Posting this at 8am, Frankfurt time, from FRA. So far our return home is going un-eventfully. We have 4 hours left before we board our final flight home. I can almost taste the sushi now…
4pm, Delhi. I’m lying in bed at the YWCA Blue Triangle Family Hostel. I napped fitfully and I’m unsure if my time – another 10 hours until our out-bound flight – is best spent reading, writing, or sitting close to the toilet. The masala dosa I greedily ate when we arrived here, is undecided about staging a full-blown intestinal mutiny and while it deliberates it’s making me nervous.
Today has been such a typical day of travel its laughable. We arose early to a bandh, a day of road and shop closures called by one of any number of malcontent groups flying the flag of Mao, Lenin, or just general communism. Splinter those groups further into many subtle shades of young communists and marxist-leninists and you get the idea. So our taxi came but took every back road he could until, forced onto the main road, he was hit by a bus. Not a big hit, but hit all the same. He got out, words were exchanged, hands thrown in the air, and then climbed acceptingly back into the cab to resume our slow progress through the pot-holed streets. Nepal is a culture of passivity, and it drives me insane.
We arrived at the airport and were adopted by a porter who whisked us through lines and was, to his credit, the best damn porter I’ve encountered at an airport. Of course, with my insistence on not using, or paying these guys, I’ve encountered so few of them – might have to reconsider that policy. Our check-in gal waived the overage fees I had to pay on the way into the country, and sent me on to security where I had to bribe not one, but two, security guards before being allowed into the departure lounge with what little of my Indian rupees I had left. I should have balked, looked insulted, and called for their supervisor. As it is I just wanted to avoid a slow, un-lubricated, body cavity search and shelled out the shocking equivalent of $30. For the rest of you travelers for whom I’ve just reinforced the notion that western photographers are idiot cash machines, I am truly sorry. Perhaps you will be the one to break them of that notion. I hope you have a good proctologist.
We went through another brief search before boarding the plane, standard in most of India and Nepal. We left on time, less standard. Shocking even. I spent the flight watching Will Smith and Charlize Theron (with whom I am unashamedly, deeply, in unrequited love – Charlize, not Will) in Hancock. We hit the ground in Delhi, cleared immigrations, found our luggage and fell into the gracious arms of Parkash and his A/C vehicle. Parkash is a driver for the travel agent we use for Lumen Dei, and I’ve now done enough airport runs with Parkash to be familiar with him, and trust him. Knowing he’ll be there to spare me the taxi hassles of Delhi airport is a great comfort.
And so here I am. Reflecting on 7 weeks of travel in the hopes that looking back instead of forward will keep me from thinking too long about the next 36 hours in transit, or the storm brewing my gut.
Ladakh was amazing. The incredible people, the great weather, and the stunning scenery. Matt Brandon kept saying it was impossible to take a bad photograph in Ladakh, and while my hard drive of 4,000 images proves him wrong at least 3,800 times, he’s not all wrong. If you take a bad photograph in Ladakh, it’s your own fault. I long to return and spend more time there – more time wandering Thiksey gompa, more time in the small villages, even more time in Leh just soaking in the atmosphere and slurping thukpa and chang. We had exceptional people doing our leg work and I welcome the chance to go back and work with our local fixers Russ Taylor and Rinchen James again soon.
Kathmandu was so different this time than last. My last trip to Kathmandu was just before monsoon and tourists were thin on the ground. Not so this time. Now, post-monsoon, at the peak of trekking season, Kathmandu was maggoty with tourists, as though they’d all hatched in Thamel and swarmed in droves to fill what remaining spaces were left in the city. There are two kinds of tourists – the annoying ones that flock from Europe (clever eyeglasses, short hair, Deuter backpacks) and the Americas (floppy Tilley hats, khaki vests, shorts, white tube socks), and the ones that fancy themselves “travelers” and not tourists.
It is the latter that most bother me, possibly because I see more of myself in them than I care too. You’ll see them in looser clothing (usually hemp or nylon, with no logo at all or North Face logos on every surface), conspicuously tattooed (foreign scripts are good, Tibetan wins), bearded (both genders at times), and most galling of all they avoid eye contact so fastidiously it became a game with me; just to see if I could lock eyes. It is as if they alone, the hippy incarnation of the great white explorer, have travelled to fabled Kathmandu, and to acknowledge another of their kind would pop the bubble and bring the reality of this small world, cheap hotels, and discount airlines, crashing down on them. God forbid my presence remind them of their real lives.
The other game they play doesn’t have a name but it’s the reverse of xenophobia. It’s not the fear of outsiders and other cultures, so much as the fear of your own culture. The winner is the one who most rejects their own culture, usually marked by: carrying a dijery-doo (my spelling’s wrong, I’m sure, but the fact that I can’t spell it means I don’t have a chance of winning), clothing festooned with the largest OM symbol that can fit onto a shirt, beads, flip flops, and an astonishing lack of hygene. Making eye contact with another westerner immediately disqualifies you.
My sarcasm came back this trip. As did my passenger-rage on the roads.
There is a particular horn on the roads in Nepal – in buses, trucks, taxis – that just about makes my ears bleed, and there is a special place of suffering in the afterlife for the man that invented it. It’s so irritating it makes me want to punch babies. Kittens even. Leaving Nepal is always sad for me, but it comes with the consolation that it’s two months before I return and have to hear that horn again. Those two months will go by too quickly.
But the rest of it – walking around the stupa in Boudha, holding hands and hanging out with the elderly women in Pashupati, hiking the hills in Dhading with chiid-labourers or photographing in a brick kiln in the terai – a small circle of red, red bricks surrounded by the greenest of rice paddies and ceilinged by the bluest of skies…I’m going to miss it. Kathmandu is a chaotic, dusty, fantastic place and I can’t wait to go back. If it all goes to plan I’ll be there twice within the coming year – I hope once with some of you from this growing community.
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Ok y’all, I’ve raved until I am blue in the face about how much I love my Pogo printer. But words can only go so far, so in the spirit of generosity I’m giving away a Pogo printer to one lucky reader. Actually, that’s only partly true. I’m giving away the shipping, ZINK, the geniuses behind the Polaroid Pogo, are the ones giving it away. They’re crazy-generous that way. And now my readers are getting in on the lovin’.
While we’re talking about the ZINK-powered Polaroid POGO…
I’m in the middle of digging out from the pile that you come home to after an extended absence, so on one hand, thank God for jet-lag. It’s 5am and I’ve been up for hours getting stuff done. On the other hand I’ll be useless by 5pm. I’m now unpacking from India/Nepal and beginning to re-orient myself towards Kenya. I leave on November 14. So travel prep stuff is on my mind.
Two items today. Not exactly unrelated to photography, but a little more tangental than usual.
