‘Ah thanks,’ I replied, genuinely warmed by his smile.
‘A gift you must give back,’ he said a little more seriously. ‘On the 26th of March,’ a little more seriously still.
‘Yep, that’s what renting is,’ I laughed before the situation became awkward.
I shook hands with Subash and exchanged a few words, but Rammani was understandably keen to get going, so we said good night and called it a day. I cautiously climbed onto the slab, and was asleep within seconds.
Chapter Four
The journey begins
The following morning found me sitting in the lobby nice and early next to a Sherpa man, drinking a cup of tea. He kept looking at me, that Sherpa man, so eventually I turned to him to wish him ‘good morning’. It must have been early, because I didn’t put two and two together.
‘Hello, good morning,’ I greeted the man.
‘Ah, the good morning, sir!’ he responded quickly in broken English, and he began to get very excited. ‘I am the Nima, sir! From bang ti gangly wang Makalu region, sir!’
‘Ah, very good,’ I replied, as I’m sure a look of recognition began to take hold of my face. ‘Oh my God, you’re my porter aren’t you?’
‘Yes is porter, sir!’
‘I am Gordon. Good to meet you,’ I told him while standing up to shake his hand. He took my hand with his, and then enclosed it completely with his other hand and begun shaking it furiously, while an ear-to-ear smile caused many wrinkles to form on his neck, cheeks and brow. Nima was a proud Sherpa porter from the Makalu region of Nepal. He stretched barely five feet off the ground, had short black hair and tremendously big ears; but he had a smile that would have made a dictator want to play with a puppy.
I’d read too much about Sherpa people to doubt this man would have any problem carrying my bag.
Subash came bundling through the door, crying, ‘Oh Mr Alex! A good morning to you. I see you have met the Nima.’
‘Yes I met the Nima,’ I laughed, in spite of myself.
Subash barked a command to Nima, who jumped up, poor thing, without finishing his cup of tea and ran over and picked up my backpack.
‘It’s not too heavy for him?’ I asked Subash.
‘For the Nima? No ways man! He is strong Sherpa from Makalu region. Nothing is a too heavy for the Nima.’
We piled into the tiny taxi that Subash had arrived in, but I was rather taken aback, to say the least, when he jumped into the front seat. I was a great deal taller than Subash – I’m 6 foot 3 and rather chunky – and I presumed that as his employer he’d let me have the leg room, but instead I found myself in the back with squashed nads and my ankles around my ears.
From the left: Subash Gurung, Nima Sherpa, Gordon Alexander
Wouldn’t be a good start to upset him in the first minute, I thought, so I bit my tongue and watched Kathmandu greet the new morning.
After a while we pulled up at a wide open area, jam-packed with buses of all shapes, sizes and colours. Nima grabbed my pack and mounted it onto his back with ease, while Subash took off for a distant corner of the station. It is a very strange sensation, at first, to have someone carry all your stuff for you. I am a big, strong man that has worked in manual labour intensive jobs, so I wasn’t used to having someone help me out to such an extent, and certainly not a man almost twice my age and half my size! However, I was giving a poor man a job and it did feel good.
I immediately needed the toilet (you can’t take me anywhere) which I relayed to Subash.
‘You is needing the pee pee or the poo poo?’ he asked, deadly serious.
‘The pee pee,’ I said, while having to use every ounce of my strength to prevent the corners of my lips from raising into a smile, which I was certain would lead to uncontrollable laughter. I had to nip it in the bud. He peeled off a few rupee notes and handed them to me.
‘Is a different price for the pee pee and the poo poos.’
I made a snorting noise from my nose, but this time it was too much and I broke into laughter.
‘What is funny?’ He asked, genuinely bemused by me finding that so funny.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ I finally managed to say. ‘In Australia we say ‘piss’ and ‘shit’, but what you said makes sense.’
‘Ah, piss and shit?’
‘Yeah, piss and shit.’
‘Ok, toilet over there, the Nima will show you.’
The toilet was revolting, and I’ve seen some pretty bad toilets in my time; at service stations in Jordan, in some remote areas of Saudi Arabia, and just most toilets in Egypt. This one was definitely in the ball park. I couldn’t do a poo poo in here, even if I wanted to, I pondered to myself while holding my breath.
‘We are thirty minutes too much early,’ Subash told me as I re-joined him. ‘Tea?’
We entered a dirty little café where only the locals went. A small boy no more than 7 or 8 years old with grubby hands brought us three glasses of steamy, milky tea. The smell that came off that tea resembled, I imagine, a spice market in an Indian city. It smelt glorious. I sipped eagerly and was slapped in the face by cardamom, cinnamon and cloves, then by nutmeg and rich brown sugar. My eyes widened, as if I’d solved the deepest mysteries of the universe. This was the single nicest cup of tea I had ever had. Without doubt and without peer. At a grubby little café in Ratna Park Bus Station in Kathmandu. If you want to look for it, it is the one closest to the toilets!
*
‘This is our buses,’ Subash told me while pointing to a modern, white mini-van that was pulling into the station. ‘Come.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked him, genuinely interested, as there was absolutely nothing to discern this bus from the 274 other identical buses sprawled around the place.
‘Because I am the very good Nepali trekking guide!’ he scolded me, a little offended.
I had much to learn.
Nima threw my backpack up to a boy of probably only 10 years, who caught it without straining and tied everything down with a rope. I kept my day pack with my camera and Snickers bars with me. We scrambled to the back row and Subash ushered me to the window seat. Excellent for seeing things, atrocious for leg room. I was squashed and uncomfortable and we hadn’t even pulled out of the station yet.
‘How long is this bus journey?’ I enquired politely of my guide.
‘It is very much depending on the road’s conditions,’ he replied. ‘Could be the six hours, maybe is the 13 hours. Sometimes there is the mud slides on the roads and so maybe it be two days.’
Should have flown into Lukla, I thought, before snapping myself out of it.
We began to roll, then the boy slammed a cassette into the tape player, blaring out hideous Nepali music so loud that the speakers began to crackle under the strain.
‘Oh my dear, sweet Jesus,’ I said out loud, but they were words no one was ever to hear. Instead a bus full of Nepali people, including my guide and porter, had broken into chorus, all of them singing the same, atrocious, whiney song. I smiled and tried to join in. This would never happen back home, after all.
We made our way slowly out of a gridlocked Kathmandu, never hitting more than 40km/h. In fact travelling at 40km/h felt exhilaratingly quick. Everywhere people just kind of stood around the streets, talking to each other. Hundreds and hundreds of people.
‘Why are there so many people, just doing nothing?’ I shouted my question to Subash.
‘They is not having the jobs. They is having nowhere to go in the day.’
Almost half of Nepal’s labour-force is without jobs. The number is about 46% (according to Wikipedia’s ‘List of countries by unemployment rate’), ranking it the ninth highest in the world; a little better than Senegal, but not as good as Kosovo. No wonder so many people had nothing to do. No wonder the streets were always crowded with people just standing around. It was terribly sad to see, even if the people did not seem particularly unhappy. Their existence was nothing new to them, as it was to me.
The man sitting
in front of me cracked his window open, initially to my delight, but unfortunately he was letting a great deal of dust into the bus. We slammed down narrow streets, jumped over pot-holes, narrowly avoided cows, men, women and children, dodged piles of rubble inexplicably blocking sections of road, and came across policemen pretending to be traffic lights, all the while inhaling dangerous volumes of dust.
Before long we began to rise out of the valley and I caught a glimpse of something huge. It was a statue, high up on the hills. Catching my expression, Subash informed me that it was in fact a statue of Lord Shiva, a deity in the Hindu religion. It was called the Kailashnath Mahadev Statue and was, in fact, the single tallest statue of Lord Shiva in the world. It stands at 44m (143ft) from the ground and is the world’s 40th largest statue. To put it into perspective, the Statue of Liberty is the world’s 36th tallest statue, and it is only 2 metres taller than this statue of Lord Shiva. Copper in colour, the god stood proudly with a trident in the left hand, the other hand held up vertically with the palm facing outwards in a sign of peace. Coiled around the neck was a cobra, which rose to a striking stance on the right shoulder so that both Shiva’s and the snake’s eyes were at the same height. I was taken aback by this unexpected monolith, and I turned my head slowly around to keep the god in my gaze until eventually an inevitably it disappeared from view.
‘Wow,’ I said to myself as we began to wind our way up the side of a large hill. We went through a small town where children played badminton on the side of the road, old men tested each other’s skills in a board game I had never seen before, puppies played and young boys tried to stop the bus to sell the white man a bottle of water, or some strange looking sweets that I had never seen before. The scenery was immensely beautiful. Rolling green hills gave way to sharper inclines and jagged ridge tops, which then returned again to rolling hills. All of which we had to negotiate in a little bus on a single lane road while dodging everything from motorbikes to trucks firing at us from the opposite direction. Often the edge of the road marked the beginning of the cliff with a vertical drop for hundreds, if not thousands of feet to the bottom of the valley. Unnerving? Nay, it was petrifying!
Our driver had obviously driven this road a million times, yet over-confidence often is the cause of accidents and we came millimetres from hitting cows, people and oncoming traffic on numerous occasions. He would attempt to overtake trucks on the steepest inclines on the blindest of corners, and his sole safety net was to beep his horn continuously, as if to say, ‘Slow down! Can’t you see I’m overtaking you on a blind corner and we could be seconds away from death if you don’t let me go around you?’ Man it was scary. It took a great and unnatural willpower to tear my gaze off of the road and back onto the breathtaking scenery.
At about 10am the bus suddenly pulled over on the side of the road at a rare area of even ground.
‘It is time to make the pee pee, Mr Alex.’
I started to make a snorting noise again. I know, I’m immature, but I can’t help it. All the men in the bus filed out and to my complete interest, they all formed a line, shoulder to shoulder, and began to urinate in the same spot on the ground. I shrugged my shoulders and joined in. When in Nepal...
*
As the ride commenced we passed numerous police check points where everything from my passport to my TIMS (Trekker’s Information Management System – something a trekker needs to enter protected areas in Nepal, arranged by the trekking agency before we left) card was checked.
‘What’s with all the police check-points?’ I asked Subash when we were on our way again for about the fifth time.
‘This is the road to China, so many checks. Maybe there is being some illegal peoples.’
Eventually we came grinding to a halt once more, but this time everyone got out of the bus. Subash announced it to be lunchtime by putting all his fingers together and raising them to his mouth.
The restaurant had open walls and was called something like The Himalayan View Restaurant, which wouldn’t have been far wrong. We were suspended high up on the side of a mountain and the restaurant afforded glorious views into the valley below. I was excited. I was about to get my first hit of Dal Bhat, the national dish of Nepal. Simply translated as ‘rice and lentils’, it is a very cheap and nutritious meal for the poor people of Nepal.
We sat down on long, lineal, wooden benches and waited for the food to arrive. We didn’t have to wait long. An empty plate was placed in front of me, which an elderly lady loaded up with steaming white rice from a communal pot. First me, then Subash, then Nima. She brought out a bowl of lentil soup, a different bowl of turmeric-coloured curried potatoes, some green beans and some pickle thing that was so hot it numbed my tongue and turned my nose into a waterfall. I watched the locals to see how it was done before having a go myself. Subash poured the soup over the rice – not all of it you see, but just the perfect amount to give the rice the perfect consistency to eat it with your hands – then loaded the plate with the curried potatoes and a little bit of the pickled chillies.
The cutest little four-year-old waiter brought out a spoon for me and held it up while hiding his face out of shyness. I caught his attention, gave him a little bow to say thank you, then gave him the same gesture that Subash had done to me nearly 10 minutes before, telling him I would be eating with my hands today. He smiled and ran off to the kitchen to return the spoon. I noticed that everyone else at the table was smiling as well, giving me the impression that most foreigners would have taken the spoon. I am pretty good at eating with my hands, having lived in Jordan for six months; but I poured way too much soup on the rice and it became a sloppy mess. But it was absolutely delicious, despite my rookie mistake.
The old lady brought out seconds for everyone, which everyone partook in. When she came around a third time I became a little anxious because I was entirely stuffed. She went to put more rice on Subash’s plate, but I noticed him put his hand over his plate and shook it slightly, preventing the lady from filling him up. I quickly duplicated his action as the lady attempted to fatten me up some more. Nima had thirds. God knows where he put it all. It cost me 110 Nepalese rupees ($1.10 US).
The restaurant had two outdoor sinks that we lined up to wash our hands at, and the pressure of the water took me by surprise. It bounced off the bottom of the sink and straight onto my crotch, then unfortunately for me I went to the toilet. While I was in there another bus had pulled up and out jumped six European girls and a couple of guys.
Then I came out of the toilet.
‘Ah Alex man!’ Exclaimed Subash, so loud that everyone within a one-mile radius could hear. ‘You pissed on your pants!’
I looked down, mortified, then defended myself, ‘No, that’s from the sink!’
‘It is looking like the piss, man.’
‘How can you tell the difference?’
He looked at me for a little while, then muttered, ‘Mmmm ok,’ but I could tell he didn’t believe me.
*
The more we distanced ourselves from Kathmandu the more the roads disintegrated. By the time we were descending the valley into Jiri, we were bouncing up and down and banging our heads on the roof. Such was the state of the road that we had slowed to a crawl. I looked across and was dumbfounded to find that Nima was fast asleep and his little body was getting thrown around. Then I looked at the man sitting next to him, who was far from happy. Nima had slipped right over and was now fast asleep on the poor guy’s shoulder, but he was too polite to do anything about it.
I made eye contact with him and made a motion as if to say, ‘Bash him with your elbow and he’ll move’. The man’s face burst into a grin and to my amusement he jammed his elbow in Nima’s ribs, as if getting permission from Nima’s employer was all he needed to go for it. The Nima woke up briefly and opened and closed his mouth a couple of times before his head lolled back to sleep up against the head rest. I exchanged a brief ‘thumbs up’ and a smile with the man before returning my view to life in the hills.
On the side of the road, men and women were busy clearing drains by sweeping leaves into a pile and then setting them on fire, therefore filling the hills with light-blue smoke. As we groaned our way over the final ridge it began to hail, the noise of which on the tin roof was almost deafening.
I felt a tap on my shoulder, followed by a finger pointing to somewhere distant, where I could make out a series of buildings with sky-blue rooves and other houses built on terraces carved into the hills.
‘Jiri,’ was all Subash said.
Nine hours after setting off we pulled into Jiri, a town that I had been reading about for a decade and the original starting point for many of the great mountaineering expeditions attempting to conquer Everest for the first time.
Chapter Five
Let the trek begin
We trundled across the road and announced our arrival at the Sherpa Guest House Restaurant and Lodge. The lady in charge was in her mid-thirties, was a Sherpa and was fairly over-weight, but just loved having us stay for the company and gossip. She took us up some steep, creaky old stairs and showed me where I was to spend the night. Two small single beds lined the walls of a fairly spacious room. I walked over to one of the beds and sat down. I thought perhaps the mattress was made from granite rock, but I’d already spent two nights on a slab of cement, so granite wasn’t going to faze me too much.
I looked at Subash, who had a worried look on his face.
‘What’s wrong mate?’ I asked him.
‘Is the room fine for you Alex? If not we could be going somewhere else.’
‘The room is perfect mate. No problems. All good.’
‘You are sure?’
‘Yes I’m sure! Stop asking me. Everything is good.’
‘OK,’ he answered slowly and a little uneasily. I didn’t know it at the time, because I’d only really known Subash for 10 hours, but it was a sign of his professionalism as a guide that he wanted to make sure I was perfectly happy with his service right from the beginning. He could have taken me to any number of lodges scattered throughout Jiri, but they would have all been similar. The room was as basic as could be, but it was also perfectly adequate - and clean. What more could you ask for in the middle of nowhere?
The Nepali Flat Page 3