This country is nuts. Even since I've sobered up, my senses haven't been so constantly assaulted since Burning Man (urine instead of essential oils and monkeys flying between the roofs instead of art cars, but you get the point). Actually, on the subject of Burning Men, I went to the burning Ghats last night to watch a face melt for the first time since my last acid trip. Then I climbed on a small boat and headed down the Ganges, where we slowly approached this giant Hindu prayer ceremony. Guys in robes were doing strange hypnotic fire dances facing the Ganges from small platforms about 15 feet from the surface of the water, while a whole crowd of people banged pots and bells and howled the oddly familiar Indian yogic chants. I don't know much about the Hindu reasons for it, but just the thought that they've been doing that every day for the past several thousand years blew my mind. They also say the fire they use for the cremations has been burning for 3000 years. It'd be interesting to visit with a fire extinguisher just to see how they react...

I'm getting a huge kick out of the insanity here, so I figured I'd take advantage of this good feeling before it turns tragic. So tonight I'm taking the train to Dehli tonight. Despite all the aweful things I've heard about that city (no there is no Pastrami on Rye, and if there was I wouldn't dare anybody to eat it), it's a trip I can't put off much longer. I need a camera for this country (just to prove to myself later on that I'm actually seeing some of these things), and I think that'll be the best place to either fix my broken one or get a new one. And it's on the way to Rishikesh and Dharmasala, the Indian Himalayas where the weather's supposed to be perfect.

OK, I'll be honest. I'm going to Delhi to do some more motorcycle shopping. There's a hotel there devoted to motorcycling around India on a Royal Enfield Bullet (www.bulletwallas.com), and if I figure I'll get a good picture on the feasability of riding around India after picking their brains for a few days.

Will let you know how things go.

Well holy fucking shit I guess I'm in India now.

So the bus stopped at the bus station in Varanasi at 3 in the morning, leaving me and this western-girl-dating-a-nepali-guy to find someplace to stay the night. Even at 3 in the morning, we were accosted by a pack of rickshaw drivers. The Nepali guy spoke some Hindi, and the three of us piled into a rickshaw after negotiating him to take us to a 80-rupee room (2 bucks) where I got a few hours of sleep until I woke up stewing in a pool of my own sweat on the sheetless bed, staring at the ceiling fan that had the guts to move just exactly slow enough to have absolutely no effect on the air in the room. It was 8 O'clock. I took my ATM card and passport and wandered off in search of a cash machine, and on the way I found an internet cafe and wrote my last post.

By an evil twist of fate, there was a street Lassi vendor right next to the ATM and, after watching a resepectable Indian man walk up and buy a delicious looking banana flavored glass of Acidophilus, all I wanted in this growing heat was a nice tall glass of whatever he was having (I was also having one of those your-body-trying-to-tell-you-something cravings about drinking yogurt to stop the interesting tricks my bowels have been playing on me for the past week). So I ask the man, "what kind lassi you have?" to which he replied "we have bhang lassi." Hmm. I've heard of India's famous bhang lassis from all the way in Thailand, and I envisioned the continuity of my day hitting a fork in the road. I could boringly walk around a bit and then go home to stare at the fan for the hottest part of the day, or I can dive in head-first into India's holyest city, bumbling around town in a drug induced stupor without any map, sense of direction, knowledge of Hindi, guide book, friends, or any idea of how to get home aside from a crumpled up business card in my pocket. The saint on my right shoulder had some good points about possibly losing my passport or being robbed, but the devil on my left had the final word. The lassi man asked me if I'd like it strong or medium, and thank everything that I had the modesty to say "medium" (even though I felt it was a copout at the time). He took a large spoonfull of some thick green paste, added some milk curd, added some white stuff from various white bottles, some ice, shook it like a martini, and served me the most delicious pot drink I'd ever had. I gave him 10 rupees (25 cents) and was off.

Before I even try to describe the insanity that was about to unfold, I should let you know that I'm also wondering why the hell I'd ever do something so dangerous and stupid. Everything I'd heard about India was how rough and tumble it was. The hotel staff, as well, did everything in their power to scare me from walking around by myself (I'd later figured out this was nothing but a ploy to hire a guide, but I was still terrified before I left). But later on that night I had a conversation with this Irish girl (a doctor, actually), whom I'd coincidentally met in the hot springs at the end of the Nepal trek. She had crossed the 18000-foot pass one day after I had, the morning after I arrived into Jomosom during a storm. The storm, apparently, went straight over the pass and caught everybody in an almost life-threatening blizzard, and I have so far heard three people's accounts of having made it. Two of them included vomiting up blood, getting lost and disoriented in the white-on-white landscape, losing the trail, and still for some reason persisting in making it over the top. This Irish doctor, despite a constant headache and frequent vomiting, never realized she had severe altitude sickness and kept going well after it was safe to. She was also travelling alone. But she related it to the book, Into Thin Air, where John Krakauer gives his story of the deadly 1996 Everest expedition where 5 people died. Reading the book, it's hard not to scold him for making so many stupid mistakes and neglecting the obvious signs of danger. But there's something we both noticed about how some decisions just can't be explained afterwards. For whatever reason, she felt totally safe to continue walking, long after someone had yelled at her to go down. Similarly, I felt perfectly up to the challenge to immerse myself in India for the first time while being incredibly, rediculously stoned. I guess some things are only mistakes if they go wrong. No matter how pissed off and frustrated I was when I finally got home, I wouldn't have changed that day for the world.



I started walking. It really didn't matter where, and I had no map or points of interest to see anyway. The first thing I noticed was how refreshingly isolated I was. In Nepal, I'd be consantly accosted by kids and teenagers trying to befriend me, or by vague merchants trying to sell me things. Here, I was the Scum of the Earth. There was no reason to pay any attention to me, unless you were trying to sell me something I didn't want. So it was easy to shrug everybody off, and be rude if I had to be, because I wasn't afraid that any of the people approaching me actually deserved any respect.

And so I walked like this, ignoring everybody around me, until I found my way into the old city. This part of town is as old as Jerusalem, with the meter-wide stone roads and the large stone appartment buildings with rediculously tiny rooms and doorways. Soon enough, the alleys got narrower and narrower, then the smells got more and more acrid, then the people got more and more deformed. The lassi started to kick in just as I was at the center of it all. Then I started to notice the Sadhus sitting cross-legged along in dark little alcoves along the street, the flames of massive amounts of burning incense, Yogis chanting from unknown rooms behind the walls, Hindi shouts of Things for sale, a lone Tabla played by some unknown performer, bulls and goats fighting to get through the narrow passes as much as the humans. It was craziness. Absolute insanity. I haven't seen anything like it since Marrakech, but I don't think it would be fair to compare anything else to it. There was just something about it that I can't put my finger on, something completely contradictory to all the shit on the ground, the dirty decrepid people, and the husslers that seemed perfectly natural, perfectly clean and sanitary. As much as everything was disgusting and poor and sad, it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. I had no idea what to make of it. So instead of trying to deal with these contradictions or make any kind of sense out of it, I just got the hell out of there.

I emerged from the "old city" to a main road. Finally, something I could make sense of. The sight of real shops and motorcycles, rickshaws and bicycles running up and down the street felt somewhat comforting. At least it made some sort of sense. I still had no idea what to do with myself, so I entertained the idea of going Motorcycle shopping. No matter what the situation, there is nothing more fun in the world than Motorcycle shopping.

So I walked and walked and walked and walked, paying attention to every motorbike I passed, my mouth watering every time I walked by one of these Royal Enfields that seem to be the National Awesome Bike of India. Eventually it became apparent that I wasn't going to find a motorcycle shop, or someone who could fix my digital camera, or anywhere air conditioned, and by then it was not only gruellingly hot but I had finally come to terms with exactly how stoned I was getting. Before I knew it, I was in no condition to do much of anything and I decided to go home.

That's where the "fun" began. I pulled out the business card of my guest house and stopped the first rickshaw driver I saw. It couldn't be more than 10 rupees to get there, but then this guy looked around confused, asked some people something in Hindi, then said "eight-t". I said 8? Great! Let's go. He said no, "EIGHTTTT" so I showed him 8 fingers. He shook his head and flashed all 10 fingers to me 8 times and I got the picture. There was no way in hell I was going to give this guy 80, and by then a crowd of other rickshaw drivers had appeared. I was spun around so many times, each one telling me the other ones are lying cheaters and trying to forcably push me into their own rickshaws, none of them apparently having any idea of where to go anyway, that I just left the group of them in a dizzy frenzy. I walked away as fast as I could, having newly discovered the virtues of walking, when a kid on a bicycle stops and tells me he'll take me there for 10 rupees. I vaguely remembered him from the rickshaw frenzy, and thought it'd be a laugh to ride on the back of a bicycle through the rediculous traffic, so I hopped on. It was terrifying and exhilarating, but after two stops to see some friends of his, it became clear that he had no idea which way to go either. He put me on another rickshaw and negotiated the price to 10 rupees (which, in retrospect was the proper thing for him to do), and I gave the kid only 5 rupees which I was impressed I managed to still be able to do in my state. I was stoned. I was really, really stoned. Total confusion, entirely at the mercy of these mercenary transportation con-artists to get me home. None of them spoke my language, and every street out here looks exactly the same. Unless I was staring directly at the front entrance of my hotel, I wouldn't be able to find it. To make everything much worse, the hotel was through some meter-wide streets so no rickshaw would actually be able to take me directly there.

I remember being on the back of the rickshaw (by the way, if nobody's seen one they're basically large tricycles with a canopied chair on the back) and three people were all talking at me simultaneously. One was the kid with the bicycle, who finally went away when I gave him his 5 rupees, then there was the rickshaw driver, then this other "respectable" looking Indian who came out of nowhere and spoke perfect English. He mentioned my hotel, said he was heading in that direction, and asked to share the rickshaw. I was so transfixed at the hilarity and insanity of the situation that I could hardly mutter the words to tell him no, so he climbed aboard. Some way down the line, I asked him what he did and why he was dressed so well. He had a "shop." It was a great "shop." He had two in Manali, where he was from, but here was here to check on his "shop" here. There was something obviously wrong with the way he said "shop" that gave away that he was a drug dealer. Eventually, once he got clear about it, he told me it was nothing like a "government shop" and that, instead, he offered the best pot in India. 800 rupees for 10 grams, or 300 rupees for the cheap stuff. 7-20 bucks for 10 grams. neat. Too bad I wasn't in the market, otherwise that'd be a really cool shop to visit. That was EXACTLY the wrong thing I could have told him. Then he went off on how, since it was a government shop, he was able to offer Chinese Opium, Cocaine, and probably anything else I could think of. I did kinda want to see what a shop like that would look like, and if I needed to I could buy a few grams of pot to be able to leave comfortably if necessary, so he stopped the rickshaw prematurely and asked me to pay 5 rupees. I only had a 100 on me, so eventually the dealer paid the 5 rupees himself. I was pretty happy about that, grifting the grifter.

His "shop" was right next to my hotel, so he said. So I followed him around and around these old city parts, constantly vigilant and making sure that we were always surrounded by people. All around me I kept seeing signs in English so I knew we weren't too far off from some sort of safety. All of a sudden, the foot traffic went from shoulder-to-shoulder to dead empty and I stopped. I wasn't going any further than that. The guy told me it was just around the next corner, but I could see in his eyes that he had no intention of causing any harm. He was a shrewd businessman and probably evil enough, but somehow I didn't feel threatened by him. He was salivating over making another customer, not of eating my soul. So I followed him another 10 meters down the road to an open door.

The inside looked dark. Too dark. There was no electricity, but some fire burning somewhere inside for light. It struck me like a ton of bricks that I had absolutely no intention of going in there. Just at that moment, some other short Indian guy with a shaved head and a comically tight muscle shirt came out and started shouting, not asking, for me to come inside to "take a look." He had the look in his eye of a hungry tiger watching an innocent little animal walk unknowingly into his cave... By now I was hyper-aware and paranoid and had I lost any interest at all of going inside. Muscle shirt man started pacing back and forth outside the door, as if guarding something, muttering something about how great his stuff is and trying to make the last-minute sale, but I was getting ready to leave by force if need be. I must have looked absolutely terrified, to be honest. In any case, the original drug dealer got the picture that I wasn't going inside and tried a different approach. He walked me back to the main street, pointed me to my hotel, and told me if there was ever anything I needed, he'd be somewhere there.

So I started walking up the street again. When another guy offered to walk me there, I decided to take the next right. I knew I was supposed to take a right turn somewhere, and this seemed right. It wasn't even so much about whether it was the right turn or not, it was more to achieve that confidence of knowing that I was well on my way to get home, I'd be home in any minute. 10 minutes later, somebody shouted "hey, Canada!" It was the guy whose presence made me turn prematurely. I had apparently told him I was from Canada. It turns out I tell everybody I'm from Canada when I'm nervous. He had a bright smile on his face and looked a little like a drunkard, but I really had no choice but to trust him. He led me back to the main street and pointed me exactly in the right direction, gave me exact orders, and sent me off. I gave him 5 rupees before he even asked, which put me in his eternal good graces.

He told me to walk 400meters, then turn right. I had no idea how far 400 meters was and, worse than that, I was kinda stuck for telling any sort of time. And it was hot. I was tired. There was some indoor place that looked like a narrow smoothie bar, so I stepped in and bought some water. The smoothie guy was just finishing up making two delicious-looking yellow drinks with fruit garnishes and everything, so I asked for one of those. He said something questioningly in Hindi, but I had no idea what he said so I just said "One More" and he shrugged and went to it. Only when he started making it did I realize there was no fruit in the bar except for a few old bananas and a bunch of jars of various powders. Maybe they were in some fridge somewhere. Nope. He put a spoonful of one of the powders from a jar into a glass. Then another from another jar. Then from another. Then another. Soon enough he was grabbing jars behind him, under the counter, from all over the store to put powders into this glass. I looked like a teenage chemist mad at work, and I was starting to get worried. When he served it to me, he gave me some sort of "look," and I had half a mind to think he was poisoning me. It was delicious. Perfect for the temperature outside. In retrospect I think it was some kind of fiber smoothie, but I remember examining everybody's faces to see whether they were giving me funny looks because I was drinking poison or because I was so funny looking. I turned out fine, and the trip to the smoothie bar would've been perfectly benevolent if I hadn't walked out facing the wrong direction.

So again I walked forever, 'till I finally decided I had gone too far. Then I turned around and walked back. By this point I started noticing people really looking at me funny, because they'd seen me walk that same stretch of road 4 (or maybe 6) times. Finally, I heard "Hey, Canada!" The same guy greeted me with the same bright smile, this time a big concerned. "How did you get lost?" I had no idea what to tell him. He took me by the arm, told me straight, slow, and descriptive exactly what I was going to pass on the way to the turnoff, and reminded me to keep asking people where to go.

There it was. I'd found him. A Nice Man in India. Finally, after hearing over and over again that everybody who talks to me is only after my money, I found a nice man who was genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of a strange traveller. I think, in retrospect, I had decided to go out exploring to throw myself at the mercy of the image of a Brutal India. I would either have been treated awefully, in which case I would save my time and leave the country, or the stereotype would break and I'd be finally able to relax out here. It turns out that all the hassle is only about trying to make a buck. That's it. Rickshaws and touts don't leave you alone because they want to offer you their services, not "just to hassle" you. Once I gave that guy his 5 rupees, he respected me and actually cared about providing the service he was paid for. That's the trick, I guess.

All the same, I was damn happy to get back home. It was 3 by the time I got there, and I found myself hungry and not wanting to eat because I'd have had to brave the world outside to get to a restaurant. So this morning I moved hotels and started over. Now that I've had my baptism of fire, it's time to explore Varanasi. I'm in the heart of the Old City, a few hundred feet from the Ganges, right next to where they burn people at night.

I'm in. I'm set. I'm ready. Bring it on.

My second-last night in Kathmandu, Simon and I went to "the" casino in town. After 2 hours of playing blackjack and drinking free cheap (extremely expensive for Nepali standards) scotch until I was drunk, I stumbled out of the casino with 3000 more rupees than I started with. It's about 40 or 45 bucks, just enough to cover my Indian visa, and well over a month's hard-earned salary for many of the people around me. Simon lost his 1000 rupees, so I spent the rest of the night getting both of us proper drunk. It was a nice way to leave Nepal.

The massive protests ended when the King backed down and allowed for Congress to reconvene, but the Maoists kept attacking villages and blocking the roads out of Kathmandu because they were pissed off at being underrepresented. They, after all, had been fighting the King for the past decade and if the country has an actual fair election, nobody would vote for the Maoists. So we all got worried that this might descend into a Khmer Rouge or Bolshevic-style takeover. Let the people overthrow the government, then have the goons with guns step in.

As far as I was immediately affected, I still couldn't get out of the country by bus. I had arrived into the country on Saturday night. By monday afternoon I was ready to buy a ticket to Delhi. Monday night the revolution ended and I was told the busses would be running. Wednesday I tried to book a ticket but learned the Maoists weren't giving up power yet, so I was about to buy a ticket to Delhi again. Wednesday night, the Maoists declared a 3-month ceasefire and opened the roads. Friday morning I boarded the bus.

This has really fucked with my head. I've changed my entire itinerary from starting in Varanasi to starting in Delhi, to back to starting in Varanasi, to back to starting in Delhi, and this morning I finally, FINALLY woke up in Varanasi. Now that I'm finally here, I have no idea whatsoever what I'm going to do. But I'm here. I'm out of Nepal. That's all that matters.

As far as the Maoists are concerned, I'm keeping my eyes on the press but it no longer affects me directly. The ceasefire is nice and all, but nobody's kidding themselves that this is the end of it. The bolsheviks, for example, waited 'till October to take control of the February people's revolution. So we'll see.

I don't have too much to say on India just yet, except that everybody's a few shades darker on this side of the border. But then again I just arrived at 4 in the morning (it's now 11), after 20 hours of being hit on the head and knees on the aisle seat of a loud bumpy bus by people, bags, and goats boarding and leaving at various horn-honking stops. People shout more on this side of the border. That's about all I've noticed. Varanasi's neat, but I gotta get to bed to really think anything decent of it. Will post again soon.

Yep, this place is back to normal. It's really, really wierd how fast everything sprang back to normal, but the city came alive OUT OF NOWHERE at some point this morning. The King made the announcement last night at 11:30, and apparently the people had been so accustomed to getting outside and protesting that everybody ran out in their underwear and PJs shouting and parading in jubilant victory in the same kind of numbers that, the day before, sent 500 people to the hospital.

9 hours later, when I got outside for breakfast this morning, the whole town's out and about. All the shops were open, full, and buzzing. I biked around exactly the same streets that were dead barren and desperately silent the day before to find myself dodging pedestrians, motorcycles, taxis, rickshaws, tiger balm sellers, drug dealers, and potholes in a fury of Chinatown nostalgia. It was a totally polar shift, all of a sudden. I remembered how long it took for New York to resume its usual pace of business after September 11th (several weeks), and then realized that these strikes and revolutions are a semi-common thing out here. They have strikes out here so often that everybody has a backup strike plan, in case one hits. Sure, they're usually not this long or important, but they're well used to starting and stopping businesses as news hits. That, and I guess everybody needed to suddenly do 3 weeks worth of shopping and selling.

It was weird, though, how yesterday the afternoon was cloudy, full of glum faces of bored, temporarily unemployed, broke and starving Nepali traders in front of closed-door businesses. And today was sunny, with every shop wide open with merchandise spilling out onto tables on the street and smiling, happy business owners happily bargaining with naiive westerners once again. It was a glorious day for shopping. I left the tourist part of town and found all the people selling nicknacks along the street had been starving for attention this whole time since their turf was under lockdown, and they were running after me and Simon to buy their stuff at well below "Nepali price" (which means only a little above what I should be paying, but less than half of what I'd be otherwise paying). So I stocked up on shit, am heading to the post office tomorrow, and am ready to finally get out of here! Go figure, of course, now that the town's back to normal I'm getting the hang of it all and want to stay, but my feet have gone itchy for India and the wind is blowing that direction. Varanasi this weekend!

ROCK AND ROLL!

The revolution's over! The King has backed down and reinstated parliament. Nepal's a democracy again... for now. There's still the worry that the Maoists, the military force behind this rebellion, will be a little pissed to remain largely unrepresented in the parliament, but at least for now the country's back on its feet. I woke up this morning to the news that the strike's over, the busses start running tomorrow, and the planned curfew has been cancelled. I don't know much more than that other than the BBC blurb. I'm heading around town to explore! I feel like I've been cooped up in this tourist center way too long. Will post again soon when I get a better picture of what's going on.

-andrew

I figured it out. For the past several days there has been a daytime curfew imposed on the city. So, after our 14 hour bikeride was over at 9PM, the city was open again. I guess we did good, then, by coming in late. Unfortunately, since the curfew's still going daily, this also means I'm stuck to the tourist part of town until the curfew lifts (between 6 and 9 PM), probably for as long as I'm still here.

I met an older guy last night who was stuck in Phnom Penh during the Khmer Rouge takeover, which made me feel like this is all a relatively slight inconvenience. He said he and the 13 other tourists in all of Cambodia had to wait 3 weeks for a military escort to the Thailand border. All day and night he had nothing to do but hang around the hotel all the press and diplomats were staying at, the one in the Killing Fields film.

I made it to the Indian embassy this morning before the curfew officially began. It was swamped with tourists (by that I mean Israelis) trying to get out of here, and after 3 hours of waiting I handed my passport to the counter and was told to come back Thursday. The embassy, entirely unexpectedly, decided to help us all out and process the visa forms in 3 days instead of 5 (5 meaning 7, since we'd have to wait the weekend). So, I get my visa out Thursday. I'm booking a flight to Dehli on Friday, so I get to actually do stuff this weekend. Granted, it's Dehli and people have told me it's one of the worst cities in the world, but at least I'll be moving again. I'll have spent just over 6 weeks in this country, a full 2 weeks longer than planned. Good thing I'm not on any schedule.

The way back from the embassy was creepy, to say the least. The curfew officially started at 9, and I didn't leave the embassy 'till after noon. I rode my bike to the embassy in the morning, dodging the foot traffic of the streets buzzing with tea shops and market stalls. In the afternoon, the roads were absolutely dead clear, except for the groups of military and the occasional massively armored army vehicle. Military dudes, for some reason, come in green or blue camo out here and only hang out by the dozen. There is, almost literally, one group of army guys on each corner surrounding the area I'm staying at. On the bikeride back, I was stopped every few street corners and asked to maintain my direction directly back to the tourist area, provided I'd finished whatever business it was that led me out of there in the first place. They are extremely apologetic, I have to give them credit for that, one guy told me it was "regrettable" that the curfew is imposed and "asked" that I return to my hotel and relax for the day. I guess that's what I'll be doing 'till friday anyway. Relaxing. At least I'm stuck outside the massive protests that have been leaving hundreds of people in the hospital every day. HP 5 is long gone, time to find another apple for this bookworm.

I've never seen "28 days later" but apparently our ride through downtown Pokhara reminded my friend of that movie. Early the morning after spending a full day finding used bicycles, I'd set off with two people I had met in the mountains to bike to Kathmandu. The intention is to get to India, which unfortunately is in the other direction, but the Indian Embassy happened to be in Kathmandu and I can't get a visa at the border. It was 200km, sure, but at least we'd get a chance to turn this pain-in-the-ass strike into some kind of adventure. It took only 5 minutes of riding to start seeing the Nepal we'd been protecting ourselves from. Up in the mountains and in the tourist part of Pokhara, we had all been completely oblivious to the massive revolts in town. Pokhara, apparently, was the first city where protesters/rioters had been shot to death by military. By the time we came through it, the roads were littered with overturned barricades, broken glass and car parts, and partially burnt street bonfires. All the shops were closed.

Then for a long time nothing happened. By that I mean it was beautiful easy riding through mountain scenery and rice terraces. The first 20km or so was all slightly downhill, so it seemed for a while that it'd be no trouble at all to make the 200km in two days. By the time we hit the hills, though, we were all starting to reconsider. The bikes were holding up, but my brakes were shot and my friend had to kick his gears into place. But, due to the strike, the busiest road in Nepal we were on was almost completely devoid of cars to hit (aside from the occasional ambulance) so I never had to use the brakes anyway. The uphills gradually got worse, and one of our rank was having more and more trouble with the strain. Just before the end of the first day, he was lagging behind us and an ambulances offered him a ride to Kathmandu. He gave his bike over to some random passer-by and jumped in, all excited to get a free lift to Kathmandu (he wouldn't have minded ditching us completely, a fact I'm still a bit bitter about. He is, by the way, Israeli), only to find the ambulance dump him at the half-way point town. An hour later, the rest of us came to that town and waited for him for half an hour before finding him there. Apparently, he had completely misunderstood the ambulance driver or vice versa, and he was stuck there, pissed off, having lost the money for the bike as well as a means of getting to Kathmandu. He managed to find a midnight black-market bus to take us the rest of the way for 500 rupees (8 bucks), hoping to avoid the maoists at 1 in the morning, but the other guy and I decided to keep pushing along. So then there were two.

I don't think I've ever been so tired in my life as that next day (yesterday), and this is no exaggeration. It was 110km to Kathmandu, and we had both had grossly underestimated how far that was. It would've been managable if some rat bastard hadn't decided to put a 40km hill climb just before the entrance to the Kathmandu valley! It was rediculous! It'd be something on its own, but after 70km of ups and down was impossible.

I started to get cranky. This might be an indication that I'd lived too long in New York, but I started getting more and more aggrivated at the swarms of little kids all trying to make conversation with me. One thing I noticed about Nepal that I've said before is that these people are friendly to a fault. The whole reason I had to make it to Kathmandu in two days was because this guy I'd met at the Vipassana camp who took me around for three days was leaving the country the following day (today), and I'd felt obligated for the first time in my trip to make it there on time, out of sheer guilt of his friendliness to me. But EVERY TIME we'd stop at some tea shop, all the kids would run around us and not stop bothering us with questions about everything about us (as far as asking for the names of every member of my family) when all we'd want to do is relax and have some tea. Worst of all was all the kids shouting "What's your name?!" or "WHERE YOU FROM?" as I'd be fighting for my life pedaling up the hills past their homes. I literally couldn't spare the breath for an answer, but all they were doing is being curious and friendly. Eventually even their looks pissed me off. I had a green doorag on and Simon had a yellow hippie headband, we must have looked like something out of the movies for them, and I remember this one teenager giving me this awestruck "wow, I want to be you" face, knowing absolutely nothing about either of us and under any other situation I'd have been complimented but this day I just wanted to be invisible. Other people looked at us with obvious disdain, but another thing about Nepalis is they have no respect whatsoever of subtlety. However people judged us, they lucked directly at us and gave us their expression. We were on display, and all I wanted in the world was to do my thing and be ignored.

Everything was against our making it in 2 days. We managed to leave by 7, but by 3PM we had gone only 70km because of all the hills. There were a couple of burnt busses along the way, still sitting in the middle of the road. I checked, after seeing so many Hollywood films, to see that the gas tanks hadn't blown up (maybe they kept the gas for themselves?) but that didn't make the damage any less complete. These busses were Fucked. Anyway, stopping to get inside and hang around didn't help our time. At 4PM, we hit a storm, still 30km from town, and had to duck inside for a half hour 'till the rain passed. From then on it was a steady uphill the likes of virtually destroyed me. Simon, the friend, was feeling the same way, but after spending all my energy on the first 70km of hills, I was in no place to tackle 3 hours of steady uphill. At one point my body simply shut down. My legs just couldn't peddle any more and I couldn't catch my breath. I stopped the bike and stood there, delerious and gaping for air, and it was the only time in my life where I'd actually felt on the verge of passing out. I felt the overwhelming desire to fall asleep, and if I'd close my eyes even for a second I'd lose my orientation and almost fall. I fought the urge to pass out long enough to park the bike for a few minutes and relax, then I just pushed the bike up the rest of the hill during a gorgeous red sunset under the storm clouds. It took almost an hour until I found Simon having tea at this massive police checkpoint on the entrance to the Kathmandu valley. The military guys told us a curfew had been imposed in the city and we weren't allowed to enter. So there we were, 10km from Kathmandu after struggling through all that and we weren't allowed in. Worse than that, there was no place to stay near the checkpoint and it was completely dark, and we were freezing. My clothes were soaked between the rain and the sweat, and now that we'd stopped I was in desperate need of a hot shower. We were advised that the nearest hotel was half an hour bikeride down into the valley, just before the Curfew zone. We had no choice but to keep riding in the freezing darkness.

That ride down is sure to be one of the most memorable experiences of my trip. Simon held a small flashlight in his mouth as we rode down, but otherwise we had nothing but the occasional lights of buildings and fires to guide us. Very soon we found ourselves riding through the remnants of a complete warzone. Bonfires in the street, concrete blockades everywhere, military vehicles and troops scattered around, all the shops closed but people mulling about. We had to be extremely careful to ride slow enough to avoid the rocks and bricks in the dark. One time I didn't spot a brick in time and, since my breaks wouldn't stop me, barely slowed down enough to not fly head first when my front tire hit it. Even with all our precautions, it was impossible not to consistantly run over broken glass and it was a miracle the tires didn't burst.

We got in through the suburbs into town and learned that, in fact, there was no curfew and the cops at the top of the hill had no idea what they were talking about. Most likely, nobody tells them anything, but it was great news to hear we'd be able to have a gigantic feast on our arrival. On the way to the hotel we hit a big, loud group of protesters shouting something in Nepali. I couln't see much through the people but it looked like there was a big bonfire in the middle of the intersection and several people were carrying torches and chanting very loudly. It didn't take much thought to make that U-turn and find a way around.

We got to the hotel, had a delicious gigantic pizza each, and passed out immediately after. I woke up this morning almost unable to walk, and Simon's feeling the same way. Maybe tomorrow we'll have a look around town to see what's actually going on, but for now I'm laying very low until the saddle ass dies down a bit.

I'm on a mission to get to the Indian embassy tomorrow to submit a visa application so I can get out of here. Looks like Tibet's out of the question, since there's no Jeeps to drive me there and biking up those hills is out of the question. If the strike hasn't ended by the time my visa is cleared (5 days), it's a 2 or 3 day bikeride to the Indian border. Or, if I can find someone to buy my bike here, I'll splurge for a plane ticket.

In the next day or two I'll learn a whole lot more about the situation here, so my next post should be almost entirely about that. Hopefully, I'll find a good rooftop from which to watch hordes of protesters get beatup. The day I left Pokhara, apparently, 1300 protesters were hospitalized in Kathmandu alone. 1300! I still can't get over that number. I think under a dozen were shot, but it's definately reason enough to keep my distance. In any case there's a real curfew on tonight so no boozing it up for me after 9. On the bike ride over, we saw group after group of army dudes carrying massive guns walking the road out of Kathmandu, accompanied by the occasional Tank-looking thing (Bradley maybe? Definately something I've seen on the Iraq footage). I don't know where they were going or why they were leaving Kathmandu, but there must have been 200-400 of them in all. There's no shortage of them left here, though. I'll let you know more about what I see on my trip to the Embassy.

I'm only 550 pages into Harry Potter (200 left) but yesterday I called my all-too-friendly Vipassana friend in Kathmandu and he's leaving the country in three days. After spending a rediculous sum of money (my travel budget for the entire trip) to various officials, unnofficials and corrupt whoevers, he's cleared a visa to live in Israel to make money for his family. It's eerie how everybody's final dream is to leave. Worse still how America tops the list of places to go to. My one-man campaign of convincing all of Nepal to move to Canada instead of becoming disgruntled Taxi drivers in New York isn't working fast enough...

Right, so he's leaving the country on Sunday and I want to see him before he leaves, so I bought a bike a few hours ago and am setting off tomorrow at 7 in the morning. 200km should be pretty easy to do in 2 days, but if I leave early enough I have a chance of pulling it in a day. It should be a nice ride, no cars or busses on the street. Wish me luck anyway.

I took the bike around Pokhara and the whole city's in this lofty Sunday afternoon mood. I'm guessing it's been that way for the past 18 days or however long this strike's been going on. It's like the entire city has taken to playing FingerPool and Cricket as the prime method of demonstration against the king. Whatever works.

I just finished the 84km walk to Pokhara and FUCK, it hurt! I really shouldn't be complaining, considering I'd just walked 175km in the past two weeks in order to "see the great outdoors," but there's something not quite so sporty about walking on pavement the whole way. Actually, here I really shouldn't complain considering it was along the only paved road in Nepal. And, because the entire country was forced to walk (sometimes several hours) for groceries, it proved to be the slowest, most talkative traffic I've ever been a part of. OK, fine. It was fun. To be able to pick a destination on a map and "just walk" to it, negating the "being stranded" bit, was fun. It was a real bitch, but it was fun. Really made me realize how awesome cars are, but also how totally different life must have been without them. It's just like driving for several hours in sparse traffic (maybe 10 cars in sight), except you spend your time talking to the cars next to you. Then they exit and you keep moving, letting your mind wander or talking to your friends until a new person walks within talking range or you stop somewhere. This Nepali/Tibetan guy I walked with had a pocket radio in his hand that played Nepali music, which was vaguely like driving through America's countryside and listening to its local hick music.

It was a long day though. Two long days, actually. 84km was neatly spaced by a tourist town exactly halfway, making it two 42-km, 10 hour walks--coincidentally, exactly Marathon distance. I was a whole lot more impressed with that distance before I figured that one out, thinking I'd accomplished some super-human feat because the soles of my feet felt like they were going to explode at the end of the first day. Still, I walked the marathon, twice on two consecutive days, with a 35 pound bag on my back, and felt damn accomplished. Then a few hours after I arrived in Pokhara, I met these Kiwis who had left the Hot Springs a full day later to arrive here around the same time, doing in two days what took me three. They pulled 60km that day, and I shut up about my aching feet.

There were some alternatives to walking the whole way down. We found some crazy teenager who'd be willing to take his car out for $150 (split between 4 passangers), but if he got stopped we don't get our money back and would have to walk anyway. And his car could get burnt by the Maoists. There was a really, really, frustrated pissed off Isreali "army" guy back in Beni who "absolutely needed" to get to Pokhara by the following evening in order to make his flight home. I sat by him during the longest negotiation I've ever sat through (2 hours) until the offer came to $130 to rent this shop owner's motorbike between 5 and 7 in the morning, at which point his son in Pokhara would meet him 5 km outside Pokhara and hide the bike. The Israeli, enforcing every stereotype of himself by playing the "They can't do shit to me, I'm a tourist" motto, figured if he didn't stop for any maoist checkpoints he'd be fine. The shop owner (who's bike stood to get burnt by the deal) gave it a 90% chance of success. So, brokering his own insurance policy, he agreed to rent out the bike for 10% of its cost to the desperate Israeli. The whole deal fell through in the end because the Israeli only had $30 cash on him and the shop owner didn't trust him to hand over the rest when he arrived in Pokhara because, after all, he was Israeli. Unfortunately, the shopkeep was probably right in his judgement. All antisemitisms aside, it's extremely rare to see these Israeli army dudes show even the least bit of respect or loyalty to the locals out here. At least, they're the only nationality I've seen consistantly disrespect the locals here, especially when there's money involved...I'll rant on on that later.

The deal was brokered by this man from LoManthang, a small town (capital of the region) a day's walk from Tibet. By the way, the "Nevada-esque" desert crappy region I was describing earlier happens to have the most coincidentally apt Nepali name, "Mustang." I had passed through Lower Mustang, the relatively developed and culturally depleted side through which the Anapurna Trek runs directly through. LoManthang, where this guy's from, is the capital of Upper Mustang. Most of Mustang's inhabitants are Tibetan and speak Tibetan, because Mustang was historically a region of Tibet before Nepal took control of it. Since the Nepali government has nowhere near as much interest Upper Mustang as the Chinese government has in the rest of Tibet, the Tibetan culture of the region is largely untouched, making it one of the most culturally interesting places to visit. Why didn't I go myself? Well, the entry permit for Upper Mustang, set by the Divine Right of the King, costs $700 US Dollars for 10 days, plus $70 for each additional day. True, this keeps the region "untouched," but not a dime of this goes to the inhabitants of Upper Mustang. This is one of those things this country's so mad about.

Anyway, this guy I was walking with is 57 years old and might have Tuberculosis. His Tibetan doctor has been trying to help, but ultimately they need an X-ray to be certain of the diagnosis. So, what do you do when you live in Tibet and need an X-ray? I met him on day 7 of his 10-day walk to the hospital in Pokhara. This man has to walk 10 days for a referral! Each way! He'll try to fly back up to Jomosom, which only costs him $20 because he speaks Nepali, but that only cuts 5 days out. And this guy's 57. To think of how pissed off I used to get when I had to walk to the opposite wing of the hospital to see another doctor! But anyway I was really lucky to get to walk with somebody who speaks Nepali (and perfect English), so I got Nepali prices on things and got to have the Nepali radio news translated for me every 3 hours as it came in.

Right, so politics:
The night separating the two-day walk, we got to see a procession of school kids singing, laughing, and shouting slogans in Nepali while carrying a large paper effigy of the King down the end of the road to set him on fire. These were kids! They had ABSOLUTELY no idea what they were doing or saying, other than that some adults told them this was what they should be doing. I don't like the King one bit, but it really pissed me off to see a group of school kids laughing and playing around a burning effigy of their king. Gave me a really scared feeling in my stomach, that this was what they were teaching the kids of this country. It had that aweful eerie Lord of the Flies "laughing cannibals with torches during a school project" feel to it. Worst of all, I take part in the burning of a giant Man every year as well, with laughing and shouting and everything these kids were doing minus the voodoo aspect of assigning a particular living person to be represented by the effigy. Maybe it was this dicotomy that put me off so much, but in any case that image has been stuck in my mind. The night before we left, in Beni, two different groups of people lit two and three tall, tree-shaped fires each up in the mountains overlooking the town. Their shouting could be heard all over town. I recognized those fires in retrospect to be proper size and shape of a man on a stick, which means that there must be hundreds of burning Kings around the country every night. The country really hates that man.

In the part of Pokhara I'm staying at, there were a couple of small rallies in the past day but nothing major. This part of town is absolutely littered with army guys with big guns, just in case something major was to break out. Also, because they're keeping the Maoists out of this part of town, the strike can't be enforced and most of the shops are open. I guess they're supposed to make us feel safe with their big guns, but the looks on their faces makes me side with the opposition. They're fucked. The Maoists were one thing to contend with. You could shoot Maoists, and they only represent a small minority of the people anyway. But now, since the 7 parties joined their cause, they have 90% of the population represented in one giant standown to depose the King. If this thing comes to a head, the Army has no chance. Worse than that, if the Maoists decide to be half as brutal to the army as the army was to them, each of these 20-year olds with guns I see "guarding my right to shop" is in serious trouble. It kinda reminds me of the looks on the flight attendants' faces when flying United just after September 11, except that these guys are in fear of their lives not just their jobs.


The protests here really put the protests in America into perspective. Unlike any protests I've been to in America, there were none of those pricks or douchebags with signs that have no relation to the issue at hand. I came to remembering the anti-Iraq war protests where I'd suddenly find myself amid a group of protesters shouting against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Fine, good point and all, but I wondered what would happen if, amidst a group of excited Nepalis shouting "FREE NEPAL," I'd suddenly burst out shouting "FREE TIBET!" and trying to convince everybody of the brutal injustices committed by China. I think it's about equivalent. There's a time and a place for everything, granted, but protests are really so much more effective when they're united.

But ultimately it's all people tooting their own horns. Nobody listens to protesters except protesters, and they're already out protesting. It's fun and it gives people some kind of high, and that's why they do it. That's why the kids burned a paper King at the stake for a school project, and that's why every few hours there's a bonfire in the middle of the street here. It's just people getting excited. This point was comically enforced a few hours ago when I saw about 10 Nepalis with homemade torches marching down the street towards me shouting slogans. At first I got a bit excited that they'd be out to riot, but they just passed by as I stepped to the sidewalk. A few minutes later, they come running back down the street, some putting out their torches, some still shouting slogans, most unsure what to do. All scattered, excited, and confused. I think they saw a few army guys and got scared, but eventually they regrouped about 50 feet from where I was standing and started shouting again, then started walking down the street away from whatever they were running from. Then came the wives. Three women came out into the middle of the street where they had just regrouped and started shouting, sorry "nagging" at the boys to bring them back. The arch in this one woman's back and her demeanor really gave the impression that she was some housewife or mother nagging her kids around like they just did something naughty and need to be punished. Ashamed, most of the guys turned back with their heads down and shut up. A few others kept the party going by buiding a bonfire with everybody's torches on the ground and promting the shouting of more slogans. With the fire on the ground, others on the sidelines joined in and they shouted some more for about 5 minutes, then dispersed. It was pretty funny.

On my way back, along the way the guys had initially walked and then ran from, I noticed all the shops had closed down when the torch men came by. I think they were worried they were Maoists were out to torch the shops of any scabs breaking strike, but it was really like night and day. I walk down and every building has a shop. I walk up and it's all closed or half-open garage doors. The internet cafes, banks, and hotels were all still open. I guess they're immune to Maoists.

So needless to say it's nice here in Pokhara. Plenty of excitement to keep me occupied. I'm almost 300 pages into HP, leaving about 450 left. If I finish the book and the strike is still going, I've decided I'll buy a bike and bicycle my way to Kathmandu. It's only 200km from here, and I briefly considered walking it, but from the tourists I've talked to, I won't have to go it alone. The book is ticking...

I'll update soon.

Well, this is interesting. It seems as thought the fabric of this country has somewhat disintegrated during my bout in the mountains. I'm currently in a town called Beni, at the end of the trek, from where I'm supposed to be able to catch a bus to Pokhara, Nepal's "Other City." Unfortunately, all busses and taxis on the highways have been burned in accordance with a Maoist-issued strike. Those "crazy guys" decided to march into Kathmandu with their big guns and their new found 7-party friends (representing the rest of nepal) and have been demanding the King to step down. The King, who finally said something yesterday after 6 days of violent protests, is offering to present the country with a new, brand new, rigged election. Needless to say, the maoists are keeping their strike going strong. So I'm stuck. No busses, no taxis, all the shops are closed, basically all I got out here are the hotels that are still open (tourists are still catered to) and a few black-market shops that have to be extremely careful the maoists don't find them open ("or else").

I came down from the mountain just a few hours ago, hoping that this week-long strike would have been over once the king spoke last night. Last night, by the way, was new years out here, making it the third new years I've seen in the past 5 months. Neato. Anyway, the strike has been declared indefinate, so tomorrow morning I'm WALKING to Pokhara. It's 84km (50 miles) and should take three days, but there's really nothing else to do. From there I might be able to catch an airplane out of this country before the whole place blows up. Basically, nobody has any idea what's going on except that nobody's allowed to work, which makes for a very scared but extremely drunk "of age" community, and a whole lot of kids running around playing in the street. I'll give you a whole lot of comments on the situation once I get to Pokhara, but the demand for internet here is extremely high so I should take my leave. In case any of you are worrying, though, I'm staying out of the police riots and keeping my head down. My goal at the moment is just to find a way out of this country to move on.

If not, fortunately I recently bought the 5th Harry Potter book, which should keep me busy for about a week of downtime. Wish me luck.

So in playing little buddha boy in the last post, I can follow it up by playing little boyscout in this one. In retrospect there were a lot of things missing from the past post, and a lot of things overstated. And I'm sure, for anybody who hasn't had the experience themselves, that any connection between observing bodily sensations to my realization of impermanence would be based purely on "sure, OK Andrew" principle. There are plenty of books written on the subject, I'll wait 'till I can append an MD to my name before I write my own. For now suffice it to say that in addition to learning how to hold concentration longer (which will definately help me for the next 4 years), I got to experience some neat feelings. I've been trying my best to meditate as much as I can out here on the mountains, but I feel like a complete idiot meditating if I'm sharing a room with someone, and I'm usually too tired to stay awake anyway. Lately, I've had a room to myself and, in the case of the night before the pass, it was the only thing to do when I couldn't sleep and there's no electricity to read by. The best places are the temples scattered throughout the trek. They're just really nice places to sit and be quiet, and usually have some sort of floor cushions to make meditating a bit easier. One time this guy I was traveling with came into a temple while I was meditating and tried to meditate next to me because I, by sitting there like a doofus, had already broken the taboo. One step closer to being a guru. Ha. Right, so anyway the past month had been fantastically productive. First got into mental shape, then into physical shape. It was so healthy, I felt fantastic.

But OH, MAN the beauty of breaking fast. Yesterday I had a Yak burger and Apple Moonshine after a month of being a sober vegitarian. Ah, the release. I guess I should back up, since I've been spending the past 2 weeks trekking through some of the most beautiful, and also some of the ugliest, parts of the world. I'll condense everything because internet is rediculously expensive out here because it was carried up to this place on the back of a mule. Or maybe a Sherpa. I'll tell you, after passing a dozen mule caravans every day, they have about the same look in their eyes as the Nepalis with refrigerator-sized loads every day. Which is not to say that sherpas are dumb, it's that mules can be really smart. I was walking along one of those cliche Indiana Jones long, extremely high, really really rackety and unstable suspension foot bridges the other day when, out of nowhere, a mule walks onto it coming towards me. Then another mule follows. Then another. No herder in sight, they just kept coming like they knew the entire 50k trail as well as they knew the ass of the mule in front of them. They knew to pass on the left, as the Nepalis do, and they also knew that I had no chance of actually passing them without being pushed off the bridge myself. Assholes. So I had to go back the way I came and wait for 20 minutes while the slow-ass caravan, and its herder all the way in the back, came through. I think they'd do well driving in New York.

So the first few days kinda sucked. The canyon we were following was covered in smog that completely precluded the beautiful white peaks looming high above us, and it was hot and the villages were all new hotel dens. The second day I learned what an absolutely wreched idea it was to prepare for a 2-week trek by sitting completely still for 10 days. My muscles had not only atrophied, but I had no stamina other than the determination to follow the group I was tagging along with. For lunch the second day we went to this restaruant at the top of this mountain, and on the SECOND-LAST STEP up, my calf went into a full charlie-horse and I almost fell all the way down from the pain. For the rest of the day, every other muscle in my leg threatend to cramp up every time I stopped I felt and I had to be super-super careful to keep moving them. My bag is also way too heavy because I thought it would be "challenging" to not drop anything off in Kathmandu. So while other, smarter, people had tiny day bags and never changed clothes, I was packing 8 months worth of traveling. I couldn't keep up with the group and collapsed at some hotel along the trail. At least I had the whole place to myself.

I woke up the next day and felt better, and the next day after that I felt well enough to do a double-day, hiking from 9AM to 6:30 and covering 24km and 2000 vertical meters. By then I was into it. That night was the last night I'd spend in a modern village ('till today). At least at this town I met some cool guys my age I'd spend the next few days with, until I caught up with my original group and realized they were really annoying anyway and left them.

I really need to send some pictures, because on the 5th day we entered the Kingdom of Rohan, for anybody who saw or read the Two Towers. The resemblance was striking, and gorgeous, and also a little desolate and ghost-towny. Each village at this point was made of rocks and wood, perched on top of a hill or along the side of the canyon, in the high desert (2500-3500 meters up). It did feel a little awkward walking through "someone else's" village every time, but the feeling from the people was that there really weren't enough of us. Of all the hotel spaces, maybe 10% of them were ever occupied. This way I almost never had to pay for a room, on the condition that I ate dinner and breakfast there. It's definately a buyer's market out here.

Not only do the buildings look like something out of Lord of the Rings, but we got to this first Rohan village as they were holding some sort of archery competition. They all sucked. Most of them were drunk, but each person had his own arrows and the bows were hand made but extremely effective. So some great pictures of Rohan are to come when I get back to Kathmandu. I got a cheap film camera but I'll have the pictures burnt to CD to send off anyway. I spent 3 nights in the district capital of Manang, where I spent two days doing some absoultely stupid and rediculously fun day trips up the sides of the mountians. The first day I went out in Birkenstocks and wool socks (yeah I know, but I had blisters and it was cold!) to try to find some cave somewhere. I don't think I found it, but I ended up climbing up to 4000 meters, at times with knee-deep snow, until I hit some completely abandoned monastery-looking village with a giant eerie looking gold Buddha that must have come on the back of some poor Sherpa. There were some more prayer flags further up, and from the distance it looked like they were accessable. By the time I got close enough to not want to turn back, I realized I was scrambling up a black-diamond slope with either snow-ice or sliding rock to grip on to with my faded-soled sandals. I guess the really stupid part was that if I'd fall/slide down and broke my leg, I'd be a 3-hour trek to any kind of help. But in the end I got to the prayer flags, found them absolutely littering this remote rock outcrop overlooking these giant mountains and canyon. I guess it'd be a good place to sit and meditate for 7 years, especially since it'd be so hard to get back down. I sat there for maybe 30 minutes before I got bored and went down anyway. The boyscout in me made me make my own trail down, since it was impossible to get lost (any way down hill was the right way), which involved a lot of fun, dirty slipping and sliding in the mud, snow, and ice. My sandals are now completely torn up, but are still somehow together despite that day and a dog chewing through 75% of one of the straps in Vietnam. The next day was a bit more conservative, but involved another few hours of scrambling up the side of a mountain trying to get to this temple in a cave somewhere near the top. At one point I lost the trail and found this other cave that was covered with these little plaster prayer-things (again, the pictures will help), it looked just like some archeological site you'd see on the Discovery channel. This was actually the perfect place to sit and think about things, since it was so obviously "the space" for many others. I eventually found this "temple," which was more of this 90-year old Llama's house. I walked in, felt really awkward at having entered somebody's house, and he told me to sid town and then annointed me with some holy sugar water and tied a string around my neck. It was a whole lot more awkward than exctiting, but I guess a cool thing to have done nonetheless.

The next three days were spent acclimatizing to the Throng-La Pass, the highest pass in the world (meaning the highest you could get without climbing a mountian). 5416 Meters tall, about 17,800 feet. I don't know how that compares to the mountains in America, but it's damn high. Really, really high. 2/3rds of the way to the cruising altitude of a 747. Altitude sickness was a big deal, so on the approach I was warned to only climb 2000 feet or less per day. My breathing was doing wierd things, according to the people I'd be sharing rooms for those 3 days with. I'd breath heavily about 4 or 5 breaths and then stop breathing for 20 or 30 seconds altogether. It scared the shit out of 2 different groups of people, but apperently is a perfectly normal way of handling the acclimatization. By the time I got to the high camp where I'd spend the final night before the climb, I had a pounding headache and even started to get a metal taste in my mouth--two signs of mountian sickness. But I was there already, I fell alseep and woke up just fine.

So Yesterday I woke up at 1:30 in the morning because I just couldn't sleep anymore. I'd heard sleep is hard up that high (I was at 4800m) and it was freezing anyway, under two thick blankets, thermals, hat, scarf, and sweater. Breakfast at 4:30, out the door as it got light enough to see at 5:30. Absolutely beautiful day. There's something really cool about sunrise when you haven't been up all night drinking, and spending surrounded by white is even cooler. I got to the top around 8AM and, at 17,800 feet I did the most American thing I knew how to do. I scrambled up the hill another few hundred feet until I was certain I'd reached 18,000 feet. Yeehaw! My brother might have set the family depth record at 160 feet, but I'm pretty sure I now have the altitude record. Take that, Dima!

I got down to the next village by 1, checked into the Bob Marley hotel (?), and checked right out after being creeped out by the first Nepali Ladyboy I'd ever seen, but not before having a delicous Yak Burger. I'm still trying to figure out why I left, but I don't think it's entirely the ladyboy's fault. I was almost out of money, and I had enough to make it to the next village where there's an ATM, but I think once I had the Yak burger I got hooked. I wanted nice food, nice beer, and a nice bed with a hot shower. I was ready to splurge, but I didn't have the money on hand. So I packed out and left at 3 for a 4-hour hike to the ATM. It was stupid. Real stupid. But I had my Ipod on and set to my workout gym music and just felt fantastic so I kept moving, totally high on the massive amounts of oxygen in the air, completely forgetting that I'd be stuck after dark. The land after the pass, by the way, turned from Rohan to Nevada. It sucks on this side. It's desert. Not even cool, death valley desert, just dry Nevada desert badlands. No trees, just a little grass. Not even cacti. So I walked faster. Then the sun went down. Then the rain started. Then the lightning started. Eventually I saw the village off in the distance and walked even faster, but somehow the rain made everything look closer than it actually was. No matter how long I walked, it seemed like I never got any closer. Eventaully it got really dark, really rainy, and I was surroudned by swamp somehow. I was almost, really almost there, and in these last 5 minutes I had to walk calf-deep in mossy, swampy, suction sludge to finally get there. Then the village turned out to be gigantic, but there was a whole giant strip of hotels about 10 minutes away. By now it was really dark and rainy. I started walking past the "old village" on the long road to the "new village" where all the hotels were. There was a giant barbed-wire barricade blocking my path, but I was so tired, cold, wet, and certian I was on the right path that I just walked around it. Two minutes later I was surrounded by Nepali military men shining flashlights at me, asking where I was going. I said, "HOTELS" they said "NO HOTELS, go back!" I told them I was absolutely sure the hotels were this way, and they had no idea what I was saying and motioned me to get the hell out of there. I was so pissed off, but who's to argue with guys in camo gear with guns? I went back there today and apparently it's the army barracks of the "Royal Nepali High Altitude Mountain Warfare School" and they close the road outside at night, isolating the two parts of the village. So I went back to the old village to find one of the old, rustic hotels. To risk making too many Lord of the Rings references, I felt like the hobbits coming to that first little dirty Man village and pleading for a place to stay. I was covered in mud, soaking wet, and aching all over. I did feel accomplished, on the other hand, at having covered at least 25 miles that day, but I don't think this came across in the negotiations for a room. Instead of that rustic old romantic hotel with a chimeny and a fire place, I found some place called the Jimi Hendrix hotel (apparently he stayed there once) that just looked like a piece of crap all over. I was in no mood for negotiating, so I'm paying for the room now, 75 cents big whup. Fortunately, they have fantastic home-made boozes. From Wheat Wine to Aprocot brandy to millet seed Sake, I got DRUNK. Oh, how wonderful! And I met some Japanese trekker and got him drunk while telling him about how the Japanese have invaded the East Village and Inuyasha was taking over the pot-smoking college scene.

So I'm still here today. This town sucks as far as trekking is concerned; it's supplied with power and phones, and you can get here by motorbike and there are even some trucks driving through, which means I'll most likely be following the road for the next few days. But I got here just as the storm started, and now it's really, really raining. At least I'm somwhere that's well supplied and cheap until the storm dies down, but I'm not moving 'till it does. I hear there are nice hot springs two days downt he road, and I'm considering extending the trek back into the mountains. I am 2/3rds around the Anapurna mountians, which are arranged like a giant horseshoe. I can spend another 4 days getting into the middle of the horseshoe, the view's supposed to be rediculous. Otherwise, I can be back in Kathmandu in 3 days if I want. I have 'till the hotsprings to decide.

Anyway, the rain stopped momentarily so I'm off to have myself a Yak Steak. I passed by YakDonalds on my hurry to get to this village, but I hear the food's better here anyway. I'll post again from Kathmandu.

-andrew

Dear All,
There comes a time in everyone's lives when we must re-evaluate the path we have chosen. It is said that one's so-called "chosen" path is the result of incomplete knowledge and, unless one has the chance to step outside his life to fully evaluate the circumstances before committing, he will ultimately end up missing the true meaning of his life and feel unfulfilled. So was said to me during my meditation retreat, and as a result of my Guru's guidance, I have decided to re-plot my path fully. Next week I will follow him to his mountain ashram where I will permanently part with all of my belongings (clothes, electronic devices, even the money left in my bank account) in order to gain full acceptance into his noble Society of Samadhi. By casting away all my savings, I can more fully immerse myself in His teachings and, given proper guidance and discipline, eventually come closer and possibly return to The Source. Discipline will be intense, food will be scarce, and complete silence will be maintained. Only time and dedication will tell, but during this time I must have no outside contact or attachments to anyone I've known. To make my transformation complete, I must maintain my separation from the world I've known for many years, possibly decades, following this point.

For this reason I must bid a final farewell to all of you, as I will probably not be seeing any of you ever again. Those of you that I will see again will find me a new and changed person, but even that won't be for many, many years. I've already send my letter of declention to USC, forfeiting the position in the entering class of 2006 that I've fought so hard for, but I know it's for a noble cause. I've changed my life, and I feel fantastic. I thank you all for your continued support during my life up to this point. I offer you the following description of my past two weeks as a narrative of how I achieved my current position, and after this post you won't be hearing from me any longer. Again, thanks for your continued support and take care of my former world while I'm gone. Namaste.









OK, happy april fool's day. I couldn't help it. I know that's what some of you were half-expecting to hear at some point, so there you had it. I'm still going to med school, I still have my money, I haven't succumbed to any brainwashing (yet), and this long pause is due to my 17 day trek.

But I did have this half-crazy experience at this meditation camp if you want to hear about it. The coolest part of this experience is that all of you can easily experience the same thing. There are meditation centers all round the US that offer exactly the same course, for free. www.dhamma.org will tell you a little about it, but if you want to hear a more detailed account, keep reading. It's the longest post I'll ever have, but most of its length is on purpose to try to convey the sense of intense boredom for those 10 days. Like the analogy to India I love take so much to heart, my meditation experience was like a giant lump of shit with a few diamonds mixed in that are worth diving for. Also, since I'll be out of contact 'till mid-April, I thought I'd give you something long to chew on. It gets really cool around Day 7, if you want to read ahead, but for it all to make sense it'd be best to stick through the boring bits. That's what I had to do, so I'm passing it on. Just warning you now.

So maybe it was a bit of an overreaction to shave my ead and enter Buddhism school because of a hangover, but I was really pissed off and it wasn't just the $12. I guess I just finally realized had been wasting my time for too long and it's time to do what I really came out here to do. And besides, if it had been my intention to ever pay for sex, it was $12! That's like two girls in Vietnam, or four in Cambodia.

The experience unfolded much like an acid trip: decision to commit, then boredom, then more boredom so you get pissed off that you wasted your time on it, then anxiety, confusion, and finally experience followed by introspection. So here it is, my extended psychedelic experience, detailed chronologically:

My experience of Vipassana camp:

Day 0:
I found myself on a crowded bus full of backpacks and Nepalis, with about twice as many seats as there should be so that I had about 5 inches of leg room for the bumpy 1-hour journey that would take us the 15km straight up a hill overlooking the Kathmandu valley. I had no idea what to expect, other than people I've met traveling have told me to do it. I understood the precepts, as Lev pointed out, that there would be no talking, no eating after midday, men an women would be separated, no comforts, and no sexual activity (yes, that includes shaking too many times after peeing). Other than that, I figured I'd be sitting on a temple floor for 10 days, that was about all I knew.

The bus ride gave me a pain in my knees that I would come to regard as a relative tickle to the pain I'd get later. I get out and they show me to my room, which luckily I get to myself because they only had 38 people to fit 100 spots. Usually they keep everybody in dorms to help enforce the no jerkoff rule, but they said I'd meditate better with my own room. I originally laughed at the idea but I guess they were right in the end.

The place consists of a few acres of land, mostly covered with buildings with tiny garden paths in between, up the hill overlooking Kathmandu. I say overlooking, but the city was usually blanketed a cloud of thick pollution so that the only time I could actually see any of it was after a rain, even though it was less than 10km away. For 700k people, they sure know how to pollute.

The first thing that struck me was how local the population was. Who am I kidding? I couldn't tell if they were Nepali, Indian, Paki, or Tibetan, and they had about the same racial distribution of NYU. Some dark, some not so dark, some Koreans for some reason, and overall the racial distribution of the crowd reminded me of my premed classes. Still, I expected a course full of hippies for some reason, but these guys looked like any old group pulled off the street. Businessmen, students, loafers, everybody. There were two westerners there, one fat British guy whose double chin gave him that same "either depressed or hopelessly apathetic to the world around him" look that Keith from The Office had. The other guy was this german guy with a completely shaved head except for a Hare Krishna pony tail growing out of a circle in the back, which he said he did "just for fun," not for any religious sense. Luckily I met him before we had to stop talking for 10 days, otherwise I would have had quite an interesting impression of him. The story ends with me going trekking with him. There I spoiled it.

Eventualy one of the happy smiling servants (eventually referred to as the bowing happy slavedrivers) informed me I was "requested" to have tea in the dining hall. I followed the German pseudo-Krishna, who had done the course at that location 9 years ago, to the dining hall and had some of the best tea of my life. This hot milk tea, which was traditional Nepali tea that everybody else had come to despise years ago, saved my sanity later on.

Unfortunately during this tea and subsequent meal, I made friends with this German guy and another Nepali I had met waiting for the bus earlier. I call it unfortunate because it's really a lot harder to not talk to someone if you know them, and once the silence began, I'd feel awkward whenever I was near.

We were led into a large hall where the head guru gave us the run-down of the rules. He was an old man, covered in blankets and a Nepali hat (looks like a Russian pointed hat) who sounded as though he were reading from queue cards. No empathy, just a harsh cold voice. I'll say more about him later, but for a while I was worried that he'd be the one conducting the sessions.

At the end of the run-down he gave us the ultimatum that we could leave now. If we chose to stay past 8PM, we'd be locked in for the full ten days. There would be no escape after that point. I considered it for a while, then realized there'd be no transportation back to town anyway, but it was a nice gesture.

At 8PM, The Gong was rung and "Noble Silence" began. I followed the crowd, half of whom had attended the course before and knew what they were doing, to the main meditation hall, where I was given a square pillow that would be my space for the whole time. I sat down, waited with eyes closed for a little while, and started getting worried that that was all I'd be doing from that point on.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came the WIERDEST chanting I'd ever heard. The tone was poorly maintained, there were only about three different notes, and at the end of every phrase he would drop his voice to a crawling throat growl that you'd only hear because the micrphone was so close to his throat. I couldn't help but crack up at the sound of it, but then he stopped chanting and told us we were going to learn the art of Annapana. After a group chanting (a formal request to Someone to learn this form of meditation), he gave instructions in Hindi and then English to focus intently on our respiration by observing nothing but the air coming through the nose. We were by no means to change our natural breath, just to be aware of its natural course and all of its sensations within the nose. So I tried. At 9PM we were told to go to sleep.

Day 1:
The Gong sounded loudly and persistently for 10 minutes at 4AM. It was a pleasant sound, more like the ringing of a clear bell than a gong, but any persistant banging like that at 4AM would be enough to wake even me. At 430 came another bell calling us to the hall. It was cold. Ass cold. I put on my thermal top and bottom, jeans, long sleeve shirt sweater, jacket and hat and even wrapped my towel around myself and was still freezing when I got to the hall. They said nothing for almost 2 hours as we sat there shivering, not allowed to do anything. So, I tried doing what the teacher told me, closed my eyes, and tried focusing all my attention on my respiration. Just the part coming through my nose. Without changing my breathing at all, and above all, without thinking about anything else. This is hard to do. I mean really hard to do. Try it. Really, try it. Right now...

Really. Breathing. Nose. Now....









How long did you last before you started thinking about food, or music, or what else was in this blog, or if your boss is looking over your shoulder, or what you did last night? Or how long before you started breathing heavily or shallowly? I quickly learned that, probably because of all the booze but more likely all the TV and Hamburgers I'd been exposed to in the past 20 years, I couldn't hold my attention more than a second or two before wandering off. My attention span was pathetic, and we were supposed to do this for 2 hours? Rediculous. So I did my best, rediverting my attention over an over again in an endless attempt to learn to concentrate for more than 5 seconds at a time. It was impossible.

Worse than that, I'd work for about 5 minutes, then realize my leg had fallen asleep, then stretch and come back to realize my back was full of knots, or wasnt straight, and by the time I finished stretching my legs and cracking my back, I had been thinking about everybody back home or something I was going to do when I got back or something I had done before. Anything but meditating.

Somehow, 2 hours had gone by and the gong rang again. I followed the crowd out to the dining hall for breakfast. Rice porridge with a small cup of bean soup, all served in metal dishes. The tea, again, was fantastic. We got a break for an hour and a half where I went back immediately and took a nap, then at 8 we were called back for meditation.

The whole group moved in complete silence with their heads down the whole time. We were not even allowed to make any kind of eye contact. All forms of communication were prohibited. Actually, when I first got there I was really excited about this prospect. I'd realized that, in 4 months of traveling, that I had the obligation to engage every Westerner I'd see in some sort of conversation, and if I didn't do it they probably would. When I came back to Thailand, I found I was the quiet, "over it" type of traveler and couldn't stand making those same conversations I'd had thousands of times by then. What's your name? Where are you from? How long have you been traveling? Where have you been? Wow, that's great. Where are you going to go next? I've heard and asked those questions so many times it made me sick. Now, finally, I was going to get my 10 days of peace and quiet.
So I sat again in the meditation hall. This time, however, that wierd chanting appeared again and we were given the same instructions, in a soothing, relaxing, new-agey meditative form but without tacky music in the background, to observe respiration through the nose. Which part of the nose is the breath coming through? Left nostril? Right nostril? Both? Was it hard or shallow, hollow or soft? After about 30 minutes of this instruction, we were to meditate 'till 11 with one 5 minute break in between.

For this whole time I felt pretty cool, actually. Not so much that I was getting any kind of results or confidence in meditation, but more that I kept seeing myself meditating and thinking how cool it was to be involved in a 10-day meditation course. After this, I thought, I'd use this method to increase my concentration every morning before going to classes and I'd be such a great student. And I'd be able to concentrate for long periods, and math would be fun, and I'd never be bored waiting in line again because I'd always have something to do. Then I'd realize I'd been daydreaming for the past half hour and I'd been thinking about such a superior concentration precisely as a result of my aweful concentration, so I'd return to thinking of my respiration for another 5 seconds until my mind would wander again. Probably 95% of that day, apart from the time under instruction, was spent daydreaming. The other 5% was just trying to concentrate, a small fraction of that was actual concentration.

The lunch bell rang at 11 and we were served this giant mountain of rice with four differenet scoops of cooked veggies, two tortillas and a small cup of bean soup. This would be the last meal of the day for the old students, but I would get fruit and more milk tea at 5. These meals were to vary slightly for the rest of my time, but not by much. Nevertheless, the cafeteria would come to be one of the defining parts of the experience, I'll go into this later.

For now let's just say I spent the day in this state of content daydreaming, in one sense happy to be there and in another sense frustrated at my lack of attention. Worse than that, the pain of sitting there was steadily getting worse. The knots in my back had multiplied and I if my foot wasn't alseep, my knees were in bitter agony. Somehow I made it through the 1:00-5:00 meditaiton session fueled by memories of college. I got my fruit, had my hour break, then got called back to meditation at 6. It was a long day. It was a really long day. I mean, just sitting there thinking about stuff or trying to focus on one thing for a long period of time was so grueling. At 7:00, we were called to sit in on an hour long videotaped discourse by our teacher, S.N. Goenka, who should probably be introduced at this point:

S.N.Goenka: He is Mr. Vipassana, the guy to start this current Vipassana movement, busy teaching every single class that is ever being given anywhere. In order to be in so many places at once he recorded the entire 10-day course to audio and video tapes that would be played either while we were meditating (audio) or during an hour long discourse every evening (video). Yeah, it's really lame, but at least this way I knew I was getting exactly the same experience as everybody else around the world. I wasn't relying on having a "good" guru.

The discourse was the intellectual arm of the course, explaining everything we were doing at the precise times we were experiencing them. After conducting those courses for the 30 years before he videotaped them, he'd learned exactly what to say to us when. So we learned the history of Vipassana. Apparently, it was exactly and only what Buddha taught and nothing more. Just his teaching before it got corrupted, which was a way of understanding all of reality through knowledge of oneself and ultimately attaining enlightenment this way. Buddha, as I came to understand, was interested in the nature of the universe as much as any noted scientist of the past 400 years, except that he lived without any instruments with which to study the outside world. Instead, he went on the premise that we could never understand the outside world by direct observation anyway beause we would have to narrow its attributes to those detectable by our senses. Any instrument as well, from a microscope to a bubble chamber, would be necessarily limiting our experience of the world to those attributes detectable by that instruement. Instead he hypothesized that our bodies our infinately observable, and by observing the inner world we'd be able to find truths that pertain to the outside world as well. This was either said on that first or second night, but I didn't understand it 'till much later anyway. I'll go more into detail as I come to learn certain parts of that myself, but you'll have to keep reading for that.

But basically, Buddha taught how to see these truths for yourself. No gods, no wierd rules, no statues, no ceremonies. It's basically a do-it-yourself handbook of Peace and Enlightenment, whose focus is experiencing truths for oneself instead of understanding things purely intellectually. This was exactly the way Buddha taught it, if you believe Burmese tradition. Here's the breif history if you care: India was covered in Vipassana practitioners for about 300 years after Buddha died, but eventually it ran the course of all religions and got perverted and corrupted. According to Goenka, a few small groups of Burmese monks kept Vipassana pure for the past 2500 years and now this guy was trying to reignite Buddha's spark. A noble cause. Anyway, my palate was wet and I got excited to try it again. One thing he did say, however, was that he kept noticing students had the hardest times on the 2nd and 6th days. He related the whole course to an operation that works on the deepest parts of the mind, and these are the days of rejection or doubt, after the first incision, where the patient wants to back out and run away. He warned us then. After the discourse we were bought back to the main hall where an audio tape told us to focus our attention on a smaller area of the nose of our choosing, either the lip of the nostril or a part in the middle or somewhere above my upper lip. We practiced for 30 minutes and then went to sleep.

Day 2: Quite possibly the longest day of my life. It was no longer "cool" to be stuck in this meditation hall for the two coldest and drowsiest hours of the morning, but I stuck to it (mostly out of fear that the happy smiling slavedrivers would do something). I was determined not to fall into this trap he had warned us again, and I actually managed to bounce out of bed and head down. For those two hours, I tried my absolute best to not get discouraged, and maybe I spent a full 10% concentrating this time.

After breakfast I went back to sleep. When the gong woke me up, I was pissed and didn't want to go at all. It was a total turn around from that morning. My back hurt, I was exhausted. I had no desire to go, yet I pulled myself out of bed and dragged myself to the hall in a way that reminded me exactly of the last year of college having to wake up early for my Physical Chem course.

Actually much of this day was spent thinking about its relation to that P-chem course. I kept finding that concentrating on absolutely nothing but this one tiny little part on the front of my nostril was as hard, if not harder, as concentrating on the most boring and unintelligable of mathamatical proofs for extended periods of time. Not only that, but I felt that same sense of frustration boil up from inside me and form a complete and total block that stopped me from progressing any further. I was to later learn this in subconscious terms, that an inner part of me rebelled against any inner probing that might lead to its eventual demise, and it put up a curtain of severe aggitation to stop me. This made perfect sense once I realized it, but only because this aggitation had formed such a curiously complete block that it was impossible to pass. It's the same frustration we all feel when we know we have to do something and it's not just that we don't want to do it, but it becomes unreasonably impossible to progress any further without going outside for a walk or something. This frustration manifested itself physically as well, tying up my back in painful irritating muscle spasms and constantly diverting my attention to the coming pains in my legs from sitting cross-legged for any more than a few minutes at a time.

This was where John's advice of trying to sing entire albums or recite full movies came into play. I got through most of 40 Oz. to freedom and the entire B-side of Abbey road without stopping. It seemed my attention span had at least increased in that way. But the boredom. The intense, unwavering boredom wouldn't leave me alone. The only way to deal with the boredom was to focus on my breath, which would eventually make me so frustrated I'd prefer boredom.

But the reality was that I was stuck there. The rules were strict, and I lived in perpetual fear of being reprimanded by one of the Happy Smiling Slavedrivers who, between all their bows and smiles would ask you so kindly to return to what you're supposed to be doing that you just feel aweful for every being so ungrateful. So for 3 hours I waited for that 11:00 lunch bell, doing my best to concentrate and supress the frustration, which seemed to only make it worse.

Lunch was bliss. I learned to make fajitos out of the tortillas, using various combinations of the veggies, and dipping it into the bean soup. Oh, the thrill of it.
But eventually lunch was over. I went back to sleep.
I barely rolled out of bed at the call of the 1:00 bell, because I knew this would lead to 4 straight hours of "meditation."

Possibly because of the refreshed perspective, but more likely due to my sense of mental self-preservation, I began to realize the nature of the exercise. Concentration was the goal of the exercise, but it was also the method of survival. Once one surrenders fully to the concentration of any one thing, time narrows discreetly down to the present. One of the topics mentioned in the discourse the night before was that the reason we can't concentrate is because the mind has been conditioned to divert all attention away from the present. Any attempt to focus on the present results in memories of the past or plans of the future. The mind has become a sort of wild animal, and the purpose of these first few days had been to beat it into submission. As I'd focus in on the present, however, boredom and frustration become impossible. Boredom is the comparison between the present situation and one of the past or future that may be more exciting. If past and future are eliminated, the only moment that exists is the present. With no comparisons to a more preferable situation, boredom becomes impossible and ideally you could concentrate forever. Similarly, frustration is the aversion to the present situation by comparison to a more preferable one. If the idea of a more preferable situation were eliminated, frustration would too disappear. The same thing happens with concentration on anything. It's perfectly reasonable to get lost in the most boring task and never realize any frustration or boredom until you become aware of the outside world, or things you could be doing.

At the end of the day we had small meditation sessions with the head guru, where he would ask some questions and then say something, then we'd meditate together. The Head Guru was this old guy who sits in the front of the class with his legs crossed, completely obscured by the layers of clothing and blankets and big Nepali (looks kinda Russian) hat covering every bit of him but his face, which was always tilted downward as he slept most of the time, except for occational bouts of consciousness in which he would bumble awake just long enough to shout sal-ZAK!, which apparently means WAKE UP in Nepali, and then he falls back asleep or watches over us intently for a few minutes and then falls back asleep. When I got to actually come close to him during the small sit-in meditation, I found his face to be completely benevolent, childlike, and compassionate to everything any of us had to say. It had that kind of permanent smile that only existed in the eyes, and was such a stark contrast to what he looked like from far away that eventually I came to finding questions just for the purpose of being around him to ask them. Props to this guy for filling the role perfectly.

During this session, he told me that we weren't actually yet practicing Vipassana, that this was just a concentration exercise to prepare us for the real teaching. With that knowledge I went to bed excited for the next day.



Day 3 and 4 kinda blended together. The instructions had changed from being aware of respiration to becoming aware of all the sensations present in the entire nose region, and eventually just to the sensations present between the upper lip and the nostril. You'd think that'd be a boring task but after a few hours I noticed there was a whole lot going on there. There'd be itches, tingles, pressure ripples, tiny skin permutations related to the movement of your nostrils in response to the respiration.

This was actually where things started getting cool. I gradually came to sharpen my mind to notice smaller and smaller things. I learned a lot about the experience of an itch if you sit and observe it carefully instead of ever scratching it. It moves! I had no idea. Imagine my excitement for learning that most of my itches would move about a half inch before dying away, given the boredom surrounding it. At one point I was convinced I felt the itch of a single neuron, which I could tell because it was rediculously faint and "twinkled" rapidly between being on or off with no gray area in between.

So you sit there for an hour and observe the jungle of sensation that somehow cropps up around the mustache area, then go outside and all the trees are sparkly. Really, it's that easy and unexpected. It might initially have something to do with being couped up in the dark for so long, but the experience lasts for several hours. I noticed this first on the third day after thinking about the ultra-subtle sensations around my nose for a few hours, and when I got outside I could swear I was on mescaline. This made sense to me intellectally, if the mind is trained to observe subtler and subtler characteristics of the body, it might pick up on things otherwise thrown out by the "reducing valve" Huxley described as his "Doors of Perception." The radiance and intensity of colors was reminiscent of my previous mescaline experiences, so I got excited and kept working at it until the sensations got more elaborate and easier to perceive. The amount of hard work required for this course cannot be stressed more. I struggled to concentrate more than any other class I've ever taken (mostly because I had no other alternative for entertainment), and this time the reward is immediate.

I also started to notice several other changes in my perception and thought patterns. My concentration was improving, for one, and by the end of the third day I had no trouble concentrating on my breath for several minutes at a time. Because the array of sensations around the nose area are infinately more interesting, I could focus intently on that one small area for up to 30 minutes without any stray thoughts. The inside of my head, as well, felt clear somehow. Actually it felt embarassingly like having the cobwebs cleaned out, or some massive Spring Cleaning when all the excess furniture was taken out. Sitting here typing this and remembering that feeling in relation to my present state, I recognize those days as having been devoid of all that background chatter going on in my mind that I never noticed until it was gone: what am I doing now, what am I doing after this, did I lock my door, should I be meeting anyone right now, am I forgetting something, I really need to buy that, I should email this guy, etc. All these thoughts combine to form some kind of static background noise in the back of my head, and these were all the thoughts that kept creeping up after I silenced my important, current thoughts. By the third day of meditation, most of these were silenced as well, so when I did have important current thoughts to consider, they had my undevided attention. Again, I thought of how useful this skill will be for med school.

On the afternoon of Day 4, we were finally given instruction in Vipassana. This came in the form of a 2-hour lecture during which we weren't supposed to change our posture at all. Mind you, by this point I'd worked up to only 20 minutes without changing postures. We sat in the main hall until the chanting came again, then we were instructed to move the area of awareness from the mustache/nose area to the top of the head. Once we started feeling any kind of sensation there, we were to move our attention down, gradually through every part of the body, passing each part only after a sensation was felt. So this is Vipassana.


Day 4, 5, and 6 were spent gradually developing this skill. With each sweep from head to toe, the sensations got subtler and subtler until a thin layer of them covered the entire body. The trick is, the more calm the mind, the subtler sensations you can experience. A panicky mind, for example, will hardly even experience pain. A furious mind, as well, would experience massive pains but usually not itches. A calm mind might experience knots in your back. In order to experience these extremely subtle sensations, one must be in a complete state of tranquility, bordering on hypnosis. This screws up any scheme of immediately analyzing any experience, since the realm of conscious analysis is far too exciting to feel these sensations. As soon as any such analyzing thought comes to mind, the sensations disappear. It's kinda like looking at a really dim patch of stars that disappear whenever you look directly at them. I soon learned, too, that my mind had been explicitly trained to analyze all information given me, so I spent one hell of a time trying to break this habit of immediate analysis (I'll be the first to admit that this is a very dangerous move, considering it could potentially open me up to some serious brainwashing. As far as I remember, or was allowed to remember, no instructions to kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia were given). They soon told me the point wasn't even about the sensations themselves, Buddha just found them to be a useful tool to lure my mind into the meditative state. Only a meditative (hypnotised, thoughtless) state could experience these sensations, so I could walk this path backwards to achieve such a state by concentrating on the senations. Clever.


By the 6th day, as was warned during the first discourse, I was ready to leave. By then, I got real good at exploring my body from the inside out. I finally found out for myself the basis of Eastern Medicine, of inward study instead of outward study, and slowly I became personally aware of things I'd only read about. By the 6th day I could pinpoint 5 of my chakras and feel this intense pressure between my eyebrows (an experience a lot of people feel but is really not as exciting as a Third Eye experience would be, actually it got to be pretty annoying). I'd be able to mentally probe all of my muscles, and when I'd get bored I'd try to feel around some of my innerds. I was able to feel sensations down my esophagus down to my stomach pretty easily, but kept getting lost in my inner intestine. I was surprised to learn how big my lungs actually were, but for some reason I had trouble feeling any sensation within my heart. The coolest thing I did, and I know John would be proud of this one, was be able to accurately describe the size and shape of a turd based on the sensations around it. It was quite the deja-vu when it came out anyway. Stuff like that kept me occupied for a long time. I got really excited to actually be able to personally experience the Anatomy class I would be taking next year.
I felt that I had learned a very valuable technique and it'll be nice to go home and practice it. But I kept looking up at the mentally enhanced trees and getting itchy feet to go trekking, and my frustration doubled as I kept thinking about being trapped in this "camp." I wanted out, but for a totally different reason. The new meditation instructions were all new variations of the same concept--feeling sensations all over the body, and I figured I'd learned all I could learn.



The 7th day it changed

I was totally frustrated all morning and even after breakfast at having to waste more of my time sitting there while these beautiful mountains were all around, just waiting to be trekked.

At some point meditating just before lunch, I became aware of something more than bodily sensation. I became aware of my frustration as a sensation itself. For the past few discourses, the teacher told us about the relation between craving and aversion, how everything returned to the sense of craving, and once craving was illiminated then the real work could begin. What I was experiencing was craving itself, manifested as a physical sensation in the middle of my body about three inches above my solar plexus. It was an honest physical sensation that corresponded to a my mental craving to flee, and having observed it before reacting to it, I had three options:

1. I could do what I had always done and fuel it by thinking of how I wanted to get out of there. This would inevitably lead to the frustration growing, and getting pissed off at being stuck there until I'd be overpowered by emotion. Previously I would only notice the massive sensation of frustration. Now, for the first time, I could "feel" the seed of craving before it overpowered me.
2. I could try to supress this craving consciously, something I've been conditioned to do when I'm not supposed to feel something, and something which in the long run will inevitabely come out multiplied later down the road. I suppressed this desire to flee for the first 6 days, for example, and on the 6th day I was completely overwhelmed by it.
3. I could walk the fence and neither supress or fuel the sensation, and simply observe. This is the most difficult path, and is what is taught in Vipassana. Actually, I was to learn, this is the most applicable goal of early Vipassana training. To avoid the temptation to fuel or supress an emotion, to simply observe it as it wells up within, it'll eventually dissapate on its own.

Say I'm in a meditative state and I experience this craving to do something or to not do something. As soon as I'd give compliment it with thought, I would not only fuel it but I'd also break my meditative state. As I said earlier, the realm of thought is too exciting to experience subtle sensations. So if I let my mind concentrate on the source of this craving, it multiplies and I break out of this meditative state. Basically I pop back into awareness all pissed off. The basic instinct is to react to this sensation, but the only way to remain hypnotised is to not react at all. The applicable goal of this whole camp was to break this habit. If you can become aware of a negative emotion and identify it before it gets out of hand, you might be able to stop it before it grows strong enough to illicit an action. Say you're really, really pissed off all of a sudden. If you can focus in on the feeling of anger, you might be able to stop pouring gas on the fire before your hand goes through a wall. That's a worthy cause. Fortunately not too applicable to myself, but anybody who is easily overcome by emotion could benefit greatly from this course.

So anyway, I became aware of craving as a physical sensation and had the opportunity to consciously ignore it and let it pass. Every sensation passes, I've learend. From the tiny subtle sensations that last mere fractions of a second to the massive pains that last hours, it'll all pass. And just like that, the craving to get out of there will pass. They had been teaching this for a long time, to tell us to let cravings pass and be aware of them instead of reacting, but I'd realized then that never actually wanted Craving to leave. Craving is fun. Craving is the source of life and excitement and, one of my major realizations that blocked any further progress on the 6th day was that, let's face it, Buddhists are boring. They have no drive. I bet Richard Gere is a great guy but would probably bore your head off if you met him at a party, and I didn't want to turn into that. But eventually I surrendered to the fact that this attachment to Craving was what made me so miserable there. If I lost my cravings, my desires, I'd become a robot. By this point my mind was wide open, strained at so much concentration, and I was having less and less thoughts. All the thoughts I had left pertained to my cravings for food or sleep or to get the hell out of there, but other than that my mind was blank. I felt like a lobotomy patient, and I wasn't ready to let go of the last of my thoughts to complete (of as I later found out, Start) the surgery. I think Tom Waits put it best, "I'd rather have a BottleinFrontofme than a Frontal lobotomy." If I could only let go, on the other hand, I might actually learn something. So this time when I finally became aware of Craving as its own sensation, I surrendered to the technique and let it pass.

From that point on I felt exactly like a mental patient. Sitting in the cafeteria with white walls and metal dishes, with my shaved head and beenie feeling like a recently bandaged brain surgery, my head was no longer thinking of how strange it was that I was so excited to make fajotos out of Nepali food. I was actually, genuinely excited to make fajitos out of Nepali food. I consciously kept all other thoughts at bay just to see what I could get out of this mental state, but I do remember being genuinely, radiantly happy (soberly, and for no good reason at that) for the first time in a long while. The world maintained the mescaline visual feel, but with the added empathy of an ecstasy experience. I apologize for all these drug references, but I find it hard to describe these feelings in any other way, drugs just tend to open these doors automatically and temporarily. Here were the same sensations, only cheaper.

I spent the whole 2 hours of our lunch break in a daze. Few thoughts, but the thoughts I did have were all revealing in some way. I kept aware of my inner sensations and remained careful not to react to any cravings.

I came back to the meditation hall to have the most intense meditation experience of my time there to that point, that would consistently get beat the following day by a crazier one. This time, as I tried again to focus my concentration on my inner sensations, I'd notice knots appearing in my back to block the subtle free-flowing sensations I had come to enjoy. With the mind trained on the most subtle of sensations, even the smallest knot in my back caused enough pain to break my concentration and try to massage or stretch it out.

When the mind is totally blank long enough, it will fulfill its own necessity of constantly chewing on memories by pulling up the really old memories. Things popped up from my childhood that I won't bother mentioning here because, in addition to being private, would be really boring to everyone else. Even I thought they were boring, and they were supposed to be my so-called "repressed" memories. I had no idea why I'd randomly think of such mundane things, and occasionally one of these memories would illicit some kind of emotional response out of nowhere. For example, I focused in tightly around one of the knots on my back and suddenly I was overwhelmed by the sensation of being absolutely terrified and angry at the same time. This emotion came out of nowhere, but with it came the crystal-clear memory of being trapped in a doctor's office by my mother. The doctor wanted to administer a 100-point scratch test on my back (a test where the skin is pricked with an allergen to see if there's an allergic reaction), and I cried so hard out of fear of the pain that they finally agreed not to do it. I must have been 5 or 6. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why that one crept up...

But the thing that contrasted most with everything I'd believed previously was that the memories or emotions somehow correlated with the knots on my back. As my awareness moved to one of these knots, a memory would appear. I remember this one knot had appeared randomly, so I focused in on it to consciously ignore it and I had the image of a digital mushroom. I then focused on the thought of the mushroom until I was playing Mario in the living room of our old house and my little sister, still a toddler, came over and pulled my hair and I got so absolutely fed up with her that I went into a rage about how I could never get any sleep because she'd always come into my room and pull my hair because I was lying down. I was SO angry. I must have been 8 or 9. I let the anger come and go without adding to it, then the memory faded and the knot cleared up.

This really bothered me. Really, I mean I know I believe in a lot of mind-body mumbo jumbo stuff but whenever I'd hear that a knot or a pain is a "repressed memory," I'd stop taking that person seriously. This happened twice on my trip so far. But here I am, having experienced it personally, and I'm a little stuck. I guess I've experienced more to convince myself that it is true than to convince myself otherwise, so I might as well leave it at that.

In any case, it did make perfect sense to me that if I could concentrate all my awareness on a knot to consciously ignore it (if that makes any sense), it would dissapate. My understanding is that a knot is muscle that has overtightened to create pain, then the muscle around it overtightens in reacton, creating its own pain and causing a positive feedback reaction that ends in a stable ball of tension that remains after the original pain has left. If one can mentally go in there and stop the muscles from reacting to each other, the knot will eventually release. I guess this still leaves room that the origins of the knots could be repressed somethings, but in any case I used this understanding to clear knot after knot after knot as they would randomly pop into my back (and I do acknowledge most of them were due to my posture).

From that point on, every meditation session was more like a day at the spa. I'd come out a little lighter, with the same feeling as having relaxed all your muscle spasms after a deep-tissue massage. That, finally, was work being done on my inner self, and I could feel it happening when I'd come outside after a session and feel lighter.

That was basically it until the 9th day, which was the last day of real proper meditation. On the 10th, we'd break our code of silence and re-learn how to interact with people. But after breakfast on the 9th day, the teacher told us how to achieve Bangha state--that mystical crazy wierd cool state of existence that's the envy of every beginning Vipassana practitioner. It's the state of total realization of impermanence, where you become aware of every atom of your being and dissolve into a state of sensation. And, of course, as soon as he explained it I was overwhelmed by craving to experience it and lost all my focus for the next several hours.

He said the first step of this was to feel subtle sensation on absolutely every part of the body, that all the intense sensations should be gone. Eventually, even the long-term pains of my knees, legs, or back would disappate after being ignored long enough. Then, I could start feeling sensations inside (which I had already been doing so this part was easy) until the same subtle sensations coated the inside as well and all I was left with was this awareness of a spinal cord. Eventually, even the awareness of this solid spinal cord would turn to subtle sensations and I would achieve the Bangha state, whatever that was.

This is how it happened to me: as soon as I got to the point of subtle sensations all over me and blanketing most of my insides, two knots appeared in my back. It was the afternoon of the last real day and I was in no mood to deal with those knots, I figured I'd just go ahead feeling subtle sensations all over my body except for those two knots. After about 15 minutes of concentration, I was aware of every point in my body simultaneously and even my spinal cord had "dissolved" into a sea of floating sensations. Everything I had previously considered "solid" and "permanent" were now freely coming in and out of existence, but I was still aware of a human form. It's impossible to describe how I could do this, or why, but somehow I consciously dispersed this body of sensation into a cloud I felt was about 10 feet away from me. I felt just like a Nova, and was no longer aware of any part of myself except for those two knots on my back. It felt like, if someone was to look at me, I'd look like nothing but two eyeballs and two black smudges floating in midair. Actually they weren't even eyeballs, they were this distinct and still unpleasant pressure sensation between my eyebrows. I still don't know if this is the Bangha state, but it felt pretty cool. But that was it: pretty cool. Is that what I spent 10 days of my life doing? This? I spent about 5 minutes like this, trying to appreciate this odd sense of cloud-being and use it to find some semblance of God, or Power, or the Source, or Buddha, or Vishnu, or Jesus, or ANYTHING that would turn this into a life-changing experience.

For a while I thought I had screwed up the experience because I didn't bother to get rid of those two knots, and the perception of them kept me grounded in reality. But I'm pretty sure that was it. I had experieced everything there was to know about the world--nothing. That was it. All my sensations are imparmenent and could not be relied upon for anything because I could fling them 10 feet away from my body if I so desired. Amazing.

The life-changing realization came a full day after this experience, when I put the course in perspective. It was all an exercise in impermence. The awareness each sensation, from pain to craving to this subtle stuff, is really to solidify the concept that every sensation is impermanent. The pleasant warm flow of sensation I'd been experiencing around my body, if looked closely, is not nearly homogenous. It's like looking at a static TV from far away to see gray, and then coming close to see a dance of thousands of particles of black and white clicking on and off. Everything about this sensation was impermanent, even my perception of it would always eventually pass. Between subtle sensations that lasted only the tinyest fractions of a second, and these massive pains that would last several minutes or longer, the whole concept of impermanence gradually took form.

Everything is impermanent. My perception of indigestion will pass, my numb leg will pass, my joint pains will pass. Even my arm itself will pass, my entire body will pass, this building will pass, the ground will change. Everything is impermanent. Rivers will change course, lakes dry up, and even a mountain is just a slow wave. Everything we know is changing, and will always be changing, and so the most rediculous thing we could ever do is get attached to anything being the same. It will change, as everything does. If you're attached to the way things "should be," you have no reason to get stressed when this picture threatens to change, because it always will. If you're attached to your belongings, why get upset when they get stolen or lost since they will stop being yours by one course or another? So many relationships end out of an attachment to the way the other person was when you first met them. Everything changes. Even I, this body, this mind, everything about me will eventually cease to be. There's nothing to hold on to, and no way to hold on to it anyway. It was the most depressing truth I've ever had to experience head-on.

But on the other hand, since I've become discretely aware of this nihilism, I'm free to enjoy things more fully. This moment right now is the only time things will ever be this way, so whenever something really fun is happening there's no reason not to get the most out of it. Everything good will change, so there's nothing wrong with getting the best out of it so long as you don't get depressed when the shit falls. When it does--you lost your job, your girlfriend dumped you, White Castle is closed--things will inevitably get better.

The trick is to control your craving for the good times. If you leave out any attachment to the good times, you can't possibly feel bad for the bad times. Similarly, if you don't get attached to the bad times, you won't contaminate the good times with past misery. Maybe I like this philosophy personally because it's one giant long extravagant way of saying what every man's been trying to tell his girlfriend for centuries, "Please babe, don't get attached." I mean, really, if there's no attachment then each others company can be fully enjoyed every time they're together, and there's no misery when the two are apart. But that's a different argument altogether...

Suffice it to say, I got to personally experience something which, although from the outside perspective might be looked at as simply a product of my imagination, I believe as experiential truth. The idea of physical knots manifesting from my deeper conscious, for example, is entirely unproven so nobody would believe it except those who had experienced it. To touch a totally different argument altogether, Buddha supposedly was able to feel his body down to the subatomic particle and determined that they pass in and out of existence so fast that they cease to be and reappear "trillions and trillions of times between every blink of the eye." He came short by I think another 150 orders of magnatude, but the idea was that he "felt" the reality of quantum physics 2500 years before it was "proven." It makes me reconsider the whole concept of truth, that if something that remains scientifically unproven could ever be considered truth. For me, brought me to the conclusion that the whole point of the scientific method is to be able to spread a conviction of truth that one person has to others. One person arrives at a conviction and would like to convince another, he outlines a thought process and shows evidence to support each step to guide the other person experientially to arrive at the same intellectual conclusion. This is what was done for me during this course, I was led by the hand down the same path that Buddha followed and found out, for myself, what he was talking about. I didn't feel muons or anything, but I did follow the path long enough to convince myself of several things that are now obvious to me. That, as far as I'm concerned, is good enough truth for me.



Tomorrow morning I'm heading on my trek. It's around the Annapurna region, about 300km of walking I think. The past few days I made good friends with one of the guys from the meditation camp, this Nepali guy who has been so incredibly and rediculously kind and generous (even though he's dirt poor and absolutely refuses to let me pay for anything). He's been so kind to me that it's kinda making me uncomfortable actually, so it'll be nice to get out. On the other hand, I'm going out on the longest camping trip of my life, alone, in the middle of a country during civil war, with nothing but a compass, a map, some money, and some clothes. I was told sleeping bags are useless since the hostels are so cheap, so I don't even have one. I've already met some friends to travel with and it's the high season and a very busy trail so I expect to see enough people along the way to never have to walk alone. Still, I'm really really REALLY looking forward to the opportunity to finally get out a bit and practice some of this meditation stuff I've been writing so much about. It'll be a good crunchy time, at long last.

I've also accidentally become a vegitarian, and I'll proably continue during the trek (they hardly have enough animals for milk and fur, let alone meat up there). No alcohol, either, for 2 weeks and probably 2 more (unavailable anyway also). It's a full detox. 4 weeks of total recouperation. The Eye of the Storm. OH THE HEPATIC FREEDOM! Kumbaya, my LORD....Koooom Bye YAh.