In this edition: Kathmandu, Mt. Everest, and trekking in the Langtang region of Nepal.

Declaration: Kathmandu is one of the most overrated cities I've ever been to.

Declaration: It is also the smoggiest.  Even the locals are wearing face masks as they walk down the street.  Even the dogs look like they're sick of living.  All this week, jets have been turning around and returning to their destinations because they can't find the runway at the airport.

Granted, this time of year is historically hazy.  But it's also true that when you breathe through your mouth, your teeth get gritty.  I don't care how magical you think this mountain kingdom might be.  In Kathmandu, it's chewy.

My first few days, I was sick.  I think someone in Varanasi slipped me a bad bottle of water, and so for a few days I was peeing out my butt.  Not pretty, but I felt all right with it, so you should, too.  Eventually, I had enough of banana lassis and repeated trips to the loo, so I went to a chemist who loaded me up with antibiotics.  My appetite returned posthaste.

In the meantime, I hung out with Miriam, who I'd met in Agra and who came to Kathmandu on the same plane as me, and Stefan, a hip Berliner who's in town for enlightenment yet didn't act like an idiot apostle-head about it.  We had many discussions about relationships and idiots tourists over steamed vegetable momos and (for me, at least), lassis.  We also attended two nights' worth of that strange new wrinkle in international travel: the movie night.  Restaurants show bootleg copies of popular American movies in order to draw a crowd.  We saw "There's Something About Mary" one night over chowmein and chips, and "Shakespeare in Love" the next.  Even recent flicks like "8MM" are showing!  That should tell you all you need to know about the tourist amenities of "exotic" Kathmandu.  Look around the streets.  Your average tourist looks 19 years old.  Either that, or they have huge Grizzy Adams beards, dressing the part of the experienced mountaineer.  Even the women.

While I recovered, I decided I had to see Everest.  To do it in person, you have to trek for three weeks and brave two flights to a village with notorious weather patterns. So I did the Tourist thing: I took a mountain flight.

One hour, there and back, and every seat gets a window.  On the way up, you can go to the cockpit and look at it through the pilot's window.  It's in the middle of a magnificent series of peaks, and not noticeably taller (the rest of them are pretty close to its height), but you can recognize its profile in a heartbeat.  There it was!  The tallest place on earth, spread out right before my eyes like a theatrical backdrop.  I could hardly believe it.  Some things are so impressive they can't stick to your memory.

The Himalaya look mean--lines of sharp, serrated edges of tough-looking rock.  From this vantage point, they looked like Earth's most dangerous edge. God could pick up the planet with one hand and use the Himalaya to cut through cosmic cheese.

By the way, the Nepalis call the mountains the Him-ALL.  The correct way, then is to say Him-ALL-ya, and without the "s", because it's plural.

Everest is a big place to be--figuratively, I mean.  On Saturday, a 15-year-old is leaving for his attempt to conquer it.  Since he's Nepali, the government is waiving the $70,000 fee.  Without such a price, every Tom, Dick, and Tenzing would give it a go.  The King even granted the kid an audience a few days ago as a good-luck wish.  If the kid makes it (with his sherpas, of course), he'll be the youngest person ever to do it.

And from the Tibetan side, a new American-based team is climbing Everest to find the corpses of British climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who went up in 1924 wearing tweed suits.  Not surprisingly, they were last seen 900 feet from the summit.  But--and this is the interesting part--the American team believes they might have made it to the summit before they vanished. A Chinese climber claimed to have found a body in old-fashioned British clothes in 1975 (frozen like a biological time capsule) but he soon after died in an avalanche and couldn't show them where he saw it. Mallory and Irvine had a camera with them, so the Americans are bringing metal detectors. Eastman Kodak thinks the film could still be developed it it's found.  And if they find photos of Mallory and Irvine on the summit, that means they made it 29 years before Hillary did.

You heard it here first!

Finally, after a week of reading and recovery in Kathmandu, I was ready to trek.  As Stefan said repeatedly in earnest but good-natured cynicism, there's no reason to come to Nepal if you're not going to trek.

So I found a willing partner for the trek I wanted to do -- the Langtang trek -- via a notice on the bulletin board at the Kathmandu Guest House.  His name was Ian, from South Africa (of course), and after obtaining our government permits to be outside the Kathmandu valley, we'd go.  We pored over maps and books for two days, sipping Cokes and milk teas.

We left for the starting point, Dhunche, via a decrepit old bus.  At the station, my eyes were already stinging from the exhaust.  And a teen-ager in poolside flip-flops skittered under the vehicle like a beetle, removing what looked like vital machine parts with the service of a heavy metal bar.

The trip took eight hours.  It should say something to you that I think it was the worst international bus trip I have ever had.  Eight hours, I said, for a distance of only about 40 km as the crow flies from Kathmandu, on a suspension-free bus packed with gasping, coughing Nepalis.  One lady, who got so nauseous she had to sit by a window so she could puke out of it, brought three big boxes marked "BROILER CHICKS," and for six hours the dimwitted birds chirped and complained.  They were the only barometer of my own mood; I was heroically stonefaced.

You've heard about the mountain roads of the world, but you have not imagined them.  Four hours into the trip, the pavement ended, and for the next four, we careened -- in violation of the most basic laws of physics -- along a 12-foot-wide patch of rock and sand, the wheels spinning perilously above the vertiginous cliffs. The newspaper always seems to have one casual, single-paragraph mention of some daily bus "mishap" in which dozens of luckless commuters lose limbs or lives down a rocky ravine. Having just left India, I didn't really worry about it. I just sat and waited to arrive, or for my fate. It's the newfound Hindu in me.

Sure, it was pretty.  The mountainsides were scalloped into farmable terraces (the deforestation results in countless landslides each year) and the drops were so sheer that it wasn't even possible to see bottom from across the valleys.  Pretty, sure, but no guard rails.  And a dozen people riding on the roof.  And intermittent police checks with bag searches.  And dust.  And exhaust.  And near misses with other buses around blind curves.  And the threat of vomit, and windows that slid open without bidding, and the seats in front of you banging your knees every six seconds.  There was no rest.  Only fierce jostling, like the way you might try to shake some sense into a naughty puppy.

Over the next few days, Ian and I would walk deep into the valley of the Langtang region, almost to the border of Tibet.  From there (legend told) the views would be breathtaking.  And so would the altitude.  We'd be going nearly three miles high, a level that often results in lightheadedness and mild dizziness -- and in the unlucky few, headaches, loss of appetite, and sometimes even death.

Death wasn't on my mind as we began.  Nothing was. We'd get up around 7:15 (in the morning!!), face the damp mountain cold with a pretense at gusto, eat our milk with muesli (careful to hide our abiding fear of food poisoning), and strap on our backpacks.

If there's now a Hindu in me, there must also be a Jesuit.  Why on earth would someone put a 30-pound weight on his back, put his feet into boots, point to a steep and possibly ankle-rending incline, and announce, in all fun, "Let's climb THAT!"?

No whinging.  It was gorgeous.  We passed through rhododendron forests, populated by curious monkeys with beautiful white manes.  We walked along ridges strewn with pine needles, and over clear mountain streams, and saw villages across misty valleys, with their prayer flags fluttering in the wind like promises.

The first day, your body doesn't understand what's happening to it. So for six hours, it draws on nearby energy supplies to get you through it.  But the next day, with your muscles sore, your body finally gets the message and takes it out on you. Your mind can fail you, too; when you know you'll be ending up at 4000 meters, you're actually glad (sort of) to see a rise and frustrated (always) when the trail dips in any way. All that rising and falling tuckers you.  I stopped at a series of impossibly flabbergasting viewpoints (places that in any other country would be cordoned off and attract millions of tourists a year) just long enough to pant at them and sweat onto them.

During extreme moments of exertion, I discovered my inner voice.  It's a scream.

And it said, "People do this for FUN?!?"  There's something perverse in doing any activity that eventually makes you trudge.

Whenever I saw a cup of tea at the many tea huts along the way, I didn't see any reason to continue. This is why hikers rest: to delude themselves into thinking they are happy. For while you're exercising, it's tragically miserable, but the brain quickly and conveniently forgets the pain of physical exertion. Much like the way accident victims can't remember the moments leading up to their personal disaster, your brain edits out the vulgarity of muscular pain so that, upon reflection of it, you don't go insane.

Often, we'd pass porters.  They carry huge baskets on their back using a painful band that straps across their heads, and they trudge up stony inclines wearing little more than sandals, and sometimes not even that. Everything that comes in and out of the valley villages is carried on their backs--planks, frying pans, lamps...everything.  It must be one of the worst jobs in the world. And to think I complained about having to write about sitcoms!

I listened to my Walkman when things got too bad.  It took my mind off myself and focused on the music. You know, I never realized it before, but at the end of "The Girl is Mine," the victor appears to be Michael Jackson.  (And are they talking about Linda?)

Nightfall brings food, and lots of it. The local dish is called dal bhat, which is seemingly designed to convince Nepalis that life isn't much fun so there's not much to be jealous of. Dal bhat is rice with lentil sauce, plus some steamed vegetable, usually cabbage.  You eat this until you feel sick, which usually doesn't take too long.

Ian, my trekking partner, was an avowed foodie. We would reject sanitary lodgings if their milk tea was priced too high, and sleep instead under the same roof as some drooling village idiot with crotch itch. Ian also extolled the endless value of dal bhat as "the perfect meal."  He cherished its blend of carbohydrates and protein, and praised the way innkeepers kept the rice flowing when you ordered it.  During the middle of our most brutalizing days, I could hear him chime, "I just felt the dal bhat kick in!  I'm getting my second wind!"

Some people hire porters for their loads.  The more I walked, though, the prouder I was of my achievement, and now I don't feel like it's really hiking if you hire a porter.  Snob.

Speaking of wind, there was lots of it at night, because most of the buildings are made of loose stones that have been reclaimed from old glacial paths and stacked up.  You can peer in between slats of wood to spy on your neighbors.  For dinner, you sit in the smoky kitchen of some local family, who feed you at exorbitant prices (for Nepalis, anyway), and try to put enough precious wood into their clay stoves to keep you warm and the roof from catching fire.  When you sleep, you bundle up.  I had two sleeping bags.  There was something cozy about listening to the roaring wind, but something scary too--after all, we were deep in some of the most inaccessible terrain in the world.

On our second night, at the Evining View Lodge, there were rats screaming in the wall next to my head.  It didn't even bother me. I guess I accepted that animals had a right to be warm, too.  Or else it's a mark of how long and hard my journeys have been.

On our third night, in Langtang Village, we met two young Israelis, Yaron and Idit, as well as Cathy from Colorado and Kasha from "Tazzie" (Tasmania, Australia).  We chatted over cups of hot lemon water, and ate plates of chapati with jam, and boiled potatoes with tomato sauce. Not an exciting menu, is it? I no longer blame Sandy Hill Pittman for the espresso machine.

The stars shone brightly in the thin ribbon of sky visible between the rows of peaks, but at night I was usually too busy hustling to my sleeping bags to notice.  Or trying to poop into a nasty hole between planks of wet wood.

Finally, after more than 17 total hours of climbing from Dhunche, we reached Kyangjin Gompa.  We had climbed from 1900 meters to 3800 meters. (1 meter=3.3 feet; you do the math).  In a final burst of excitement, we hauled ourselves up 500 more meters (in two hours) to reach the prayer flags fluttering atop a crest overlooking the valley. Our breath was thin as the oxygen and our steps were slow, tiny, and methodical. I got dizzy every few minutes and stood in place to rest, staring longingly above my head at my goal.

And then we were there.  Far below us, under the birds and the wind, was the village.  And all around us were the bright, snowy mountain peak, marching glaciers, and bursts of blown snow.  And across the mountains was Tibet.  We'd made it!

We were giddily snapping photos of the spectacle around us, posing for auto-timer shots, when I heard a noise like distant thunder.  I turned, and across the valley, a massive avalanche was tumbling down the face of Langtang Lirung. Slowly, like milk in water, it billowed and settled over the glacial moraine below us.  It was a rare sight--and a reminder of how angry this land really is.

That's something I've noticed time and again on my trip.  As Americans, we take for granted the beauty and gentleness of Earth because we live in a fairly mild terrain. The eastern seaboard gives you such a paltry idea of how formidably wracked the rest of the planet can be. So much of it is indescribable through words or lenses; its power lies in the ability to dash your life against mighty forces, or to move your soul by means of its nearly celestial gravity.

That's as good a reason to travel as any: visions to make your soul shift inside your breast.  Sights of unsharable, unrememberable energies.

The next day, Ian went back down the mountain.  I had to rest.  I went over to Cathy's lodge and we snacked on yak cheese. (Tastes like hard parmesan; love it!)

On our rest day, we sat with a couple of Australians who were part of a larger trek.  They were suffering from AMS, or altitude sickness.  There's no way of telling who it will hit--Ian was fit and young, and Sharon about 40 years old, with housewife looks.  They both looked totally wiped out.  Their leader had dragged them up the valley in only two days--far too fast to be adequately acclimatized--and they were exhausted.  They spent a few hours inside a pack chamber, designed to pressurize your blood into accepting the increased altitude. (Cathy helped pump it for a while.)  They should have been descending, like doctors suggest you do, but the rest of their team--at the insistence of their gung-ho Ozzie leader--was climbing the nearby Yala peak and planned to tackled the daunting Ganja La Pass after returning the next day.  I looked at them, bundled up and sallow-skinned but chirping, "I'm fine! Really, I'm fine!", and felt glad that God didn't pick me for altitude sickness -- at least at this height.  Greed and machismo, I said to myself.  Each causes more danger in this world than the other.

I was also grateful that my legs were holding out.  A Dutch man named Jan, who was staying at my lodge, snapped his ankle as he entered the village, and the next morning a helicopter had to come evacuate him to Kathmandu.  He was lucky, too, in a way; most villages are too snuggled in the valley for choppers; normally, he would have had to be toted out in a basket by sherpas.

The next morning, the helicopter came, violently disrupting the tranquility of the place like a rock in a still pond, and the whole town was there to see it.  All 20 buildings emptied.  Jan got on.  Then a local family showed up, with a small child draped across the shoulders of her father.  She was clearly ill, and when word got out that the rich Westerner was leaving in a chopper, they had brought her in the hopes that the doctor would see her, too. Her father deposited her in the helicopter and they stood back.  Within moments, though, the pilot began arguing about money with them.  Then, she came off.  And Jan's porter got on instead.  As the blades of the aircraft whipped the colorful costumes of the villagers, the sick girl was borne away to the warm hearth of my lodge.

Another thing I repeatedly see is the invincibility of Western money.

An hour later, Cathy and I left.  We walked all day, which was the 300th of my trip. It was glorious, going down after a week of going up!  The sun was warm and the birds were soaring overhead and the snowy peaks were gleaming.

Cathy and I spent the night, utterly spent, by the noisy rapids of Bamboo Lodge in the valley floor. As we woke the next morning, having tea by the turquoise mountain water that thundered past our breakfast table, you were watching the Oscars on television. Early on, we heard another helicopter leaving the valley. I noted my thankfulness for my sure footing over the course of the trek.  With knees barking like German Shepards, we finished the return. We passed through valleys twittering with hundreds of different types of butterflies, tiptoes over landslips, and walked beneath entire tribes of langur monkeys. 

When we got back to Dhunche, I turned on my first light bulb in over a week and took a long-awaited hot shower.  I am SO THIN!!!  I even look good in thermals. Opting not to risk the mechanically unsound buses down the mountain roads for eight hours (remember how I do with brakes?), we hired a Land Rover.  Bliss.  Back into the womb of comfort, back to smoggy Kathmandu, back to a waiting dinner of Pad Thai and ice cream and Golden Tiger.  Cathy and I beamed at each other like co-conspirators, like the doers of impossible deeds that we were.

Since my airline, Royal Nepal, is on strike, I felt immediately hemmed into this place.  If I waited until April 3, the date of my ticket, and the airline's still on strike there would be a fair chance I'd be stuck here until May.  And with elections coming, the locals are promising riots.  So, I've bought a ticket out on Sunday, going through Dhaka, Bangladesh (!!), and onward to Bangkok on Monday.  I'll get a refund from Royal Nepal.  My travel agent said my choice was for the truly brave.  At any rate, I get to see another country, overnight, for free!  Bangladesh!  Whoa, nellie.

Ian, Cathy, and Yaron have fallen ill now that they're back.  Me?  I'm fine.  Eating bagels with yak cheese for breakfast.  I've served my time.

Today, Kasha saw me eating lunch in a cafe in Thamel.  She had disturbing news.

The helicopter Cathy and I had heard during our walk out of the valley, on that last day, was carrying someone we knew.  Sharon, the Australian woman we'd hung out with while she suffered from altitude sickness, was aboard it.

She had died in her sleep at 5 o'clock that morning.

The AMS never improved. Apparently it killed her. Her group leader's breakneck pace was rumored to be the cause. Her husband brought her body back to Kathmandu.

But this time, the sick little girl got to come, too.

Jason

---Right now I'm in: Kathmandu, Nepal
Days: 304   Countries: 26