A warmish day in rustic Nepalganj
The airport is about 10 miles out of the town of Nepalganj, but quite close to the airport we find a tiny ghetto of very poor people clustered in some cardboard shacks or huddling in a couple of concrete block buildings, and above one of these wretched little buildings flies a tattered Tibetan flag with a sign for a hotel. “We pick this one,” says Lama. The opportunity to stay in a horrible concrete Tibetan cellblock makes him happy because he wouldn’t stay in a Hindu-owned hotel to save his life, even if it had air conditioning, which one hotel right across the street happens to have, but it costs thirty dollars to stay there which he refuses to pay.
We finally find a rickshaw walla who agrees to tote our half ton of baggage to our hotel for the princely sum of 10 rupees, or enough money to keep a very thin person like himself alive for about twenty minutes. The inside of the airport itself is a veritable bake oven, hot enough to catch fire if you farted. It is mid-May, the hottest month of the entire year, so-called “machete season,” just before the summer monsoon arrives, the season when people fly into incomprehensible rages and kill their loved ones just for practice.
“Is very warm,” said Lama. “Is hot. We sleep early and get up early. First we have supper.”
The exact air temperature eludes me because my expensive Swiss chronometer that tells me the time, date, elevation, mood of the general electorate and stock market prices in Zurich doesn’t seem to function above 45 degrees Celsius, or 113 degrees Fahrenheit, and evidently this day is far hotter than that. Actually I think the insides of the watch may have melted. It hurts me even to breathe, so I bitterly curse the thick woolen sweat pants that I have mistakenly donned to cross the Himalayas. As far as sweat pants go, they certainly work. I am sweating like a vertical river, sweating even more than I am moaning while scratching like a flea-bitten mongrel. When we enter the concrete cellblock cleverly disguised as a guest house two stories high, we find the entire interior of the building is encrusted with about two inches of soot — walls and ceilings alike — evidence of the coal-fired kitchen belching away in the back, a dim pit through which we stagger on our way upstairs to our room carrying our bags one by one, sweating profusely. “We need to lock,” says Lama. “All our things here. Be safe.”
Going through the kitchen is like passing through the gates of hell. Although it must have been close to 50 degrees (122 Fahrenheit) outside, it is far hotter inside the kitchen and — most alarmingly — we find it is even hotter upstairs in our room. Heat rises. We drop off our bags in the ten foot by ten foot room, lovingly furnished with a flickering twenty-five watt light bulb and a slab of bent plywood on which somebody had thoughtfully placed a quarter-inch thick slab of once-green foam, probably about fifty years ago when the cellblock was constructed. Several decades of sweaty bodies have reduced the foam to a quarter of an inch of pure grime. There is a door within the room that connects to an adjacent toilet, which we immediately close because it is obvious something had died in there long ago, probably of heat prostration, and no one ever had the courage to retrieve the corpse. There is a spigot emanating from the wall which produces a limp trickle of hot water for 2–3 seconds before dwindling away to dust. “Lama Tenzin,” I say, “there is something in the toilet.”
Closing the door to the toilet does not reduce the stench, but it keeps down the pitter patter of the little feet of whatever creatures are living in there, and denies them entry to where we plan to sleep. The proprietor brings us our bedding, which consists of a sheet so thin you could see right through it except for the brown stains that seemed to outline a body (somewhat like the shroud of Turin), along with a small oblong of brown foam that I eventually ascertain to be the pillow. The only feature of the room that appeals is the huge lock on the door, evidently borrowed from a medieval castle, and the bars on the windows which look inward to the hallway. “Is good lock,” said Lama, taking a photo of it. “Very strong.”
The lock pleases Lama Tenzin no end because it means our trekking gear is safe if we go out of the room, which we are forced to do immediately because it proves impossible to stay inside the room and still exist as a human being. Since we had picked this hotel because it was Tibetan, I wondered about his concern about theft, but we were going to trek over the Himalayas and I didn’t want any gear ripped off either.
“Tashi delek (hello),” comes the cry in Tibetan. There are actually several families living in this quasi-dungeon, and all the children line up in the hallway to look through the bars of our room at the amazing sight of foreign tourists desperate enough to stay in such a hellhole, all the while gazing longingly at our giant stack of worldly possessions. Outside, the air is hot enough to cook a goat, so we flag the same rickshaw driver, the young lad now asleep in his cart (I doubted there was anyone in the village who could spare a rupee to hire him) and tell him just to pedal up and down the road at two miles an hour in a pitiful effort to get some “fresh air.” It is a cruel thing to do, asking the emaciated lad to haul 350 pounds of hot flesh up and down the road, but since I feel I am going mad from the heat I really don’t care; if he could lower the temperature a single degree it would be an act of kindness. The fields are brown, barren, dusty and blistered by the heat. Small pitiful bodies lie in the dirt, panting. There is no shade of any sort. “Is hot,” muses Lama. “Very hot.”
There is no bottled water in the hotel to purchase, and none in the nearby village either, and only sugary sweet soda to drink, a bottle of which soon makes me even thirstier than before. Lama orders dinner, a blazing hot Thali meal for both of us, which he devours hungrily and on which I nibble gingerly, sitting on a cheap plastic chair in the courtyard watching half a dozen Tibetan men play dice in the dark while getting very drunk on homemade hooch as I try to swallow what is supposed to be food. The meal, if possible, is even hotter than the air. I am in substantial discomfort, but Lama only sits and says nothing, so I vow to match his steely resolve and not complain about anything. “We get plane early in morning,” says Lama. “We go to bed now. Must rest.”
Within 30 seconds of lying down my bed sheet is completely saturated and my foam pillow as well. I stand up and wring out the pillow like a sponge, but the effort exhausts me and I lie down again carefully, breathing methodically, counting my inhales and exhales in a vague effort at meditation and with the equally vague hope of somehow falling asleep. All the children in the entire hotel are now clustered around the bars of our window, watching closely. This may be the greatest moment in all their lives, perhaps the greatest moment in the ghetto’s history. There is no glass in the windows, and someone has conveniently punched huge holes in the wire screening strung between the bars, so mosquitoes fly in through the holes at will. Soon we are being bitten like mad, sweating like condemned men, lying side by side on our planks and trying not to moan, staring at the flickering twenty-five watt bulb while counting the minutes.
Around 10 o’clock one of the Tibetan men who had been outside shooting dice and drinking liquor smashes his way upstairs, yelling loudly while cranking up his boom box even louder than it had been playing outside. Soon the room next door is full of screaming as the dice man starts slapping around his wife. Lama takes this as a good reason to get up and open the door and go to remonstrate with the man. “You no shout, you no hit,” yells Lama. “You be quiet.”
The drunkard, stunned at finding a Tibetan lama in full royal purple regalia suddenly appear in his bedroom, goes silent immediately. Upon Lama’s opening the door, entire battalions of mosquitoes storm into our room, biting viciously. I remind myself that we are in a malaria zone. Lama closes the door tightly, thereby eliminating the slight waft of air that had briefly preceded the mosquitoes, which continue to buzz and strafe us mercilessly as the minutes progress. I lie there like a cadaver, saying not a word, sweating profusely. Finally I can stand it no longer and strip off my sweatpants. This gesture causes quite a commotion among the audience pressing at the windows, and the murmuring brings the situation to Lama’s attention. “Michael, cover yourself with sheet,” he hisses, alarmed at my lack of modesty. “Children is looking.”
I pull the bedsheet up to my waist, only to find the sheet completely saturated. If I turn either right or left to alleviate the discomfort of sleeping on a piece of wet hardened foam, the motion causes a squishing sound, proof positive that I am sleeping in a puddle. I lie rigid on my back, attempting to match Lama Tenzin’s iron discipline just next to me.
The time crawls along, the mosquitoes increase their feast, but around midnight the children tire of their deathwatch and go to bed. Next to me I hear lama Tenzin breathing softly, and finally his breathing turns to a low moaning, and I know with grim satisfaction he is sharing the same level of torture as I feel. Unfortunately there are no wooden chairs on which we could sit upright. Every hour or so I check my watch, but the simple motion of lifting my arm up to my face causes rivers of salt to run into my eyes. I take off my t-shirt and try to rub the salt out of my eyes but my shirt is wetter than my bed sheet. I feel like a pepperoni pizza that has been left in the oven too long, and my mouth is so parched with the residue of hot spices that I keep fantasizing about a long cool glass of water.
“Aaaagh!!” Around three in the morning Lama Tenzin sits up abruptly, shouting loudly in Tibetan, and calls a halt to the nonsense. We trudge down the darkened stairs and venture outside, where the temperature has dropped to a refreshing 45 degrees Celsius or so, and sit upright on the same plastic chairs from last night, gasping like fish dragged up on the beach, finally watching the cruel wicked yellow orb of the sun rise in the east like an instrument of pain. By the time it is light enough to see, heat shimmers are already dancing on the pavement. “Where is driver?” says Lama. “Where is rickshaw?”
Our teenage rickshaw walla, who had promised to sleep in his buggy outside the front door on the prospect of earning a few more rupees, is nowhere to be seen, so Lama staggers down the road to find what he can find, while I am sentenced to return to our room to watch the gear. The kitchen walla has already woken from his stupor and is stoking the fires of hell for breakfast, causing swirls of filthy black coal smoke to emanate from his cave and curl up the stairs, whereupon the entire population of the dungeon commences to cough, spitting large gobs of green mucus all over the hallway, it’s only source of decoration. Eventually Lama Tenzin returns with another rickshaw walla, and we three tote our half-ton of gear down the steps, sweating profusely, and load up his cart. It’s only a 10-minute ride to the airport, and we load our gear aboard a small bush plane, and it’s already so hot that you could cook a goat on the tarmac.