But my jet lag is providing all the mind altering I can handle at the moment, so I turned them down. Sigh.
Still, the layover in Bangkok was well worth the expense, as I awoke to find that my mind had made it across the Pacific. We had a joyous reunion in the shower this morning, and together the two of us went downstairs and had a tasty Thai breakfast of various spicy things from the buffet. Then we checked out of the hotel and strolled back across the elevated walkway to the airport terminal. It’s good to be coherent again.
At the check-in counter, to my utter surprise and delight, I found out that I had been somehow bumped up into business class for the flight to Kathmandu, which gave me the privilege of waiting for my plane’s departure in the business class lounge. There I sat down in a comfy chair and read the morning’s papers and drank tea and ate pastries. Put me in a fine mood it did.
While reading and noshing, I set my watch to Kathmandu time, as I always like to get a jump on these time zone changes, and settled in. Unfortunately, I promptly forgot that I reset my watch. So I completely lost track of the real time, and when I happened to glance up some time later at the departure monitor, it showed my flight, in flashing red, to be in the final boarding stage.
Yikes! I looked at the clock on the wall and realized that I had exactly seven minutes to race down to the gate and get on my plane. Made it just in the nick of time!
I heartily recommend business class if you can get it for free. On Thai Air at least you get a big seat, and linen, and real china, and various delightful things to eat, and wine, and dark chocolates with port, and they give you little slipper thingees for your feet, and hot towels, and generally make you think about just staying on the plane and flying right back to Bangkok. But I got off.
I’ll tell you what though, I’m thinking about finding out how much it’ll cost me to upgrade on Air India when I start heading home.
The trekking company that is going to take me to Tibet sent one of their staff to the airport to pick me up, which relieved me of the need to plow through the sea of touts washing up against the glass doors outside customs. We didn’t quite escape their clutches though, as one of them grabbed my bags from me just as we reached the car and put them in the trunk. For this effort he demanded some baksheesh, and rather than argue the point, I gave him a couple of 20 rupee notes, about 53 cents. He didn’t seem to think that I was properly rewarding his Herculean efforts, and pointed to the wad of 100 rupee notes I had procured at the money changer in the terminal and said, you give me some of those. I only looked at him over the rims of my imaginary glasses and got in the car.
Kathmandu
Kathmandu, at least what I saw of it on the way in from the airport, is pretty much exactly what I expected. It’s hot and humid, buried in garbage, and choked with smog. There are people everywhere, mostly walking or riding bicycles, but enough of them zipping by on smoke-belching two-stroke motorbikes at breakneck speed to make the whole scene overwhelmingly chaotic. All the houses are crumbling and draped with laundry. And the noise from the constant horn blaring is almost a continuous background tone.
And yet, there are cows chewing cud in the middle of the road. Beautiful women in brightly colored saris flow through the crowds, and fruit bats the size of cats hang from many of the tall trees. Flowers grow almost everywhere, and as I strolled through the streets around my hotel this afternoon, even the hashish hawkers seemed benevolent. I’m sure I’m going to enjoy my stay here.
The weather, as I mentioned, is hot and humid. And as I type this the skies have opened up and the afternoon monsoon deluge has begun. But two complete strangers, once they realized that I was not going to buy what they had to sell and settled into a non-commerce oriented conversation with me, told me that this is exactly the right time to be traveling to Tibet. Apparently this is about the only time that the Tibetan plateau is lush and green, and the monsoon rains don’t get past the Himalayas.
Much.
So we’ll see. Tomorrow I’ll start exploring this place in earnest. I have four days to kill before we set off for Mt. Kailas, and I doubt I’ll have any trouble finding places to go and things to see.
But now I’m going to go downstairs and see about getting some dinner. Then I’ll head back out into the mad streets of Kathmandu to see if one the hundreds of cyber cafés will let me load this file onto one of their computers.
Wish me luck!