leeches

Here's part of my right foot after walking with a new friend here up to the top of the Nagarjun forest mountain above Kathmandu. The blood is from leeches, who inject a natural vasodilator and anticoagulant, which makes the wounds bleed profusely for a long time after they finish sucking and let go. There is also a natural anesthetic, so it is painless. I'm holding my foot off the platform because it was dripping all over the wooden planks I was standing on. On the other side of my foot at the time of this photo one leech was still attached. I had nine altogether.

This is just a bone I'm throwing here because I know I promised a long post. There is just so much to write about that it is taking me forever. And I'm trying not to spend all my time on the computer, for obvious reasons, like having the sort of fun in the photo above.

More stuff soon, I promise.

back in Kathmandu

I arrived back in Kathmandu this morning and will be posting stuff very soon, so you can check back tomorrow.

Nepal

It came time to leave Bhopal and India for a few reasons, health and legal among them. The options are limited -- India's borders are almost nothing but problems and oceans. Pakistan, China, Myanmar, Nepal, Bangladesh. I really hate the Chinese government and I would cringe to even give them money for a visa. Furthermore, almost all its borders with India are disputed or unrecognized. Pakistan is not an option, thanks to Bush and their own difficult rules about visas. Myanmar is far worse than China and the border is completely shut, anyway. There are no boats to Sri Lanka and a war seems to be starting there. Nepal has been in a civil war for a decade and Bangladesh is flooded. So I chose Nepal, because I've always wanted to go there.

It took two overnight trains to get from Bhopal to Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, which is the closest big city to the Nepal-India border town of Sunnauli. I discovered the joys of travelling in a cheaper class than I had tried before, and I will never go back to the supposedly nicer cars. The windows are open in the lower classes and I spent the first night lying on my bunk with my head under the window, feeling the wind and staring up at the stars as Madhya Pradesh flew by to the lullabye of heavy train wheels. I love trains. When I'm lying down like that, I can feel the whole size of the train by the vibrations of the wheels locked into the tracks. There are subtle undulations, like echos that give a sense of the massiveness of these machines. The passenger trains here are incredibly long. From the middle, the whistle at the front sounds like it's a mile away -- a ghostly wail.

On the second train, from Delhi to Gorakhpur, I befriended a Nepali family who offered me a ride from Gorakhpur to the border. We started at about 10 a.m., seven of us stuffed into a car the size of a Geo. With our luggage. The driver was a small, wiry man described by my new friends only as a "Nepali brother". The drive to Sunnauli is supposed to take almost three hours, but this guy was flying. Highway driving in India is like one, long, continuous game of Chicken. I should have been shitting in my pants, but strangely I felt totally calm. This is a phenemenon I have been noticing more and more lately. I think my amygdyla is broken. Life in India simply fried it. It scared me fearless.

Anyway, there are many Nepalis on the Indian side in that area. The border is open to them and many Nepalis come to India because the work and money is better, which is hard to fathom but true nonetheless.

At one point on the ride to the border our driver slowed his breakneck speed to navigate through the livestock and vegetable carts of a large village and then suddenly he pulled over. I looked around to see why, but there were just a line of several very serious looking men standing under a tree. One of them walked over and stuck his hand through the window and the driver placed a small wad of cash in the man's palm. He explained this as we pulled away only as "tax" (a word used *very* loosely over here). Having paid our taxes to the sinister men under the banana trees, we continued on. I wondered if we got a receipt.

At the border I was rushed by a crowd of men wanting to carry my big backpack for me and sell me bus tickets into Nepal. First I had to get a visa, though. I went and signed out with the Indian government's little border office and then walked through the gate and into the little Nepali office, where I filled out the necessary forms and paid the fee of $30 in U.S. currency. This is strange and frustrating -- they will only accept U.S. currency for the visa. I imagine this makes European travellers red with anger. It pissed me off enough. I had to spend a whole morning in the State Bank of India's office in Bhopal filling out an application to buy American dollars from them because I didn't have any. Why would I have any? They want to know not only how much but why you want them, where you've been, where you're going, where you're taking the dollars, blah blah blah, and then I had to go make photocopies of my passport for their files. All this to get less than 100 USD because that's all the Nepali border police will take.

Finally, I was into Nepal. To get to Kathmandu from there requires a 10-hour bus ride through the hills. Not wanting to tackle that at night, I decided to spend the night in the town of Butwal, just a few kilometers in from the border. I got bus at noon the next day.

Nepal has been in a civil war for years now. Hard figures are all disputed, but roughly equal parts of the country are under the control of the Nepali monarchy and the Maoist rebels. The rest is battleground and it has been very taxing on ordinary Nepalis. A short while ago a bus trip from Butwal to Kathmandu would have been impossible because the rebel army had the city surrounded and all the roads were barricaded. A temporary ceasefire was declared about a month and a half ago, though, so the roads are open now. This is because very important changes are happening in Nepal as I write. You probably remember the massive and bloody protests in Kathmandu in April. After days of a near total shutdown of Kathmandu and many people shot by the police, the king finally relented and stepped aside to restore parliamentary democracy. He had assumed totalitarian control about a year earlier. Now everything is up in the air and they're trying to decide what kind of government to have.

While non-violent for the moment, the roads show conflict. Between Butwal and Kathmandu, we passed through countless army checkpoints. These consist of barrels filled with stones placed in the road, with logs, tires, and other found objects strewn in the middle of the pavement so that every vehicle must zig-zag it's way as it approaches the soldiers, who pace around or sit behind machine guns resting on piles of sandbags and grass sod. Lots of spiralled razor wire everywhere. The soldiers often come onto the bus and swagger around, staring each person in the face for a breathless moment. I have yet to figure out exactly what they are looking for. Subversive twinkles in our eyes? Sometimes they question people about certain carry-on items, heavy hardware in particular. One guy got questioned, for instance, about a large roll of thick cable he had with him. People carry all kinds of things on these buses. There are literally goats and chickens in the aisles, struggling to keep their balance as the buses swing around the hairpin turns through the hills.

My bus arrived in Kathmandu just after sunset. For the last several kilometers to the bus station we could barely move through traffic because the whole city was filled with Maoist rallies. Out in the mountains, on the way to Kathmandu, we passed bus after bus filled to capacity and covered with young people on the roofs, waving red flags and wearing red bandanas. Once in the city, it was just more of the same. The news reported about 500,000 had converged on the capital that day. Every bus was covered with flag-waving kids. They seemed to be having a lot of fun.

I must apologize for not being able to provide photos -- I have no computer with me now and so I cannot download and transfer photos. I will borrow some of Nepal from other people's websites, though, just to provide some illustration.

I am feeling somehow non-verbal about Nepal, almost as if to write about it would cause it to evaporate. For now, I will just say that this place is bewitching.

Hindi has come in useful -- even remote Sherpas way up on the hilltops can often speak perfect Hindi. Many don't, however, even in Kathmandu, and I have begun to study Nepali, which uses the same script and many similar words, but different grammar and vocabulary.

I am going to have to cut off this post and continue later. There is much to tell, as I've already been here for two weeks, in and out of Kathmandu. I am going back into the hills for a while, so this blog will have to go on hiatus for another week and a half. Most Nepal has sparse opportunities for communication with the outside world.

Ok, check back in about two weeks and I will put up some interesting stuff when I get back to Kathmandu.

back to the basti's

I went back to the bastis a couple of days ago. This time I was with a couple of other volunteers who wanted to do some interviews. We went to Atal Ayubh Nagar first. The smell was even worse this time. It was about 110 degrees, maybe hotter (45 C). This time it was not about to rain. It was unmistakable this time. Atal Ayubh Nagar is getting gassed every day. Between the first row of shacks and the factory wall is a grassy area where we found a group of children running around and playing. This close to the factory, the air was so full of the chemicals I found it difficult to stay there for more than a few minutes. At the other end of the strip, I ran into Islam, a young guy who was on the padyatra. He lives in Annu Nagar and works as an electrician with his older brother. I like him a lot, and hadn't seen him since arriving in Delhi with the padyatra. After hugging hello and asked him about this smell. He said without any hesitation that it comes from the chemicals in the factory and that the hotter it is, the more fumes are released. To describe it as a "smell" is not totally accurate. It is partly a particular scent, partly a texture. It feels like fine sand paper in my nose and throat.

We later visited Shehzadi in Blue Moon Colony and then headed to the solar evaporation ponds beyond that, which is where Union Carbide dumped tons of chemicals to just sit there. There is now just one big pond. When we arrived, a few boys were hanging out by the edge, doing something. Several cows were grazing on the grass growing around the water. Their milk will be poison.

Near the pond I ran into both Nasir Bhai and Chhote Khan, with his unmistakable, huge hennaed beard. Chhote Khan, exuberant as ever, absolutely demanded that we all follow him to his place for tea. By time time we got there and sat down on the floor, the small home was surrounded by about 50 or 60 children and some adults, all pushing to get inside and see us. Of particular interest, I think were the pale girls, especially one new blonde volunteer. I had been to Chhote Khan's once before and didn't get anything near this response. Chhote Khan was having to push the doors shut on people.

After we were bunkered down, Munni Bi, Chhote Khan's wife, complained that the city hadn't brought tank water in days, and they had all been forced to have nothing but the contaminated water. Meanwhile Chhote Khan was busy arranging sticks of wood burning under the pot of tea. When he handed them out to me and the girls, they looked at me and asked if it was safe. "Probably," was all I could say. "It's mostly milk." It was delicious. No small cup of tea could be more dangerous than refusing tea from Chhote Khan.