of. He is unusual because one does not often see in captivity a fully mature male orang with what are called cheek pads. These growths change the look of an orang from rather oriental redhead, sleepy-eyed innocence to something you would never want to meet in a dark alley. We spent a half hour or so watching Orang Sr. and Wife as she reached through the bars to pull off palm fronds with which to make a nest, but when Sr. came to join her she draped them around him so that he would have shade. It was touching. When the lunch wagon arrived, however, all palm fronds drifted down to the ground as Sr., with deliberate, swaying, hand holds that made clear his enormous strength swung down for lunch, followed at an appropriate distance by Wife.

The first time I visited this pair they had two little ones, now grown and in another cage. Sr. was lying on the ground on his back with a palm leaf over his face while the family, quite obviously, tiptoed about him. “Don´t wake Papa. He´ll be cross.”

Tuesday we went to visit our old friend J on Cheung Chao, a nice ferry trip. J is an Englishman who came out here, worked as a writer and editor for many years before he developed a congenital disease that has bent him double. He still translates French medieval poetry from time to time. We sat at a restaurant looking out at the harbor and the fishing boats and talked away the afternoon.

I had been discussing the necklace with Sue. When we got off the ferry we went back to the shop. The owner´s son was there and wanted a higher price. I was adamant about the price his father had given me. When his father came in we agreed on that price and I took my “pebble” treasure home with me to the Helena May. Time to pack up.

I had very little time in BKK before catching my flight to Barcelona, but N, T, W and I had one more meal together. This one was reached through a labyrinth of lanes that led to a building in a garden that backed onto Klong Sam Saab. If you have ever been to Bangkok with me you have taken a boat ride on Klong San Saab. It is a canal that runs through Bangkok to the Chao Phraya River. I love that ride.
We had a huge lunch with dishes not usually made outside of the home in Thailand. The woman who runs the restaurant is an old school friend of W´s and this is her new venture that she is rightly very excited about. It is called Sansumran at San Saab and is off Sukhumvit 31. Good luck finding it.

N, T and W took me back to the A One. I am always melancholy at leaving BKK, leaving SE Asia but this time with the King´s death the sadness was deeper. We were an American and three Thais at the end of an era.

N said to me, ”When you leave I feel the way I used to as a child when summer was over and I had to go back to school.” I feel the same.

But next year….

Having slept fitfully, altitude or attitude, I’m not sure. I had had a conversation with a Chinese anesthesiologist over my evening yogurt who complained at length about not being able to sleep so I may have contracted my sleeplessness from her suggestion.

My hired-by-day guide, Jumpa, arrived and we took off for the Jokhang where we went in on the left hand side of the main door. The right hand side trailed a long, long line of Tibetans which wound between the prostrators many of whom were very well dressed—one in a bright blue chuba, the Tibetan wrap-around dress, with a matching hat. I saw a one legged man doing prostrations with metal blocks to protect his hands. He clicked them together at the over-head position, a pacific variation on the military heel click. Prostration, rather like the yoga salutation to the sun, is a form of Tibetan worship.

Once inside the Jokhang the two lines converged and, because of the Tibetan circumambulatory pace, it became a bit scarily frenetic. The elderly Tibetan woman behind me grabbed a fistful of the back of my jacket and hung on for dear life. We went charging through the five-meter passage where the bell from the long lost Christian church hangs overhead, into the first courtyard. The feeling of compressed frenzy exploding outward suggested a Woody Allen dramatization of the passage of sperm into ejaculation.

But in the court I had a chance to look at my favorite mural of the Tibetan Regent, Sangye Gyatso, receiving tribute from the Mongol Khan, Gushri Khan, in the 17th century, both with humorous faces and bulgy noses looking immensely happy and pleased with themselves. When I told Jumpa that I loved this painting, he commented condescendingly, “Not very old.” This certainly put me in my place and it is true it is a mural commissioned by the 13th Dalai Lama in the 19th century.

In this court Jumpa showed me the pillar with two stones embedded in the wood, except one is gone now, and the place on the pavement where there are two mysterious black bulges. The Jokhang is full of these little mysteries and enchantments of ambivalent significance.

We went on into the main hall, a mass of shoving Tibetans, cheery, not aggressive, shoving. Jumpa was excellent, more informative than any of the guides I´ve had before and more understandable. He showed me some murals depicting the castles of nobles in Lhasa before Buddhism. These had swords on top of them, stuck in like candles in a cake, signaling their readiness to do battle. The Buddhist umbrellas of peace later replaced them. The paintings made me think of the offensive towers of San Gimignano in Tuscany.

On the second floor we looked at 7th century doorframes either executed by Nepalis or heavily influenced by them. Their figures are more Hindu than Buddhist with occasional sexual overtones. All these carvings, beautiful in their sinuous lines, are slick with yak butter from the lamps in the chapels. From this level I could clearly see the cornice of grinning, 7th century white, lions with the sphinx in their midst, a tag around his/her neck to identify him/her.

Coming back down stairs we went into the most revered chapel where the Jowo resides, a statue of the Buddha at the age of twelve, gleaming among yak butter lamps. I circumambulated him being blessed by a monk as I passed, touching my head to the heap of khatas, scarves given as an offering, cushioning the Buddha’s thigh and then along the dark passage behind him lined with gleaming figures to come out again into the main hall.

The odor of yak butter didn´t seem as overpowering but the religious energy was as strong as ever. I think the Chinese have either restricted or reordered the method of giving yak butter and tsampa, roasted, ground barley, because no one seemed to be bearing bags of either. I hope there is a general repository for these gifts but such a restriction would certainly help to contain or, at least, restrain, the rat problem.

As we walked Jumpa told me, with pain and bewilderment in his voice, that his ten year old son will only speak Chinese in and out of the home because his teacher told him it was very important that he always speak Chinese. I comforted him as best I could by telling him I was sure there would come a time when his son would react against this instruction.

Outside the Jokhang I noticed that the Chinese have put a three foot high glass guard around the 18th century doring, a tall engraved stone, which gives instruction on how to protect the population against small pox. I wondered if people have been chipping at it. Jumpa had told me that the Chinese have covered many of the old pillars in the Jokhang because people gouge out bits to take home.

We stopped at the ATM on Mentsikhang Lam where I did something so quixotically idiotic it took me several days to recover. I withdrew 5,000 yuan in two batches of 2,500. I had trouble with the machine because of the large amount I was withdrawing but even that did not wake me up to what I was doing. When I figured it out I was aghast. Jumpa kindly blamed my altitude addled brain. Later I realized that my retarded mind was still dealing with the exchange rate for Nepali rupees, having not yet acquired the fact that I was in Tibet and, therefore dealing with the rate for yuan. There are about 100 Nepali rupees to a dollar. Therefore, fifty US would be over 5,000 rupees. There are about 7.60 yuan to a dollar. I had withdrawn over seven hundred dollars worth of yuan, far more than I would ever spend in my remaining eight days in Lhasa.

As we walked to Tashi´s for lunch, my brain was on liquefy in its autonomous blender. I was aghast at what I had done. Jumpa said that he knew a man who would change the money back into dollars at the black market rate which is lower than the official rate. Probably I should have held on until Hong Kong and gone to the HSBC bank there which is the main branch. But my mental blender was on high. A half an hour later over a table in the Tashi restaurant, in full public view, I exchanged my wad of yuan for four crisp fifty dollar bills and three one hundreds acquired from a small, Tibetan man who would not look me in the eye. The bills could have been play money or counterfeit. I will end the suspense now. They were fine. They just cost me two hundred dollars.

After lunch walking to the Ramoche, another important temple but much less intense than the Jokhang, Jampa told me that my former guide, Norbu, was no longer guiding but driving. This was alarming news because Norbu would be a wild, erratic driver. He was a superb guide once one left Lhasa, knowledgeable and inventive in emergencies. Also he knew everyone. I stopped using him because he started drinking while on trek.

At the Ramoche, all the paintings on the walls are new and beautiful. It turned out that they were done by a distant relative of Jumpa´s. I would not have taken Jumpa to the Riwoche but one cannot enter the more important temples in Lhasa any more unless you have a guide.

Jumpa and I parted company and without him I went to a tiny temple next door to the Ramoche where people circumambulated at speed and smiled at me. I ambled home looking in shops. One near the Jokhang, on the Barkhor was selling bits and pieces that had obviously been torn from temples. There is a lot of this illegal trade going on quite openly in Lhasa.

Home at the Lebrang, in the garden, I worked on my blog. In the midst of which four Australians, mostly middle aged, arrived on roaring, red Honda motorcycles having driven from Everest Base Camp, one way. They were individually immensely charming and magnificently fit.

They went out to eat steak at a place called The Owl and I had a banana and yogurt.

The next morning I had breakfast with the Australians who shared their peanut butter. We talked politics a bit but there was nothing much to say. They made fun of Americans who only go to cities but they just ride through the countryside, never walking or pausing. They certainly didn´t see the Jokhang or any of the other sites in Lhasa. It is interesting that need to be superior to your fellow travelers. At the end of a trek in Bhutan, that I should never have done, although I am very glad I did it, some of my fellow trekkers said, when we saw the other inhabitants of the hotel dinning room, “Yes, but we are trekkers, travelers, not tourists.” It is better to travel than to tour but perhaps one should cut one´s fellows a little slack?

When the Australians left I was told I could move to my new hotel any time. The Lebrang, because of a Chinese holiday, was so over booked that they had asked me if I would mind staying in another place. I readily agreed hoping that the new place would be an improvement on my dungeon room. I zipped everything up and one of the men from the Lebrang walked me, carrying my back and day pack—I just trotted along with my purse—to the Barkhor around to the other side of the Jokhang and then out through a worrying maze of streets—how would I find my way—to a big gateway leading into a court surrounded by three story buildings with verandas and sparkling windows. There are trees, sparrows, pots of roses and marigolds in the court of the Yabshi Phunkhang. I learned that this was formerly the residence of the 12th Dalai Lama. I seemed to be the only resident. They said at the front desk, in the charge of two smiling Tibetan women, that they did laundry and I immediately gave them mine. I also learned that they had just opened the hotel and were very worried about its success. They need not be.

I was three flights up, which, at this point, was hard going but doable. But I was rewarded by a superb room, huge, with two beds, enormous windows, one with a curtained window seat, butter colored sun spilled in lighting up Tibetan painted chests, carved pillars, embroidered pillows. There was a bathroom any Wisconsin housewife would have been proud to own.

Despite these enormous improvements in my physical situation I felt totally lousy. It was my fourth day at altitude, often the worst. I went down stairs to sit in the garden and write, ordering ginger-lemon tea and a big pot of hot water. I managed to Skype a friend in upstate New York on my phone but since she couldn´t hear me I signed off. But it was good to see her face. However, as I drank mug after mug of tea and hot water I began to feel better. WHEN will I learn that my physical problems in Tibet are in part caused by dehydration? By the time I had wiped out both tea and hot water I was feeling quite all right.

I gathered myself up and went off to Tashi´s for lunch. When I came up the stairs Tashi´s sister greeted me with a big grin, saying “Tashi´s here!” We had a grand hug, talked about everyone and everything. The sadness of the Barkhor without its stalls. What her new employer, my dead friend´s daughter is doing. How the restaurant is getting on. What happened to the man who used to cook at the other restaurant, which was in the Kirey Hotel. During this I had four cups of butter tea, thugpa, a Tibetan noodle soup, and cheesecake.

A family member arrived and I left intending to go to the Meru temple, an old favorite of mine, but instead stumbled first into a very active monastery and temple full of people and chanting monks. I love listening to monks chant. Although the resemblance is not great, it does make me think of Gregorian chanting. When I went upstairs I saw an unusual image of a Green Tara. The Taras are deities who formed from the Buddha’s tears when he recognized the terrible suffering of humanity. They protect and help all sentient beings. The face, but not the body, was in bas-relief, a thing you rarely see in Tibet and I realized I was in the temple of the “talking Tara,” Gyürme Tratsang. And that is what I know. I don´t know when she talked or to whom or what she said.

From there I walked on down Beijing Street to the Meru temple where years ago I gave them money to put a new skin on their drum. A rat had eaten the old skin. Next to it is another temple from which one is always barred. I don´t now why but it may be a place for the fierce deities that women are not allowed to enter. It looks very spiffy and recently renovated.

The other temple, the Meru, looks sad, neglected. In the back, behind the main altar there is a pillar hung with chain mail, 19th century weapons, guns and on the wall a fine thangka on display, a small, elegant painting of what was identified on a label as “White Brahma,” portrayed as a warrior. The weapons and chainmail would have been donated to the deity in thanks for surviving whatever conflict they had been used in. I gave 10 yuan, which caused the two young monks on duty to whisper to each other.

It is sad to see its condition. Down its stairs, outside, were two sad, hungry cats with matted fur in a puddle of sun.

Walking back to the Yabshi Phunkhang with happy thoughts of having tea in my window seat I made a mental list of changes in Lhasa: new buses with digital signs on their fronts; new blue and white official taxis, huge TV type screens advertising everything from soap to cars, street lights—some quite handsome with cut out metal designs– no stalls on the Barkhor, cleaner streets, x-ray machines and metal detectors, acute Chinese shopping frenzy with huge speakers outside shops blaring messages or music, sidewalks now mostly even, flowers in pots arranged before the Jokhang, soldiers not apparent as last time when they were stationed three to five together in full battle dress with fixed bayonets on every corne lights—some quite handsome with cut out metal designs– no stalls on the Barkhor, cleaner streets, x-ray machines and metal detectors, acute Chinese shopping frenzy with huge speakers outside shops blaring messages or music, sidewalks now mostly even, flowers in pots arranged before the Jokhang, soldiers not apparent as last time when they were stationed three to five together in full battle dress with fixed bayonets on every corner.

 

Ethan left the next morning for the U.S., causing a serious downward spiral in my bien-etre. I became sad, upset, angry. In case you think that, of course, I felt those emotions because travel is lonely and sad when you journey alone, I want to say, no, not true. Traveling alone is wonderful, as I was about to rediscover. When you travel with someone you form a unit and other people don´t talk to you because they are unwilling to intrude on that unit. If you travel alone, people talk to you. That was about to happen to me, but first I had to make the adjustment to losing Ethan. He is wonderful to travel with, uncomplaining about 90% of the time. Yes, he would rather have a sit down toilet but he isn´t going to spend the day telling you about it. He´s ready to try things. Curious. Interested, particularly in people. I often do things with Ethan that I would never do on my own—an elephant ride in Thailand comes to mind.

As I had another cappuccino under a tree in the Kathmandu Guest House garden, a black and white cat who accepts offerings of cheese and likes head scratches joined me. Above us in the tree, whose trunk is green with epiphytes, was a crow with a discerning eye who comes down to clean up crumbs and carry off large pieces of abandoned toast.

I took myself and my unhappy mood off for a walk. On the cashmere- sweater-stretch of Tridevi Marg I stopped to watch a woman photograph a young, black and white sacred cow who was settling into a doorway. I got out my phone and copied her. When she asked about the quality of the cashmere, I realized she was American. I suggested she try the shops at Babar Mahal Revisited. She pulled out a notebook as I tried to explain how to get there. We then lapsed into a Western tourist whinge about crossing the big streets in KTM. One of these crossings, just a few yards away, is where Tridevi Marg crosses Kantipath. A policeman is generally on duty but I think of him as someone who will call the ambulance when I am bleeding and broken on the pavement since drivers sometimes ignore his signals.

She agreed that it was a problem and then came out with the best one-liner of my trip. Gazing thoughtfully at the young, sacred cow, now dozing in a shop entrance, she said, “I always try to cross with a sacred cow.”
In Nepal you might hit a person, because the charges are variable for hitting a human but never a cow since if it died you would be charged with cow murder and executed.

[This story may be apocryphal. I hope it is not insulting to Nepalis and if it is I expect them to tell me. The reason I doubt the authenticity of the anecdote is because I don´t think a British Consul would drive his own car.]

I have been told that a British Consul´s car, driven by the official himself, once hit a cow causing a near international situation. It was finally decided that the cow, in walking in front of the car, had committed suicide and no charges were brought.

There are far fewer sacred cows in the center of Kathmandu than there once were, so that this youngster was a bit of an event. I crossed Kantipath sans its company but with lifted spirits.

A few days later the young man with the elephant hair bracelet, Shushan, picked me up for my flight to Lhasa. We also stopped for a British man, small, quiet, on the far edge of middle age, at the Yak and Yeti, the hotel started by the Russian, Boris, situated in a green and quiet park. I got a glimpse of the luxurious interior. We discussed Brexit.

Through the waiting room of Tribhuvan Airport came bustling, a cheery, extraverted American woman from Philly, but with a decided New York City accent, dangling from a finger something she´d bought in one of the little airport shops. She swung it in front of me saying, “These are great stocking stuffers.” You had to like her, she was so open and full of bounce. She seems to travel all the time and is one of those people who have a stash of gently dog-eared bon mots. When we saw little of the Himalayas, the flight to Lhasa takes one over Everest, she said, “I think I´ll ask for my money back.”

Our arrival in Tibet was amazingly orderly and efficient, although they spent some time going through the Brit´s guidebook, examining pictures, which recalled Russia in the old days when they went through your magazines. There was, however, a feeling that we had entered the land of automatons, the officials were so stiff. This was my 10th time in Tibet but it had been five years since my last visit and my eye was very much on the que vive for changes. I was hoping that the Chinese had not overwhelmed the Tibetan culture.

I was met by my woman Tibetan guide, whose name I understood to be Diane. This seemed to be unlikely and, indeed, proved to be untrue. Her name is Zhayang. Between being a bit deaf and the Tibetan accent I often get things wrong.

Driving into Lhasa the fields on either side of the road were bare, having been harvested weeks before and, therefore, no cows, yaks, dris, or goats were about. There was snow on the mountains, not much, but the beginning. We went through three tunnels on a well-paved highway. These tunnels, that originally caused awe amongst the Tibetans who had never seen such structures, have cut the time into Lhasa from four hours down to one. We saw a building, undoubtedly a gompa, a temple, built into a cliff. When I asked my guide about it, I thought she said it was an ani gompa, a nunnery, but when I referred to this later she was mystified. An hour after arrival, I found myself in the midst of the usual snarl of incomprehension between Tibetan guide and Westerner. However, shortly thereafter we did pass an ani gompa, a big white spread of buildings on a green hill where, she told me, the government had built a road to connect the nuns to the main highway.

As we entered Lhasa we passed a grey herd of new, large, not entirely ugly, cast concrete apartment buildings. We then swiftly drove along the avenue of industrial and business buildings fronted on the road by large, ornate arches, that takes one into the center of Lhasa.

I was unhappy to find I had a dark, ground floor room at my hotel, the Trichang Lebrang, the former home of a Tibetan prelate. I stay there because it is Tibetan owned and run, not a Chinese establishment. Most of the rooms are lovely with big windows, brightly painted walls, ceilings held up by tree trunk pillars carved with flowers and Buddhist symbols and quite good bathrooms. Some rooms have their own terraces or balconies.

I had a window but it looked onto a dank court. It was so dark I couldn´t see the paintings on the walls without turning on all the lights. The bathroom was fine, however. Then I discovered that they were no longer doing laundry at the hotel. I started calculating how many days I could wear a pair of trousers. The place was crammed with Mainland Chinese, men and women eating in the garden, which they strewed with tea bags, used napkins, cigarette butts, banana and orange peels. They would lean over their plates to spit out a bone, a tough piece of meat. I had lunch, but the food was as terrible as ever and I think they have taken to using food coloring, something that all Indian restaurants do all over the world but not a thing Tibetans used to do.

My reasons for coming to Lhasa were a) to find out if I could, at 80, breathe at 12,000 feet, more than 3,500 meters, b) to see some friends, c) revisit the astonishing temples and other sites of Lhasa. My covert agenda was that if I found I was able to breathe at 12,000 feet, I would “think about” doing the sacred pilgrimage around Mount Kailash again. (The book I am trying to get published, THE MOUNTAIN WILL DECIDE, is about a number of circumambulations of the mountain. I´ve done 7.) My fear is that I no longer have the strength to do the 33 miles going up to 18,600 feet at the pass, Drolma La. My dearest wish is to do it one more time.

I have a contorted relationship with Tibet, with Lhasa. I love it with a vehement passion, the color of a fire-headed geranium, intense as the odor of jasmine. Against all reason I feel not just at home in this barren, aesthetic landscape, but happy, despite acknowledging that this culture is totally alien to my ingrained Western ideas. To walk the khora, the sacred path, around the Jokhang temple, accompanying Khampa men, their long, black hair braided up with scarlet fringe, or old Tibetan women whirling their prayer wheels while walking the family dog or holding the hand of a grandchild, is always a precious experience.

I hate being in Tibet where I feel unwell because of the altitude, the food is mostly lousy, dust infiltrates everything, the dryness causes blood scabs to form in my nose, and I must carefully guard myself against cold since there is rarely, very rarely, any external form of heating. Your body warmth is what you’ve got. These are the two strands that twist round and round each other all the time I am in Tibet. In any day I will twine back and forth between love and loathing a half dozen times.

I asked the way to the ani gompa, although I was sure was just down the street, and it was. When I walked in I saw a tall, lean young woman, with long hair and a large camera guided by a short, masculine Tibetan woman. Coming up behind them on the temple stairs, I asked the Western one where she was from. She was from Milan. We spent a good part of the day together.

The nuns were chanting; we walked around the hall and Drolma, the guide, suggested we sit, which we did for an hour. The nuns managed to simultaneously chant and grin at us. When they changed from one mantra to the next there was a flurry of blasts from a clarinet like instrument, clashes of cymbals, and a rumble from a drum. They seemed a loving and united community. One nun with a slightly lop sided face, a stroke perhaps, poured tea. She asked me with gestures if I wanted some but I had no cup.

After a while I went to stand outside where the tea-maker, a different woman from the tea-pourer, offered me butter or milk tea. After some confusion about my cuplessness she went to get me one. I alternated between butter and milk tea, which seemed to stabilize me. I was wobbly with the altitude. Drinking butter tea is, I find, a big help in adjusting to altitude.

I love that the nuns show affection for each other. They were endearing to me, which, of course brought back memories of previous trips to Tibet, the German girl who first brought me to the nunnery and the abbess who used to be here. All this is in my agentless book.

We came down from the chapel to watch young novices making the rolled up prayer strips that go into prayer wheels. They smiled at us briefly and then went back to rolling up mantras. I was shocked when Drolma told me that the Chinese had closed the shrine where Tsongsen Gampo meditated underground. I presumed that it was because Tsongsen conquered all of western China, right up to the gates of Xi’an, then the Chinese capital. Nevertheless they were busy selling his Chinese wife, Wencheng, in a movie, posters for which were all over town. The Chinese claim they have a right to Tibet through this Chinese wife. They never stop pushing their propaganda. However, the closure turned out not to be true as I discovered some days later. I still have no explanation as to why Drolma would tell that lie.

I went for a very slow walk to Tashi´s, a friend’s restaurant, noting my breathing, which seemed to be fine although from time to time I felt light headed. When I entered the Barkhor, the khora, the sacred path around the Jokhang temple, the Saint Peter´s of Tibetan Buddhism, I had to do it through a metal detector portal and put my bag through an x-ray. Several police persons were standing about. Out of curiosity I left my phone in my pocket when I went through the metal detector. It didn´t go off at any of the detectors I went through. So this is all show on the part of the Chinese. I also noted all the little stalls selling everything from prayer flags to fur hats, that I used to poke into as I walked were gone. This made the Barkhor cleaner but much less interesting and a little sad. I also found that my friend Sonam´s tourist agency FIT had closed up.

Slowly I climbed the stairs to the Tashi One Restaurant but to my surprise I had no difficulty. I was hoping to see Tashi, a young woman I have known for twenty years, but she was in Chengdu with the daughter of the woman, also my friend, now dead, who had established the restaurant. This story is also in my agent-seeking memoir.

However, her sister, now a very grown woman, was running the Tashi in her absence and trying to feed a puppy a couple of days old who was being ignored and abandoned by its mother.

After a while Erika and Drolma came in. We had bobis, a sort of Tibetan crepe that you stuff with veggies and chicken or yak, drizzling a lovely cheese and shallot sauce over the filling.

I walked with Erika to her hotel along Beijing Street trying to locate my old landmarks. The Yak Hotel was there, but not the Kirey which I used to stay in, and I didn´t see the Banok Shul. Erika took me to a wonderful postcard place where I bought enough cards and stamps to probably finish this year´s mailing. My addressees have been much reduced by death.

I wrote for several hours in the Lebrang´s garden, then tried to send out my blog but couldn´t. Slowly it dawned on me that I was being blocked. I gave up and had a banana and local yogurt, which turned my gut into a heavy metal percussion section.

My guide, Zhayang, had told me not to take a shower my first night in Lhasa because she said it would increase my altitude problems. Why this should be true I can’t imagine but I dutifully eschewed my shower.

The next morning the wet shoes took their revenge as I felt a cold gathering to leap from nose to throat. My sinuses were making me miserable. A Claritin took care of that. We had a few leeches as we walked through wet grass but not many. On a road again Ethan paused in amazement before a huge, gloptious heap of poop. He had never before seen what a water buffalo can deliver. Just after, he saw his first water buffalo, large, grey, chewing sideways and peering nearsightedly from under curved horns.

We stopped for a rest at a restaurant/guesthouse run by a husband and wife. She spoke some English and wanted to know if I was Ethan´s mother. When Ethan said “Grandmother” she was delighted. She wanted to know my age (in Nepal I get more attention, reverence, regard and adulation for my age than I can possible deserve) and then volunteered that her father was 85, her mother 84. She herself has nine grandchildren. The couple has made their house bright with pots of flowers. She sells bits and pieces but I was not interested in carrying even a little bit for the next few days. I wished her health and happiness when we left.

Sarosh bought a cucumber from her, which he sliced and we ate with salt. The entire day as we walked on various roads between staircases we saw only one motorcycle and one car, the latter crammed with Nepalis plastered against its windows. As we walked in the afternoon Sarosh stopped and brought us to the side of the road where we could look over the edge, down the hill. There, amongst the trees, were dark faced gibbons swinging on long, long pale arms through leaves beginning to turn yellow. There is something about gibbons with their curvaceous tails, dark faces set in the tight hood of their pale fur, with their enormous arm span, that for me has an aura of innocence. Perhaps it is a nostalgia for my own innocence because I too delighted in swinging from trees on shorter arms when I was a girl. The monkeys in the temples in Kathmandu, on the other hand, do not strike me as having any innocence at all.

Just as we were coming into The Australian Camp, so named because Australians camped there, it began to rain. I was jubilantly grateful that we had escaped it.

I spent time with an old acquaintance, a French pug whom I had met on my last trek here but he had met too many travelers in the intervening years and didn´t recognize me. There was also a hyper cat who jumped into your lap wanting to knead you all over as it purred wildly. It also talked incessantly rubbing against you all the time. Even when it walked it kneaded the floor with its paws. Hyperthyroid?

The next morning, at 5 am, the views of Fishtail (Macchapuchare) and various Annapurnas were magnificent. It was probably our best view and certainly our longest as it lasted several hours before the clouds began to pile up around the peaks like snow banks.

As we started down from The Australian Camp I found the front of my thighs were agonizingly stiff, odd muscles around my knees incredibly sore. I was also just plain tired. However, as we walked, picking up leeches around my ankles and two on my hands, the muscles stretched out and stopped hurting. We went down and down, at one point through a stream, and then mud, passing lots of people, small houses, fields, dogs intent on their tasks and at one point a troop of donkey going up to be loaded.

Around ten we came out on a road where a Tibetan woman tried to sell me a key chain that she claimed had fossil coral on it. Definitely not. I was so angry at her misrepresentation that I moved off abruptly. Ethan at the same time was being worked over by her husband but also didn´t buy. When we got into the car I was most relieved. We drove to a small town with a bus stop at its center. I recognized it and the store we stopped at which has a very white, miniature poodle who is king of his corner.

His coat was cut but not in the usual manner. This was a home job. He looked like he received his trim from the same person who cuts the hair of more than middle-aged French and German ladies, presumably with a rusty hatchet.

We started walking from there along a road which is in process—up rooted trees, mud, deep ruts and a jack hammering machine. We had lunch in a nice town where I had stayed on a previous trip. The house we ate at is across from a small Hindu temple beside a little pond. There used to be trees along the edge of the pond. Sarosh pointed out that they had chopped the trees down. I can´t imagine why. Certainly it does not improve the view.

Over lunch we met some New Zealanders, a family that travels together as, I think, a sort of annual reunion—mother, probably my age, a plump daughter, a slim, smart daughter and a rough, tattooed son in middle age. They were fun to talk to because they traveled individually and together all over.

We arrived in Sarangkot at the Lake View Lodge where we had large rooms with ensuite bathrooms that looked down to Pokhara and the lake. If Sere and Sarosh hadn’t been looking after us, I´m not sure we would have ever received our dinner the wait staff was so muddled. But the view of the lights around the lake below us was a perfect distraction as was conversation with the New Zealanders.

We were up at 5:45 to climb up the hill to see the mountains, which were close, huge, white mammoths. Unfortunately there were lots and lots of us, as well as music and some girl in floating garments doing a dance with a fan. I turned my back on her and tried to ignore the music. The mountains are never an experience that needs to be enhanced.

We were a very international bunch with Chinese, Nepalis, New Zealanders, us and a group of men in tee shirts printed with a message about a smoke house in Texas. They were nice Americans who were, I thought, a bit reluctantly voting for Trump. They knew, of course, immediately, whom we would be voting for.

Returning to the Lake View Lodge we had a huge, muesli, hot milk, two eggs, toast and tea, breakfast. Then we started our long walk down. It is two hours to the road. Toward the end of our down we passed various people, most of whom struck me as about to be in trouble. There was a Scotsman and his girl friend, both looked in good shape, but already he was having a serious problem with the heat, walking without his shirt. In that sun it is not good to go shirtless. There was a single young man who struck me as having a sense of what he had gotten himself into and then an older, late fifties, heavy man whom, it seemed to me, was doomed. We also passed a very dead, large, snake. At first we were not sure it was dead so we stood at a respectful distance until his prolonged stillness reassured us. In Thailand he would have been scooped up for supper.

We got down without any accidents although I slithered a couple of times and walked on the rock road to the main road where we were picked up by a pretty, blue car whose driver was very proud of it. We were delivered to the airport where Sarosh, God bless him, got us on an earlier than expected flight. In Kathmandu we were picked up by the young man with the elephant hair bracelet and taken to the Kathmandu Guest House where I handed in my laundry, sat down and wrote over a cappuccino.

We flew on Air Buddha to Pokhara, which used to be a pretty, quiet town on a lake with nice dusty lanes to wander. Now its streets are paved, engorged by motorcycles and trucks. I can’t get away from it fast enough. We drove a long time to the trailhead the landscape getting more and more precipitous, green hills/mountains covered with trees or terraced into rice paddies or cornfields but everything verdant and high so that one feels enclosed by the hills, wrapped in greenness. It is thrilling countryside. As Ethan commented, “It is enough to make you believe in God.” We stopped in Nayapul, which I remember from earlier treks.

We picked up our porter here, Sere, a young man, late teens, early twenties, with either Chinese or Mongol ancestry, judging from his eyes, cheery, as are almost all Nepalis.

It is a town facing a river in one direction and the road in the other which means it is full of business and bustle. There are a series of restaurants cum general stores cheek by jowl along the roadside selling the usual range of goods from batteries to Coke. Each has its own clean but smelly squat john. The road through town to the trail is a complexity of muddy ruts and all the women barefooted or flip-flopped walked faster than I.

We walked out of the village passing houses and fields, going up slowly, a gentle rise. There is a steel arched bridge, which crosses a tumbling, tumultuous, beige silted river. On the other side, houses climb up a hill. One, with flowerpots full of geraniums and marigolds blooming wildly, has a restaurant that looks down on bridge and river. We had lunch there.

After eating we started to do the endless steps passing through villages, rice fields and isolated houses. The Nepalis build steps on their hills out of rocks yanked from the soil. Villages maintain them, pulling out rooting trees and weeds, resetting stones in spring and fall. No two steps are the same height. I find them more difficult than a steep path whether going up or down. The stairs twist and turn endlessly up the mountainsides.

About three in the afternoon, a light rain began to fall. This was not unpleasant at first as it was misty rain. But then it became more vehement, pelting down with spitball force. We pulled on raincoats that were plastic and, therefore, made us perspire. One way or the other we were drenched in rain or our own sweat. We continued up the stairs down which ran rivulets of rain. For a little while we had a road, muddy but with a more gently slope than the stairs.

At this point Sere stopped, put his foot up on a rock and lifted his drenched pant leg. My heart sank into the snake pit of yuck and ugh. I know that gesture. He was looking for leeches on his ankles. I put my foot up on a rock and also looked. So far no leeches.

We continued on in a state of sodden misery for about two more hours, finally turning a corner to see a flight of well made, uniform height stairs down which water was cascading. We had arrived in Gandruk. I squished my way along the deserted stone path through the village to our guesthouse where there were a number of depressed looking, sodden Australians. Trekking misery was full blown amongst us. Ethan took it without comment.

From the window of the WC I could see a dozen large orange tents, two-person I think. My room was the usual Spartan affair, two beds with crisp sheets, pillow and blanket, white walls and linoleum floor that was about to become the site of a massacre. As I unlaced my trekking sneakers I saw my socks were splotched with bright red. Raising the cuff of my drenched trousers I saw the black bodies of leeches slowly bloating up on my blood.

I hate leaches. I detest leaches. I loath leaches. I execrate leaches. I abhor leaches. I abominate leeches.

I took off my soaking trousers tearing off one or two along the way. I then started brushing them off. What I should have done, of course, was to go down stairs to the dinning room in my wet trousers and get salt. This would have shriveled them up and prevented them from leaving their mouth gear in my flesh as I swept them off. The mouth gear causes infections. As I brushed them off my ankles they clung to my fingers, more embedded mouth gear between my fingers. As I got them on the floor, where they hunched up and elongated like caterpillars, I pounded them into sanguine oblivion with my shoe. By the time I was through and leech free the floor was awash in rain wet from my sodden shoes, trousers, plastic raincoat and blood, my blood. But they were all dead. I wiped up the floor with toilet paper, then painted my ankles and between my fingers with iodine. Iodine is indispensible for trekking because it kills bacteria and disintegrates leech mouthparts. It can also be used to purify water.

Dinner was some kind of chicken curry, quite okay, and so nice to have meat since sometimes there is no meat. The bed was dry. I painted my ankles with iodine again before climbing into my sleeping bag, which was also dry. I bought a rainproof backpack some years ago.

We woke to mountains at first only vaguely visible behind clouds. I could make out Macchupuchare behind its cloud. Others in the Annapurna massif revealed themselves, white and huge, in morning light. Clouds opened and closed the view with their white. Trousers, shirt, socks and shoes were still sopping but after breakfast Sarosh took us off on a little tour giving our clothes time to dry, although my shoes remained sodden for the next two days.

We walked up to a little unlit museum. It was a charming excursion through the village and its houses; however, as we came around a corner we surprised a group of just barely, barely being the operative word, prepubescent girls washing themselves and their hair. Most wrapped themselves up in whatever was available but one, with nothing available, let out a tiny squeak, a very small mouse cry of alarm, and then crouched down putting her green plastic basin in front of her. It was very cute but she was genuinely upset. We all sedulously looked away.

The museum was quite good, although totally unlit. Ethan opted out. I followed Sarosh around as he lighted things with his phone. They had all the right stuff on display—various kinds of baskets and copper pots, a loom, clothes, various plows, big flat baskets for winnowing.

The woman next door who may or may not have been in charge of the museum had a business renting clothes and jewelry to dress up in. Sarosh and Sere had a good time looking local.

I had noticed as we walked through town that the carrying bag that men slung across their backs was made from the hand woven fabric I had bought on my Annapurna trek with Sarosh. A friend had designed a dress for me that showed off the embroidery and fringe, which are a distinctive feature of these clothes. When I wore it on the next trip to show Sarosh, he had been enthusiastic about the old in a new use.

We pick up our packs at the teahouse and started on the endless journey down stairs to the river. The views are spectacular over terraced fields with houses perched in their midst. We passed a number of European trekkers, but as we came down to cross a dirt road there was a large group of what I took to be Indian teenagers sitting and standing on the stairs. The boys would not move to let me by. I had to skirt them by going off the path. I made a comment to Sarosh who said they were Nepalis. Obviously wealthy Nepalis considering their shoes. It was unpleasant that they were rude but good that they were trekking. We ran into them later, several times, and at each encounter, to my interest, they became less rude.

We stopped to rest at a house with a wide porch where Sarosh bought a giant cucumber that he sliced and salted for us. Slurping this up we watched an infant playing near her grandmother who was washing clothes. When grandma moved on to other tasks she was put into a homemade playpen where she gazed soulfully over the rail. At another house on a post we saw a basket that was almost a closed ball of weaving. Peering in, we were glared at by a setting hen, who obviously considered us paparazzi. At the river we stopped for lunch and then started the serious climb up the other side.

In a village on this eternal climb we passed an open building where a woman was weaving the cloth used as a carrying bag and just after that a basketball court. We couldn´t stop for Ethan to play, which was too bad since he is 6 feet 4 and he would have created an interesting imbalance to the game.

As we came into the town of Tolka on a road which was a relief after the stairs, we were passed by a middle aged couple, the man striding along in a natty grey Nepali suit, the Nepali hat in pink and grey and a pink scarf swung elegantly about his neck. His wife, also very nicely dressed, but carrying, with a band across her forehead, a huge and heavy basket, followed him at the appropriate distance. She nattered constantly as they walked. He appeared to be listening.

As we turned a corner people pointed out to us an enormous congregation of small birds lined up on telephone wires, flying on and off in flutters of wings. Small, black and white, there must have been a thousand of them. Sarosh looked them up later. We decided they were Himalayan Swiftlets.

At the guesthouse Ethan had a chance to play soccer for a while, which was good since he had missed his chance earlier to play basketball.

A young man who was amused by his task walked us to Satish’s office. I know what street it is on but cannot locate the building. There is so much signage in KTM that I don’t “see” things. There are, by the way, no street signs in KTM. I don’t believe I have ever seen one, nor are there any stop lights.

We went over our arrangements for our trek and my schedule for Lhasa, Tibet for ten days and paid. Satish, while we were going over our dates, received a call. One of their guides had an Israeli man on the Annapurna Circuit who, having made it up to the pass, went into severe altitude sickness, couldn’t walk, couldn’t breathe. They were trying to bring him down on a horse. As we sat there Satish ordered the helicopter to take him out.

One of the problems of being young, Israeli, and just out of the army is you are very sure of your strength. But altitude is not about strength. It is a totally eccentric testing of your physical abilities.

I trekked the Annapurna Circuit just after I turned 70 in 21 days. It normally takes 18 days. The ascent to that pass, Thorung La (17,700 feet) is extremely steep and arduous. I’ve done passes a thousand feet higher but it is often the angle of ascent, the steepness, not the actual height that causes the problem. I kept having to stop to get my breath and was not sure I would make it so I had a certain sympathy for the Israeli man. A Japanese man, who went over the pass with us with a friend and a girl friend, had a sort of temper tantrum on the pass. He wanted us all to stop and wait for him. You don’t do that. Each person goes up at her/his speed. Altitude can also cause mental distortion.

As Satish was ordering the helicopter my long time guide, Sarosh Magar, walked in. I introduced Ethan to him. Sarosh guided me for the first time on that circuit around the Annapurna Massif. That’s ten years ago. Sarosh was young, unmarried then. At the trailhead as we were about to start walking, I said to him, “I think you should know my age. I’ve just turned 70.”

“Oh,” said Sarosh looking at me with interest. “My grandmother is 70. But you have excellent teeth. She doesn’t have any.”

I decided this was definitely my guide. He further endeared himself that evening when we stopped for the night at a teahouse where there was a six month old. I asked the baby’s name. “Renaldo.” I raised my eyebrows at Sarosh. “We used to name our children after the gods but now we name them after football stars,” he explained.

Ethan and Sarosh seemed to take to each other to my delight.

Having ordered the helicopter, Satish turned his attention back to us. “We were able to get you the Tibet visa, although it is very uncommon for someone to go to Tibet for ten days to do nothing. However, Dawa Dorje was able to reassure them that you were all right.” Dawa Dorje is their agent in Lhasa and he and I have known each other for over fifteen years.

I wasn’t planning on “doing nothing for ten days”. I wanted to find out if I could, at 80, still breathe at 12,000 feet and how bad my reaction would be to the altitude. I also wanted to revisit places, see what changes the Chinese had wrought and visit a friend.

Ethan and I walked down to Durbar Square, me with my guidebook determined to do a little serious tourist work. We started at a tiny shrine just in front of the Tana Deval Temple that used to be entered only by the King. Just in front of it there are two little shrines, one had a handsome Garuda, a giant bird usually with snakes in his mouth who belongs to an earlier, lost tradition, kneeling before a Shiva shrine, and a Ganesh shrine in which the statue is slathered with red paste. Here I had a long discussion with a man who was selling onions on a tarp about Ganesh, how he got his head and lost his tusk. He didn’t know they tusk story. I knew, by his skeptical glance that he was going to check this out.

We walked across Indra Choke Square in front of the Akash Bhurav temple with rampant, shiny lions, tails up and mouths open on its balcony. It is another Shiva temple but unbelievers are not allowed in. Because a festival is coming, there was an image outside that was so crowded with offerings you couldn’t make it out. People lighted candles. The image had a smear of red paste with, I think, rice in it over its mouth.

We walked through the blanket bazar, Kel Tole, to the Sweta Machhendranath Temple where I have not been in probably fifteen years. Its age is not known but it was repaired in the 17th century. It seems to be one structure inside another, an exceedingly ornate gilded cage around an inner wooden, earlier core. There are prayer wheels as the place is Hindu and Buddhist. Ethan suddenly went into mock American germ terror over how many hands had turned the wooden spokes of the prayer wheels. We walked around the cube looking at various images and then came back to the central image, I believe, a Buddha. There were offerings around his big niche—marigolds, rice, bouquets of flowers, banana leaf plates of food. Little mice, perhaps a dozen, were nibbling on these and then scurrying into holes or cracks where they live.

I then took us rapidly to the big road with the park on the other side of it to catch a taxi to Babar Mahal Revisited, heading almost immediately to Chez Carolina. This is one of the best, possibly the best, restaurant in Kathmandu. They serve a green salad that you can safely eat. I have good duck and excellent tomato soup. We were joined by a young, affectionate grey and white cat that tried to suckle on Ethan’s shirt with great enthusiasm.

We then made a tour of the shops. Babar Mahal Revisited is at the back of an old Rana palace. There are lots of leftover Rana palaces in KTM. What was once the stables, has been reinvented as and elegant labyrinth of shops, restaurants, galleries, spas. It is a lovely quiet place to ramble through, very enjoyable after the horns and traffic downtown. As I found out later, a very fine boutique hotel is about to be added by some grandsons of the original Ranas.

Shirish had asked us for lunch the next day. She lives on the other side of town in a house that looks down on KTM. We had the best dahl I think I’ve ever had, beautifully spiced with a light flavor, chicken for me, vegetables for Ethan, a delicious dish with okra and a plate of cucumber, tomatoes and onions. We ran off before coffee because I was dead set on getting Ethan to Pashupatinath and then walking to Bodhnath.

Shirish got us a bus instructing the diver that we were to get off at Goashala. It was not at all a bad bus or ride although Ethan objected to it but he was sitting in the back. I could hear him talking to the man next to him.

We got down at Goashala. To my satisfaction I immediately recognized where we were and was able to take us to the open square building that is an old people’s home. It is a hollow square with little temples to Shiva on a mound in its center. People live in the square composed of four corridor like buildings, which surround the mound. A man insisted on following us around, talking all the time, which killed his chance of getting any money out of us. The building was injured by the earthquake and is under repair. The old people, those who have no children to take care of them, are here taking care of themselves, washing clothes, pots and arguing.

The temple is on the banks of the Bagmati River, sacred but heavily polluted, and is dedicated to Pashupati, the gentle form of Shiva as the protector of beasts. If you are not Hindu, you may not enter but you can go down to the river to watch the cremations. Above the bridge are the ghats for royalty. Some one was enveloped in grey, billowing clouds of smoke on that side. Below the bridge ordinary people are cremated. We watched a corpse, brought to one of the commoner ghats, lifted off its bamboo litter onto the firewood already arranged. I then realized that on our side of the river there were soldiers lined up with rifles, standing at attention to honor a fellow military man.

His son poured ghee, clarified butter, around his head and lit the fire as a bugle played from our side of the river, saluting him. It was, despite the crowds milling about, a moment quietly set apart in time.

All around us there were young men in lungis, with the sacred thread, the upanayana, across their chests, having their fortunes told, while others read scripture aloud. Rarely were the men alone with the fortunetellers. They all seemed to have brought a friend along.

We climbed up the hill away from the river. Ethan was delighted by the monkeys along the way. We passed through the area of small shrines with a massive brass Shiva trident in front of one. The monkeys danced above us on the ridge rising over the path as we started down hill. We came down beside the temple, Guhyeshwari Temple that commemorates, Kali’s vagina. Guhya is vagina and ishwari is goddess.

The goddess Paravati, her fierce form is Kali, when her husband, Shiva, was insulted by her father became so angry that she leapt into the fire—this is the basis of Sati. Shiva carried her corpse, grieving, and wandered about with it as it fell to pieces in his arms. Various parts fell to various parts of the earth. This temple marks where her yoni, her vagina, fell. It is an important tantric temple.
We crossed the bridge before the temple after passing under the beautiful tree that provides shade for worshipers and wanderers. Without much difficulty we found our way, in about half an hour to Bodhnath, the big beautiful stupa. Unfortunately the top is being repaired so we did not get the full effect. We stopped in one temple as we circled and Ethan bought a bracelet from one of the prayer bead places.

In the middle of the night Ethan knocked on my door looking sweaty and unhappy. He had picked up, it is pretty inevitable, an intestinal bug which was giving him pain as well as the usual diarrhea. But some pills took care of much of it by morning.

I contacted Satish so that we would have alternate plans if Ethan wasn’t all right, had coffee with my friend Abhi Subedi, who is always doing 47 things in 50 countries. He is a superb human being and wonderful writer of plays and poems particularly.

I spent the day running around doing errands. I got to the main post office but my postcard lady was not there. However, the one who had the franchise gave me a good price on 100 postcards that were rather dusty and a bit bent here and there.

I found a tiny drug store off Durbar Marg where I bought my Lumigan eye drops, 75 in the US, for 7.60 US. By the time I returned to the KTM Guesthouse Ethan was eating magnificently again.

Photo 1: The Kathmandu Guesthouse terrace at night.
Photo 2: Tamil streets, Kathmandu.
Photo 3: Tamil streets, Kathmandu.

We were, indeed, up at 3:00 am to catch the 6:30 am to KTM. One of the wonderful things about Ethan is he gets up and goes. I always worry but always without reason.

They hassled me over my walking sticks at the check in. Even if I had Schwarzenegger strength I couldn’t stab someone with one of them. They insisted that they weren’t walking sticks but ski poles. I insisted they were walking sticks not ski poles. They sent me off to register them in one place. I came back and had a further argument, which I won, taking the sticks on board with me.

We were late getting out of immigration in KTM because I could not find my passport-sized photos and then, because we wanted to pay by card, we had to wait until everyone else had gone through. Plus the man charged Ethan for 30 days rather than me, causing the transaction to be done twice. But, and this is a triumphant BUT, we were met by a young man, can’t call up his name, from Himalayan Expeditions, my trekking agency.

This may seem small so I will explain. There are places on this earth where it is a fearsome thing to arrive without support—any Indian airport or rail station in the middle of the night. The KTM airport is on this list. You walk out the door into a wall of men who want you in their car and you have no idea what the price should be. The simple phrase, “Taxi, Madam?” is a battle cry that announces your defeat even as it opens the engagement.

The said young man, wearing a beautiful elephant hair bracelet, ushered us to a car where we sat in relative peace while the frenetic KTM world danced about us on feet, two wheels, three wheels, four wheels and more. I was watching Ethan with some anxiety since this was his first Third World Country. To me the basic definition of Third World is: poor, dirty, a place where things don’t work. To an American the third may be the most incomprehensible. Things should work. But Ethan was immediately entranced by the liveliness of the streets.

I should explain. Ethan is not my grandson, nor is his brother, we are not blood relations, but they are my grandsons, most definitely and emphatically.

I had booked us into the Kathmandu Guest House for sentimental reasons. When I first came to KTM in 1979 with a group of anthropologists lead by Prof. Messerschmitt of the University of Washington, it was the only guest house in town outside of Boris’s Yak and Yeti Hotel which Boris did not own anymore, more about Boris later. Last year they were hit by the earthquake and part of the structure is gone but the garden is charming with little platforms piled with cushions on which to lounge, palm trees, flowers in pots.

They had us both in the same room, so that had to be adjusted. But because we had come in so early we were on the way down to Durbar Square by a little after 10 am, picking up cash at an ATM on the way.

We had to pay 1,000R to enter the Square but we could get a ticket that would be good for two weeks of free entry. The Square is simply sad; heaps of bricks where temples used to be; props holding up the cracked exterior walls of the palaces. The home of the Living Goddess seems to be intact. The little post office that used to be here has been closed because the building is in a dangerous condition. Therefore my postcard lady is no longer there.

For years I have bought my postcards from a woman who sells them beside the post office. She and her husband sent their daughters to college. They are now both married, working and producing, to their mother’s chagrin, more daughters. You are supposed to produce males not females and it is the woman’s fault when this doesn’t happen. When I came to KTM after the earthquake to see friends and the damage for myself, (some of you may have received that blog), the PO was open but I missed my card lady every time I came. However, the postmistress told me she and her family were all right, although their house had collapsed and they were, like many in KTM living in a tent. I was able to get them money through my trekking company, Himalayan Expeditions, who sent me a picture of her so I would know the money had reached the right woman. I thought that maybe she had transferred operations down to the main post office.

We stopped to say hello to a man who owns the hotel I used to stay at on the Square until a baby rat ran across me two nights in succession. The Sugat is a delightful small hotel with tables where you can have breakfast on the roof overlooking Basantapur Square which is right next to Durbar Square, but the baby rat was too much for me.

We took a taxi to Durbar Marg where my favorite dress designer in KTM has her shop, the eponymous Yasmine Studio. The woman who runs operations for Yasmine in her absence, Shirish, was there. Ethan went off to explore and Shirish and I caught up on the last year. Her handsome, gracious husband and young daughter were there. To my delight her daughter is hooked on Harry Potter. I confessed that I have read all the HP books and seen all the movies. I think Rowling has gifted us with a superb new classic. Also she strikes me as being an admirable human being.

Shirish asked us to lunch in the next few days.

Ethan and I then went to lunch at the Annapurna Café before walking back to the KTM Guest House passing two blocks of anguish inducing beggars, one of which was a baby, a month or two old, lying alone, swaddled up, in the sun. There was also a leper with bandaged hands and feet lying on his back. This is always a difficult passage but Ethan managed as well as one can.

We stopped by a hat shop where I always intend to buy hats for Ethan and his brother but never do. By this time I realized that Ethan had picked up a few words of Nepali. This is one of the things that makes him great to travel with. He even tried Thai last year, Thai being tonal is a real challenge, to the delight of Moon. I realized that all my fears were needless. Ethan was entranced with Nepal and the Nepalis.

That night I spent time working out an entent cordial with my squeaking ceiling fan—no earplugs.