20. To market, to market - to sweat this man right outta my skin!

I've decided to create an adventure a day here.  It fills the hours, finds me friends, and every time I miss the comfort of Australia I look around at the ancient Newari houses, at the tiny rickety cobbled lanes, and I think - yea, I could have had a hot shower and power, and a toilet seat that doesn't slide off when I'm sitting on it, but look where I am.    I walk five hours a day, I'm vegetarian while here.   

I've lost four kilos so far. My tummy is flatter. My legs are getting their shape back. My hair is growing back.  I like my smile.  Adventures await.

Taking life in hands  - 25rps

Personal rickshaw driver  - 100 rps 

So I went to Indra Chowk, by rickshaw for 100 rupees, holding on for dear life as he careened through the crowded dark, narrow lanes, to the ancient market place where traders (mainly Muslim) have been working for centuries. It's filled with oil lamps, brass pots, shoe makers, mattress stuffers, teeth pullers, blanket sellers, tikkas for the forehead, thousands of plastic bangles, recyled elecrical goods of every persuasion, peanuts and chai sellers carrying tiny glasses of hot sweet essential tea in metal holders for the workers. Chai! Chai! Chai! 

Indra Chowk ancient bead market, selling new Indian beads by the hank

Most colourful is the bead market, a twisty, tiny warren of stalls tucked between ancient, toppling buildings, where weeds grow on rooftops and pigeons poop in ancient window frames creating stalagmites of avian history.  Most of the men in their booths that are hung to the ceiling with ropes of beads, look as if they have been there since the market began:  long white beards and embroidered skull caps and white kurtas and pants. Many of the younger men working there have had their trade handed down by their fathers; often they learn from the age of 8.

These hanks of new beads are the traditional red and green seed beads, glittering like rivers, interspersed with large gold beads, that Nepalese women wear as married status.  

I think they come from India by the billion, but like everything here, everything is promised to be  "my special design"  "I make myself" even though there are millions of everything common in the markets.  

Really old pieces are IMPOSSIBLE to get, anywhere. Trust me, I've done so much foot soldiering that I have blisters to prove it. 

There's a gold market nearby, but I haven't yet found it, where customers buy gold beads in various sizes from the length of your hand to the size of a thumbnail.

Then they choose their bead hanks from the many vendors who sit on their haunches on old white cushions. These men either restring them themselves, faster than your eye can focus,  or take them to a group who work as a team, while you wait on plastic chairs drinking too sweet milky chai with skin on top.

Notice lighting arrangements

They weave and spin and wrap gold thread to make a looped fabric clasp. They make special knots by shredding the first thread on which the hanks come, then twisting them together with thumb and forefinger onto a longer thread, then slide all the beads down in seconds.  The don't even use needles to thread the beads - just frayed ends of cotton. Some black beads look like rivers of dark hair, and all are finished with the gold thread loop and knot closure.

Shopping with the girls

Across the square, down another warren of dark alleys, is the wedding market, where everything from lush sarees to henna, tikkas, paper lanterns, sequins, curtain tassels and bedspreads are traded: you'll have to squeeze against the sides of the walls if a vendor comes past with his cart laden with huge calico bags. 

Local starbucks

There's also a local starbucks;  for a few rupees a plastic cup; it's hot and sickly sweet and you have to stand in the cobbled lanes, risk being pooped over by pigeons, run over by rickshaws, taxis, stoned tourists, motorcycles, bicycles, carts, kites and stray dogs.


Gold beads are interspersed between the bead sections, the glittering necklace is twisted quickly and drizzled into a brown paper bag, a wad of crumpled rupees changes hands, and another happy customer goes away with a traditional necklace.

And always, the sadhus - begging with beautific faces for alms ... or bananas ... or coffee ... what a life. I found a dvd called Naked Sadhus, documenting how they spend their lives being professional beggars with awesome hairdos, seriously functional clothes and fabulous makeup.

Hands up sign means "I hand over my power to you"!

Every stallholder entreats you to "come, come, looking is free".  Of course, the minute you touch one, the vendors hands fly behind his back and it's sort of yours, and all that remains is to negotiate the price. "Just looking" suddenly doesn't work, neither does "sorry, just taking photos today".  A workable excuse is "I'm waiting for my friends" I used to say "husband" but that brings a catch to my throat, besides,  friends last longer!   "How much you pay? How much you want?"  If you tell them you don't want it, they reply with "it's very cheap." If you say you already have some they suggest your buy more.

View from my bed at HBH, Thamel.

Wow, right now, there's a storm over the Himal .. it's less than 10degrees at midday and its getting very dark.  The dogs are going nuts, barking.  I can smell garlic and porridge cooking downstairs.   I'm still curled in my warm bed, power on, hearing thunder. This was yesterday's view from my bed, before today's cold storm. That means tomorrow - more snow.  I am feeling really, really happy.  Luda comes soon - I'm so excited.  I feel almost like a local!

As part of my "what insane thing can I do today" experience, I booked in for an Ayuvedic treatment. My friends and I have different intretations of this word.  Are You a Veal Dick? Are You Veddyic for dis treatment? Ayu veddic sure you want to be excoriated to within an inch of your pubes?  Ayu veddi sure you can stand being handled overtly fondly by a total stranger ... and more.

I've been pushing myself quite hard; bullying myself into settling in here. I spend many hours at Or2k, the Turkish restaurant where I sit lotus position on cushions with my Mac and extension cord and converta-plugs, and often meet new friends for old stories and excellent village goat's cheese pasta (al dente, entree portion, too much money,)  but has power and wi-fi and friends and cool music like Tracy Chapman and Bob Dylan, and exhausted trekkers still with mud on their boots and some who have definitely been here too long with dreadlocks up to the ceiling so they have to bend through doorways, wearing the most odd assortment of clothing collected from Bhutan to Banglore and beyond.

Yesterday I met a Richard, a free wheeler from the 'States, who lay next to me on the floor in his Bo Diddly hat, his chest , then his face, rubbing my thigh.  (It's Nepal. We need all the warmth and lurve we can find and no I did not go home with him ...)  While we critiqued our pastas, he asked me why I had to have a routine here - why always something to do - why couldn't I just let the days roll. He's been travelling for a year, no direction, no time frame. Changes hotels frequently. Never hands out addresses or asks for them ..  I asked when he was doing the Annapurna circuit. Dunno, he replied, it will just happen.  Unh Huh.  Everything had the same response.  Then he asked me a pertinent question:  Why Don't you Allow yourself some Pampering time?  Then ... see ya .. on with his shoes, and off into the dark.

Well, holy shiva, the man has something there.   So I booked in a pedi, a facial and a thoroughly deep ayuvedic treatment, with optional steam bath and sauna, at the local beauty parlour, recommended by Shiva at HBS's front desk. It cost a fortune, enough to build a new school in that little village. I was ashamed I did such a thing.    Alas I did not take my camera, but trust the following.

I was walk-collected at 9am, by a young man whose only question, as always, to me, was "whereyoufrom"? Nothing else usually follows that extent of English, I can't do that much in Nepali. He led me down twisted lanes, which, had I only just arrived, I would never be able to find my way out of.  The Spa was Serenity, or Tranquillity, or Harmony, or Bliss, or Divine or something, considering what follows, I've forgotten.

A young Nepalese woman led me to a change room, where, a bit like having a CT scan, I was told to "take off all",  place in locked locker and wrap up in a towel. I was given some very large rubber sandals (eeuw pshaw, pshaw, pshaw -  to plantar warts) and flip flopped my way in semi dark (power off, of course, peak time ..) and lay down with my head poked through a little hole in the therapy mattress.  Eeeuw, a bit stinky .. .not even a stick of incense.  She lit a white candle, melted the bottom, and smudged it to the concrete floor. She whipped of my towel like a lesbian in a locker room,  and rolled my black lace panties up into the crack of my bottom. She started at the top of my head, and unless I lost consciousness in those few seconds when I next felt her massaging my heels, she must have flown over me.   I could hear her hands slip slop and slapping with oils which she applied to my head, my legs, my back, my neck, with a little bit of due diligence applied to my boobs (glo-white in the Nepalese dark).  OK she didn't really Touch-me Touch-me there, just a bit odd to have a pair of foreign hands down there, if you get my drift.


The oil smelled like sesame, olive, rosemary, and I am quite sure that she added a healthy dose of balsamic to the dressing.  She worked me like a pro, and soon I drifted off, with the candle light and the not too hard, not too soft ministrations, and my cares were wafting away while she pummelled and pulled and tugged and found those little bits that hurt like Shiva's trident after a while on a claptrackle (my new word for Nepalese bus).

Edging just a little too close for comfort to the pubes, she then whisked away and worked my head, shoulders, neck, underarms, a little too close to the squashed boobs ... but anyway I was in la la la la la di da land, bugger the smells and stickies, when suddenly the lights burst on, the heater started pumping out hot salad dressing air, and the jukebox on the floor blasted out hip hop Nepali songs. Was this an invasion from our borders?  The riot police? Nope, just the live wire electricity , on cue.

Alas, now I could see my surroundings.  The stubby white candle had melted in a grey puddle, and burned a nice black smudge on the wall which had mould growing up from the floor. The curtains were rotting at their base, and had interesting flora growing up the sides. The sheets were as stained and as wrecked as if I'd just had a oily sexual marathon with five South African rugby players. Beneath my table, through the hole for my face, were stacked old cardboard boxes, left over shoes, and the next victim's pillows. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling.  The oil bottles were on the concrete floor. Ms Masseuse was wearing odd shoes.

Give her credit: the massage was glorious, bar the visuals.   I was then led to a steam bath, protesting because I thought I'd faint in the heat.  I was ushered to a tiled surface clad in only my Roman Vikings towel, as my black lace panties now looked like a Kalamata olive in a salad bowl;  something noisy was cranked on outside, and the room hissed with steam.  Very quickly, thank shiva,  visibility was down to an inch. The room grew hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter. I started fighting the heat, gasping, but then  let myself into it ... and soon the sweat was running off my chin, my boobs, my shoulders, the backs of my knees, down my back. I was given water to drink which immediately converted to sweat pouring from my body: bugger imbibing, I  poured it down my face and over my back to stop myself from heating up like that claptrackle. Sweat was coming from everywhere, even my tongue.  I was steamin' up big time:  my own personal ecosystem.  I swear, any longer in there and I would have sprouted anthirrhiums from my nostrils.  Asparagus from behind my knees.  Coins from behind my ears. 

A pale steamy foggy blur moved in a corner: I managed to gasp " how much longer in here?" to my fellow sweater, as my breath heated up and I was reminded of when I had diphtheria as a child and had to have oxygen tents and Friar's Balsam inhalations and spent some time in an iron lung. "As you like" came the voice from the fog. I fumbled my way to the door, clasping my plastik water bottle and slipping on the mossy concrete. When a cold blast of the ugly world hit me, I turned right back in again determined to stick it out. 

Oh man, once I'd given into the heat and the steam and the total surrender to this totally new experience, I looked at the sweat beading on my Balsamic dressing on my skin.  I felt trickles of heat dripping through my scalp.  I put my head back against the catacombs type wall and told myself that every drop of sweat leaving my body with such haste is another drop of me that will never again have touched D.  I lay back and I mouthed - because you can't sing in a steam bath - "I'm gonna steam this man right outta my skin"! And man, girls, goddesses - it was a truly wonderful experience for which I had to keep my eyes shut because they too were sweating! If there had a sudden been smash and grab, and someone insane enough had wanted to grab me right then for my organs, I would have shot right out of his cannonball arms, right through the concrete and tin roof, right into space, so slippery was I. 

Then the flashing lights started. And they had nothing to do with the power supply.  Half vision.  Zig zagging aura.  I haven't had a migraine for about 20 years.  My tongue stopped working. I tottered into benches, saw half people, half signs. I stumbled into the men's toilet because when I read male it was female without the Fe. I tried to dry my hair but the naked element in the dryer scared me and couldn't find the right half of my hair, anyway.

I was given a cup of half green tea and sat on a half-there black sofa, and put on one and a half rubber sandals.  Half a woman took me by my half hand and led me to have my fifteen toenails painted in the next parlour. Was there LSD in that steam?  Cocaine in that water?  Did washing out that man mean my cerebellum had to be punished too? Oh goddesses, I was out of it. So out of it.

I was led to a half black leather seat that lounged backwards over a basin, but we were doing my toes. My beauty parlour woman had a pretty half face, and when she asked me to raise one leg, I could't work out how to do it. She lifted it for me, onto a brown towel. She stripped my old nailpolish with cotton wool which she threw on the concrete floor; then picked up some half metal instruments that were in an old plastic bucket with which she nipped and tucked and primped and preened my tootsies tortured from so many hours walking a day in hiking boots.

Eventually she moved from sitting on the floor to sitting on a plastic milk crate where she did a very dedicated cleanse of my toenails, heels, half my calf, most of my knees, wiggled and jiggled and tickled my toes and my soles.  Meanwhile I'd picked up a local publication of the Kathmandu equivalent of Cosmo, where most of the articles were about how men only use women for sex,  if they have sex before marriage, while Ii was trying to beat the Saturday Night Fever disco going on in my head, complete with spinning balls and coloured lights and several half Bollywood dancers in my head.

Newspaper was wedged between my toes to separate them.   But trooly between the Sydney NYE fireworks, the leg massage was super xlent, with super duper yak butter cream mixed with rosemary and exfoliating salts.  She asked me to choose a colour - are you kidding, with what was going in my head? Choose anything - they look the same to me.  Everything was psychedelic.  She chose red to match my Salwar.  My feet were pink and loverly and some of my toes had returned, but now  I was freezing, shivering, toxic.  In the next room, I was facialed and further exfoliated to within an inch of my epidermis. She used tools I'd never felt before. I was slopped and slapped and patted and powdered and pampered for an hour, eyes closed behind spinning cartwheels.  Then she applied a facepack with burned and stung but I couldn't get a word out, not even a weak Help because it would have come out as ..lp!  My words were tumbled, tangled, jangled, lost in the disco. I imagined I'd leave with facial blisters to accompany the Las Vegas activities in my head. 

Then clunk!  bang! Clatter! The power went off.  Implements were dropped in the next room and Disco Hip Hop Audio was finally silenced.  And my shivering went into overdrive!  I had just a tiny towel covering everything I own, and I'd been left alone with just a turmeric and dahl and Korma curry facepack to keep me warm. Finally, the muti came off, and ala kazam, my wrinkles have disappeared.  I really was glowing .. the Special Glo facepack works - or was it my do-it-yourself-christmas lights?

I staggered home, half blind, knowing I was going to lose my insides and upsides too. Do not talk to me do not talk to me do not talk to me I muttered to the half beggars, I will vomit all over you,  you lovely half pashmina sellers and the half vegetable vendor I buy fruit from every day.  The litter of pups growing by the wayside was instantly reduced to a bundle of two legged creatures.  I fell into potholes and bumped into half lampposts.  Key! I mumbled to the always friendly people at the desk. Don't speak.  Hand over hand I pulled myself up the five flights of stairs in the dark where I practically fell into my room and rushed to the toilet, still attached to my handbag. Ups and downs yessiree - more toxic waste leaving my body!  I took 2 panadeine forte, then an hour later a codeine megaforte and made myself some black masala tea. I dropped everything including the slow boiling kettle which spilled water onto the sometimes-working TV. The drugs eventually worked. But I spent spent much of the day shivering and gaga, and speechless.

I am glowing, notwithstanding.  The pain of D is easing.  I have a rich, full life now, and I am blessed with love at every turn.  Here - to all my goddesses .. thankyou for being here. And supporting me, and loving me, and reading me.

Brigit called on my local sim to meet hours later.  She met an NGO in the street who builds schools and libraries for Nepalese children.  Thank you Brigit for this universe.  I am meeting them both today. Who knows now what lies ahead?  But it's snowing on the mountains, and all my warm clothes are at the Readytomorrow laundry,  and I have so far resisted buying a Dear Human Please Feel Me pashmina.