Anyway, I know this doesn’t completely explain how I became a Tibetan Buddhist monk, but if I told the whole story of how I met Kunga Norbu and became his disciple and went undercover into Tibet it would take me forever, and besides George was going cross-eyed as I told him all this about my past. He was done eating so he waved a hand and cut me off.
“Shambhala, Freds, Shambhala. You were telling me about Shambhala.”
“Yes I was.”
“You could take me there?”
“Sure. Do you want to go?”
“Do I want to visit Shambhala? Do I want to see Shangri-La? Damn, Freds—why didn’t you put it that way in the first place?”
“Because visiting it ain’t the point. Saving it is the point, and that’s got to happen here. Besides, you wouldn’t have believed me if I had just up and asked you out of the blue do you want to visit Shambhala.”
“I still don’t believe you, Freds. But it’s monsoon. There’s nothing else to do. And if you’re right, well.…” He grinned. “You take me there and show me, and then I’ll see about helping you out.”
* * *
So a couple days later we left the Hotel Star at dawn and woke up one of the taxi drivers whose car was his castle and had him drive us to the Central Bus Stop, and there we located our usual ticket agent who took us through the mud and dead buses to a decrepit old clunker that was packed full. Now in any other season we would have made a beeline for the roof and traveled in style up there, but because it was monsoon we had to jam our way inside. A Rawang man and his wife and daughters were in our seats, so we sat on the floor between the front seats and the partition separating the passengers from the driver’s compartment. About an hour later we began the typical Kathmandu departure. Get out of the depot and stop to scrape off the hitchhikers who had jumped on the roof during the run up the mud ramp. Stop for gas. Stop to search through the southern quarter of the city for an engine part. Stop to fix a flat. This time when the spare tire was on they found they couldn’t get the flat tire secured under the bus where the spare had come from. They spent an hour trying, and even the driver got down to look at it. He was a big guy with a thick black moustache, looked like an ex-Gurkha and nothing could faze him, he attended to his driving and usually let his flight crew handle all the other problems that every trip presented, so looking at this unattachable tire was a real concession. Finally he shrugged and pointed and the flight crew nodded and came on board and pushed all the aisle passengers back a bit, and maneuvered the flat tire in the door and up the steps and into the aisle, where it stood as tall as some passengers and much muddier.
So we left Kathmandu at noon when we were supposed to be off at seven, which was not bad. Every bus ride in Nepal is an adventure and I enjoy them no end, but George doesn’t. On this one he had fallen into a trance to try to escape. Every time he came out of his trance he would look into the driver’s area and see the mechanic sticking his head down into the engine compartment with a lit cigarette between his teeth, making adjustments while the engine ran, and George would groan and fall back into his trance again. A wire crate of chickens was set just under the flat tire in the aisle, and every time the chickens looked up they figured they were about to be run over and would squawk madly, then overdose on panic and fall asleep, only to wake up and go through the trauma again. Right beside the chickens sat three Swiss trekkers breathing in the thick fog of cigarette and engine oil smoke like it was ambrosia, they were the kind of Swiss travelers you see in Asia who have been so stressed by the Formula 409 aspects of their culture that their compass has cracked and nothing suits these types better than to be stuck knee-deep in manure and mismanagement in some Asian backwater, whereupon a Ludwig van Ninth look of bliss comes over them as they realize they couldn’t get more miserably un-Swiss anywhere. So this bus trip was pleasing them no end.
Meanwhile we were trundling out of the Kathmandu Valley, either east or west I shouldn’t tell you which, and it had its usual dreamy look, monsoon clouds filtering the light so that the greens leaped out like Kodak ads, with villages in the distance little clumps of brown, surrounded by trees in pink or lavender bloom. Fields of early rice ran up into the clouds in hundreds of terraces, until it got hard to tell how far away a hillside was because you couldn’t believe anyone would terrace a slope so fine. The hilltops were cut off by a cloud ceiling that got lower and darker until finally the pleasures of the view were wiped out by torrents of rain, rain so dense it looked like God had scooped up the Indian Ocean and dumped it on us. Typical monsoon afternoon. I don’t think the driver could see past the windshield, but he just hunched forward a touch and carried on as usual.
After that there was nothing to do but meditate or watch the expertise of the driver, who was blindly navigating enormous mudholes and guiding the bus over landslides that had buried the road entirely. These were never cleared off but were driven over so often that a new track was established, weirdly lumpy and canted over. But our driver pushed through at a walking pace, timing every jolt and bounce to get him over bad spots, the engine clunking at about the same rpm as the wheels, and every time we lurched safely back onto the real road and splattered off at our maximum speed of around forty kilometers per hour.
* * *
Then just as our bladders were about to blow up and our brains to implode we stopped at a roadside village. The villagers crowded around to greet us and we burst through them like a gang of fullbacks, rushing in both directions down the road to the ends of the village to relieve ourselves. George and I and the Swiss were especially well attended by the village kids, and we peed into the bushes with a considerable audience giggling at us as we tried not to look at or step in the dismal and copious evidence of the intestinal problems of all the travelers who had been there before us. Naturally a road village has shitting grounds vastly larger than your typical hill village, and I knew by the expression on George’s face that I didn’t have to point this fact out to him.
We returned to the village center and sat at a table under a long tin roof. There wasn’t much room between the road and a river, and this open-walled building filled most of it. Buildings across the road and up the hillside had been abandoned and were in the process of being torn down. Silent women served us big steel plates of mushy dhal baat while kids surrounded us to beg for money—one guy who looked about eight but could have been fourteen smoked a handrolled cigarette and kept saying “Candy? Smoke? Dollar? Ballpoint pen?” A gang of younger ones chased a pig from puddle to puddle, yanking on its tail until they were almost run over by a Jeep splashing through. People ran out to greet the Jeep but it didn’t stop.
George passed on his dhal baat, and bought a bottle of lemon soda and two packets of Nebico wafers. This was in keeping with his usual culinary strategy while trekking, which he called prophylactic eating. You see he had never really recovered from an early encounter with a plate of dhal baat that had had its rice insufficiently cleaned, so that it tasted “just like taking raw dirt and eating it off the ground” as he was fond of saying. After that he couldn’t even look at the stuff without gagging, so he ended up not only practicing prophylactic antibiotics use, meaning he popped pills daily in hopes of discouraging bacteria from catching hold in him—he also practiced his prophylactic eating, meaning he ate nothing but boiled potatoes that he peeled himself, hardboiled eggs that he peeled himself, Nebico wafers that he unwrapped himself, and water that he both filtered and triple iodinated. It didn’t work, but it did make him feel better.
So we sat there and George ate his placebo diet and the clouds pissed on us and the villagers either stood around a little wood stove under the tin roof or rushed out to greet the occasional passing vehicle, and all in all it was like a play put on for George’s benefit called “The Degradation of the Nepali Roadside Village” only it was real. Roads were built and people either used them to go and join the unemployed in Kathmandu, or stayed behind and tried to live off the road traffic, which would have worked if only a few
of them were trying it, but with all of them trying none could succeed, and all around them the terraces fell to pieces in the rain.
But I never said a word to George about this. I just left him to watch it.
An hour later the bus’s flight crew decided it was time to go and we all climbed back aboard and wedged into our places and were off again, at about the hour we had been scheduled to arrive at our final destination. Almost immediately we hung a left onto a road that looked like something out of a civil engineering handbook, a narrow lane of asphalt maybe two buses wide at the widest, black as coal and perfectly smooth, with concrete gutters and abutments and supports and drains, and thick wire mesh covering the hillside above the many switchbacks that the road made. “Hey,” George said, cheering up. “The Swiss have been here.”
“That’s right,” I said. “This is the road they’re planning to extend to Chhule.”
“Is it the Swiss who are going to do it?”
“No, they’re done. It’s someone else, no one I know is sure who.”
The switchbacks marked the slope like sewing machine stitching, but even so the grade was a bit steep by Nepali standards, and our old clunker only just beat a walking pace up it, slowing down even more in the turns. Each hairpin was a major effort for the driver, because this bus like all Indian buses had a steering wheel that had to be spun three or four times just to dodge a rock in the road much less make a one eighty. Our driver had to twirl his big lasso like Mr. Toad on the wild ride, while one of his assistants hung out the door to tell him how much room there was to spare before we fell off the road and back down the gorge. The assistant’s signaling system consisted of shouts of panic of varying intensity so that every time we made a right turn we suspected it was the end and the chickens were positive. This went on all afternoon. We did nothing but vertical distance, so that a full three hours after we had left the roadside village we could still look right down on its roofs, a fact that George couldn’t seem to come to terms with. “Look at that,” he’d groan at every turn, “it’s still there.” But then we rose into the clouds and couldn’t see anything at all.
Hours passed and it got darker. The driver stared through his windshield decals into thick mist, driving by telepathy. I began to feel all warm and cosy, lulled by the bus’s motion, as if I was in a teahouse and the engine was a stove. I love trips like this. I mean what is life for, when you get right down to it? Days exactly like this one, if you ask me. We were on our way to Shambhala, after all. No one could expect it to be a simple thing.
Having passed through all transitory emotion himself, George became philosophic. “This had better be the real thing you’re taking me to,” he said.
“It is,” I told him.
He looked doubtful. “I can see how a remote valley could stay hidden up here in the old days, but how do they do it now? I mean, how do they keep satellites from seeing them?”
“They don’t. They’re in the satellite photos.”
“I thought it was a secret city.”
“It is, but nowadays it’s more of a disguised city. The government in Kathmandu knows it’s there, but they just think it’s one of their little high valley villages, with a Tibetan population. Someone from the district panchayat drops by from time to time, and everyone is friendly enough, they just don’t tell him where he really is. The monastery doesn’t look all that important, and most of the lamas stay out of sight when visitors are around. They pay their taxes, and send a representative to the Panchayat and all, and they’re left alone like any other remote village.”
“So it doesn’t look magical?”
“Not to the tax collectors.”
“No gold towers and crystal palaces and all?”
“Well, there’s some stuff in the monastery. But the truth is hardly anyone from Nepal ever comes by. Kathmandu seems to think of it as a Tibetan village that got caught on the wrong side when they formalized the border with China. Which essentially is true. Besides Kathmandu doesn’t pay any attention to villages right next door, much less one as remote as this.”
“So it’s safe.”
“But the thing is, if too many people were to start dropping by, the secret would get out for sure.”
“Thus the road paranoia.”
“Right.”
Much later we began to stop at high villages, lit by kerosene lanterns and the bus’s headlights. At each stop a few passengers got off and the rest settled back into a stupor, until finally it was past midnight and we were rolling into a completely dark village that was The End Of The Road. The driver honked his horn and we fell out like cripples, and the teahouse keepers emerged and rounded us up.
After recovering our backpacks from the roof of the bus and finding them soaked, George and I followed a man into a teahouse I had frequented before. As we staggered up to the crowded bedroom on the second floor I looked in the kitchen, and there in the harsh glare of a Coleman lantern was our bus driver, hunched by the stove scooping up huge handfuls of steamed rice and wolfing them down, cleaning off the last of a big steel plate with a stolid expression and a regular movement. Just another day’s work as far as he was concerned—seventeen hours of driving a lousy bus over bad roads in horrible weather, surely ten trillion turns of that old steering wheel, and it made me happy to think that such heroes out of Homer still walked the face of this earth. By the time we got up the next morning he and his crew would be long gone, back down to Kathmandu where they would turn around and start the whole epic over again the very next day. Some people really work for a living.
* * *
The village at the end of the road was in the same state as the road village from the day before—focused on the great dirt runway that slashed it in two, new buildings clustered around the road ending, old buildings torn down for construction materials or firewood, and the whole thing surrounded by shitting fields, especially by the river running at the far edge of town. This happens because of the lack of toilet paper but it does no good to their water supply. As we completed our morning business there George said “I don’t see why they can’t believe in invisible bugs. Air is invisible. Their gods are invisible.”
“Germ theory just ain’t intuitive, George.”
“Neither is religion.”
“I’m not so sure of that.”
“But why should there be a difference?”
“It may be that the reason for the existence of the universe is a more pressing question for most people than the reason why they get the runs.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Besides,” I said, “if you got a good enough answer to the first question then the second one is answered too, right?”
He only squinted at me in a certain suspicious way he has, a look he often gave me.
We returned to our teahouse, and after a breakfast of Nebico wafers and hardboiled eggs we were on our way. Backpacks on, the trail found. Trekking at last.
Now in most seasons this would be the fun part—trekking, one of the finest activities known to humanity. But in the monsoon everything gets very wet. Trails become streams, streams become rivers, rivers become killer torrents. There is a big increase in bugs, mold, rot, damp, and disease.
I like trekking in the monsoon, myself. But I bring along a little umbrella and a pair of wellies with their bottoms carved until they are almost rubber crampons, so I had less trouble with the slick trails than George, who had disdained these accessories and was suffering the consequences. He tended to ski the downhills, and his head was always wet, which I have found is seldom conducive to good humor.
Still, we were trekking. Gone were the long views that in other seasons are such a joy, however. In the monsoon all you see are clouds, mist, rain, and whatever’s there in the little bubble of visibility around you, all of it looking green and wet and somehow otherworldly now that your attention is fastened on it rather than the distance. The mossy trees look foreign and fantastical, the trail is a reddish streak of mud leading you through dripping
green creepers, and the occasional chorten or mani wall looms out of the mist like something out of the Bhagavad Gita, which in a way it is. And every once in a while the mountains appear through gaps in the clouds like live things flying overhead. Oh, it’s a spacy thing all right, trekking in the monsoon, and if you’ve got your brolly and wellies and a stick to knock aside the leeches, it can really be fun.
If you don’t have those things, well, you get like George. None of his tour groups ever went out in monsoon and so of course he didn’t either, and now he was paying the price because he had forgotten how to do it, if he ever knew. He kept falling on slippery patches and stepping in the streams until he couldn’t have been wetter laid out in his bath. Rain got in his eye and he thought there was nothing to see anyway, and since he wasn’t looking he kept getting jumped by leeches, which is a painless thing and without negative consequences, but unpleasant if you dislike it. We’d be hiking past bushes or tall grass, and if you watched you would see that some of the little black twigs were wiggling around, trying to feel your heat, and if they did they would leap aboard and weasel through socks or pants or boots and suck your blood. Whenever George looked down at his legs and caught one in the act he howled. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Oh my God, leeches!”
“Put mosquito repellent on them, they’ll drop right off.”
“I know.” And he’d drop his pack in a puddle and hurry like it was little rattlesnakes latched onto him.
Trying to make him feel better I said, “Hell, first time I came here with my buddies we went trekking and you know back home when you’re bit by a mosquito on the forearm some guys will trap them by tensing the forearm muscle, after which they can’t get their sticker out of you and not only that they’ve got no stop valve neither, so they just keep swelling with your blood until they blow up, and where we came from this was considered a big laugh. So one of my buddies gets bit by a leech on the forearm and he says, ‘Hail, I’ll teach him to bite a Arkansas boy, I’m gonna give him the mosquito treatment’ and he tenses his forearm and we start watching, but not only is this a leech it’s apparently one of them cow leeches, it’s got about ten million times the capacity of a mosquito and so it starts like a tiny little twig but just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger till it’s like this black watermelon hanging off my buddy’s arm. He keeled over in a faint and we squoze the leech to try and get some of his blood transfused back into him before we burned it off, but he was white as a sheet for about a week thereafter. Isn’t that funny?”
Escape From Kathmandu Page 16