more on that

I want to add a little to what I started in my last post:

India is often called by foreigners the "land of extremes" or "land of contrasts" or something like that. This is true. Whatever superlative you hurl at it, the opposite is almost always certain to be equally true. This is part of why India confounds so many people, eludes definition, accurate description, comprehension.

It is ironic that I referred to "old Mississippi" when talking about how unjust India is. It is ironic because the huge revolt against American racism and segregation drew very heavily on direct action precedents set right here in India and on the wisdom gained, the lessons learned during India's struggle for independence. Having said that, it is further ironic to encounter the old lunch counter style bigotry of the Old South right back in Old Delhi.

The fact is that India is a world of contradictions, almost as if the polar opposite attraction of things were the only thing that could keep a country this incredibly large and diverse together. While India has one of the oldest and most calcified systems of class oppression on the planet, it also has one of the richest histories and cultures of religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity, tolerance, and democratic precedents. How can this be? I don't know, but it is true. The place that gave us both Buddhism and Gandhian non-violence now forms the more formidable half of one of the world's most volatile nuclear stand-offs.

There is such incredible cruelty and callousness here, but then everywhere also there is kindness and generosity of a depth and sincerity that I had only glimpsed before coming here. This country's deeply rooted social injustice provided the fertile ground for American corporations to devastate the lives of Bhopal's poorest. And yet when I marched with them to Delhi I couldn't believe the warmth and support offered by so many along the way, even by the police. You wouldn't get five miles with a group like that walking while chanting and singing down the highway in the U.S., much less halfway across the country. Perhaps mostly because of the extent to which India's current identity draws upon its heroic struggle against tyrannical British rule, there is a different sort of respect here for social justice activism, for people standing up to power. And that's a good thing, because there is plenty to stand up to.

Can you imagine what Bush would say if you sat in front of the White House and launched a hunger strike against the War in Iraq? Well, first of all, you would just get peppersprayed and dragged away within five minutes, but let's just pretend this was when we still had the Bill of Rights -- if the message ever got to him that an anti-war activist was starving on the royal sidewalk, he'd probably say something like "hunger strike? that's good right?" Here things like that mean something very different. Basically, hunger striking against someone is like calling them British occupiers, just like referring to Guantanamo as a concentration camp is like calling Bush a Nazi. (This is a little bit of a tangent, but another piece of political vocabulary that enjoys a different weight here in India is self-immolation. It's not so unusual to read a headline like, "Member of Parliament, disappointed with Congress Party, sets himself on fire". I wouldn't mind reading that headline in the U.S. now and then -- "Tom DeLay, angered by gay marriage ruling, goes up in a ball of flames on Senate floor.")

I should also mention that the last paragraph of my last post was based on the experience one has in Paharganj, Delhi, and I kind of wrote it in a way that might be understood only by people who have spent time there, of whom there are almost none among the people who read this blog. Paharganj is an old drugged-out, chaotic area of Delhi where you go for really cheap hotels, and in all fairness it is pretty hellish. On top of having almost every awful quality of a total all-out slum, it's touristy on top of that, so you have to deal with all these silly faux-hippies who taken a look around India (but where? and did they not see anything?) and decided it would appropriate not to bathe or wash their hair for three weeks, perhaps in solidarity with... actually no one. I blame them for the aggressive bands of men following me, poking me, trying to sell me little drums that seem to have no particular connection to Indian music. Paharganj is filled with thick smoke, dust, the smell of baked piss, and then while dodging large ungulates and reckless motorcycles and autorickshaws, you have to constantly be fending off all kinds of slimy characters who, no matter how many times they've seen you, no matter how sick and dehydrated you are, won't stop trying to sell you every silly thing you could imagine, like big plastic lawn chairs, for instance -- just the perfect additional item for my travels. I could carry it on my head. I always thought what I was missing in my Indian travels was a big, white, plastic lawn chair to tug through the narrow doorways on the trains and buses. Then the fake sadhus, fortune tellers, you name it -- fake everything. After spending so much time in a place like that (many weeks) -- or in any place -- it comes as a particular insult to be refused entry to a casual restaurant for tea with a friend. Anyway, my last post's little tirade was aimed squarely (if not obviously) at Paharganj, a place unique within India.

Most of all, I just wanted to clarify that I have great and deep affection for India, an affection that far outweighs my undeniable disappointment and anger with many things that I see here. That's all. I do love India. And it's also not at all my place to sit here and say what "India" is or is not -- India is far, far to wide and deep for that.

Get with the program, India

So, the past few times I've tried to check on my blog, I haven't been able to see it. Being in the most remote of places, I heard nothing until today that the Indian government has put a block on a slew of websites including all blogspot.com blogs. I'm sure they have some dumb excuse, but it's apparently too dumb to even explain to the press. The real reason, of course, is because some people in power, like so many Americans, must have fallen asleep in history class or are just too stupid to understand the way civil liberties work. There is never a justifiable reason to shut down all the blogs in a country, or to shut down all the newspapers or radio stations. In articles all over the world this week, the world's largest democracy has the distinction of being included with a handful of fabulous beacons of freedom like China and the Islamic fundamentalist nations. I am pasting the New York Times' article on it below.

To clarify, I can log into blogger.com, write and post, but I can't see the actual blog at its public address. Neither can anyone else in India. The blogs are still accessible, of course, to anyone in most of the rest of the world, including my crowds of adoring fans in New York, Los Angeles, Reykjavik, Tokyo, Zurich, and Santo Domingo. : )

Anyway, this comes on the tail of another incident that really pissed me off. When it comes to civil rights, India is a disaster, a bed of nails. I felt like I was in old Mississippi two weeks ago when in New Delhi I was suddenly, to my shock, denied entry to a rooftop restaurant I frequented for tea. The reason? My companion was a resident of South Delhi and of northeastern state origin (Nagaland, an Indian state east of Bangladesh, on the Myanmar border). That means his features are Tibeto-Burmese. Dressed identically to me, he was treated like a stray dog who had followed me into the lobby, while I had just been smiled at by the guy at the front desk. They retracted my welcome and flatly stated that we were not allowed into the restaurant because of a "policy".

From me they got slammed with the biggest and longest shitstorm of Hindi, legalese, and pure, uncut venom they had ever tasted from an American. But that doesn't solve the problem, of course. My friend had to listen to the whole thing from the curb. I felt nauseated. I slept only a couple of hours that night. I'm still furious, of course. I don't want my shoes shined, or your attempts at pizza, burritos, or falafel sandwiches, nor your ridiculous Om Sweet Om t-shirts -- I'm not looking for deluxe sleeper bus tickets to Rishikesh or Goa, and I don't need your sit-down toilets, or toilet paper, or McDonald's and Pizza Hut, nor cheap calls to New York -- I don't care that you have hot water, air-conditioning, or crappy televisions in the rooms. I want to see some simple humanity.

And I want to be able to have a blog. What's the deal, India?


**********************************

From the NYT:

July 19, 2006

You Won’t Read It Here First: India Curtails Access to Blogs

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

NEW DELHI, July 18 — As India’s financial capital, Mumbai, observed a moment of silence on Tuesday to commemorate the seven bombings of commuter trains seven days ago, a blistering silence blanketed the Indian blogosphere.

For reasons yet to be articulated by the authorities, the government has directed local Internet service providers to block access to a handful of Web sites that are hosts to blogs, including the popular blogspot.com, according to government officials and some of the providers.

The move has sown anger and confusion among Indian bloggers, who accuse the government of censorship and demand to know why their sites have been jammed.

Nilanjana Roy, a Delhi-based writer who runs kitabkhana.blogspot.com, a literary blog, called it “a dangerous precedent.”

“You have a right to know what is being banned, and why it’s being banned,” she said. “I can understand if it’s China or Iran or Saudi Arabia. I’m truly appalled when it’s my country doing this.”

The ban, which has come into effect in recent days, means that people living in India are, in theory, kept from reading anything that appears on the blocked platforms, whether Indian blogs or otherwise.

But the ban seems far from effective. Some Internet providers have blocked access. Others have not, and many more blog aficionados have figured out how to continue reading their favorite sites.

One Web site offers help, by way of a free blog “gateway.” “Is your blog blocked in India, Pakistan, Iran or China?” it asks, and goes on to offer instructions for outwitting the restrictions.

That site was prompted by the efforts of the Pakistan Telecom Authority to block blogspot.com in February, as a way to prevent the proliferation of Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

On Thursday, a technician at a Bangalore-based service center of one Internet provider said the government had ordered the block of blogspot.com “due to security reasons.” Another service provider in Delhi said the government, without explanation, had directed his company to block access to fewer than a dozen sites; he could offer no details on the nature of those sites.

Officials at the Ministry of Communications did not return repeated calls. Gulshan Rai, an official at the ministry’s department of information and technology, said he was aware of “two pages” that had been blocked for spreading what he called anti-national sentiments, but did not provide details.

The secretary for telecommunications, D. S. Mathur, the highest-ranking civil servant in the sector, hung up the phone when reached at home.

The tempest is a testament to growing government anxiety about how to control this mushrooming medium.

Like blogs anywhere, Indian blogs serve as forums to pontificate on national passions: books, movies, politics, cricket. There are blogs devoted to everyday self-indulgence: One blogger, a self-described amateur photographer, writes of jogging in the monsoon, while another recalls what she wore to a cocktail party.

And there are blogs that strive to be public service tools, including one that within hours of the Mumbai train bombings began listing phone numbers of hospitals where victims were taken. Called mumbaihelp.blogspot.com, it is now blocked.

The attacks in Mumbai killed 182 people and injured more than 700. Frenetic Mumbai observed a short silence on Tuesday in memory of the victims.

It is impossible to know how many Indian blogs are affected. One blogger, Mitesh Vasa, from Vienna, Va., has documented “40,128 Indian bloggers who mention India as their country.” That does not include those who do not identify the country they are based in, nor others who identify their country of origin, as Peter Griffin does from Mumbai, as “utopia.”

Mr. Griffin, who helped set up the mumbaihelp site, said he woke up Tuesday morning to a furious litany of 300 e-mail messages, mostly from bloggers enraged by the blockade.

Among the speculation offered was that certain blogs could be used by terrorists to coordinate operations. “Even if that were true, it doesn’t make sense,” Mr. Griffin argued. Anyone with a domain name, he said, could effectively do the same thing on an ordinary Web site.

internet in Ladakh?

As I mentioned in my last post, I am in Ladakh, which is the eastern half of the state of Jammu & Kashmir. There is much to write about, but internet here has to be accessed by satellite or I don't know what, and it's about nine times as expensive as Delhi or Kathmandu. So that is why I haven't been writing anything here. I have some offline notes, though, that I might be able to get up here soon.

While Leh is a little oasis of international travellers and the comforts that come with them, it is about as remote a place I have ever seen or known. It took about 20 hours in a jeep to get here from the town of Manali in Himachal Pradesh, and we passed little more than a few tents that whole time. Many or even most people fly here, but I don't think they have any real sense of where they are. Anyway, I'll be able to describe more later, hopefully.

even to the meanest

Yes, I'm fine, of course. I am nowhere near Mumbai. I am in Jammu & Kashmir, but on the other side, the peaceful side - Ladakh. I am in Leh.

From Kathmandu, my plan was to go to Delhi and from there get an overnight train ticket to Jammu, where I could find a 12-hour bus to Srinagar, where I would spend some time before traversing the mountains to Leh. I left buying a train ticket until the last minute (I spent a few days in Delhi) and then got a string of random warnings from people not to go to Kashmir. I have a particular type of superstition (not the right word, really) and despite no evidence of danger I decided to swallow my pride and totally change my plans and go to Ladakh via Himachal Pradesh to the east.

Ironically, just hours before leaving Delhi I ended up having to defend my non-logical decision to this Kashmiri entrepreneur who entangled me in a long discussion about Kashmir as he tried to persuade me to go. "You had the right idea before, bro [sic]" he said. So I came to Leh with intention of gauging the situation from here, where many people arrive through Srinagar, and to possibly return to Delhi through Kargil, Srinagar, Jammu, etc. I really wanted to go to Srinagar for several reasons. No more. Somehow this feels like a close call. The chances that I would have been one of the foreigners blown up are very slim, of course, but had I gone the other way I would be there right now and would be hiding in some hotel room figuring out how to discreetly get a jeep out of there. No fun.

And I'm really disgusted by these bombings, both up here and in Mumbai, disgusted in a new way, somehow. It occurred to me that one of Bush's many crimes has been his robbery of our ability to passionately condemn attacks such as these without seeming to align ourselves with his putrid, rotten designs.

To all the terrorist bombers, including Bush, I offer some words I recently read here, a passage that resonated with me particularly strongly this week. This is something Buddha said in talking about killing living creatures -- cows, spiders, ducks, rabbits, scorpions, and certainly fellow humans:

"Of life, which all can take but none can give,
Life which all creatures love and strive to keep,
Wonderful, dear, and pleasant unto each,
even to the meanest..."

Kathmandu to Delhi, by land

I finally decided if I didn't force myself to pack my bags and move out, I could find myself in Kathmandu a month or two from now, and there are other places I need to go. So I set a day and went to the bus station to catch a ride back to Butwal, the place where I spent my first night.

This is hard to describe without a map of India and Nepal, but most people go through the border at Sunnauli, which is several hours from the Indian, rail-connected city of Gorakhpur. That is how I came. I did not want to do that going back. Instead, I thought I would take another bus from Butwal all the way across Nepal to its far western edge and from there enter the Indian state of Uttaranchal, where I could catch another bus to Delhi. The idea was to prolong my travel time in Nepal while cleverly avoiding the parallel route in India, especially the intolerably annoying crowds of predatory liars in Gorakhpur and Sunnauli. There is another border entry point at Mahendranagar/Banbassa (Nepal/India), which is very unpopular mostly because before the ceasefire the Maoists were frequently blowing up bridges along that way.

(By the way, if you're wondering whose side I'm on and it's hard to tell from my writing, I can't say I'm on anyone's side. When comes to the issues and grievances, I am certainly on the side of the Maoists. How could I possibly be in support of a religious monarchy? And I've been hearing about the crimes of the Nepali army for years -- rape, massacre, etc. Very, very few people, it seems, are in favor of the king or the royal government in general. The thing is that the Maoists are a military, too, and they have their own rap sheet. I think it's naive to give into romanticism and turn a blind eye to the horrors of the war and pretend that the Maoist violence is somehow "good" violence. It's very sad. So many people are displaced, squeezing an existence out of the fringes of Kathmandu because their own valleys and villages became to unstable and too violent. Many, many are dead. And to many of the living, this is all just a intractably complicated mess, above their heads and beyond their control. The hope is, of course, that the Maoists and the newly forming parliamentary government will emerge from the current talks as some kind of hybrid entity that is peaceful and fair to Nepal's most helpless people.)

Anyway, after spending one night in Butwal, I got up at sunrise to look for a bus to Mahendranagar. I was told first that none would leave until the afternoon, then told that I could get an earlier one to somewhere halfway and find another bus from there, and then I was told, once I was on such a bus, that the bus would go all the way to Mahendranagar after all. I was rolling by 9 a.m.

As soon as I entered the bus I was adopted by two teenagers whose names were Vinod and Sagar. Wonderful guys. I'm so sick of using the words wonderful, beautiful, blah blah, etc., but my vocabulary has simply been taken off guard by Nepal. Is it just my imagination, or are there fewer words for good things? Show me hell and I can tell you all about it in crisp, painful detail, but take me out and all I can do is bob around cooing "wonderful, beautiful" like a pigeon. I will figure this out and solve the problem, just give me some time.

So Vinod and Sagar sat with me and asked me lots of questions, and told me anything I wanted or needed to know along the way. We talked in a mix of broken English and broken Hindi.

After about an hour on the road, Vinod turns to me and says, "now we enter Kapilavastu." I don't know if that rings a bell for anyone. Kapilavastu was the name of the capital of the small kingdom ruled by Siddhartha Gautama's father. So this was it, the place we were always told about, where the Buddha-to-be threw open the curtains of his protected existence and wandered out to encounter the sick, dying, and dead. Siddharta Gautama was actually born in what is today Nepal, very close to Butwal (the town from which our bus had just left) in a town called Lumbini. There were wise old men that ascribed a certain importance to the baby and prophesied that he would become a great spiritual teacher. His father, the king, responded by keeping him on a tight leash and getting him married as young as possible. Much later, once Gautama had wandered all over northern India, broken through and become liberated, and wandered all over even more, teaching, he spent several monsoon seasons back in Kapilavastu. Anyway, I was pretty thrilled to be in that actual place. It was one of the prettier parts of the journey, actually -- tortuous roads around rocky hills patched with lush green ferns and deciduous trees. Some farms in the flatter parts. Apparently archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of what the believe to be the actual city of Kapilavastu, but there was nothing like that to be seen from the road, of course.

Most of Nepal is inaccessible by road. There are only a few roads in the whole country, really. If you look at a map of Nepal, you can see the few roads that exist. Those are all of them. It's not like looking at a map of Florida, for instance, where you see big freeways, then normal highways, and even the streets in the towns and cities, knowing that beyond that are countless smaller streets, roads, paved and unpaved. There is pretty much no such thing as a piece of property that you can't drive to, even way out in the boonies. In Nepal it is totally different. Except for a few main boulevard-style roads in the middle of Kathmandu, I saw not a single road in all Nepal that was wider than the minimum width for two vehicles to pass each other. And there aren't a bunch of side roads. For anywhere off the road, you have to walk. And most towns and villages in Nepal are nowhere near a road. They are only near trails. You can walk or take a helicopter.

So, I was on the Mahendra highway, which runs the length of Nepal from Mahendranagar in its southwestern corner to Kakarbhitta in the southeastern corner, along what's called the Terai. The Terai is the thin strip of Nepal that runs parallel to the Indian border and is flat -- before the earth is thrown up into the sky. It is all forest and farms. It's not all quite flat. Compared the nearby Himalayas it is flat, but not always flat enough to go very fast in a bus. My hope was to reach Mahendranagar by early evening or late afternoon so I could cross the Indian border and find an overnight bus to Delhi.

Not far past Kapilavastu, we came to the back end of a line of buses and trucks as far as we could see up the road. Our bouncy progress slowed to a halt. At first I thought it must be a Maoist roadblock. There were no hills in that particular spot so we knew it couldn't be a landslide. The driver put the bus in park, turned off the engine, and went off walking somewhere. Vinod, Sagar, and I decided to go up ahead and see what the problem was.

At the front of the line we came to a big knot of people talking to each other. There were a bunch of people, both men and women, adults and children, sitting on odd pieces of wood and logs that had been dragged into the middle of the road. Behind them was a pile of burning tires that was almost burnt out by that point. Beyond that, there was another line of crap dragged into the road, including a huge pile of heavy boulders and some large tree brances. Some local police were standing around casually chatting with the villagers and blocked truckers. I couldn't figure out what was going on, it was so strange.

It turned out that the there had been an accident the day before. A truck had collided with a motorcycle, both passengers of which had died. The people sitting on the logs and boulders in front of the burning tires were members of the victims' extended family or families. They were blocking the road until they received a large compensation payment from the truck company that owned the truck involved in the accident. They wanted 25 lakh Nepali rupees, I think. This was their civil suit, essentially, and the knot of people was a sort of ad hoc street court. The police didn't seem to think this was anything worth getting too upset about, and neither did anyone else. That was the funny thing -- no one was mad. Everyone behaved as if there had been a landslide, or all their engines had broken down. I was getting a little impatient, but I also felt so bad for the family. There was one old woman in particular who looked so brokenhearted as she sat there on a log. I imagine there was little else they could do but this roadblock. What else? Hire a lawyer? No way. File a suit themselves? Where? It's very possible that they could not even read.

It was about noon and sun was as high as it could be. It was at least 100 degrees F and there were no shadows anywhere, even if you stood with your back against the side of a truck. People all over were gathered under the trucks to kill time and discuss what to do. Some vans and trucks just turned around. Try again tomorrow, what's the difference. Today, tomorrow, the next day. Many bus drivers, including ours, decided to trade passengers with buses stuck on the other side of the roadblock. Underneath a big-wheeled truck, we gathered to get some money back for the portion of our journeys yet uncovered. This was a complicated, time-consuming process, with the conductor calculating each individual's fare and mileage on a piece of paper.

After about half an hour, Vinod, Sagar, and I were trudging up the road with our bags. The family just sat there as crowds of people dragged their posessions over the piles of boulders and logs. No one complained. No one even looked annoyed.

After about another hour of standing around working things out with bus people on the other side of the blockade, we were rolling again. I had given up hopes of getting a bus to Delhi that night, and was now just hoping to reach Mahendranagar before it was so late at night I'd have to sleep outside.

The bus I was on, it turned out, was not going all the way to Mahendranagar, and eventually I had to jump off and find another bus. In the end, I got to Mahendranagar too late to cross the border. I got a room and a simple dinner and started early the next morning to continue.

Can't write more now, gotta go.

quotations

Very good. The first three were quoted by Jon Krakauer in *Into Thin Air*. The last is from *The Algebra of Infinite Justice*.

"The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities." -- A. Alvarez, *The Savage God: A Study of Suicide*

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live ...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." -- Joan Didion, *The White Album*

"I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven... I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event." -- Harold Brodkey, "Manipulations"

"The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable." -- Arundhati Roy

pilfered photos

So, it's hard for me to put up my own photos because there are few places to get them off my camera, and then few cd drives to upload them from, and terrible internet connections. So I scrounged around for other people's photos to illustrate Nepal a little bit:

This is exactly what Kathmandu looked like when I arrived for the first time, except it was just after sunset then. Traffic was at a standstill. For the last leg of the trip, every bus we passed on the mountain road to Kathmandu looked like the one in this photo.

Not a very good photo, but this is a roadside military checkpoint, a more permanent/established looking one, to judge by the nice roof and meshed-in stone construction.

Om Mani Padme Hum, in Tibetan script. It is everywhere. This photo might have been taken on Swayambunath, the hill where the photo below was taken. It is one of the Kathmandu valley's main Buddhist places. One of my favorite places.

I love fog and mist. The fog and mist is a big reason they say not to visit Nepal at this time (it's rainy and you can't see the highest mountains), but fog and wetness are so perfect for Kathmandu, I can't imagine it without.

This is what the hills I explored looked like. High as the Rockies, but green and lush as rainforests, wickedly beautiful. I did not go to any snow-covered areas. That I hope to do when I return in October or November.

The ubiquitous Buddha eyes, on Freak Street signage. If Kathmandu had a single symbol, the Buddha eyes would be it.

unable to leave Nepal

Travel books say this is the worst time of year to go to Nepal. The U.S. State Dept. warns Americans not to come here. Predictably, I have been rewarded grandly for ignoring both.

As I mentioned in my first post about Nepal, I arrived here almost one month ago, at the beginning of June. I spent the first night in Butwal, which is a small town at the foot of the Mahabharat Range, just a few kilometers in. Looking back, it was nothing, but when I arrived there I was pretty enchanted with the vertical wall of green mountains rising just behind the town's last buildings. They sort of overlapped each other, like hands cupping some hidden goodie, and shot up high enough to be persistently carressed by clouds. This is the rainy season.

The next evening, after a really tough all-day ride in a bus on mildly terrifying mountain roads, I arrived in Kathmandu. It is always a strange and exhilarating experience, I think, to arrive after dark in a city in which one has never been before. As I mentioned in my first post about Nepal, the city was completely jammed with Maoist ralliers when we pulled in. 500,000 of them, according to the papers.

I eventually made it to a place to stay -- Freak Street. It used to be the place where all the counterculture Westerners came back in the 60's and 70's to run away and lose their minds, basically. It was dirt cheap then and is still about as cheap as it gets in Kathmandu. Quite the opposite from having turned into some awful faux-bohemian East Village situation, though, it has actually toned down so much that you almost have to look for signs of what it even used to be. It is almost exclusively occupied by locals now. You can see the old Freak Street in places like the Snowman Restaurant, though, a tiny graffiti-covered place that serves only pies and cakes, with the best rock music in the neighborhood, and which has been there since 1966. My small hotel looked out over a large open square that was always bustling with people, and across which was an area thick with very old temples and other buildings. A beautiful place.

Kathmandu (and Nepal in general) is full of intriguing little details. I like the intricately carved dark wood against white walls, atriums and terraces full of potted plants or hanging vines, and design that is obviously the result of centuries of communication and mixing between India and Tibet through and across the Himalayas.

Socially, I have to say it's quite a relief after India. I'm not the only one who feels that way. Kathmandu is full of foreigners who came here from India to renew their visas and are having a hard time leaving. It wasn't until I got here that I realized just how tough India is. There is this sort of hippy idea of India as this gentle place where sweet little bearded men will offer you a mango and tell you to enjoy life. It couldn't be more different. Any reputation that NYC ever had for being tough, mean, and cynical far more appropriate for northern India. (I hear the South is totally different). NYC is like Care Bear City compared to the average town in northern India. In India people throw rocks at you just for fun, out of boredom. Not just at foreigners, but at Indians, cars, trains, cows, dogs, whatever. That's just one example. India is tough. When I got to Nepal, I came my fists swinging, figuratively, telling people off, being really cynical, etc. It took a few innocent casualties before I realized no one was fighting back. It is so much gentler here, both in Kathmandu and out in the mountains. I'm still trying to figure out why. Even the dogs are nicer here. Probably because they're not constantly being kicked or having rocks thrown at them like in India. In India you'll see people walk up to a sleeping dog and throw a big rock at it just for fun.

There is also a lot more social freedom here, as far as I can observe. Women wear what they want more often. In India I have never seen any female in jeans in any city smaller than 12 times the size of Kathmandu. In Nepal you see girls wearing jeans even in very small towns. I'm not trying to say that it's good or bad for the whole world to start wearing jeans, but in India the men wear whatever they want -- kurtas, jeans, suits, it's their choice. The women are forced to wear absolutely only traditional clothing, which in Muslim areas is solid black at 45 C (110+ F). Nothing fair about that.

In Nepal, sex is more accepted as a natural part of life. This is apparent in little details, like the fact that condoms are sold openly in normal shops (you have to look for them in India, or go to pharmacies in big cities), right up there next to the shaving razors and cigarettes.

There is also a much greater variety of music, Nepali, Indian, and Western. Nepalis rock out. A typical music store here is not very different from one in New York in its variety, but with a lot more local music, of course. Next to the most comprehensive collections of Buddhist chants you could ever hope to find, you see things here like Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, the Pixies. The bookstores here are likewise excellent. Think St. Mark's Bookshop but with a heavy emphasis on Himalayan culture. In the largest bookstore here there is a whole room of nothing but books related to Buddhism. I really like Kathmandu.

A lot of the youth here has an attitude that I find very intriguing. Sort of a gentle punkiness. Something very likeable. It's hard to describe, but if you hang out with people here, it's not hard to imagine why the police had such a hard time with the protests and why they (the police) were ultimately defeated.

Foreigners in this part of the world attract a lot of attention and curiosity, inevitably. In India this can go well, but it goes badly far too often. It's sad, but it pisses me off -- for many men (the women are basically not alowed to express anything, ever, positive or negative) the only way they can come up with to spark up a conversation is to do some annoying and/or abusive thing. In Nepal, I have found it unfolds quite differently. I'll be walking somewhere or sitting on a bench and I'll notice that a group of boys will be glancing from a distance and maybe conferring among themselves about me (you get a knack for sensing this after a few months). Rather than do some asshole thing at that point, here they eventually approach cautiously and their elected spokesperson will gently say, "excuse me?" and then ask you where you are from and what you think of Nepal, questions like that. I have spent a lot of time wandering around with people I met that way. They are genuinely interested in asking you all about wherever it is you are from and in talking to you about Nepal. And the ones who aren't interested give you the respect of ignoring you as you walk down the street. That is much appreciated.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon walking all over with a group of four 20-something year old guys who were refugees from Bhutan who had come looking for day labor in Kathmandu. Sounds like Bhutan is pretty awful to its minorities, by the way. These guys were telling me about midnight police terror raids and being dragged out of homes to watch them be set on fire by these torture squads. Bhutan is one border country I forgot to list in the earlier post, when I was deciding where to get out of India. It was eliminated as a choice because they charge 200 USD PER DAY to visit there as a tourist, which I now imagine they use to terrorize their minorities.

After about a week in the city, I decided it was time to wander outside the Kathmandu Valley a little bit, and decided to go to Kodari, which is on the border with Tibet, northeast of Kathmandu. I packed my bags and went to the old bus station (there are two main ones), which is incredibly chaotic. I knew I needed to get a bus to Barabise, from where there would be buses to Kodari. There were hundreds of buses but I couldn't find any to Barabise. I couldn't find anyone who spoke English or Hindi. Finally, I found one to Barabise but it didn't leave for another three hours. At that point, a young guy who spoke some of both English and Hindi told me he was also going to Barabise and he thought we could get there by taking a bus to Banepa and looking for ongoing transportation there. Ok.

Bus travel in Nepal is very uncomfortable. Probably worse than India. It's hard to compare at this level. So far, though, I have found myself more frequently in more contorted positions here on Nepali buses, and in those positions among more and bigger non-human passengers, including huge tires, adult goats, chickens, sacks of rice and grains, long pipes and, on one bus, about seven or eight full Santa Claus -sized bags of rubber flip flops, bound for street vendors in Kathmandu.

So, on this ride I ended up in the aisle, holding the ceiling, with my head and shoulders bent far to one side so I could fit there, trying hard to keep my head far enough away from the hard ceiling to avoid slamming it there too often on the merciless, suspensionless bumps. My large backpack was balanced on the roof. My new travel companion, whose name was Upendra, had found a spot near the dashboard, which had about seven people stuffed around it. After about an hour and half, Upendra was suddenly running alongside the bus outside the window and banging on the side for it to stop. I didn't see him get off. The bus pulled over and he came to the door to tell me to get off. Ok.

I pulled my bag off the roof and looked around to see we were at a military checkpoint for the Nepali army. Some logs in the road and a bunch of spiralled razor wire led to a few piles of sandbags with rain cover, behind and around which several soldiers sat with machine guns while others stopped certain vehicles. Updendra had told me he was in the army, and this was relevant to our getting to Barabise in some way that I didn't understand at first. He was just in a t-shirt and loose pants. Upendra was, like such an incredible number of people here, extremely warm and sweet, the kind of guy it is hard to imagine being associated in with any army, certainly the U.S. army, despite matching the role physically. Hanging out with him highlighted the madness of the whole war thing here (and everywhere else).

We ended up hanging out at the checkpoint for about an hour. The soldiers were interested in talking about where I was from and all that stuff. Their supervisor seemed most interested in any advice or insight I had into the possibility of him ever making to the U.S. to work as a security guard for a bank or some place like that. "It must be paradise," he said. This is the common view. It's a difficult conversation to have. To respond fully and honestly means somehow conveying the misery, isolation, and emptiness of life in America while not diminishing the importance of some basic material welfare so lacking for so many people over in this part of the world -- enough food every day, basic healthcare, and education at least to the point of literacy, among other things. The soldier behind the sandbags and sod emerged at one point to show me his machine gun, which the supervisor said was his favorite of the various guns they had there, most of which were made partly of wood and had old-fashioned bolt actions. This one was full-length, satin black, with edges only slightly worn, a formidable magazine and all other parts perfectly fitting together like the underside of a black beetle. "It is made in America!" he said proudly, and the others nodded in agreement. The other guns, I found out, were from India. Much less exciting.

While we were chit-chatting, Upendra pulled over a truck or two to see where they were going. Finally he found one that was going to Barabise and motioned for me to hurry over. I hoisted my heavy bag up on my back and ran up the shoulder of the highway to the cab of this cargo truck, greeted its occupants with a few 'namaste's' and handed them by bag to throw behind them before climbing up myself. There were already four people up in the cab and now six with Upendra and me. Once everyone had all limbs safely tucked inside, the door was shut, the engine revved, and we were off to another bouncy start.

The driver was a very thin boy with bangs and looked like he was about 14, which means he was probably about 16. The steering wheel of this thing was half as big as his whole body. He sat perfectly straight up in the seat with both hands on the wheel and I could tell how intensely he was concentrating by how wide his eyes were and by the way his lips were always slightly puckered and slightly moving in a concerned sort of way. There was certainly plenty to be concerned about. We were on very narrow, dirt roads strung along the edges of steep mountains, passing other trucks and vehicles by hairs. Also, because this is the wet season, the road are in much worse condition than usual. I consciously resolved to relax, but still couldn't keep my eyes off the road.

The views from the road were stunning, of course. This is Nepal. After a few minutes, the boy driving reached up above and behind his head, never averting his gaze, grabbed a casette tape and started up an album of some very seductive Hindi music. At that point I was again reminded of what a wonderful thing it can be to be travelling completely alone. You just don't get the same luck and the same mobility if you are attached to anything more than a backpack. Even the backback is too much a lot of times. I want a divorce but I need the clothes and supplies.

After about an hour or two we came to a halt behind about six or seven trucks, cars, and buses (and a bunch of motorcycles, of course, as always) at a curve near the top of a hill. At first I assumed that there had been an accident or part of the road had washed away or something and we would be stuck. A boy in his late teens approached the driver's door of the cab and a there was some discussion in Nepali. I could only understand part of it -- anything having to do with numbers, because it's the same in Hindi -- and it was obviously about money. The boy outside was agitated and demanding, and kept yelling and making gestures to someone further away who was out of sight. He wanted 700 NR (about 10 USD), but the driver was pressing to pay only three or four hundred. It was the Maoists. They were collecting payments. The only one speaking in the whole cab was the driver. Everyone else was just silently staring ahead. I took their cue and decided to stay out of view, staying crouched behind the driver's seat because I didn't have enough money to pay for a Maoist visa fee, which they have been known to demand from foreigners (fairly enough, I think). The whole situation is so confusing. Here I had recently left a post of the royal military, and Upendra was getting a ride in this truck (in plain clothes, thankfully) specifically to go to his station, a military check point in Barabise. Between these two points, though, the Maoists had the road. After a third and more demanding visit from the boy on the road, they agreed on 500 rupees, and by that time the congestion ahead had cleared and we started rolling again.

It was raining hard when we pulled into Barabise, which was a tough little town. It was already about 6 p.m., too late to get another bus to Kodari, which was still 30 km away on this twisting, messed up road. I might have found some other combination of rides and walking, but the rain was torrential and I was already soaked. I ran inside a gray wooden building where Upendra showed me I could stay for the night. There wouldn't be any shopping around this evening.

The proprieter of the place, which was a restaurant with rooms above, was a small but very tough-looking man with a deep, hoarse voice. He spoke no English but fluent Hindi, and offered me a room for only 80 rupees, a little over 1 USD. There was no refusing it, so I followed him to the back of the restaurant and up a narrow wooden staircase so dark the man had to repeatedly flick a lighter to illuminate the steps. After several hairpin turns we entered a long hall with about a dozen simple beds in it. Next to those were the private suites -- that's where I was headed. These individual rooms were created from thin wood. Mine had two beds in it and a large window looking down onto the muddy main drag of Barabise. It was very, very simple, but clean enough.

It was just the bathroom that I'd try to avoid. The man had flicked his lighter in front of the door, which was on the way up the stairs. "Toilet," he had said, as if that were necessary. It could be smelled from the floors below and above it. My room was just outside its range. On the door, painted in all-caps letters similar to what you might use as font for a horror movie poster, was the word "TOYLOT".

The toylot was not a good place. You see, this is the inevitable thing that happens when we prissy foreigners go new places. We write home about the toilets. I'm sorry I can't help it. Some of the toilets here just burn themselves into all one's senses and refuse to fade away in memory like other things do. I finally had to pee. I ventured closer and hesitantly opened the door. Moments later, I was inside the Toylot. It was so dark. Did I mention there was no electricity and the sun was already gone? There was only one tiny window, anyway, one at the level of the soil -- the hotel was pressed into the side of a hill. The whole interior was dripping wet. It was a dark brown concrete. It reminded me of parts of the Tower of London I saw as a kid, like those miserable stone tunnels in which they'd stuff people who had used the wrong fork at dinner or farted near the queen. It was a long bathroom. Lots of unnecessary distance from the door to the toilet. And no running water. This was a perfect example of a bathroom situation where it would almost be better simply to have no bathroom at all -- where the bathroom just serves as a sort of clearinghouse for filth. Anyway, enough about the bathroom.

I was called for dinner about an hour after it got dark (I had just been sitting on my bed, staring out the window). The first floor was a barebones restaurant. There were about six large tables with benches on either side of them. About 15 people were eating when I descended the staircase, but I could hardly see their faces in the candlelight. I sat down next to a friendly married couple. I hadn't eaten since Kathmandu and I was starving. A boy about six or seven years old came and put a plate of rice in front of me, and an older girl followed up with some dal, cooked vegetables, and one fried egg. Good food. I ate everything, then asked for a candle before heading back up to my bedroom. A bus early the next morning took me to the Tibet border at Kodari, which wasn't anything too dramatic. I walked to the border, rolled my eyes at the Chinese guards swaggering around (Free Tibet!) and decided to walk back the 3 km to Tatopani, where I could spend a few days in peace. This is such an extremely beautiful place. On the road I was joined by about 10 little kids who lived in Tatopani and just wanted to horse around with me. It was raining by the time we reached the town.

Tatopani (tato + pani) means "hot water" in Nepali. That's because there are hot springs there. That's the real reason I went there. Tatopani is on the Bhote Kosi river, which runs about 100 feet below the road. Everything is very steep and vertical. If you look up from the road, you see that the rocky cliffs are draped in countless strings of Tibetan prayer flags, which I was told are to prevent landslides and other falling rock misfortunes. Tatopani is a Sherpa area (and Sherpas are Buddhist). You walk down a long set of stairs to near the river banks and there is a small temple. The hot water comes from beneath that. One level below, out of a stone wall, the water pours out of the mouths of eight lion heads. Most people go there just to bathe. The identical looking mountain wall on the other side of the river is Tibet.

I can't write any more now, I'm too tired, and I have already written so much. The truth is that I cannot write everything I want to write about Nepal unless I spend most of my time here writing. The mountaintops, the temples and stupas that are on top of them, the monkeys that are on top of the temples and stupas, the tiny trails through thick forests, the wonderful people I have met, both native and foreign, I want to write about it all, but I have to keep moving. I'll have to leave most things unsaid. I love Nepal. I'll leave it at that.