As we gathered in the lobby of the Katmandu Guest House to await Sanga and the bus, Carl and Bill were still screwing around with their duffels. My immediate concern was to make sure everyone was prepared to leave the hotel when the bus arrived. We would be gone for eight days. I was energized by the anticipation of getting out of the polluted air of Katmandu and into the mountains.
After our unanimous vote to trek to Basa, Sanga and I had told the other members what they needed to do to be ready for the bus the morning of our delayed departure. Everyone needed their passports on the trek, but they should leave any unnecessary documents and valuables in the hotel safe. Sufficient currency should have been exchanged into Nepali rupees for the trek, hotel keys turned in, and each member's return registration confirmed with the hotel management. Duffels were supposed to be packed and extra luggage already checked into the KGH storage room. While I scurried around trying to make sure everyone would be ready for the bus and getting myself checked out of the hotel, I noticed Bill was still struggling with his duffel. I wasn't sure why Carl had his open beside Bill's. Bill looked nervous and Carl looked a little put out. But I had my own issues to attend to, so I just reminded them they needed to have their shit together by the time Sanga told us to load up.
Carl later told me that Bill had so much stuff in his duffel he couldn't close the zipper. Bill had three pillows in his duffel, including a pink one with built-in headphones. Niru's gear list stated that the company provided a pillow on the trek for anyone who needed one, so there was no need to bring a pillow, let alone three pillows. So, while the rest of us were checking out of the hotel, Carl was kindly making space in his duffel to accommodate some of Bill's excess baggage.
I realized I was becoming irritated with Bill, and perhaps beyond what was reasonable. When Sanga said the bus was ready for us, Bill wanted to stop everything and take a group picture in front of the KGH. I was getting antsy to get on the road, and we could have taken a group picture at the hotel anytime in the last two days, but of course, Sanga smiled agreeably and helped Bill get everyone arranged into a satisfactory pose. My irritation did seem excessive for the minor delay. Bill was thinking about preserving the moment, while I was concentrated on getting through it to begin the next moment—the road trip.
Anyway, we were off, but almost as soon as the bus moved into traffic in the narrow streets of Thamel, there was a minor accident in front of us. That sort of thing is just life in Katmandu. Minor accidents are common in my experience, but I have never seen a traffic accident with serious bodily injury in Katmandu. But now it was Bill who was upset; he began demanding that our driver get off this street. Sanga smiled and laughed as if he thought Bill must be joking, but he got out of the bus and helped the motorcyclist who had been bumped by a car move his motorcycle out of the way so we could pass.
Once we were out of the Katmandu Valley, the road trip became typical of driving in rural Nepal—a long, hazardous ride up and down narrow, winding roads through many one-rooster villages. Though the road to Jiri is dirt for stretches, it is mostly paved, constructed with funds provided by a Swiss organization.
Traffic drives on the left as in England and India, the two countries that have had the most influence on Nepal. Pedestrians in towns walk in front of vehicles with impunity, not, I think, out of ill intent, but out of a sense that moving quickly is not of particular importance. Roadway villages are usually a crappylooking conglomeration of tin shanties thrown up around older stone and wood structures, with the occasional petrol station, tire repair shop, and roadside eatery with bhat (rice), chiyaa (tea), and chang (beer).
Roadside villages in the Himalayan foothills, as in most Third World countries, are a collection of poor people trying to eke out a living connected in some way with the commerce passing on the highway. Many have left nearby farms. The roadside villages above the Katmandu Valley are not aesthetically appealing to most eyes, but they are usually surrounded by lush green hills terraced with little farm plots of rice, millet, or barley. These pretty little farms mediate the contrast between the ugliness of human poverty inside the village and the beauty of nature's hills and valleys. When people mass into close quarters to try to live off of commerce, the result seems to be ugliness. It may be pastoral romanticism, but it also seems to me that when people live off the bounty of the land in small groupings, they enhance the beauty of the earth, rather than detracting from it.
I was really looking forward to getting out of the city, off the roads, and onto mountain trails, trekking through villages that cannot be reached by motor vehicles.
The group dynamics of expeditions can range from warm and comradely to interesting to volatile. As the bus ride from Katmandu to Jiri was twelve hours and we had already spent more than two days together, our group dynamics were taking shape. This group had only one woman, Karen, an attractive thirty-five-year-old brunette. From the first day in Katmandu, Bill paid particular attention to Karen, calling her “sweetheart,” and making a point of sitting by her and walking with her. Sexual tension is always an interesting dynamic. I doubted anything would come of Bill's attentiveness to Karen, as he was a bald, overweight, over-fifty married man. I assumed he would not be particularly attractive to Karen. She, however, seemed to enjoy Bill's attention. Bill is clever, bright, and a gentleman. But I was worried that the growing fondness between Bill and Karen would add a dimension of difficulty to the hoped-for cohesiveness of our group. No one else seemed bothered, so I wrote it off as another symptom of my irrational irritation with Bill.
As we traveled east away from the Katmandu Valley and deeper into the Himalayan foothills, the scenery became more engaging. The road followed the Sun Kosi (River of Gold), which we eventually crossed by a steel suspension bridge. Then the road wound through and out of a great valley created by the river. Our driver carefully negotiated switchbacks up the side of the valley until we were tracking along the ridgeline road.
David showed us his impressive set of camera gear and lenses as we bumped along in our little bus. He does photography for the LA Galaxy soccer team, and was clearly the most practiced and prepared of all the shutter bugs in the group.
Scenic photo ops became more frequent. One town we drove through, Dolkha, had the Communist hammer and sickle symbol painted in red on many of its buildings. Sanga nodded and said, “Maoists,” in response to our questioning looks.
Carl asked Sanga to tell us about the history of the Maoist rebellion. While Sanga described the bloody revolt that ended with King Gyanendra being deposed, there were different reactions among the group members. Carl listened attentively. Karen asked whether there was a spiritual dimension to the civil war. David listened with a cocked ear but continued looking out the window for scenic photo opportunities. Bill wanted to argue a few points about the socioeconomic causes of the revolt. Dax butted in a few times, trying to bring the history lesson to a close.
Dax was impatient to bring the attention of the group back to its primary focus during the long bus ride, which was Dax. During the ride, Dax engaged in almost nonstop comedic and intentionally inflammatory commentary. Dax loves to get under other people's skin. He is a loquacious New Yorker transplanted to LA and enjoyed outtalking the laconic Hoosiers, Carl, Bill (originally from Indiana), and me; the laidback Californian, David; and Karen with her languid Mississippi drawl. If he senses any homophobia, Dax makes sure to play up his gayness; if he senses an effort to show one's liberal acceptance of gays, he makes jokes about gays.
But more than just making jokes, Dax talks, and talks, and he doesn't stop talking. Once he gets going, it is like a dam has broken and words flood out in an unrelenting torrent. He mostly talks about himself—what he likes in food, his taste in clothing, the latest redecoration of his house, the real estate prices in his neighborhood, his most recent car or motorcycle purchase. Occasionally, he will interrupt the flow to ask your opinion, or to allow comment by another, but he will deftly cut off the interlocutor and (to mix a metaphor) gallop off in some other direction, paying no attention to what was said. Dax does this with complete self-consciousness and knowledge of the effect on others, and while he was holding forth on the bus, every now and then he would smile slyly at me or wink, to let me know, I think, not to take offense; he was just doing his Dax thing to properly introduce the rest of the group to what they had to look forward to on the trail with Dax.
Dax and I had been tent mates in Ladakh in 1996 and friends since then. We corresponded by email, visited each other a couple of times, and spent two days rock climbing the Gunks in upstate New York a few years after our '96 expedition. (The drive to the Gunks from New York City in Dax's new yellow Porsche Carrera was a trip!) And Dax was a member of our 2007 Langtang-Helambu expedition. He had been a good friend. And despite his exterior display of narcissism, when needed, Dax is a good listener and caretaker.
Dax was unable to do the climb of Kanglachen in '96. He was so heavy with upper body muscle that he was very slow and unsteady on the trail, got severely sunburned and dehydrated, and had mild altitude sickness before we reached base camp. Our leader, John Roskelley, ordered Dax, over Dax's strong objections, to hike out of the mountains with a group of Israelis who were on their way out and had four-wheel drive vehicles awaiting them for the drive back to Leh. Dax considered this experience humiliating, although he knew John's decision was the correct one. Over the next year, Dax shed forty pounds of muscle, trimmed down to 185, ramped up his cardio-aerobic training and left behind the bodybuilder lifestyle to become an outdoorsman.
If one is in the right mood, Dax is delightfully funny when he does his comedic-irritating schtick. If not, he's just irritating. Our group of six plus Sanga were happy to be on the road to Jiri in our little white Tata bus. And Sanga's happy-sirdar disposition set the tone, so for the most part, we enjoyed Dax on that twelvehour bus ride.
The bemused but confused look on Sanga's face when Dax made gay jokes or references told me that he didn't really understand what was going on, but, like a good sirdar, he would laugh at whatever the rest of us laughed at. When we had a moment alone, Sanga asked me to explain Dax. Sanga had not had a gay member in any of his groups, at least that he knew of. He was shocked and intrigued when I explained that Dax is a homosexual. He treated Dax no differently after our private talk. In a tone of urgency to me, however, Sanga requested that we not let the villagers in Basa know that Dax is homosexual. He said, “They would not understand it.”
We arrived in Jiri well after dark. Sanga directed our driver to a lodge on the main street. We pulled our duffels off the bus, and the lodge owner directed us to three rooms on the second floor. The rooms were the typical for Himalayan mountain lodges: plywood-walled cubes with a window.
Bill offered to share a room with Karen. When he discovered she had brought a battery-powered sound machine with her because she cannot sleep without its soothing oceanic music, he immediately asked Carl to trade rooms. Accommodating Carl placidly agreed, so Bill and Dax shared a room, as did David and I. In the morning and during the rest of the trek, many jibes were made at Karen's expense about her sound machine. “You come across the world to sleep outdoors in the Himalayas and bring a machine so you can hear the ocean, jeez!” She took the criticism in good humor and, each night on the trek, lapping ocean sounds were heard from her tent, perhaps for the first time in the Himalayas.
It was a good night for me, getting to know my cuz. We peed together standing atop the second floor ledge—male bonding.
The next morning, a little brouhaha broke out in Dax and Bill's room. Dax discovered that Bill had brought four pairs of blue jeans and a pillow collection. He was incensed that Bill expected a porter to carry these useless items on the trek. Blue jeans, like pillows, were not on Niru's list of items to bring on the trek. The most inappropriate pants one could pick for trekking are blue jeans; they are too heavy, too hot, and too tight to move comfortably on mountain trails. What was Bill thinking! Why did he ignore Niru's clear directions of what to bring on the trek? I never got an answer to that question from Bill.
Dax reamed him out, lecturing him on the fact that another human being would be carrying Bill's overstuffed duffel loaded with useless stuff. After dressing him down, Dax sorted through Bill's duffel, picked out appropriate clothing, and then ordered Bill to dress “like Jeff and I do on the trek.” Fortunately, Bill had brought one pair of wind pants, which he wore every day after that.
But the sun was shining, we could see the mountains beyond Jiri, and we ate a large hot breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast at the lodge. Off we went, our first day on the trail to Basa.