22. Sadhu Susan - or My Kingdom for an Imodium!

Namaste from inside a tent.

A tent called Bliss

I have spent the last few days at the restful Himalayan Yoga Centre, 1/2 hour from Thamel by taxiclackle (400rp), or backwards by rattleclackle (15rp) which includes hiphop youths with wrap around mirror sunglassess, shy girls giggling behind their hands, toothless grannies hugging their walking sticks, and other assorted villagers carrying drinks in pink plastic bags.  My package deal: 4 nights 5 days,  $190us includes all meals, super-deluxe safari tent, (double zips), hot water bottle, daily health treatments, food, yoga, silence, clean air and walks. Hmm. Just what my fried brains needed.

Alas it was not restful, because I arrived there, sick as a sick dog in Nepal, and that's sick.  I have spent the last three days crapping my insides out into buckets, long drops and bushes;  vomiting bile until I saw stars and wishing someone would chop off my pounding head with a powdered willy stick.  My biggest blessing, for which I thank everything there is in the universe, was the western toilet, (when I could make it) with a seat that didn't slither away as I attempted to crash land.  Damp mothballs in the sink covered up the stink and frightened away mosquitoes.  And a shower with boiling water, hand mixed with glacial water from a tap a meter away.  As the weak Himalayan sun sneaked over the peaks, I brushed my teeth in the brisk open air, with a headlamp on my forehead:  other guests dodged to share my beam.  The power is out for 16 hours a day.  

Camping in the Himalayas for the Foolhardy is not for those weaned at  Club Med.  This isn't Everest Base Camp, and I'm not Sir Edmund trying for immortality and a high flying flag. I'm just an insane, currently lost woman from Avalon, on what sort of a mission I'm yet to find out.  The demons are at me, thick and fast.  It's still 6 degrees at night, and I'm sleeping under canvas. So I'm Horizontal on Camp Bed at 8pm, trying not to count the stones beneath my fragile, bruised body and calm the cacophony of cerebral pyrotechnics.  Zips up. I wanted to snap off my frozen vapour and bring it under the covers to warm it up but I didn't want to risk losing my hand to the elements.  I pray for daybreak.  I hold onto bladder ablutions as long as possible, then totter in the pitch dark, under a zillion-star sky and rock bands of hysterically barking dogs, to the communal bathroom at 2am.  The headlamp flickers on top of my beanie, and I'm padded in every fleas jacket I own so I won't freeze to the cement. 

To paraphrase TS Elliott: The aim of all our travelling is to discover that you will never again take anything - not even a grain of salt when you are dehydrated - for granted. 

I'm a sadhu in the making. My hair is matted because I haven't got my expensive conditioner.  My hands are crinkled as a chapatti because the water is always cold and I'm probably dehydrated. My nose runs faster than I do.  I walk with my hands in prayer position, begging for gastric salvation.  I grin beautifically at those who pass because I'm half crazed with migraine induced hypothermia and poop induced hypoglacaemia and apoplectic as a result of previous.  I can put my nose to the ground while kneeling, because I no longer have curves!   To be fair, the setup is lovely.  The garden is divine, spotless;  from across the valley most of the day I can hear children singing in the local school, and tune into their flute lessons. Gongs and conch horns warble across the mountains from the monasteries, punctuating the prayer cycles and reminding me where I am. In the lazy afternoons there's the option to learn the local cuisine of momo or russian salad at the hands of the chef: two months married and he is still always in a hurry to go home, his life spread between two worlds.  He has his wedding photos on facebook but lives in a village a long way, hours,  away.

Not Switzerland - Himalayan Yoga Centre

We eat together around a round table in the sun, on the lawn, under an umbrella or in a small dining room with a plastic table cloth over a plastic table.  Vegetables and dahl, dahl and vegetables, repeat.  Breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is just was I need and want, apart from getting more sick while I was here.  The plan was a few hours yoga soon after daybreak, then a remedial massage, then lunch, then a walk, or explore, or ramble through the villages or to local sites like the Monkey Forest Temple or monasteries, then a meditation, dinner, talk, and bed.  Alas, the first night was very, very cold; a tent in the Himalayas for Shiva's sake!  My immune system rapped me sharply over the knuckles and hammered me with everything it could for being so irresponsible. I woke with a horrible cold, still a bit of migraine, then the ups and outs.

I had one oil massage which I didn't enjoy at all, as I'm not used to lying starkers under a recycled scratchy towel being fondled by a female stranger, and I shivered the whole time. The next day the masseuse heated the room, but it's not my favourite way to spend hours. I'm leaving a few more attempts for similar experiences in Maroc and Turkiye.

Dr Subodh intoned Buddhist philosophy and sage words for all sessions:  sitting on his dais, cross legged and calm, he helped suffuse us with light.   However, he is Nepali, I am English. The other guests were from Colombo, Canada, Italy and Spain. He spoke an "English" that they understood.  I was lost in translation to the towers of Babel.  I have no idea, at all, what he said - it sounded like a flowing river of syllables, leaping over rocks and getting lost in eddies. I recognised a word here and there, like Mantra, and Being, and even Japan (which I thought was an Asana till I saw the newspapers after breakfast and realised he was repeating some news).  I just sat there, wrapped in my fleas blanket, looking as beautific as I could manage, considering the lights in my head, the percussion in my stomach, the cat scratch pad in my throat, the spinning prayer wheels in my lungs and the ache in my lower back.

I chanted all the Oms, and Suck Your Muti's, and Prana Yamas, and Shanti babas, and did my left and right rotational nostril breathing, and my lion roars, and cobra poses, and pant pant pant pants, and tried really hard to put my ankle behind my ear, and think only that Today is the One, Now is the One, and notwithstanding, the morning sun beaming onto my battered body through the open door to the valley, was indeed beatific. I could hear the owls call my name, imagined the stairway to heaven calling me, calling me: seeing the beams of radiance that I would ascend and leave this earth's journey ... wings flapping, choirs of angels .... my sarong had become a magic carpet ... 

A doctor was called from the village, who arrived two hours later on a bicycle and attended to me in the garden where I had been laid to rest.  Inside his worn leather bag were antique instruments, tubes, syringes; luckily he used only his stethoscope and fingers that flipped and flopped around me.  Hollowed depressions were tutted at. Eyes prised open and ears peered into.  Pale skin pinched and parched throats paletted.

I had beauty parlour brain boil, and I was surviving by the skins of my teeth.

Ayu Should Ha Warnd Yu.  

Apparently the treatment I had at that shonky beauty parlour place in Thamel is not only very, very dangerous, it's illegal in Nepal. When I managed to explain where it was, there was more tut tutting and eye rolling.    That open steam bath, at very high temperatures, exposing the head and eyes, could have killed me. Children die in hot cars.  Sane adults lose their marbles in deserts.   Sunstroke can pickle a person. What the parlour was pumping out was enough to fuse half of Kathmandu.  At the time,  I thought my eyes were melting; only a natural desire to keep my eyeballs in my head made me close them. Pouring that cold water over my head compounded the problem as the water immediately turned to steam.  My brain had begun a slow boil. None of the barefooted women in the dark took a history;  at no time was I monitored. I poured all my fluids through my skin so nothing was left to cool me down; I was dangerously dehydrated.  My body heated up, my organs panicked, my metabolism lost its way and the blood supply to my brain took a lunch break.  

Another of my nine lives, used up.

Hence the ups and downs and outs and etceteras for the past few days.  

I'll try a walk later: is that a range of mountains before me, or just one lofty peak, swimming around? 

Monastery -- oh, for a name!

In spite of all this, I enjoyed being out of the insanity of Thamel and the tourists, surrounded by ancient beauty. I could see for horizon after horizon.  This was the Kathmandu I remember of so many years ago: rural and unspoiled.  I managed a "walk" on the first day, to the Monastery.  Three hours hard labour there and back, along broken roads where people tended their goats and gardens, drew water from wells, and made roads as they have for decades - pouring tar from a perforated drum onto gravel. The view from the top of the monastery,  of silent, serene, contemplating buddhas, made the journey worthwhile.

21st Century, Nepal

No concept of one-stop shopping in these villages.  Many of the villagers live in mud and stone and thatch houses, bordering unpaved roads, while many more of them now live in enormous mansions, occupying the lower floors as the higher ones are completed. They visit their local tailor, chicken slaughterer, fruiterer, butcher and bottle shop, where they catch up on the births, deaths, marriages and family feuds..  Every family member helps to build the house - which can take up to six months.  None of them seem completed; but family members who have gone "abroad" - to the US, to Europe, to Australia, send money back to their families in Nepal.

Old and new, cheek by jowl, Kathmandu valley

Kentucky Flied, plucked, skinned and disembowelled, vile you wait

New zip, tucks, pleats, kurta, fix pocket?  I'll fit you in.

Local fruit and vegies, and local bottle shop

Beverley Hills,  Kathmandu Valley

He also works who stands and watches

Beautiful as this area was, kind as my hosts were, I was too sick to enjoy myself.  I was flattened by another blinding migraine this morning. Dr Subodh took my pressures and meridians and temperature,  which was so low it didn't register on his thermal scale. He quickly whipped up some magic muti of cardamom and pepper in hot water, and slathered me in a mustard sauce. I'm shaking my fists at the my internal universe!  Give Me A Break!

I decided to terminate my camping misery and I rode back to Thamel in the car of a young man on the way to his cousin's wedding.  So what, you may ask - weddings are a rupee a lac here.  There's one at every street corner. But this one is, for a storyteller, a bit of a thrill - the result of a real live elopement. The kids - who didn't have the approval of their parents, ran away two months ago to Pokhara.  Unheard of!  This cousin called his friends in the police department imploring them NOT to stop the runaways at the Nepalese border.  In a rage, the uncle of the cousin had smacked his face and called him The Agent!  But now they're back, having fought for their love, and are having an enormous post coital wedding for 420 close relatives.  Love Over Comes All Uncles.

So now I'm back in my Hotel Blue Horizon, warm, plugged in, miles from dahl, and my lovely man who brings me breakfast has just run up six flights of stairs to bring me some some Imodium.

Yep, it pays to have friends in high places.