by Rob Binkley
“Uhh … that’s cool.”
Brian explained that he explored many markets in India over the past few weeks while I was “rhapsodizing over disfigured beggar girls.”
“Before we left America, I only shopped at IKEA. Who knew?” he said while taking a deep breath of mountain air. “Maybe I should become an importer.”
Our walkabout led us down to Durbar Square, a complex that houses a bunch of palaces, temples, and courtyards. Once home to Nepal’s royalty, it dates as far back as the twelfth century. Its coolest feature was the Hanuman Dhoka Palace Complex, which was named in honor of the monkey god Hanuman. There’s even a statue of the deity standing at the main entrance, which Brian photographed while admiring its texture.
“Good energy coming off this thing,” he said.
That night we went out to eat and had an interesting conversation over dinner. Through the window of the restaurant, Brian saw a boy of ten come up to him and mouth, “You give me food.”
Brian shook his head no.
“Do you feel good about refusing him?” I asked.
He sat there for a second just staring at the boy then turned to me, “I want to give, but when do you stop? I gave all my chocolate away in like five minutes. I gave those kids who followed us around for an hour my full bottle of water. I bought that one kid milk who said, ‘You buy me milk or give me five rupees, or I get very mad.’ Should I help all these kids, or should I be giving food to that guy?”
He pointed across the street at an old man with no legs who was pushing himself down the street on a skateboard, using a cane as a row and holding an umbrella between his other arm in the rain, which just started to pour down.
“What’s the right way to give back? And to whom?” he asked.
“That’s a question we need to meditate on.”
After dinner, we checked out the Kathmandu scene. We went to two dive bars, Tom and Jerry’s and the Blue Note Jazz Bar, that had great personality, with Christmas lights hanging inside and lots of colorful candles burning. We hung out with more backpackers and got to know some of the Nepalese people.
Brian got himself into a drinking contest with a hardcore hiker girl named Kiki at the Maya Bar who looked and drank just like Karen Allen from Raiders of the Lost Ark, according to Brian. Combine the high elevation with the fact that our alcohol tolerance was no longer at Bukowski level, and Kiki kicked his ass.
He barely downed a twelfth shot of the local moonshine before he keeled over in defeat. “Party’s over, said the little girl,” he said with a face full of dirt floor. Kiki stood up victorious and the crowd in the bar roared with laughter.
I helped Brian back to our guesthouse. “Too bad you’re so wasted, man, I’m pretty sure she was flirting with you.” Brian was in no mood for love. All he could say was, “I thought those bhang lassis were … bad news.”
The next day we decided to stay away from the bars and take a plunge into a whitewater rafting adventure. For fifty dollars, we booked a one-day, two-night expedition with Exodus, a local booking company. We took a bus up near the Himalayas through some small villages. The bus was so old it swayed dramatically from side-to-side on the cliff roads. The Norwegian girls on the tour with us screamed the entire time.
We set up camp the first night beside the Bhote Kosi River with Mount Everest as our backdrop. Our Nepalese guides broke out their guitars and we all sang around the fire pit and drank beer. We kept the hash in our bags since we wanted to be sharp for our river ride and were still hungover from our hash and bhang lassi bender of the past few weeks.
When it was time for bed, we didn’t pitch a tent because we didn’t have one. “Let’s sleep outside under the stars,” I said.
“Well … duh,” Brian said.
Once everyone was asleep, Brian and I snuck down river to sleep in the rafts, which were more comfortable than the rocky ground. We lay there staring at the moon.
“It doesn’t get any better than this,” I said.
Brian yawned, “Another priceless romantic moment down, many more to go …”
“Too bad I have to spend them with you,” I said.
We drifted off to sleep happy. An hour later, we awoke miserable. I thought someone had thrown a bucket of water in my face, but it was raining buckets. Our raft had become a bathtub full of rainwater. We ran back to the campsite and tried to sleep under the school bus, which was a disaster. Torrents of rain came rushing under, drenching us all night. The last thing I remember before I passed out was Brian looking at his feet and saying, “I got two soakers. This sucks.”
The following morning, we woke to sweet sunshine. The rafting adventure was still on but since it rained all night (combined with the Himalayan runoff), the river was now up to a Class 5. The guides were having nervous arguments with each other and kept walking down to the river to check the water level. “There appears to be some disagreement among the natives,” Brian said.
“The river is too high; this is Class 5 all the way,” I said.
Even though we were amateur rafters, we decided to go for it anyway.
The safety course was virtually nonexistent. To put it politely, our guide had “public speaking problems” and barely spoke English, so after our limited instructions we pushed off from our campsite while all the buses took off to meet us down river. Our raft was in the lead (the four girls and us, plus our guide).
We knew we were in trouble after two minutes on the water. Our raft was hauling ass out of control down an angry river, and we weren’t even to the rapids yet.
The second we hit our first major rapid, our guide was quickly thrown overboard. Brian reached over and pulled him in. “Dude, you can’t leave us to die! Be a leader!” The guy had no idea what Brian was saying. We went careening down the huge rapid with our guide barely hanging on—everyone was screaming, our guide included.
Brian and I were having fun amid all the chaos, until our raft got stuck at the base of the rapid. A torrent of freezing river water rushed down on our heads. All the girls were screaming bloody murder. “Dead on our first rapid—you gotta be kidding!” I shouted. Our guide was going crazy, shouting nonsense.
“Worst guide ever!” Brian yelled.
Stuck in the middle of a huge whirlpool there was no way out. Our raft was sinking under the weight of the rushing water. “Nobody panic! This thing’s gonna flip!” I yelled. The moment I said it, it flipped and we were all dumped into the river with the raft on top of us.
Under the raft I heard Brian shout over the girls’ screaming, “We’re drowning like rats!”
I yelled, “Dive under and out!!” Brian and I dove under the raft like two seals. I got to the surface and took in a huge breath of river water. Sputtering for air, I looked around and saw no Brian, no nobody—just some of our gear floating around.
The current rushed me away. I got into the whitewater position with my knees in front of me, holding my paddle like we were semi-trained to do. My scuba rescue training kicked in; I tried to lodge my paddle between some rocks to try and climb back to help everyone, but the current was too strong. I couldn’t fight it so I stopped trying to be a hero and focused on saving myself.
Going down the river solo was fun, except for the getting slammed against the rocks part. After a few minutes, I emerged from the rapids and floated into calmer waters, where I swam to shore. “What a ride!” I yelled, full of adrenaline.
I looked back and saw no one else behind me. “C’mon, Rakow! Whatever you do, don’t die!” I was worried about Brian but more worried about the girls. I thought for sure one of them had drowned.
Was this how our trip would end, one of us entombed in a watery grave? We had skirted danger and escaped death many times so far. Had our collective luck run out?
Finally, I saw heads bobbing up in the whitewater. “Please God, don’t let those be decapitated.” I said.
They weren’t. I saw some of the hands waving for rescue. I laughed when I saw Brian emerge giving me the finger. I l
ooked up at Mount Everest. “Thank you, Buddha!”
Once he got into earshot, I heard Brian cursing up a blue streak. “Lawsuit pending! Lawsuit pending! Where’s that idiot guide!”
Brian made it to shore and we hugged it out.
“We all signed a waiver, dude,” I said.
“That was not legally binding!”
After a while, the girls struggled ashore, then our guide, who apologized profusely in a language I didn’t understand. We counted heads to make sure no one was lost. We were all there, but we were a bloody mess and the girls were hysterical.
When the other bus arrived, the rest of the tour piled out to help us. A few of them told us they’d wisely gotten off the river before going down the first rapid—then watched in horror as we got hammered. The Norwegian girls were so shaken up, they said they quit and stumbled over to the bus to go straight back to Kathmandu. We never saw them again.
After their bus took off, Brian and I looked at our guide and said, “You owe us, let’s finish!” He thought we were joking but when he saw we weren’t, he said, “Very, very good!” So we all hopped in the raft and finished the trip.
We only flipped two more times.
At the end of the day, while walking back to the bus with Brian, I said, “All in all, near-death experiences like these make you realize where you stand in the grand scheme of things.”
“Dust in the wind, man,” Brian said. I looked back at the shadow of Mount Everest swallowing us and knew he was right.
We skipped the second night camping and took the bus back into town and checked into the Kathmandu Guest House. Located right in the middle of town on a large parcel, it’s a great place to hang with other travelers. If you’re ever backpacking in Nepal, you’ll probably either stay there or eat in their café.
Brian and I weren’t doing much eating. We had developed severe stomach problems because of all the river water we swallowed. We were also fairly beaten up, so we spent a few days recovering on their grassy grounds; it was the perfect cure to what ailed us. We hung out in their lush gardens with this Nepalese guy named Ram who kept begging us to bring him to America. I told him I’d try and get him a visa. Brian said, “Why are you filling this guy with false hope?”
“I don’t know. He’s a nice guy and I guess I wanna help him keep the dream alive.”
“You are a cruel man.”
“Sometimes false hope is better than no hope at all.”
After recuperating, it was time to pack more adventure into our search for enlightenment. We decided to do the quintessential Nepalese backpacker hike, the Annapurna Trail. While other hikes around here could take months, you can do this one in a few days.
We’d end up on the trail for two weeks.
Brian and I set off on our adventure by taking a bus to Pokhara where our stomach problems returned. The bus driver was flying around the curves like a maniac. We saw two buses that had recently gone off the cliffs, which was alarming since our driver seemed oblivious. When we arrived in Pokhara, we kissed the ground then checked into the Oslo Guesthouse for one dollar a night each.
That night, we looked around the small town and nearby lake. We saw rowboats rowing and people swimming in the warm water, but we didn’t take a dip. Instead, we went shopping for supplies and started arguing about our plan of attack. The only thing we agreed on was we didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on gear that we would use once then have to either sell or lug around the rest of the trip.
Brian said, “Here’s an idea: we don’t bring any gear.”
“How are we gonna camp or eat or—?”
“We won’t camp and we’ll eat what the other hikers have lugged up. Get it? We trade our way to the top! It’s simple economics.”
“You never took economics.”
“Just hear me out. We don’t bring food, supplies, or gear. Every other hiker on the mountain will have that crap, right? Instead, we pack something truly valuable that’s cheap and easy to carry—something that we can trade, that the rest of the campers don’t have.”
“Are you proposing I risk death and agree to this hare-brained scheme?”
“Yes, I am.”
We proceeded with Brian’s “trade-our-way-to-the-top” plan. We stocked up on nothing sensible, only easy-to-carry (cheap) vice-related goods that the other hikers would not have:
• eighteen Snickers,
• ten Mars bars,
• five Milky Ways,
• one plastic bottle of Jack Daniels,
• one plastic bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila,
• two packs of smokes,
• three condoms,
• two cans of Pringles potato chips, and
• a bag of weed.
We would trade all this crap for real supplies.
“We’ll be the most popular campers on the rock!” Brian exclaimed. I was skeptical, “If we die of hypothermia, I’m going to kill you.” He laughed, “If this doesn’t work and we die of hypothermia, I’ll kill myself!”
With our pack chock full of supplies that will kill you, we met up with a backpacking couple we’d hung out with at the Kathmandu Guesthouse (Peter, Nichole, and Jasper, their baby) and all split a taxi to Phedi where the Annapurna Trail begins. Our first glimpse at the mountain peaks was magical. We all cheered.
“Let’s summit!” I shouted. “How hard can it be?!”
“How bad can it get!?” Brian said, with a slight tinge of fear in his voice. Was he having a premonition? Were we about to die? I put the thought out of my mind.
We were slightly naive, foolishly foolhardy, and woefully underequipped as we began our trek into the Himalayas—but we had heart and a half-baked plan. Brian and I started off like gangbusters. The trail was full of backpackers. We noticed a lot of our fellow hikers had camping gear, but not us. We were counting on staying in the teahouses (or guesthouses) that the locals said were on the trail every few hours or so. The other hikers warned us that, since it was the offseason, some of the guesthouses may be closed so “we may have to charm our way into somebody’s home, or sleep in a barn.”
Brian was game. “Hope there are some farmers’ daughters up there.”
“Settle down. Remember, the eyes of God are on you. Should we get a Sherpa?”
“No way. They’re five dollars a day and we packed nothing—what are they going to carry?”
“They keep us from getting lost.”
“Lost-schmost. I’ve got this.” Brian held up a map of the Annapurna Trail.
While we hiked, when we needed something we would trade our pack full of vice-goods for essentials like food, water, nuts, and toilet paper. So far it was working out as planned. We thought this rotund German hiker named Gunther was going to trade us for our entire pack, but he ended up buying our bottle of tequila and a Mars bar in exchange for two days’ worth of bratwurst sandwiches, some fruit, a hunk of cheese, four bottles of water, and six protein bars. “Sweet haul for a bottle of tequila,” Brian said, stuffing my pack with our new supply of “real food.”
Every once in a while, we noticed some other hikers watching our transactions from afar. We could tell they were looking to score. Later they’d come up to trade us for something. One guy who was hiking with his girlfriend traded us for a condom. When the condom guy left, Brian patted his pack. “I feel like a total drug dealer, and it’s awesome.”
“This may have been the smartest move you’ve ever made, Rakow. But save a condom for yourself—there may be a randy farmer’s daughter up the mountain for you.”
“What I wouldn’t give for a mountain angel like what’s-her-name,” he said wistfully, still waxing on about his nameless bus beauty from the PI.
“Too bad you didn’t get her stripper name,” I said.
“Go-go girl name. Is there a stripper database somewhere I don’t know about?”
We entered a valley that led to the most magnificent mountains I’d ever seen. We hiked past rice terraces with sacred cows and babies with r
unny noses. Even though we’d lost a ton of weight and probably already had cirrhosis and brain damage from all the toxins we’d ingested, Brian and I still felt fit. So we went hard all day and passed many other travelers, except for the Sherpas (ages five to seventy) who kicked our ass. Our trek was slower because it was the rainy season and the trail was very slippery.
At one point, Brian slipped and fell. When he got up, I made a shocking discovery. “Don’t be alarmed, but … you’ve got bloodsucking leeches all over you.” I pointed. He looked down and saw three on his arms.
“Get ‘em off!”
“A really big, hairy one is sucking on the back of your neck.”
It took five seconds for Brian to strip down to his underwear. He was making a hilarious scene. “Remember Stand by Me!’” I yelled, “Check your underwear!” I was not helping things. A few hikers stopped to laugh, others to gawk. One small Nepalese child walked over and calmly helped him remove them one by one. The kid thought it was a game. When he was leech-free, Brian put his clothes back on and gave the kid a piece of frozen chocolate for the effort.
“You smoke?” He pulled out the pack of cigarettes from his pack and offered it to the kid. The kid declined while gobbling the chocolate. “Bad for lung. Namaste.”
After a grueling eight-hour hike, we dragged our wheezing asses into a village called Landruk; our legs, feet, and lungs were frozen and burning at the same time. We checked into a teahouse on the edge of a mountain for fifteen cents a night and collapsed in our tiny beds. I tended to my wounded feet. They had silver dollar-sized blisters on them from the Blundstone work boots I’d bought in Australia but never broke in.
“Dude, you’re a mess!” Brian said while he watched me clean my wounds.
“I’m an idiot for hiking in new work boots.” Brian was cleaning his leech bites. “You’re not looking so good yourself,” I said. “We gotta get it in gear, this is only day one.”
“I believe now is the perfect time to break out the JD.” Brian cracked open the bottle of Jack Daniels. An hour later, we passed out from exhaustion.
On day two we took off like lightning. There aren’t many trekkers up in the Annapurna region during the rainy season, so we hiked alone. It only took us a few hours before we got completely lost. “This is why you get a Sherpa!” I lost it on Brian.