The Nepali Flat

by Gordon Alexander

  The latest accident occurred just two days after a Tara Air plane crashed midway through a 19-minute flight, killing all 23 people aboard.

  Poor weather and dense fog are believed to be the causes of Wednesday's crash. The bodies of all the victims have been recovered.

  Both planes crashed in northern, mountainous parts of Nepal, but the crash sites are more than 100 miles (160 kilometres) apart.’

  Flying in Nepal is not safe. And it is not getting any safer.

  But back in the present, Subash was calling to me after a short eternity in la-la land: ‘We can still walk to the Jiri if you is wanting this.’

  ‘Never again!’ I cried, using hyperbole to great effect.

  A security guard stood at the entrance to the airport, barking orders at people and really just making a nuisance of himself. Subash began a heated debate with the man, who would not be swayed no matter how hard my guide worked his rhetoric.

  ‘The Nima is not allowed inside,’ said Subash. ‘You is needing the boarding pass to get inside.’

  ‘We don’t have boarding passes yet,’ I said.

  Subash frowned at me, his impatience growing. Why do you have to be so trivial? he said to me with his eyes.

  ‘Ok Nima, thank you again for everything my friend,’ I said, putting my hand on the small man’s shoulder. He grinned the widest of grins. ‘No wait!’ I almost shouted. ‘We don’t have a photo of the three of us. Now who could possibly take it, Subash?’ I added, except this time I motioned furiously to the security guard with my head, indicating that Subash should request a photo.

  ‘Ok I will ask him,’ he replied, although he was highly reluctant to ask the guard for some reason. He asked and the guard burst into the greatest smile that up until that moment, I hadn’t thought possible from such a rude person. I guessed he was one of those stuck-being-a-soldier-for-a-living-because-photography-doesn’t-put-bread-on-the-table-in-Nepal kind of people, hence why he was so nasty. I forgave him immediately and gave him a quick rundown of the camera.

  Well, I know he had three fantastic models, which aided the process greatly, but the man actually took a really good photo. He was delighted when I told him to take another one just in case (meanwhile porters everywhere had seized the opportunity to carry in their client’s bags to the terminal building behind this man’s back. It was like a terrible spy spoof, like Austin Powers or something equally as awful, whereby we had engaged the security guard in an entirely implausible distraction).

  I turned and shook Nima’s hand one last time. He flashed me that brilliant, genuine smile and we said our goodbyes. I turned to walk into the terminal building with my large backpack back under my charge. We walked into a zoo without rules. People pushed in front of other people and others spat on the tiled ground while everyone was shouting and carrying on as though this were the final day of Earth. Subash was worth his weight in gold that morning. He grabbed my backpack off me and kind of used it as a battering ram to knock unsuspecting souls out of his way. He became a human cannon ball and only the very foolish stood in his path. He found the right airline counter and we began the process of weighing ourselves and the bags. I stood on the digital scales and it made a weird clicking sound before the screen cut out automatically.

  ‘Oh shit, I think I’ve broken it,’ I said to the airline employee.

  He kind of manoeuvred his head to the side so that he could take the reading and exploded into laughter.

  ‘It is only going to the 105 kilos,’ he answered. ‘You is more than this.’

  I nodded gravely. All I could think was that these planes weren’t designed for people of my mass, and that I’d have to refund my ticket and walk all the way back to Jiri. But he waved me over to an ancient looking set of scales, big enough to weigh an elephant on. I felt pretty important for some reason. I weighed in at 106kg, six kilos lighter than I was when I left my home. If you want to lose weight while eating as many Snickers bars as you want, just book a flight to Nepal and go wandering in the high Himalayas for 25 days. That’ll do it.

  A heated debate broke out between Subash, the airline employees and the airport manager (who happened to be the owner of the lodge I stayed at, who was pouring the largest portions of rum I’d ever seen). It seemed that the 106kg of me, combined with the 16kg of my big backpack and the 10kg of my day pack were way over the personal weight allocation. The airport manager had taken my side and had casually strolled over and stood by Subash. He was now shouting down the airline dudes. I was smiling, in spite of myself. There is something very strange about Nepali people speaking Nepali. They can be so animated that it is easy to work out what they are talking about, even though I understood only one word in the entire conversation. The airport manager was now pointing at Subash and did a he’s-a-very-small-man impression, pointed at me and raised two fingers and pointed at the airline ticket he was now holding.

  ‘He is wanting to charge you more monies for the more weight,’ Subash turned and told me over his shoulder.

  ‘Yeah I know, they’re all the same,’ I answered. ‘Tell them I am very big, you are very small and I paid for both tickets.’

  ‘Yes, your friend here is a saying that now.’

  ‘Yeah I thought so.’

  The airline employee broke into a huge smile, shrugged his shoulders in defeat and then handed Subash two boarding passes.

  ‘You should thank this man, he just saved you a lot of money.’

  I did thank him and then headed to security. I really could not work this out. You put your bag on a little table and walked through a metal-detection machine, then was felt up by an incredibly intimate security guard. Maybe I imagined it, but I think he winked at me. Then you grabbed your bag and proceeded into the departure lounge. How did they know what was in my bag? It could have been 10 kilos of C4.

  It was only 7am and already the building was crowded with hopeful flyers. There was a fair bit of cloud around, and there was a general consensus that it would be a short day of flying in and out of Lukla. 7.30am came and went, as did 8.30am. There were no screens to indicate what might be happening and why there weren’t any planes coming or going; no screens to tell us why our flight was now an hour and a half late. Eventually a man sitting next to us, a resident of Kathmandu, placed a call, presumably to Kathmandu airport, and was informed that flights out of Kathmandu were delayed due to bad weather at their end. Subash eavesdropped on the conversation and began relaying the gossip.

  It didn’t really bother me. They say few people remain unchanged after trekking for a long period of time in the Himalayas. Some people find a sense of spirituality that they did not have before, other people become more confident in their own abilities, some people talk more, some people talk less, but I found myself to be entirely unchanged bar one little thing. I can now sit in a room and just do nothing. I am fantastic at it. I can sit and stare at a wall, not even necessarily watching paint dry, but just a plain old wall and be quite content. Does that make me a better person than I was before I came to this Himalayan Kingdom? Well, I suppose it does.

  Throw into the room a bunch of people to stare at, and I found myself to be quite happy that the plane was delayed. I didn’t have to be anywhere, do anything, or walk anywhere. So I just sat there with a look of contentment sprawled across my bearded face. Sometimes I stared out at the beautiful, nameless peak dominating the view across the airfield, glistening in the morning sunshine. Sometimes I moved my right leg, which was resting at a 90-degree angle on my left leg, and introduced a role reversal with the resting leg becoming the supporter. It was all very Zen.

  With the time fast approaching 9am, there was a sudden hive of activity. Security guards began pouring out onto the tarmac and porters began frantically trying to do their best headless chicken impressions, running around with baggage trolleys and hurtling them into each other as they jostled for the best position to load the incoming plane. Everyone stood up and craned their necks to see which airline was going to be the first
to arrive.

  ‘If this our plane, our airlines, then we must be quick,’ Said Subash with great determination in his voice.

  ‘I thought we were on the first flight no matter what.’

  He rolled his eyes at me, gave me a what-the-hell-would-you-know look and basically told me that this was not Australia, this was Nepal, and that I should do exactly what he tells me to do. A plane came roaring up the runway and did a quick U-turn in front of the terminal before the pilot cut the engines. It was our airline. Subash shot up, leap-frogged about nine people and all of a sudden was the first person in the queue. He looked around and saw that I was about 20 metres behind him and about 10th in the queue, and rolled his eyes at me again before turning his focus to being the first one on that plane. I felt like giving him the finger but I showed a great deal of restraint. Perhaps I had changed.

  The incoming passengers streamed out, many looking a little over-weight and slightly daunted by the look of trim, tanned and bearded outbound trekkers. The pilot and co-pilot got out for a smoke. They were dressed in black leather pilot outfits from the 80s and had proud, exaggerated moustaches. Subash motioned furiously that I should join at the front of the queue, which I did this time, apologising all the way to everyone I passed. I made an I’m-sorry-but-my-guide-made-me-do-it kind of face and eventually boarded the plane in second place. We sat right at the front of this poxy little plane that would not have been out of place in a museum, buckled up and sat with nervous anticipation.

  I got my camera out, flicked it onto HD recording mode and began to record the event. Then I thought: No, I’d rather enjoy this moment, switched the camera off and looked out the window as the pilots kicked the engines back to life and commenced their pre-flight checks.

  All too soon we were off. There was no conventional pause at the top of the runway to commence final checks - these guys meant business – and within seconds we had reached the top of the strip and commenced a gut-wrenching drop as the engines began to do their thing. You know that feeling you get when a roller coaster begins a downward spiral, or that feeling in the stomach when a car goes down a dip in the road too fast, or that feeling when you begin to accelerate in free-fall from bungee jumping or presumably sky-diving? Well that’s what you get in your guts when the plane begins its take-off on Lukla airstrip.

  The runway is simply that steep. It has to be so you can pick up enough speed to actually take-off, instead of plummeting to your death off the side of the mountain. It has to be that steep so that planes landing can slow down in time. Within milliseconds we were at the end of the runway – the pilot used every single millimetre at his disposal – and I’m not going to say we took off. More like we carried on at the same height for a while as the ground dropped steeply away from us. It was all terribly exciting. I could not imagine coming the other way and flying into the face of a mountain.

  Eventually the pilots decided to stop pissing around and we began to climb. We were fast approaching a large wall of cloud. I have flown enough in small aircraft, some smaller than this one we were in now, around the top end of Australia’s Northern Territory, to know that clouds of that magnitude make big bumps for little flimsy man-made machines that glide through the air. The pilot knew this too, but he inexplicably waited until the last possible second, just as we were about to be utterly enveloped by a mean-looking cloud so large that it could hide Everest several times over, before pulling back hard on the control yoke. The result was another gut-wrenching incident as the plane sharply climbed above the cloud.

  Pissed off that we had just avoided it’s grasp, the cloud gave us a huge bump anyway and I was made to feel very happy that I had firmly fastened my seatbelt. As I was directly behind the pilots I could see all the instrumentation. I could have flicked the pilot’s ear had I so desired, and let’s be honest here for a second, he probably deserved it after his little stunt. My eyes became drawn to a little flashing light directly in front of the co-pilot, which intermittently read ‘Terrain Warning’. You could fly just metres over peaks in this cloud and have absolutely no idea. I’d sat on the wrong side of the plane, as Subash’s side afforded beautiful views of the Himalayas, while my side seemed to be mostly dusty hills. A few weeks ago I called those hills mountains, but perhaps Subash was right all along. I had scoffed at his notion that something with a pointy top that was greater in elevation than 4000m could be considered a hill, yet these rises surrounding the Lamjura Pass looked like little children compared with the giants we had been wandering between but a few days ago.

  Clouds swirled around the highest places and we began to enter the Kathmandu Valley. Here, dust reigned supreme. Soon, everything disappeared from sight and we could see nothing but a gathering brown haze. I lost interest with looking out the window, but instead became fixated on a dial that was going round and round in an anti-clockwise direction. It told me we were at 5900 feet. I did a very rough conversion, realised we were at about 1800 metres, recalled that Kathmandu was between 1300m and 1400m, and then by process of deduction realised we were but a few hundred metres from the ground. I looked out the window again and strained my eyes, willing them to pierce the brown smog, but they saw nothing.

  I turned my attention once again to the dial, which had us fast approaching 5000ft. I watched as it flicked past that milestone, before looking out the window once more. Just as I did, I caught fleeting glimpses of houses and five-to-six storey buildings rising out of the gloom. Within seconds we had cleared them and were now gliding over a large field made up of dead grass. Then we hovered just inches above a bumpy bitumen runway, before touching down hard on the beautiful black top. I high-fived myself inside my own head, before thinking: Well, it’s a real shit kinda day in Kathmandu. We bumped our way along an airstrip desperately in need of an over-lay. I should know.

  We piled out of the plane and I bumped my head for one final time in Nepal. I smiled at the air hostess who had essentially the easiest, but maybe the scariest job in the entire world. All she did was bring us one tiny piece of candy about half way through the flight. She said the words, ‘Mind your head, sir,’ a millisecond too late. It reminded me of all the beautiful places I had been to, and as it didn’t hurt, it told me I’d finally killed about every single nerve my forehead had to offer. That may just come in handy in rugby matches in years to come.

  A mini bus pulled up and we dutifully boarded it before being made to sit there for 25 minutes while one poor bloke unloaded all the luggage into a cart, dragged it over to the minibus and attached it to some sort of tow bar at the back. I really wanted to go and give him a hand but we were locked in this bus with no way out and the driver had disappeared. It was probably not a good idea anyway. He probably would have dropped dead on the spot if a white man had offered to give him some help.

  Chapter Twenty

  From Trekker to Tourist

  Collecting our baggage was of course fun. I watched as humans became animals right in front of my very eyes. There was literally 12 people on that plane and so we literally had to collect 12 bags, yet everyone wanted their bags first. In Nima’s absence, Subash had assumed the role of porter-guide and he was going nuts at the makeshift rack-cum-baggage carousel. It was most entertaining watching it from the back of the crowd, but heaven forbid you got caught up in that madness. I laughed out loud as a Nepali woman, perhaps 50 years old, pushed a young German man out of her way as he approached his backpack. He looked like he was about to burst into tears.

  The funniest thing about the entire ordeal was, that if these people had formed an orderly queue, even the last person in that queue would have received their bag about 19 times faster than the first person did when they were behaving like puppies fighting over their mother’s milk.

  We found a taxi driver, or rather he found us. He was a friendly chap, chatting away to Subash about our trip over the past month or so. Of course I knew this as Subash was listing in chronological order the towns we’d visited along the way, not because I had suddenly lear
nt Nepali. I was far more likely to die in this taxi than I was in that plane, but suddenly the utter chaos of Kathmandu’s roads felt rather safe. I found myself smiling as we narrowly avoided a cow, and bursting into a small but controlled bout of laughter as the driver narrowly avoided another taxi that was reversing down the middle lane of a three-lane highway. Apart from the pollution pouring in through the open windows, this was living!

  We pulled up at Hotel Friend’s Home. When I had managed to secure some form of internet in Namche Bazaar a few days earlier, I had trawled the internet for a vacancy at this hotel, but I never managed to actually secure a booking. Subash had assured me they would find a room for me because I had been a guest there before.

  ‘Yes, but Subash, how can they find a room for me if they don’t actually have any rooms available?’ I’d asked him, a little confused.

  ‘No problems man,’ he’d countered. ‘You is staying there before, so they is finding you the rooms. If not, you can stay at Hotel Mum’s Home.’

  ‘You just made that name up right then didn’t you?’

  ‘What you is meaning?’

  ‘I mean, is Hotel Mum’s Home a real place, or did you just make that up?’

  ‘Is a real, man! Is owned by the same peoples as the friend’s home.’

  ‘You should tell them it is a ridiculous name!’ I said, while flicking the ridiculous name into a Google search, dubious that anything would come up. I should have known. It was legit. ‘You do realise, Subash, that people go on holiday to crazy places like Kathmandu because they don’t want the comfort of their mother’s home. If you want something like that you go somewhere like Paris or Rome or New York. Not Kathmandu.’

  ‘It not my hotel,’ he replied, immediately absolving himself from the argument. I didn’t blame him really. ‘What you is meaning Kathmandu is the crazy places?’

  ‘I is meaning that any city that has the cows running down main streets in the middle of the city is a crazy places,’ I answered. He’d kind of made a weird shaking motion with his head, as if this were the most normal thing in the world.