Nepal’s second biggest city, Pokhara, is a handy base for people who are preparing to go trekking in the Annapurna region which means that a huge number of foreigners go there and their needs are amply provided for. Fern and I weren’t planning on trekking but we decided to call Pokhara home for a while. It was vitally important that Fern have a package of specialized medication sent to her from the US so we needed to have an address long enough to make the arrangements and wait for it to be shipped. We rented an apartment and got settled in. There’s nothing all that exciting about Pokhara but it’s cheap, one can find just about anything they need there, and the views of the Himalayas are wonderful.
It’s nice to have a little break once in a while, especially in a place like Nepal where traveling from town to town can be exhausting. The last time we did this was in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which is similar to Pokhara in many ways. Something resembling normal life ensued for us. Every morning Fern did yoga and I further developed my on-the-road workout routine. The presence of a kitchen gave us not only the opportunity to cook whatever we wanted but the rewarding task of going to local markets in search of ingredients. Over the course of about six weeks we developed some friendly relationships with local merchants, something that generally doesn’t happen when we move around so much.
An important Nepali holiday occurred while we were there, known by a few different names – Tihar, Deepawali, or the festival of lights. It takes place over the course of several days and each day is different. Colorful patterns were made in the streets with powdered pigments and offerings of flowers, fruit, and other foods were placed pretty much everywhere. It was adorable the way different animals were honored on specific days. On one day cows were honored so we would see random cows wandering through the street picking at the offerings with bright red smudges on their foreheads and necklaces of flowers and piles of decorated cow dung. Another day dogs were honored. Other animals had their moments in the spotlight too. There were more family oriented parts of the festival that we didn’t really see. In the afternoons the streets were dotted with gatherings including music and dancing and in the evenings the buildings were adorned with candles and strings of colorful lights.
The apartment we rented was on the third floor of a small building and our kitchen window looked out over the dwelling of a neighboring family. They lived in a makeshift little shack sandwiched between two larger concrete homes and it was impossible for us not to see their activities. It was actually pretty interesting just to see how they lived. The matriarch of the house was almost always around and there was a constantly shifting cast of other people coming and going. There were men and women of all ages and one man who was probably the woman’s husband. There were two children who climbed around and got into all sorts of entertaining situations. Some of the guys would show up with freshly caught fish and then sit there and clean them. Several people could be seen cooking up huge batches of curry. Overall there were quite a few people for such a small space and I couldn’t tell for sure if they were all family or not but it didn’t seem to matter. Anyone was welcome and they brought what they could and everyone was taken care of. A bottle was passed around a small fire in the evenings (Nepalis are big drinkers) and they got a little rowdy. There was a lot of laughter. This was probably a very ordinary Nepali family, barely scraping by on a tiny income by western standards, but they had a warm sense of community and at least on the surface they appeared to be really happy. The two children, who may have been twins, were sooooooooooo cute.
There was one thing that we didn’t love about our place. It was almost impossible to get a decent night’s sleep because of all the noise. Dogs would bark their heads off in the streets for hours at a time throughout the night and sound reverberates like crazy in the all-concrete buildings. Around midnight another neighbor (the large family in the shack was actually very considerate) would go outside on the balcony and take ridiculous sounding phone calls that involved a lot of yelling into the phone very near our window. A few hours later the hacking began.
For some reason that I don’t quite understand, and Fern and I have brainstormed possible explanations at length, Nepalis have this whole spitting thing that they do. Spitting is extremely common in many countries but in Nepal it has become such a dramatic gesture that it’s funny and annoying at the same time. The spitting part is fairly normal but it’s what comes before the spitting that is so grotesque and bewildering. There is a harsh raspy clearing of the throat which is apparently more effective the louder it is and it is performed anywhere, everywhere, all the time. Our neighbor had a special knack for the technique. He emerged about three in the morning and created rippling waves of bodily noise that seemed to originate in the stomach. It sounded like deliberate controlled vomiting combined with clearing a thick lining of phlegm from the trachea to be expelled with pizazz, gusto, personality. This practice took place every morning at the same time and it went on for a long time, right outside our bedroom window.
When the spitting had been over just long enough for us to fall asleep (around 4 a.m.) another neighbor would come out with a huge pile of all-metal plates, bowls, cups, and other especially resonant eating vessels and wash them by slamming them against each other and clanging them around as much as possible. A little known fact – the louder you wash your metal dishes the cleaner they get, just like the throat clearing. Then there was a about an hour of relative quiet before the tractors without mufflers started to slowly pull carts of melons, steel rebar, and cow poop through the streets.
The sleepless nights were wearing us down so we tried an experimental solution. There were occasions such as rough and frightening bus rides when we discovered that taking a Xanax (a common anti-anxiety drug) helped us to relax and basically just sleep through the experience. Despite the fact that it’s technically a prescription drug it is readily available in Nepal simply by asking for it. So we tried it out to see if it would help us sleep. After all, one of the difficulties with trying to sleep while listening to someone vomit and spit for 45 minutes is the mental agitation, not just the volume of the noise itself. The Xanax helped quite a bit and we both started to get a lot more sleep.
One evening a couple of weeks later I sat down on the couch and I asked Fern to sit down next to me. I put my arm around her and started crying for no particular reason and it went on for a long time. I haven’t cried like that since, well, any time in recent memory. Of course Fern wanted to know what was wrong but I told her I didn’t want to talk about it. I honestly didn’t know, only that I felt empty, and depressingly sad images of myself had been haunting my mind. There are certainly some emotional challenges that go along with being on the road for so long but nothing really explained this. Fern sank into a deep depression as well and her smiles were few and far between. Something was not right. Was it just that we were bored with being stuck in Pokhara with nothing exciting to do? Was it that we missed our family and friends and felt lonely? Was it a lack of purpose? How could we be on such an adventurous journey and feel so terrible?
Curiosity arose in me one day and I decided to do a little basic internet reading on Xanax, to see what the proper dosage is for which specific conditions and perhaps most importantly, if there were any side effects. It wasn’t long before I started to suspect that Xanax may have been having a very negative impact on our emotional well-being. For one thing, I discovered that it’s extremely addictive and withdrawal symptoms can be very serious. People with diagnosed anxiety problems take a fraction of a pill a couple of times a day but we were taking one or two pills before bed but not maintaining a consistent level. In a sense we were inadvertently overdosing and going through withdrawal every day. Considering these things it seemed to me that the likelihood of negative and less common side effects was pretty high. Many pharmaceutical drugs have an alarmingly long list of possible side effects, especially ones that tinker with brain chemistry, and this one is no different. A few things that jumped out at me after a quick search for side effects were fatigue, difficulty concentrating, feelings of isolation, depression, unusual changes in mood, discouragement, feeling sad or empty, irritability, loss of interest or pleasure, confusion about identity, place and time, environment seeming unreal, general feeling of discomfort or illness, lack of feeling or emotion, and even thoughts of killing oneself. I was also surprised to learn that, at least according to one medical website, Xanax is one of the most abused drugs in the world with addiction and the corresponding unpleasant withdrawal occurring often.
Oopsy daisy! Sleep or no sleep, it was time to stop taking Xanax. It took a surprisingly long time for both of us to feel normal again but I’m happy to say that our failed experiment with Xanax seems to have been the cause of the trouble and we were able to get on with our generally happy lives.
It was somewhat nerve-wracking having to wait for Fern’s package to get delivered. Nepal is not known for its delivery services (or even having navigable roads, for that matter) and the consequences for Fern would be dire if her medication got lost or mailed to the wrong place or sent back to the US because they couldn’t find the address or it didn’t make it through customs. Once the tracking system stopped providing updates we got a little concerned and stopped in at the shipping store to ask about it and the guy had Fern’s package sitting there under his desk. Whew!
Now that the medication was out of the way we were getting antsy to see something a little different and hopefully get closer to the mountains. Since trekking around Annapurna wasn’t on our agenda we picked a village that was closer to the mountains called Sikles and thought it might make a good place to do some day hiking. Maybe we could take a motorcycle there. Sikles is about 17 kilometers (10.5 miles) from Pokhara. When we talked to people about our plan they thought the motorcycle was a bad idea because they said it would take five or six hours to get there on a rough road. I figured there must have been some miscommunication going on. Maybe they were thinking of a different town. It couldn’t possibly take five hours to go 17 kilometers. I could jog there faster than that.
Due to the extremely poor maintenance of the motorcycles at the place where we intended to rent one (blessing in disguise?) we decided not to take a motorcycle. We packed our stuff up and took the bus and it turned out to be one of the roughest bus rides we’ve had so far. It would be entirely possible for a person to suffer from whiplash simply from being on a ride like this. The road wasn’t paved at all and there was a steep drop off at the edge of the road. The bus spent the majority of the time in first gear. Even the locals looked around with smiles on their faces because it was humorously ridiculous that a full size bus would travel such a road and it ended up being a lot like a carnival ride. And guess what. It took five hours. Average speed ~ two mph.
I had previously read some stuff online suggesting that Sikles was a nice destination for tourists wanting to experience a well preserved traditional Gurung village (an ethnic group inhabiting many small villages up in the Himalayas) and there were travel agents touting treks to Sikles. What we found was indeed a beautiful traditional village but the only foreigners who went there were trekkers. Accommodations for trekkers are not on the same scale of quality as normal accommodations. There were extremely limited choices when it came to finding a place to stay and finding food. We found the people of the village to be very friendly except, unfortunately, the person who ran the guesthouse where we stayed. Our stay in Sikles was short, but we did manage to soak up some of the beauty of the place. The unpaved road came to the edge of town and ended there. Narrow cobblestone walkways meandered through the traditional stone homes and farming terraces flowed down the steep mountainside from the village. Children in their school uniforms excitedly waved and said hello to us. Older people who spoke no English stopped and tried to chat with us or help us find our way.
We took a day hike up from the village to a point with some wide open views of the Annapurna range. This was the closest we would get to those peaks, some of which were in the neighborhood of 26,000 feet. The viewpoint was a nice place to sit and relax. We just stared at it in awe. There was a deep rumble of noise that we heard a couple of times before realizing that it was an avalanche and eventually we saw where it was happening. It happened several times and we watched as a narrow ravine produced what looked like a waterfall but it was actually snow flowing down the mountain. On our way down we stopped to hang out with a small herd of buffalo for a while. These buffalo had it pretty good. They stared at us and we stared at them. As we got nearer to town we passed a couple of Gurung ladies sitting on the hillside singing. They had beautiful smiles and a beautiful song and they appeared to be fully enjoying themselves. I think a little of the local rum may have loosened them up. They could have been making fun of us for all we knew but it sure was nice to see them enjoying the afternoon in in this way, on this peaceful mountainside.
On the night before we were leaving I met a couple of guys at our guesthouse who were trekking through the area – a slightly older Norwegian man and his younger Nepali guide, who was also his friend of several years. They described an aspect of Nepali society to me that I was unaware of, having to do with the caste system. When they were ready to eat dinner the guide went into the kitchen to let them know. The ladies working in the kitchen at the guesthouse wanted to serve the Norwegian first, and when he was done eating they would serve the guide, who was considered low caste. The Norwegian insisted that they eat together. When the guide went into the kitchen they made him leave, which was an improvement over how things are in some other places and how they were here in the not-so-distant past. Tradition would dictate that after being contaminated by a person of low caste, the kitchen would need to undergo a ritual cleansing before they could serve food to anyone of higher caste and they would angrily bar him from entering the kitchen to avoid having to go to this extra trouble. It’s normal for people to ask a newly met person their name, where they’re from, and what kind of work they do which in part helps them to determine their caste and whether or not they actually need to treat them with respect. They can also tell somewhat by certain physical features although that can be misleading. The guide explained to me that in some towns if he neglected to give his full name he was occasionally mistaken for a Brahmin, or high caste, because of his facial features and they would treat him completely differently.
This system is slowly changing and it exists in other old fashioned Hindu populations as well, in India and perhaps other places. It hurt a little to talk this intelligent, soft spoken, sincere young man and know that for him inequality is blatantly built in to the system. Of course the same is true in my own country and probably most places on earth but that doesn’t really make it easier to accept.
As Fern and I have visited small villages and seen little pieces of a very old-world traditional way of life, it’s easy for me to focus on parts of the picture that seem simpler, healthier, and more natural than life in a technology/media driven modern frenzy of overconsumption that is the modern western city. There are, however, drawbacks to traditional ways and it’s not realistic for me to overlook that. Systematic inequality is a tradition that would be best abandoned to the history books, regardless of which country we’re talking about. Progress is definitely happening but change is slow in the the mountain villages of Nepal.
jim@snorkelbandits.com