Nepal – Postscript

Shortly after arriving back in Vienna, my erstwhile companion Frau Tucek informed me that she wouldn’t be travelling with me again in the near future, indeed most likely never again. She said she preferred that we not see each other any more. This was big let down for me since I had become quite fond of her in the time since we had met a few years earlier. Maybe the ear plugs really didn’t work as well as I had thought in Nepal, or maybe the lack of a shower for so long had something to do with it, or maybe it was something else entirely, but it’s clear that I’d lost my favourite travelling companion. Her easygoing style and great sense of humour can't be replaced. Sometime hopefully soon I’ll pick up the blog where I left off before our adventures in Nepal, but I have a feeling that future adventures won’t be as rich and satisfying without the incomparable Frau Tucek to share them with.

Bye Marion.

Not Easily Forgettable...

Techno Viking

It was kind of sad to check out of the Yak & Yeti that morning. Our trip was coming to end and we were all now thinking about the long journey home. But it was a good trip and we would have lots of fond memories.

Unfortunately, we would look back on the fond memories after we got back home because now we sank into that “hurry up and wait” world of air travel. Our guide insisted on getting us to the airport extra early “just in case” there were any complications. We sat around the departures hall for a few hours doing nothing at all in particular, There was a news shop, a souvenir shop and duty free shop, all selling ridiculously overpriced goods that none of us wanted. There was a Star Alliance Gold lounge, but as I think I mentioned somewhere before, I had been downgraded to Silver only some two months before.

When our flight finally showed up on the television screens above the security check, we all rushed to queue up and get through quickly. This was a mistake because all we did was sit down and wait again on the other side. I however, was subject to special search, as the x-ray monitor was convinced that he had seen a knife in my bag. He was so convinced as he went through everything in my carry-on, that I was starting to doubt myself. Did I really pack that Swiss Army knife in the checked-in bag?

As a parenthesis, this reminds me of another story of a young couple who had just gotten married in Spain. They were dating for a time and thought that they knew each other quite well. Just after their wedding they were in the airport making off for their honeymoon. Not having sufficient luggage for the trip, the new husband had borrowed a carry on bag from his brother, who it turns out had just returned from hunting the previous weekend. Unfortunately the brother had not checked the bag very well before borrowing it and had not noticed that a single bullet had been left behind in the bag. Of course that bag was the one that the new bride had placed through the x-ray machine. When confronted with the evidence, neither one of them had any explanation since they hadn’t even known that the husband’s brother had been hunting the week before. All of the bags we’re, quite understandably, completely searched inside and out, and I’m sure each of the young newlyweds was secretly thinking to him and herself “how well do I really know this person I just married?”

But to return to our main story, they found no knife in my bag and let me go. No worries, I thought – it was the most exciting thing to happen in hours. Unfortunately this diversion was gone and we began another session of waiting. By now we were given a gate where our flight would be leaving from. We rushed, of course, to the gate, only to find that it was a large room, with about 100 – 200 seats, all of which were occupied. There were maybe another 100 people standing around. It was packed.

And of course, our flight was late. This didn’t mean so much for Frau Tucek and me, since we would be spending another 4 or 5 hours in the Bangkok airport anyway waiting for our connecting flight to Vienna. But Mark and Anne had a connection no more that an hour after the scheduled arrival, and another connection in LA, and then another in Atlanta, before finally arriving in Florida. It would be a bad trip under the best of circumstances, but if they missed their first connection, it could easily turn into one of those monster traveller stories from hell.

The flight to Bangkok was unremarkable except for the presence of a rather unforgettable character sitting across the aisle from us. He wasn’t tall but it was obvious that he worked out regularly and was rippling with muscles. His attitude towards his fellow passengers was cocky, imposing his body physically in the aisle in order to block any mere mortal who might want to pass by while he was stowing his bags in the overhead compartment. He looked self conscious yet ready to pick a fight with anyone over anything. He must have been a Russian. I immediately dubbed him Techno-Viking, after a video I’d seen on You Tube about some strange character dancing about in what I took to be the Berlin Love Parade. Although this wasn’t a perfect, or even a particularly good comparison, it stuck in my mind and I continued to use it.

While this gentleman’s girlfriend sat beside him the entire flight not moving and wearing an enormously oversized pair of Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, Techno Viking made himself king of the aircraft. Each time the drinks cart passed he would stop it with his foot and take something off. This was a Thai Airways flight and the flight attendants were not going to provoke him and so allowed him to do this. He even took more than one meal, wrapping the second one up in napkins and hiding it away in his carry on bag for later, I guess. It was cheapness combined with arrogance, definitely a Russian.

Frau Tucek and I watched him with horror and fascination, and worried that if he were a Russian, there was a high probability that he might be flying through Vienna. The thought of sitting next to this guy for eight more hours was unbearable. We tried to put it out of our minds.

Knowing that our fellow travellers had tight connections, Frau Tucek and I hurried (as fast as Techno Viking would allow us) off the plane to say goodbye in Bangkok. But in the corridor directly outside the exit from the aircraft they were nowhere to be seen. They probably had to rush to catch the connection. It was a bit of a let down not being able to say goodbye to them, but I understood their rush. Anyway, we had all agreed that we would try to meet up for another adventure trip soon. Anne and I were already brainstorming about something in Patagonia.

Even though the flight from Kathmandu was delayed, we still had quite a long wait in Suvarnobhumi Airport. The airport was huge and so we decided to take advantage and explore every bit of it. We spent quite a bit of time at souvenir shops and bookshops. I even bought two books about the world’s best adventure walks to help plan future travels with Mark, Anne & Frau Tucek. We stopped off and got some half decent Ramen, but mostly we were just waiting around. We saw Techno Viking several times and studiously avoided going anywhere near him. He was clearly waiting for a connecting flight and we hoped it wouldn’t be ours.

Eventually our flight was called and as we boarded the plane there was no sign of Techno Viking. We settled into our seats and got comfortable. Luckily there was an empty window seat next to Frau Tucek so we would have some space to spread out during the long flight. But no, at the absolute last second a disgusting fat man made us get up and let him pass by as he attempted to squeeze into the window seat. He was only partially successful and was in fact spilling over into Frau Tucek’s seat as well. It wasn’t a pleasant flight back to Vienna, especially because after we landed, the strange fat man panicked about getting his bag out of the overhead bin when there was literally no space to move and almost caused a fight right there on the plane. He should have been sitting next to Techno Viking.

But soon we were on the ground and everything was good. We were back in lovely Vienna, finally after a long and eventful trip. Frau Tucek’s family was there to meet her as she passed through customs control. I left them to catch up and took a taxi home.

Dinner at the Rum Doodle

Despite the luxury of the Yak & Yeti, I kind of missed the call of the kitchen boys that morning with their cries of “Tea Coffeee?” No matter, we were not in any rush, and the mere fact that we had a hot shower available at all more than compensated for the lack of a hot beverage immediately after waking up. We wandered down to our buffet breakfast in the hotel restaurant and had plenty of time before we were picked up by a mini bus for a morning of sightseeing in Kathmandu. I picked up a local newspaper to read during breakfast. I find that you can always find something interesting in local newspapers, and sometimes the articles are quite humorous, even if they don’t intend to be. But this time I was looking for news about Thailand. We would be flying via Bangkok the next day, and the last time we had seen any news it was that there were continued riots and indeed tanks on the streets of the city. Since the last time something similar had happened, protestors had taken over the Bangkok airport and not allowed anyone to enter or leave, we were anxious to know if we should rebook our flights. But Bangkok was quiet, and we relaxed a bit.

Nepal, on the other hand, seemed not to be quiet at all. True, there were no riots on the streets, but there was something very much approaching a constitutional crisis going on. As we all know, the Maoist insurgency that had been plaguing the country for decades gave up its armed struggle a few years back and agreed to participate in democratic elections, which they promptly won. Part of the peace deal, however, included the absorption of the rank and file Maoist soldiers into the professional Nepali Army. This was anathema to Army Chief of Staff and he was resisting. The Prime Minister, a Maoist, ordered him to comply. The General refused. The Prime Minister fired him. He refused to go. The Prime Minister appealed to the President, a non-Maoist, who sided with the General. The Prime Minister resigned in protest. And so on and so on.

As our group filed out of the hotel into the waiting bus, I recognised a familiar face: Our tour guide from Bhaktapur, whose accent two weeks ago I couldn’t understand. The last time I had seen him seemed so long ago, like a different age. He was very gracious, but the additional time I had now spent in Nepal had not assisted me in any better understanding this man’s accent.

We were headed out to a place called Pashupatinah and we really didn’t have any idea what to expect there. We parked the bus and walked down a long stretch of dirt road, accosted by various vendors promoting their wares. I had fairly good excuses to decline most of what was offered since it seemed that I had bought just about every typical souvenir as gifts for friends and family. Having successfully run this gauntlet, we eventually came upon a small stream with steps leading down to it on both shores. This, we were informed, was a tributary of the Ganges, and therefore a sacred river.

Where the Hindus Burn their Dead

There were a series of stone pedestals sticking out and above the steps, spaced uniformly along the shore. On one of these pedestals what looked like the remains of a bonfire were still smouldering. At this point it was disclosed that this was the place where the Hindus brought their dead to be cremated. It was true - what we saw in front of us were the last embers of a burned corpse. I was a bit nonplussed, although I tried my best to hide it. I had never seen anything like this before. But the Hindus took it all in stride. It was completely natural. As some men swept ashes off the pedestal into the river we could see the monkeys and some small boys that were scouring through the water for any objects of value. A ring, or perhaps a necklace would make a good day’s wage.

Even the monkeys know what to look for

We walked along the river bank some more and passed a wall built perpendicularly to the river on the far bank. On the other side of the wall, the “facilities” were considerably nicer, but it was clear that their purpose was the same. “This section is for upper castes only” our guide informed us. “One day I’ll be laying on that stone right over there” he said as he indicated a raised platform over by the wall.

There were quite a few people milling around the steps looking distraught. And just as our guide had pointed out his future cremation spot, I saw some men carrying a corpse down the steps and laying him out on a flat rock half way down to the water. He was wrapped in a shroud and after they laid him down they took it off of him and started bathing him right there. I had a shiver. “We don’t think of death as something that should be hidden away. We’re all born naked and we’ll all die naked” were the words of our guide. I thought, “I know but… dang! Don’t people want any privacy with their mourning?” This place was really different. We sat there for about a half hour more, while we were told something about the religious rites. There were phallic symbols about, supposedly representing Shiva, and people kept touching them as they walked past, as if for luck or something. Our guide was describing something about the power unleashed with the touching of the sex organs, but I resisted making any adolescent jokes. The ceremony going on in front of me was just too weird for jokes.

We are all born naked and we will all die naked...

...for all to see

We had wanted to wait to see the cremation, as grisly as that might be, but we were told that probably some relative was missing and that was why they were waiting. Supposedly this man had just died during the night and they had brought him directly here. No embalming, no preparations, just send for all of the family to come. His arm fell out from under the shroud and I could see he was still wearing his wristwatch. I inwardly cursed the monkeys.

So we left Pashupatinah with some strange feeling and got back into our small bus for our next sight of the day. It was a very, very large stupa called Bouddhanath and set in a square somewhere in Kathmandu. We were able to actually climb up on top of part of the stupa and walk around, surveying the various shops, restaurants, houses and monasteries that were surrounding it. Supposedly this was a very old stupa, one of the first in Kathmandu, and was built by Tibetan merchants who originally passed through Kathmandu when it was just a trading post many hundreds of years ago. I couldn’t attest to that but I could reliably say that it was largest stupa I’d seen so far. It took a few minutes just to walk around the base, even though granted, we weren’t walking quickly.

Stupafying

There were several small monasteries on the square surrounding this immense object and we were allowed in to visit one of them. This monastery looked rich indeed judging from the decorations, but the best thing was that at that moment there were monks seated there in the middle of some chanting recitation. It sounded kind of cool and soothing but it looked incredibly boring to be a participant. If this was the path to enlightenment, I was sure I would spend the rest of my days in utter darkness.

Just imagine repeating "Om Mani Padme Hum" over and over again

.

We wandered some more around the square, which come to think of it, I actually remember being circular, until we arrived at a shop selling thangkas. A tangka is a kind of a painting, done on cloth or canvas and usually very detailed and ornate. We were led up to the first floor where there appeared to be students or artists working on some new ones. The walls were full of completed ones. Some were very nice, but with a price tag to match. This was a modern shop with credit card readers and I didn’t think my haggling skills from Namche would be of much use here. But I must say that some of the paintings were extremely nice and looked like they should be in museums. I could imagine if I bought one, it might increase significantly in value, especially in the west. But as a rule I never buy art as an investment. If it doesn’t appeal to me aesthetically and at a reasonable price, I won’t go near it.

Some in our group did buy some thangkas, however, and after that the proprietor saw fit to let us go on our way. Typically these visits are a stitch up between the tour guide and the merchant…a cultural art visit combined with the “opportunity” to shop for souvenirs. I’d seen it from Beijing to Cairo. Everybody makes out except for the merchant without connections. The tourist tends to be overcharged, but usually never realises it, and anyway pays only a fraction of what such things would cost in the West.

Well, after Bouddhanath we were back to the Yak & Yeti, where we had another relaxing lunch. The afternoon was free but we needed to be back gathered in the lobby in the early evening for our last group dinner. It would be at a restaurant called the “Rum Doodle”. Now I had heard of this place before: Mark and Anne had told me that it was a very famous place and we should put it on our “must see” list. I had forgotten about it in the interim, but now I was told, this was a legendary place that all climbers returning from Everest visit. It may be due to the fact that whoever has summitted Everest gets to eat for free at the Rum Doodle for the rest of his life. Or maybe it was that the restaurant itself was named after a classic sarcastic novel from the 1950’s about mountain climbing in the Himalaya.

So we had the afternoon to kill before dinner and of course Frau Tucek and I took advantage to buy what remaining souvenirs might still be available in Thamel. I bought some tea for the girls back in my office, some incense for my ex-wife and of course, a pair of locally styled relaxing pants for myself. This last purchase was starting to become a habit whenever Frau Tucek and I travelled to faraway places.

The Funky Buddha Chillout Garden in Thamel...of course

We were laden with purchases once more but managed to get back to the hotel in time for our dinner engagement. It was decided that we would walk to the Rum Doodle, which was actually a bit inconvenient because it turns out that the Rum Doodle was actually in exactly the same spot where we had just been shopping. It was not a question of physically walking the extra 40 minutes up and back that bothered me – we had done enough walking over the past three weeks. It was more the hazardous process of negotiating the traffic in Thamel. And as we walked through Thamel to the Rum Doodle, the streets were more alive than ever. I remember thinking that this would be impossible to explain the visual, audio and indeed the impact on all senses to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. It’s a pity that I was too stupid to think of taking out my camera a filming a video.

And so we climbed the stairs of the legendary Rum Doodle, passing autographed photos of such greats as Hillary and Messner. We dined on the rooftop garden, which was nice but not quite the 40,000 ½ feet high that was advertised (as also in the eponymous book). The food, on the other hand was mediocre, but I guess you can’t have everything. The management, however, did provide us with a wooden cut out “footprint” that they typically distribute to those groups that have just returned from Everest. It was up to us to leave a message on the footprint and then we would be permitted to nail it to the wall of the restaurant for posterity. There were thousands of these footprints nailed to the walls already. We drew ours up, signed it and duly left our profound message for future generations. I was identified as “Gnarly Charley” by one of the California girls.

Immortalised...

Yes, a Cigar and a Cognac at the Rum Doodle

As we were getting up to go, an idea struck me. We had been drinking during dinner, and of course I had had a cigar and cognac afterwards, and this normally is not conducive to particularly prudent ideas. In any event, I recalled that they have these bicycle rickshaws running in every direction about town. I remembered them vividly because I had almost been killed by several of them over the course of my short stay in Kathmandu. At the time I thought it would be a cool idea to hire 4 of these rickshaws, paying full price for each, and everyone kicking in towards a $20 bonus for the driver who could make it back to the Yak & Yeti first. Considering that the cost to rent the rickshaw was 3 or 4 dollars, it was a substantial bonus to come in first. And so was born the first (that I know of at least) rickshaw race from the Rum Doodle to the Yak & Yeti, a tradition that I hope will be followed for years to come by the thousands of trekking enthusiasts that I know read this blog on a daily basis. Unfortunately the first race was marred by an ugly early start by one of the teams but at that point the thrill of weaving in and out of oncoming traffic and not being killed was enough to make it worth it. But alas, Frau Tucek and I came in second to last.

...And They're Off!

The Happy Winners

Back to Kathmandu

I had left the party at only 11 PM but still had a headache when the 5,30 wake-up call came around. I could only imagine what the people who stayed partying until 3,30 felt like. It was funny, but a few moments after getting up, I considered that having a hangover is a remarkably similar feeling to having altitude sickness. I rummaged through my pack for aspirins and tried to get my gear together. No time for a shower this morning – the flight was scheduled to depart at 6.45. I got dressed and stumbled down to breakfast where I saw some faces that must have looked worse than mine. Even the kitchen boys were moving very slowly that morning. Or maybe it was just me; maybe I was just looking at things with somewhat distorted lenses.

Needless to say I took no breakfast that morning. But I sat there with the group for a bit, waiting for the call to walk across the street to the airport. It was slightly foggy that morning and our guide had told us the flights from the previous few days had been cancelled due to foggy weather. Oh god, I wouldn’t want to spend days in Lukla waiting for a flight. But he said that the weather report was good for today and he was optimistic. After a bit of sitting there we suddenly heard a siren. Then a few moments later came the whine of a plane in the distance. It was the first flight coming in from Kathmandu. We watched it land as our guide told us to get our gear together and then we set off for the airport. Lukla Airport is small, very small, and the time it took us to get to the gate was less than 10 minutes, including a perfunctory security check. But of course, we would have to play “hurry up and wait” even at this tiny airport since it seemed they needed to clear the backlog of flights that had built up when the airport was fogged in. But the planes started arriving and departing at very rapid intervals and in no time our flight was called.

We straggled out onto the tarmac with our gear just as a group of fresh faced trekkers were disembarking from their plane. They were excited, with looks of enthusiasm on their faces. Maybe it was just the landing they had gone through, but I think most of it was the anticipation that they were about to begin their big trek. They looked over at us as we walked towards the plane and their expressions changed to something like “Who are these gnarly characters? Do you think we’ll look anything like them in two weeks time?”

Exit Gnarly; Enter Clean Clothes

We boarded the plane and prepared for the roller coaster take-off. I was feeling somewhat better now but not sure how my stomach might take the experience. The pilot taxied to the far side of the runway, right up against the side the mountain. He revved the engines and the propellers turned furiously, making an infernal amount of noise. Still we didn’t move forward until he suddenly released the break. We lurched forward and headed down the runway (and I mean “down” because the runway is on the side of the mountain and is angled downward). We picked up speed and could see the end of the runway approaching. I won’t say that we actually ran off the edge of the runway, but we did achieve flight only meters from the end. Then, to complete the roller coaster we rose, and I watched the ground disappear suddenly below us. Thrilling stuff.

It was a short and uneventful flight to Kathmandu and soon we were back in the bustling town with the insane traffic. We arrived back at the Yak &Yeti relatively early in the morning and they didn’t yet have any rooms ready for us. So we sat in the lobby and I grabbed a complementary newspaper from the business center. The headlines were about some case of Swine Flu that had broken out in Mexico and was travelling around the world at a rapid pace. Airports were on alert and some countries were imposing travel restrictions. I asked Dr Mark if what was going around Khumbu could possibly be Swine Flu. “No way”, he said. “Swine Flu is much more dangerous. It can kill you.” Hmmm…

I walked outside in the cool gardens of the Yak & Yeti and noticed that the flowers in all of the trees had bloomed during our absence. The garden was a delight of pinks, purples, yellows and greens. The swimming pool was full and even clean, sparkling blue. I’m sure our “roughing it” of the past two weeks was a major influence on my opinion, but this place was really nice.

The Tranquil Gardens of the Yak & Yeti

Finally we got to our rooms, showered, and Frau Tucek and I set off to explore Durbar Square. It was the one place in our guide book that we really wanted to see but unfortunately couldn’t manage when we were here before the trek. We set off with a map of Kathmandu in hand but found it fairly difficult to navigate the narrow streets and madcap traffic flows. We knew roughly the direction in which we needed to go, and thank god, because it was rather difficult relating the map to anything around us. We did finally make it to the Northeast corner of Durbar Square, where we found some rather strange shops and even stranger looking characters. A young gentleman came up to us and started speaking in English about how he was a student and understood many of the things to see in the Square. He started pointing out different buildings around us and telling us stories about them. He pulled out a guide book and started telling us, in a friendly and helpful way, the main attractions worth seeing. This was really nice and he was so disarming that we listened to him instead of just shooing him away. He pulled out a little notebook full of names and comments of tourists he had met in the past, all thanking him for being such a great tour guide. He said he could show us around the square and said that normally it cost 300 Rupees just to enter the square but he knew ways to get around paying. Of course he wanted a fee for all this. The whole thing seemed very dubious and we tried to politely dissuade him. He was very tenacious however, and continued to make his case, following us around and giving us no peace. Finally I had to ask him a bit forcefully to please stop and he adopted an injured tone, muttering something about “all human beings need to help all human beings and not be selfish.” I stood my ground and asked that he please leave us alone. He went away.

Hindudes

Shortly thereafter, we turned a corner and the Square spread out in front of us. There were buildings scattered in every direction, none of them labelled. It actually might have been good to have a guide, and that guy probably was a good one. As we proceeded forward, a uniformed woman came out of a small booth and approached us. She demanded 300 Rupees fee to enter the Square. “But what about all these other people?” I asked. “Fee only for foreigners” was the clipped answer. What could we do? We paid.

Our guide would have happily told us what that is

We wandered around, climbing some of the temples and viewing the various unintelligible sights. We wandered into the courtyard of a museum that had a sign outside saying it was closed, yet a guard on duty was allowing tourists to enter. We had been given a map by the uniformed woman and tried to make sense of everything but it was useless. Remembering a story our would-be guide was telling us about a young woman who was locked up and treated like a god, we entered the courtyard of her house. Supposedly she sometimes made appearance at a 2nd story balcony, but not today. It actually would have been much better to have had a guide.

...And this too

And so we wandered around, stopping to do more gift shopping in the square. I bought little Buddha statues as gifts and a set of Gurkha knives for myself. In retrospect, Durbar Square was probably not the best place to go souvenir shopping, but I was actually enjoying haggling, even thinking that I was getting good deals. Who knows if the deals I got were good, even though I tended to get down to around 25% of the starting price. But even if the prices I paid afforded an enormous markup to the seller, the prices were low compared to anywhere else in the world. I was happy either way.

A prize for anyone who can tell me what that is

Finally, I saw on our little map a place labelled “Freak Street”. I had read about this street in my guidebook before I left home. Supposedly during the sixties, this place became a Mecca for hippies as they all descended on Kathmandu looking for spiritual enlightenment. I thought it might be interesting so we took a walk down the street to see if it contained anything remotely interesting. But apart from a few shops and cafés it was nothing more extraordinary that any other side street in Thamel.

Fellow Traveller, Well Met, on Freak Street

We made our way back to the Yak & Yeti for a leisurely lunch. I took a nap while Frau Tucek read a book by the pool. That night we had dinner with Mark and Anne in the hotel and afterwards I smoked a cigar and drank a cognac in the splendid gardens. It was nice to have found luxury again.

Party in Lukla

Even though, indeed perhaps because, I slept so well that night, the 5AM wake up call was hard to answer. Even the smiling kitchen boys with their offers of coffee did not instil any urge to get up and hit the trail that day. The bed in Namche was so comfortable, it seemed that nothing could motivate me enough. We had a long walk ahead of us that day, about 7 or 8 hours, all the way back to Lukla, and so I grudgingly got up and packed my gear, in between sips of coffee.

Shortly after breakfast we set out and almost immediately started the descent that we all recalled as the first difficult climb some two weeks before. My ankle still hurt a bit, especially going down and I kept one hiking pole out and in use. After about an hour or so we reached that bridge again; the one that had initially inflicted such a frightful scare on me. I must say that it still looked gnarly, but I was tired enough not care any more. I think this is one way to best overcome irrational fears – put yourself in the situation where the fear is a luxury, and you may just realise you have more important things to think about than to indulge yourself. This clearly worked with my ex-wife, who for years was petrified to fly on any aircraft. It was really, really a problem for her, but do you know what cured her? Having kids. Seriously. As soon as she had to take care of two infants on the airplane, her motherly instincts outweighed her fears, especially on those occasions that I was not flying with them. She just didn’t have the time with two kids climbing about to think about anything except for watching out for them. I’m still pondering, however, how to put this potentially very useful theory into action in the case of my fear of heights. I can’t believe that climbing to the summit of Kala Pathar with two infants would do the trick. But then again, if I ever really managed to make it to the summit with two small children, and I saw one crawling towards the edge, I’m sure my own fear of heights wouldn’t be my primary concern.

That Bridge Again

Shortly after crossing the bridge we exited Sagarmatha National Park and continued descending all the way to Phakding for lunch. My foot was feeling fine and I put away the walking sticks. Maybe I was overreacting all along, but then again the end result was that I was OK, and therefore wasn’t going to second guess any of my actions. Lunch was set up outside of a lodge where we met a young woman from Tibet selling necklaces. Her husband and the rest of the family was still in Tibet and she was here trying to make some money to send back home. Some of the necklaces were truly beautiful and she seemed very sincere. We had no idea if the prices were cheap or expensive, but thinking back on it, I should have bought some necklaces from her. I don’t know why I didn’t but since I eventually bought some necklaces subsequently in Kathmandu, I regret not having bought them from her instead. It wasn’t from any great difference in price, just a feeling.

Plumbing Comes to Khumbu

The last three hours from Phading to Lukla were three very long hours indeed. Lukla would be the end of our trek, finally; the end of walking for a while. Here we would catch our flight back to Kathmandu the next day. Mark had some respiratory problems from all of the dust and had a gnarly cough by now, but we were all feeling the effects to some degree. This stretch consisted of a lot of “Nepali Flat” walking and Lukla was always promised to be “on the next mountain over that ridge.” But eventually we did reach Lukla and as we entered the town with a feeling of accomplishment, we were greeted by a woman who held up her naked baby’s legs apart so he could pee into the center of the dirt road in front of us. This was our ticker tape reception.

Our guide had previously collected quite a bit of money from us. This was ostensibly for the tips that would be given out to various staff members of our small expedition. I don’t recall now (and unfortunately didn’t write it down at the time) how much the “recommended” tip was, but it was sizeable. It was also to be divided up in front of the staff at a party later that evening. And uh, oh yeah, we were supposed to kick in another suspiciously large amount of cash to buy drinks for the party.

Our flight wouldn’t be leaving until the following morning so we would be spending the night in a lodge in Lukla. I took a shower in the windowless bathroom that looked like it might be somewhere in the bowels of a ship and got prepared for the party that evening.

To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to the party, particularly because our guide said that the porters would perform some traditional Sherpa songs and dances for us as a show of gratitude and that we would be expected to dance and sing something traditional from our countries also. Well, this really didn’t sound like something I would accede to easily but I knew from living in Asia previously that one can’t refuse these things.

So we gathered for dinner in the same room where we watched with awe and enthusiasm the flights landing in Lukla two weeks before. There were handing out cans of San Miguel beer and I graciously accepted. After dinner we gave out the envelopes to the various staff. It was a strict hierarchical process, with the Sirdar getting the most, then the guides, the cook, etc. We were also strongly dissuaded from giving any individual tips, even though some of the guides had taken pains to carry many day packs when everyone was hit with illness. It was all controlled from the center. Maybe that’s the way society works there, maybe not.

Well, the porters did sing and dance that night and we were allowed just to choose songs typical from our countries and play them on a boom box. The Americans chose “Staying Alive” from the 1970’s film “Saturday Night Fever” and the Michael Jackson song "Thriller"... American folk classics, to be sure. Dancing was unavoidable and after many San Miguels I got up and joined along. The life of the party was the young man from California, who did his best to get everyone involved and in a festive mood. The party went on and on but I was feeling the effect of the alcohol and left at about 11 PM for bed. It was a different feeling from Dr Anne’s warm milk. I heard they partied on until 3,30.

More Fun that I Thought it Would Be

The party went on...

...and on

Namche Again

Our last night camping went relatively well, I had only awaken once during the night and it was a relatively balmy 0º when the kitchen boys woke us up at 6,00 the next morning. The weather was so nice that we took down the dining tent and ate breakfast outside. Soon it was sunny and warm and everyone had a good feeling starting off that day. It was because we were going to Namche.

Namche meant a lot of things to us by then. I had memories of it as a bustling city, full of activity, markets and people. There was a bank, a bar and…well you know, there were so many buildings I never even got to see all of them, so who knows what else might have been there? It was just that big. But Namche had two important things that each of us wanted more than anything else: warm showers and clean beds. It had been a week since we’d slept in beds and something like ten days since I’d had a shower. We were at our gnarliest ever. And another thing: In Namche, each room had its own personal flush toilet! Paradise.

Something occurred to me suddenly as we packed up and got ready for the day’s hike. I was breathing fine: slowly and evenly. The lower altitude had finally arrived! Maybe that was the reason for my good mood that morning. Or maybe it was Anne’s warm milk prescription. She would be promoted to Dr Anne after this! Whatever it was, I was feeling great.

Yak on Guard Duty

I don’t remember the altitudes, and I’m pretty sure we had a net descent that day, but there were still some significant uphill stretches. Many rivers were still to be crossed, or actually it was probably just a few of them that we had for some reason to cross many times. As the day wore on, we were getting tired and longing for the end of that day’s trek. By mid afternoon we were on a wide flat trail and this made it easier to walk in a lazy, kind of feet dragging way. After taking probably hundreds of thousands of steps over the past few weeks, one kind of gets tired and perhaps a little careless late in the day, especially when your guard is down on a flat surface. And so about an hour outside of Namche I stepped on a rock sticking up from the trail and twisted my left ankle. The pain was searing and immediate, creating that feeling in your stomach of sudden nausea that lets you know it’s serious. I was thrown off balance and started to fall, unfortunately towards the direction where the trail dropped off down the side of the hill. So I hopped three or four times on my right foot and finally regained my balance. I slowly, gingerly tried to put my weight back onto the left foot. The pain was immediate, and not at all pleasant, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. I would be able to walk, but it wouldn’t be fun.

So out came one of my hiking poles and I managed to hobble my way through the last hour to Namche. As long as I used the poles, and intentionally favoured the leg, there was no pain at all. It might not have been that bad after all. My boots were fairly heavy and sturdy, especially around the ankle, and it would have been undoubtedly much worse if I were wearing lighter boots. But still, I didn’t want to take any chances until I could get the boot off and take a look at my foot. There was a steep descent the next day and I would need to be as fit as possible.

That Bustling Metropolis

After we checked into the lodge, I graciously allowed Frau Tucek to shower first, since I knew I would lose if I tried to negotiate. Meanwhile, I opened up the laces to the boot as widely as possible and slipped my foot out of the boot. It hurt, but the black and blue patch below the ankle that I was dreading to see was not there. It wasn’t serious. This was a relief.

We had been planning to do quite a bit of shopping in Namche and after we both had sufficiently scrubbed off a week’s work of dust and smelled nice again, we set off to explore the shops of Namche once more. I had made a list of all of the people I wanted to buy gifts for and I think the total came out to more than 20. We bought all manner of things – T shirts, singing bowls, little Buddha statues. Although we took a break at around 5,00 to go back to the hotel, collect some more money and have afternoon tea (we need to be civilised about these things, you know), afterwards we were back out at the market haggling for quick-drying towels, necklaces and ceremonial masks like the ones we’d seen at the “no adjective” monastery in Pangboche. We made it back to the lodge, laden with purchases, just in time for dinner.

After dinner, a few members of our group set off for the local Namche bar that they affectionately called “The Office”. As for me, well, I was becoming quite partial to Dr Anne’s Warm Milk prescription and went to bed (ahh bed!) early. My ankle was OK, My breathing was OK. I slept like a baby between the sheets, with no sleeping bag or plastic bed bug bag,

Trees Again

Wake up call was at a leisurely 6 AM. It wasn’t even that cold, so I would need to make some difficult choices about which clothes to wear. I had miscalculated and brought too many heavy hiking trousers and not enough light weight, warm weather ones. Effectively I had no clean light trousers left, except for a pair that was locked away (so to speak, because actually it wasn’t) in the storage room of the Yak & Yeti Hotel in Kathmandu. I could tell it would be too hot that day for the heavy pants so I rummaged through my duffle bag for the plastic bag that held my filthy brown hiking trousers. The smell was pretty bad. I took out the trousers and banged them against a rock for a couple of minutes. A lot of dirt came off, it’s true, but I think that no matter how hard you try, you can’t beat an odor out of a pair of pants.

Looking for clean clothes

It was not only the smell but the other various aspects of personal hygiene that instilled in us an intense longing for the civilisation of Namche. Frau Tucek and I were in constant negotiations as to who would get to use the shower first when we got back. Somehow I had the feeling though, that whatever we’d agree, she would always get the shower first, even if she had to make that little pouting, “curled up bottom lip” look that always made me give in.

Our first stop that day would be to the town of Pheriche, the main attraction of which is a hospital run by an NGO called the Himalaya Rescue Association. The walk to town was not long, maybe and hour and a half, but we were walking down in the valley now and there was quite a bit of water running about in small streams that needed to be negotiated. I had a bit more energy this particular morning and was happily jumping over small rivulets of water with everyone else.

Pheriche is just another sleepy town but with considerably more buildings than we’d seen in days. There was even a stand alone bakery (what is they have about bakeries here?). The hospital itself was a non-descript building but had a gigantic satellite dish standing outside that was almost larger than the small one floor hospital. It probably didn’t consist of more than five rooms, but it did have something not many other buildings could boast about in these parts: its own generator. In the small room that served as a reception they had T shirts and other souvenirs for sale, presumably to assist in the upkeep of the hospital, although judging from the price list on the wall, it might not have been necessary. I can’t remember exactly any of the prices but I think that just an initial consultation cost between $50 - $100. From the room beyond I could hear a conversation that seemed to be someone describing his altitude sickness symptoms to a doctor. It figures. We left the hospital. I don’t recall anyone buying any souvenirs.

After a short stop off in a neighboring lodge for a spot of lemon tea and views of some incredible photographs decorating the walls (this is where I saw the stunning poster of Ama Dablam Camp 2), we were back on the “Nepali flat” trail. After crossing a river and climbing back up a steep and somewhat scary slope on the other side, we stopped for a break and I looked back. Behind us were two valleys, each one carved by its own river. They came together and met like a Y shape. The impressive thing was that sitting above the intersection of the Y was the Khumbu Glacier. This is how far it stretched to. It was simply incredible.

I don’t have much more memory of this day. It was all a bit anticlimactic after Everest, and indeed, after so many days, things started to blur together. But one thing I remember, just before we entered the town of Pangboche, was that suddenly there were trees again. It was funny; I hadn’t noticed when we passed the tree line on the way up, but here it was like a welcome diversity of colour and smells had suddenly appeared. It had been four or five days since I’d seen a tree. I wondered if possibly that was the longest period of time I ever went without seeing a tree. Certainly when we thought about it, we could also say that it had been at least 10 days since any of us had seen an automobile, and would still be some days more until we did, something that really registered with the Californians in our group.

In Pangboche there’s a monastery that has no adjective next to it on my trekking map. It’s a bit off the beaten path and it’s not famous, but maybe that’s what made it more special to me. The ceremonial masks and paintings decorating the walls appealed to me more than various sights at the “interesting monastery” at Thame or the “important monastery” at Tengboche. Also, it had a sincere feeling to it. They weren’t selling souvenirs there and although there was some sort of ceremony going on, it was going on behind closed doors, not for tourists. Actually it was going on behind one particular, scary looking door that was decorated with a monster and painted skulls surrounding it.

Pangboche, not for your typical tourist

Is he giving me the "cornudo"?

Don't even think about going in there uninvited

Supposedly the monastery was one of the oldest in Khumbu. There was a sign on the entrance saying that it was 604 years old, but strangely no indication of when the sign was erected, so there was no way to know how old it exactly was today. Logically it was at least 604 years old but out guide poured cold water on that calculation by saying that it was “about” 500 years old. I guess nobody knew for sure.

The rest of the day was dusty, windy and hot and I think I caught a cold somehow. Maybe it was just the dust but I had sneezing and coughing fits. The backs of my hands, and indeed a few other people’s as well, turned red and rough. I couldn’t tell if this was sunburn or windburn or something else but I took to wearing gloves, or when too hot, keeping my hands in my pockets. My lips were still a mess and every time I sneezed, smiled or laughed they would crack open and bleed. It was good to get into our camp in Tengboche again and camp under the trees.

I'll take the high road

That afternoon I tried a bit of intellectual stimulation on our group by introducing “The Monty Hall Problem”, a logical / mathematical problem. It didn’t go over well, maybe because people were too tired to think about it. Even Dr Mark said he wouldn’t agree to the answer, even after I tried to explain the logic behind it. So I decided on a considerably more pedestrian form of entertainment, impressing some of the American travellers of a similar age by reciting from memory such timeless classics such as “The Oscar Mayer Weiner Song” and the “Theme to Gilligan’s Island”, just to prove my American credentials were intact.

After the past few nights I really wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Anne had been trying to sell me on the idea that a glass of warm milk before bed would work wonders. Now normally I prefer a glass of warm cognac before bed but cognac was scarcer than cigars up here and I so I took Anne’s advice. It worked. I was tired and fell asleep immediately. The only problem was that, like most dangerous drugs, the effect eventually wore off and I woke up about an hour or two later. But it was only a temporary consciousness and I fell back asleep for the rest of the night until the kitchen boys woke me up the next morning with my coffee.

Kala Pathar

The cold returned once the sun went down so I bundled up again. I still wasn’t feeling well and so didn’t have much dinner. Some of the others had similar feelings. I recall Dr Mark summing up the feeling quite neatly as “hitting a brick wall eating”, meaning that while eating you suddenly get the overwhelming feeling that you’re full and can’t take another bite. I went to sleep early that night and actually managed to get some sleep, probably because I had so little sleep the night before. But still it was fitful; I kept waking up between short intervals of sleep. I was also still hyperventilating most of the time and around 4 AM I awoke with a start, breathing very heavily, and couldn’t get back to sleep at all after that. Not that it mattered; the kitchen boys were soon making their rounds. They knew by now that it was tea for Frau Tucek and coffee with milk and sugar for me.

Most people were also up relatively early that morning. We were camped at the base of Kala Pathar and we were going to summit early this morning. I think Dr Mark might have had some serious issues with the altitude at that moment, because apart the brick wall, he didn’t even make the attempt to the summit. At 5545 meters, Kala Pathar would be the highest point we would reach on this trip. Even so, when we looked up at the summit from Gorak Shep, it looked puny compared with all the 7000 + meter peaks surrounding it. You couldn’t possibly boast of climbing Kala Pathar with all of these other mountains around, but the truth is that Kala Pathar is only 350 meters lower than Kilimanjaro.

The best thing about Kala Pathar, indeed the only real reason to climb it at all, is that it offers the most outstanding views of Everest. I’ll bet that most photographs of Everest you’ll find from the Nepali side will be from Kala Pathar. Certainly the photo on the cover of my trekking map must have been from there. I made sure to put fresh batteries into my camera before we left.

The going was tough and I was tired from the outset. My breathing was really heavy at this point and I wanted to stop for rests far too frequently. When the sun came up it reminded me of the seeing the sunrise on the way to the top of Kilimanjaro three years earlier. It also brought back the memories of how difficult the summit day was back on that earlier trek. And then I remembered that at one point on Kili summit day, when I was doing particularly poorly, Mark and Anne offered me something they called “goo”, which was a sort of energy paste. It must have been pure sugar, but whatever it was it worked magnificently. I had a burst of energy that lasted at least an hour. I mention this because I had found a very similar product called “Power Gel” when practicing for the Vienna Marathon and had bought a few packs. I had brought them with me but had never thought of actually consuming one. Well, if ever there was time, it was now. So I took one out of my day pack and sucked the sickly sweet paste out of the foil wrapper. The taste made me cringe, but almost immediately I ceased feeling tired. Unfortunately it didn’t stop my hyperventilation, but it got me to the top with no problems.

As we approached the top, the mountain narrowed significantly, as they do. The last little bit was very steep and required me to use my hands as well, and when I finally got up to the summit area I sat down for a rest. Then I looked to my right. Within half a meter there was a sheer drop off. At first my hand involuntarily grasped at the rock I was sitting on. After that I was frozen for at least 20 seconds. Slowly I began to inch my way away from the cliff and towards the center of the mountain, trying to chose a midpoint between the drop offs on both sides. There was still maybe two meters before the absolutely highest part of the mountain and people were queuing up to get their photos taken there. I looked up and held steadily onto the rock. I got dizzy just looking up there and could feel myself losing balance, even though I was seated. The very top was only one or two meters in width with drop off on both sides. It would only really be possible for two or maybe three people to fit up there. It was completely out of the question for me to attempt it, even contemplate it. But my fellow climbers were encouraging me to do exactly that, and so I figured the longer I stayed there the worse my experience would become. I took out my camera and got some shots of Everest. Unfortunately however, the sun was rising from immediately behind Everest and it was very difficult to get any photo without a blinding glare that would ruin the shot. The rest of the views were just as impressive, particularly of Pumori and the Khumbu Glacier and Icefall, but I left those snapshots to Frau Tucek, who at the moment was happily scrambling up the last bit of the mountain to get her photo taken. I slowly slipped away, being very careful about where I was putting my hands and feet as I descended the steep part. My legs were shaking at this point, but as soon I was back to the trekking trail I was fine. I continued all the way back down, however and made it back to camp around 9,00. The whole climb took no more than 3 hours.

Frau Tucek graciously places herself between me and oblivion

Frau Tucek Makes it to the Top

Everest, as seen from Kala Pathar

Mark and Anne were up when I got back and the porters were dismantling the tents. Mark asked how it was and I told him about my panic attack. “I’m glad I didn’t go then” he said. Really? Mark? Afraid of heights? I didn’t know that before, maybe because I was too preoccupied with my own panic to notice anything else.

Slowly my companions all returned and we had “lunch” at around 10 AM. They spread out the blue tarp and even though we all complied with the order to not put our boots on the tarp, an errant zopkio thought he might share our meal with us and wandered onto the tarp, upsetting our lunch. The porters quickly chased him away, but in defence of the poor beast, it must be said, the zopkio was not wearing boots at the time.

We would have a long day walking down to Tughla, passing Lobuche sometime in the afternoon. We should have started out by now but we needed to stick around here at Gorak Shep until the Brazillionaires’ helicopter arrived to whisk them off to Kathmandu. This is why we were having lunch at 10 AM, to take advantage of the waiting time. I had a bit to eat but wasn’t really hungry at all. I just wanted to descend.

Just Waiting Around

At 10,45 the Brazillionaires helicopter still hadn’t arrived. And even after it did, it would still take awhile for them all to clear out because the total weight of three adults and their gear would be more than the helicopter could handle at this altitude. The air was indeed thin up here. The helicopter would need to make two trips back to Namche (or was it Lukla?). Then at that lower altitude it would gather all family members and luggage together and fly to Kathmandu. The whole thing must have cost more than $10,000. Dang.

But at 10,45 our guide decided that enough was enough. He sent us ahead with the Sherpas and he stayed behind with the Brazillionaires to wait for their chopper. We set off on the trail back to Lobuche and at some point when we were ascending, I noticed that we were still walking next to the glacier. I knew it had ended at Everest Base Camp, but I had originally thought that it started at Gorak Shep. Now I could see that the thing stretched off into the distance in both directions. Just as I was thinking about this, a helicopter flew by just above our heads. It was the Brazillionaires’ ride. We bid them goodbye in our thoughts, even though none of us really had a complete conversation with any of them. In fact, we wondered why they would go on a group tour anyway if they clearly had enough money to arrange a private expedition and didn’t want to interact at all with the other members of the group. Oh well.

Once we had arrived back at the climbers’ graveyard, I knew that we were at the ridge just above Tughla. Another steep decline and we’d be done with another long day. When I got to the top of the ridge, the two lodges that constitute the town of Tughla appeared very far away indeed. It was still more than an hour’s walk to go. The fact that it was down hill was better than uphill, I guess, but also harder on the knees. Some of the younger members of our group, such as Frau Tucek and the lad from California, were taking advantage of the surge of oxygen and were almost running down the hill, jumping from rock to rock. I didn’t feel the oxygen surge, certainly not enough to jump from rock to rock. It was true, Tughla was at 4660 meters and that was about 900 meters lower than the dreadful summit of Kala Pathar, and I felt a little bit better, but it wasn’t low enough yet for such activities. I was still breathing heavily.

The descent to Tughla

I dropped into my tent and took a nap. It felt good but soon I awoke and found I was sweating. I looked at my watch and it registered 40º. Impossible. I sat up and sneezed, and when I did I cracked my lip open. Obviously I had parched lips from the dry air and didn’t take any of the sensible precautions urged on me by the infinitely more sensible Frau Tucek. As I wiped the blood from my face and applied Frau Tucek’s proffered lip balm, I asked her how her ears were. “Almost better” was the answer. This is a land of extremes, I thought. That night my watch registered -3º. Assuming that the watch was always wrong on the same scale and in the same direction, I didn’t know exactly what temperature it was, but in any case the change from the afternoon was enormous.

Everest Base Camp

By the time our 4,30 wake up call came around I was dead tired. I managed to get maybe an hour or so of sleep that night but only in intervals of 10 to 15 minutes each. It was still dark so I switched on the headlamp to put my contact lenses in and the batteries chose that moment to decide to expire. The cold empties batteries much faster, folks. So I borrowed Frau Tucek’s lamp and got my contacts in. As I sat up I found that I was breathing very deeply and rapidly again. No, my hyperventilation of the night before was no dream, particularly because you typically need to be asleep in order to dream.

It was cold that morning, cold enough to even justify wearing heavy trekking pants. So stuffed my dirty brown trousers into a plastic bag and put on my new Raven Fjall heavy expedition pants. The boots were actually not that bad when I put them on; the hot water bottles did the trick. But for some reason after 15 minutes or so, my toes went numb anyway. Hmmm…

I was not feeling well and this time I was pretty sure that it was the altitude. We weren’t really that high, just over 4300 meters, I guess, but the headache, insomnia, lack of appetite and hyperventilation are classic symptoms (actually I not sure if hyperventilation is a classic symptom, but it certainly makes sense that it should be). They offered us a cold breakfast but I refused. As we huddled there in the freezing temperatures at 6 AM, with the first hints of sunlight coming over the mountains, our guide was trying to organise us for our daily trek briefing but some people were lagging. Blowing in our hands and jumping up and down, most of us wanted just to get moving in order to warm up. Finally our guide sensed this and put the map away, saying something about doing the briefing after the sun came up. I shouted “Johhny Ho!” and we were off.

We didn’t really need the briefing that morning anyway. Since our guide had changed the day’s plans the night before, he had already explained that we would walk to Base Camp, and then back down to Gorak Shep. It would be a long day, about 10 hours hiking. And we would be going up another 1000 meters higher.

I was panting almost the entire 3 hours up to Gorak Shep. It sounded really bad and everybody was asking me if I was OK. I felt fine, really. I just needed more oxygen and this seemed the most efficient way of getting it. I thought back to my days on Kilimanjaro. I didn’t remember hyperventilating at all there, and I had been much higher. True, I didn’t remember much of the summit day since I was definitely suffering from lack of oxygen. Why was this happening? I put that thought aside as we sipped our lemon tea in the one hut that comprised the town of Gorak Shep, while the Brazilians, true to form, ordered a meal. I think the one reason why Gorak Shep is even on the map is because it’s the closest place to Base Camp where a helicopter can safely land. The Brazilians picked up on this and started inquiring about hiring a helicopter to take them back to Kathmandu. At $1800 per hour, a helicopter ride was a luxury. It was clear that these were no ordinary Brazilians, they were Brazillionaires.

Thank God they have signs up here

Following our short break, we started another ascent up to the top of a ridge. At the top, the mountain views were stupendous. But there was something even more impressive: an enormous glacier that stretched off as far as the eye could see. This was the famous Khumbu Glacier and led all the way to Base Camp. We would follow along this ridge, parallel to the glacier, right up to the camp. The only thing was, off in the distance there was no sight of the end of the glacier or the camp. It was clear this was going to be a long day.

Khumbu Glacier

And as we walked along, glimpses of Everest came in and out of sight. They were impressive, but not as impressive as the one we would see tomorrow from the summit of Kala Pathar, or so our guide informed us. From where we were standing there were also fantastic views of the perfect pyramid shaped mountain of Pumori and Lola, the other mountain besides Nuptse that was partially blocking our view of Everest. And we could eventually make out a place where the glacier, which was dirty, rocky and relatively flat, suddenly turned white and jagged. “That’s the Khumbu Icefall” our guide reported. Icefall? Like a frozen waterfall? Once we rounded one side of the ridge, about an hour after leading the lodge, we could see that it actually was like a frozen waterfall: it curved around a bend and up the side of a mountain. The frozen water was very, very slowly coming down the mountain and eventually feeding the glacier. The entire thing was enormous, and truly stunning to take in with one view. Just then our guide pointed it out. “There it is off in the distance. See it guys? It’s Base Camp.”

“Where?”

“Right over there, just to the left of the Icefall.”

I squinted.“See those little orange spots? Those are tents.”

Slowly something orange was appearing in the far, far distance. I had one of those “You gotta be kidding!” moments. If I had been carrying hiking poles I probably would have thrown them to the ground like a child.

Can you see the orange dots off to the side of the Icefall? Me neither.

We walked for another hour as the Base Camp came slowly into focus. We were still at least an hour away, and the truly exhausting thought was that after we arrived, we would turn right around and walk back to Gorak Shep. We were high now, over 5000 meters and not only I was feeling the altitude. A few other members of the group were also showing some signs of altitude sickness. But that’s not to say that I was doing well. I remember one particular moment when I was staring at some jagged ice and snow formations coming out of the glacier and hallucinating that they were circus tents.

Circus Tents?

Finally we swung down from the ridge and made our way onto the glacier itself. The Base Camp was actually on the glacier; tents pitched on the dirt and scree that was covering the ice below. At times we could see the ice itself through gaps in the dirt and rocks, and quite a bit of it appeared to be melting, creating rivulets of water flowing in every direction.

Around noon we finally arrived at Base Camp. My first impression was that my circus tent hallucination was not an isolated incident since I could swear that I saw a sign on a tent that said “Bakery”. Approaching closer, I found that my eyes were not deceiving me. There may not be a post office at Everest Base Camp, but there certainly was a bakery. But other than the bakery, Base Camp is nothing more than a scattered collection of tents. It was a little bit of a let down. But the views of the surrounding mountains are icefall were truly marvellous.

But of course

We had brought a pack lunch with us and we sat down on some rocks to eat it. The lunch was gnarly in and of itself but the altitude caused many of us to lose our appetite anyway. I think I ate the chocolate bar…I must have been delirious. As we sat there, eating, resting and breathing, suddenly there was a loud but low rumble. Our guide stood up. “Avalance!” he said. “Look! Over there.” I jumped up and looked. It was true; a large amount of snow was falling down the side of the mountain that was directly opposite the icefall. It was far enough away that it didn’t represent a threat to us, but as I scanned the side of the mountain and the amount of snow that was hanging onto the various ledges and outcrops, the avalanche suddenly seemed much smaller than it might have been. A bigger one might actually be able to reach us. I recalled the ice melting under the scree on the glacier and gave that a thought.

Base Camp: Just some tents

We slowly got our gear together and started the long walk back to Gorak Shep, It occurred to me that most of the net gain in altitude we had that day was in the first part of the morning, and that the stretch since Gorak Shep was mostly “Nepali Flat”, meaning lots of ups and down but no net gain or loss in altitude. This meant that in effect we would not be making a net descent for the rest of the day, or perhaps a very small one of 100 or 200 meters. I was bracing myself for another 3 hour stroll when we heard another rumble. “There, over by the icefall”, our guide pronounced. And sure enough snow was piling down the hill. It looked a little like when you shake the branch of a snow covered pine tree – the snow falls onto the snow covering a lower branch and increases the amount of snow falling on the branches below in a chain reaction. We heard two more avalanches on the way back that afternoon. Each time gave me the feeling of the first few seconds of an earthquake.

The going was slow and plodding on the way to Gorak Shep and nobody said much. We spread out even more than usual and practically didn’t resemble a group anymore. But once we stopped at a place that afforded particularly good views of Everest. As we were sitting there taking a short rest, one of the kitchen boys came running up with his very large kettle of lemon tea. Only the guides had come with us to Base Camp. The porters and the rest had stayed behind at Gorak Shep to set up camp, except this kitchen boy whose task it was to provide us with a mid-trek refreshment break. So we sat there for quite a bit until the entire group was together. When the last person had had his fill of lemon tea, the kitchen boy (who by the way was a full grown man) ran off again with slightly less heavy kettle.

Snow Blowing off the Tibet Side of Everest

Around 3 PM we finally straggled into our camp beside the lodge at Gorak Shep. Unfortunately the camp was pitched on a dusty field by the helicopter landing zone and it was hot. We literally collapsed into our tent. It had been a 10 hour walk and we were beat. And it was so hot inside the tent I had to change my clothes. My watch registered 35º. That was clearly too high but it gives you some indication of the extremes in temperature that are commonplace here, as well as a possible reason for the avalanche activity that day.

Back From Base Camp

A Change in Plans

My watch has a built in thermometer that usually registers the temperature about 5 degrees warmer than it really is, and that’s when I’m not wearing it. When I have it on my wrist, the body heat can distort it significantly more. Around 2,00 in the morning I awoke and looked at the temperature. It registered -2º inside the tent. It would be colder outside. The problem with all this that immediately presented itself was that I needed to use the toilet (and I use that term euphemistically since the "toilet" consisted of a hole in the ground inside a tent). I struggled to decide which would be more uncomfortable: trying to hold it in until morning or getting up and going to the toilet tent. I tried to convince myself to sleep through it, but that only worked for about 20 minutes. I kept waking up. Some friends of mine camp with a special “pee bottle” for just such an occasion, but I had never considered such a thing. Too bad.

So I got up and looked around for my gear in the dark. Frau Tucek was sleeping like a baby with her earplugs in but I was sure I would wake her if I lit my head lamp. I fished through my sleeping bag looking for some warm clothes to wear. Normally I keep the next day’s clothes in the bag with me while I sleep to avoid that shocking feeling of putting on frozen clothes in the morning. I made an exception for the brown trousers, but anyway I had taken them off as soon as the sun went down and switched to warmer pants.

It took some time to get dressed and put my freezing boots on, and nature’s call was already urgent. As I quickly stepped out of the tent and started to turn my headlamp on, I felt something strange and stopped suddenly. I could see without it! I looked up and was stunned to see the sky lit up with millions of stars. There was no moon but the entire camp was lit up by nothing more than starlight. I stared upward, but only for a few seconds as nature resumed its relentless call and I ran off to the toilet tent.

When morning finally came around and I put my boots on, my feet almost immediately went numb again. This was bad – it took more than an hour to get the feeling back. We breakfasted in the lodge, where presumably the Brazilians had slept in marginally more comfortable circumstances, and met up for the day’s trek briefing. We could see on the map that we were at the convergence of two rivers. We would leave one and follow the other up to a very small town called Lobuche, which I guess was just called as such after a nearby mountain of the same name. We were told that up here you really couldn’t even call these places towns anymore, since they only consisted of lodges and even these closed down during the winter.

So off we set, trekking to the northwest now. The weather was great and the mountain views spectacular. Our guide would often come up with pop quizzes and ask us the names of the mountains in view, challenging our memory of the morning’s briefing. Most of us failed these quizzes, especially because seeing the same mountain from a different angle gives it a completely different appearance. And after a while I started to get mountain overload. There’s just so much that at a certain point you can’t appreciate the grandeur of it all anymore. When I closed my eyes, I saw mountain peaks. I asked our guide what the name of one particular mountain was and he said it didn’t have a name. Maybe he just didn’t know the name but if he was right, it was amazing. The mountain had to be at least 5000 meters high. If you took this mountain and put it down in any other continent, it would be famous. But here it was so common it didn’t even have a name. I suggested that we should call it Mount Charles, you know, just so that the poor mountain would have a name, and so I referred to it as such for the remainder of our trek.

A bit later we stopped for lunch at a place called Tuglha. Lunch was leisurely, held outside but at a table in the garden of a tea house (no blue tarp!). We met some fellow trekkers who were on their way down. They’d already been up here for three weeks and were not with any group. They just bought a permit, a map and guidebook and set off. I wish I had that kind of courage.

The Sirdar and me

After lunch we had a steep climb, which seemed to be the case after most lunches, thinking back on it . After about an hour or so walk to the top of a ridge, we found a place with all sorts of manmade rock structures. Some were primitive, just collections of rocks piled on top of each other, but some were clearly manufactured far away and brought up here. Our guide informed us “This is the mountain climbers’ graveyard. Each one of these is a monument to someone who died trying to climb Everest.” It was bit eerie. Supposedly it was first started by the Japanese who lost 20 climbers on Everest in 1997. Since then the monuments keep going up. Some of them had plaques on them listing the names of the fallen. It seems like the Koreans were also especially unlucky here.

Graveyard...of sorts


His name was Sean

Somewhere along the trail here we heard that there were already 40 expeditions at base camp waiting for the weather to get good enough to start their ascent. It was now mid to late April and it was almost time for the start of the real climbing. Supposedly it’s a complicated process as to how they chose the first expedition to go because the rest are supposed to contribute to the first expedition’s expenses. The first ones up, you see, secure all of the ropes and ladders that the rest of that season’s climbers will use.

Just a bit of rest

Back in Vienna some friends of mine told me that they had read that there was a post office at Everest Base Camp and they insisted that I send them a postcard from there. But our guide quickly debunked that notion. Then again, there are actually two base camps, the other one being on the Tibetan side. I heard that it was even possible to get to the Tibetan base camp by automobile, so who knows? Maybe they have a post office there as well. But back on the Nepali side we were told that life at base camp could be pretty boring. Some of the people are up there for weeks or even months before beginning the ascent, presumably to get acclimatised and to be ready for any auspicious weather that might permit a good start. I heard that some people get so bored they rent a helicopter to fly them to Kathmandu to go to a disco or something for the night and then fly back the next morning. This could be expensive. The only helicopter service operating up here charged $1800 per hour and had rigid weight limit restrictions.

We arrived at our camp in Lobuche at mid-afternoon. We were camping in an open field quite some distance away from the two or three lodges that constituted the town. The skies were clear and we were close, but from this angle we couldn’t see Everest. The reason in fact, was that we were too close; it was being hidden by the smaller but closer mountain called Nuptse. Nupste was the mountain that had appeared as a ridge just below Everest when viewed from the south, but here from the west, Nuptse was king of the skyline. And why not, at 7861 meters, it was taller than any other mountain on any other continent, and yet it’s completely unknown among the general population of the world.

Nupste hogs the skyline

During dinner our guide proposed a change to the itinerary. Our programme had called for us departing the next morning for a place called Gorak Shep. Once there we would climb a nearby mountain called Kala Pathar where there are reportedly great views of Everest. The following day we would hike to Base Camp and the return all the way back down to Lobuche. But our guide pointed out that the views from Kala Pathar were normally much better in the morning and we might get stuck with cloudy weather if we attempted to do it in the afternoon. So he proposed switching the order and hiking all the way to Base Camp and back to Gorak Shep tomorrow, and then the next morning climbing Kala Pathar and descending all the way to Tuglha. It would be two very difficult days but despite his continued admonitions of “You can never predict the weather on the world’s highest mountain”, his weather predictions usually turned out to be quite accurate. So we all agreed to the 4,30 AM wake up call and turned in early.

The night it was cold; I registered -6º inside the tent and our guide later said it might have been -15º outside. But I had an idea. I would take my hot water bottles, put them inside my heavy hiking socks and stick them into the boots, which were going to spend that night inside the tent.

Around 11,30 I woke up suddenly, gasping for breath. I tried to sit up and started hyperventilating from the effort. I tried getting back to sleep but as soon as I started settling down again, I felt the need to take deep quick breaths. It wasn’t alarming – I was getting enough oxygen – it was just inconvenient way of going about doing this. In a way it felt sort of like when you’ve gotten into a rhythm when running long distances. You just keep breathing in a way that gets you enough oxygen. Except that I was laying down resting and not running. Anyway, it’s very difficult to sleep when you’re hyperventilating and needless to say I didn’t get much sleep that night.

Ama Dablam Base Camp

The sun was up early and so was I, even before the kitchen boys came around with their offers of “Tea Coffeeeee?” Getting out of the sleeping bag was bad enough (the water bottles were still warm!), but having the boots standing all night long outside in the entrance flap caused them to be unacceptably cold when putting them on that morning. It was hard to imagine that the temperature would be so much different outside the tent than inside, but my feet turned numb after five minutes and they finally got back to normal only after a few hours. A new strategy seemed to be in order.

As I climbed outside of the tent and noticed the kitchen boys already preparing for their morning ritual, I was once again shocked at the sight of the mountains. The clouds had cleared during the night, revealing views more stunning than we had seen before. I grabbed my camera and started snapping away, and I noticed that there seemed to be another front of clouds headed up the valley towards us. Quick! Take photos before the clouds come back!

The kitchen boys prepared a coffee for me, which is always nice, and as I was sipping it I noticed one of the other members of our group coming over a ridge above the camp. She was obviously an even earlier riser than I was and she was carrying her camera. “There are some great shots of Everest over the hill.” I went up to investigate but once I got to the other side I found that clouds were advancing from that direction as well, and Everest was no longer to be seen. It looked like the start to another cloudy day, and I could just imagine our guide saying something like “The weather’s never predictable on the world’s highest mountain” for the rest of the day.

By the time we had breakfast we were fogged in again, but our tour guide had a feeling it might clear up when the sun got high enough to burn it off. He gave his daily briefing of where we would be going that day, assisted by his trusty map of the Khumbu Region. As we gathered around, Frau Tucek noticed that one of the porters was getting sick over by a rock. Dang! We had even infected the crew now! Everyone went over to have a look, which was probably the worst thing we could do to the poor guy. He kind of turned away, I guess from embarrassment - it was supposed to be the clients getting sick, not the porters. We left him as he went behind the rock with the Sirdar and a few others and we went to get our gear ready for the day’s trek. It was difficult packing that day, the temperature was fluctuating every time the clouds entered or exited, and there was always the threat of rain. Still, I wore my ever filthy brown trekking pants and carried some rain gear in the day pack.

I had gotten sunburn several days earlier, almost certainly as a result of ignoring my well intentioned fellow travellers’ admonitions to apply sun screen. The burn was fading now that we’d had a few days of semi-cloudy weather, but a new concern emerged: It appeared that Frau Tucek had got a serious case of sunburn … on her ears. Actually, maybe it wasn’t sunburn, maybe it was windburn, but whatever it was, it looked gnarly. Parts of her earlobes seemed to be disintegrating entirely. No worries though folks, I’m happy to report that she subsequently achieved a complete recovery.

Ama Dablam...Majestic

Our first stop today was up to the base camp of Ama Dablam, one of the most beautiful mountains in the region, to get some pics. Base Camp was at 4560 meters, and the summit a little further up at 6812. From base camp the mountain appears to be a head resting on two parallel shoulders, or even better, like a large bird with its wings spread out. And right where the middle of the bird’s head would be, there’s a great accumulation of snow built up on what appears to be a large ledge, something like an enormous duck bill. “That’s where camp three used to be” our guide responded when I pointed it out. “Used to be?” I started. “Yeah, there used to be three camps to the summit but since that avalanche, most parties try to do it in two. I didn’t ask if an expedition had been camping at camp three when it happened. It was too terrible to contemplate.

Camp Three

Some days later I was having a lemon tea break in a lodge in Pheriche, I think, and on the wall was the most amazing photograph of camp 2. I should have taken a photo of the poster but unfortunately didn’t. But I searched the internet and found some photos almost as good.

Camp Two

Unfortunately it was far too cloudy to see anything when we got to the base camp except for some tents and an old woman tending yaks. We sat and took a break for a while since our guide was sure that eventually the clouds would part and we would get our views. And true enough, eventually blue patches started showing through the clouds in spots and even started gliding our way. As the gaps passed in front of the distant mountains, we caught fleeting glimpses of the views that seemed to be evading us. Each time a break in the clouds allowed partial views, especially of Ama Dablam itself, we furiously started working the cameras, attempting to get any pics before everything was covered again. But slowly, the clouds did dissipate, entirely, and we took even more photos. My guide confounded me again: The weather really isn’t at all predictable here. Even so, I probably have 100 shots of Ama Dablam from base camp. No matter – it’s a magnificent mountain.

Quick! Where's my camera?!

Leaving Ama Dablam, we made our way back down to the river and crossed over to the other side. We stopped and had lunch at about 4000 meters before starting the trek back up to 4320 and our goal for the day: the town of Dingboche. Dingboche is really only a cluster of houses but up here it counts as a town. They even had an internet café. I asked why it seemed that all of the towns around here ended in "boche"? Did it mean something? Our tour guide, never at a loss for words, indicated that long, long ago there was a holy man who meditated in the these parts. Every place where he did serious meditation a new settlement was founded, and they all ended in “boche”.

Frau Tucek graciously points out Mt Everest for you

At this particular boche, there was a lodge where we would be staying for the night. Or more precisely, we would be staying in tents in the garden of the lodge and not inside. This seemed to be a particularly silly thing at the time. If there was a lodge, why stay in tents? But after I saw the toilet in the lodge, I was happy to have the relative cleanliness of the toilet tent outside. I could only imagine what the rooms were like. Maybe it was up here where the bed bugs stories got started. Nonetheless, the Brazilians felt that the opportunity to sleep in a bed was worth taking and so rented rooms in the lodge instead of sleeping outside with the rest of us.

Approaching Dingboche

The wind picked up and the temperature started dropping, quickly following the sunset. We took our dinner inside the lodge and the family was nice enough to start a fire for us in the big stove in the center of the room. Unfortunately they were having some difficulty getting it started and put the young son of the family (I mean young – maybe seven or eight years old) in charge of the task. There was a small fire going in the stove but he couldn’t get it to catch onto the larger pieces of wood, or maybe it was that the yak dung fuel was too fresh. Either way, his solution was to throw a dishful of gasoline into the stove, which caused a mini explosion that sent flames shooting out of the top of the stove almost to the roof. It also produced quite a bit a smoke, not only from the initial explosion, but also because it seemed to have misaligned the stove pipe from the hole leading through the roof, and the smoke was accumulating in the room. We were sitting right next to the stove and I must say the odor wasn’t pleasant. It was too much for some people who moved to the far side of the room and opened a window, which kind of defeated the purpose of lighting the stove in the first place.

Camping

The morning sun soon burned away most of the fog and mist. I was up early but unfortunately had forgotten that there was a Buddhist service scheduled for that morning in the nearby Tengboche Monastery and was only reminded as I leisurely made my way to breakfast. Dang…missed the Buddhist ceremony tick! Frau Tucek and I were sharing a room at the wonderful Rivendell lodge in Tengboche and the accommodations were basic. Which was just as well since we’d been on the trail for about a week now and we were starting to look a bit gnarly ourselves. Frau Tucek had paid 300 Rupees for a shower the night before and was looking considerably better than me, but neither of us had a chance to do laundry since we’d left Vienna and some of our clothes were beginning to stink. “This place stinks” was the only thing I could say as I entered the room after washing up and brushing teeth at the communal sink. In fact, I think both of us must have uttered that phrase at least five or six times that morning.

It had been cold during the night and course the lodge had no heating in the rooms. But the drop in temperature was almost a welcome relief because I was finally not sweating buckets in my “good to -30 degrees” sleeping bag. It also allowed me to begin to address the stinky clothes problem that kept rearing its ugly head every few minutes that morning. The problem had arisen due mostly to my fear that it would be very cold for most of the trek. So I brought four pairs of light trousers and four heavy winter trousers. This seemed quite reasonable at the time but I had already used one pair of light ones past their limit just in Bangkok and Kathmandu and had left them festering back in my broken roller bag in the store room of the Yak & Yeti. The second pair I had hermetically sealed in another bag back in Kathmandu, astutely keeping a reserve for when we returned to “civilisation”. That left only two pairs of light pants for the trek, and by now both of these had also reached their expiration date. The main problem facing clothes on the trail is the immense amount of dust that is kicking around. I was really thinking we would be either on rocks or snow most of the time but the truth was that up until then we had been walking primarily through dust. This takes its toll on clothing, particularly trousers. Luckily, both pairs of my light pants were brown (originally I mean, because all trousers tended to become brown after a few days).

So in a way I was looking forward to some cold weather just so that I could change my pants. The problem that morning seemed to be that although it got very cold at night, the daytime temperatures could be quite high as well. So I left my warm trousers packed and put on the gnarly brown trekking pants again.

New Shirt, Same Old Trousers

With the clouds gone, the entire feeling of the place changed. The mountains were back in their majestic glory. There was a great view of Everest in the distance. Time to hit the trail.

Everest: Getting Closer

The Sirdar, who was the expedition leader, was a quiet man. Actually, all of the Sherpas were quiet, or maybe just compared to us I guess. Or maybe his English wasn’t that great, or maybe he didn’t know what to make of us strange foreigners, but he rarely engaged in conversation with us, compared with for example, our tour guide. So I was bit surprised that morning when he suddenly burst out with a booming vocal “Johnny Ho!”. Johnny Ho? I looked around. No, no Hawaiians or Chinese in sight. Could he be referring to Tally Ho? Not sure, but anyway, it was his way of saying “saddle up” without horses. Whatever it was, he spoke. And so I boomed out after him “Johnny Ho!” He seemed pleased with that. So I repeated it every time it was time to get up and hit the trail. I was learning from our tour guide the great art of repeating yourself.

We had lunch in a lodge along the way and shortly thereafter began another descent to cross the river. True to form, but only more so, the post river ascent was steep and hard. We were headed up to about 4300 meters, where we (or rather “they” since we had no duties but to walk) would pitch camp. When we arrived, the clouds started rolling back in again. A toilet tent was set up and I think the sight of it made us all relieved that our mystery illness was behind us. Actually they set up two tents and I wondered if we would have the luxury of the portable chemical toilet we had on Kilimanjaro, or the basic hole in the ground supplied in Peru. The answer was a compromise. True, one of the tents just had a basic hole in the ground, but the other one additionally had a stool with a hole cut in the seat. Nice touch, especially popular with the ladies.

We walked around a bit and climbed up a bit higher, but the fog was rolling in fast and soon visibility was down to just a few meters. There was a point where I lost my bearings and wasn’t sure which was the way back to camp. I retraced my steps and found it with no problem, but after that didn’t stray far.

The fog rolls in

As we arranged things inside the tent it started to rain. Well, that’s convenient I thought; at least they arranged for us to get settled in first. Unfortunately, however, a tent isn’t as large as a lodge room and keeping dirty gear separate from clean is more of a challenge. The tents were top rate Mountain Hardware models with a rain cover and entrance area separate from the sleeping space. Boots, hiking poles, etc were to be kept in the entrance flap. I had heard some horror stories about people leaving their boots outside and having them stolen while they slept. This would be a disaster: hiking in the Himalaya without boots would not be fun. But there were no other groups camping near us. Indeed we were nowhere near a town at all. It seemed safe. We sat in the tent most of the afternoon and evening listening to the rain and my Ipod.

Tea Coffeeee?

As evening fell, so did the temperature. I had learned the trick in Peru to fill up my water bottles with very hot water just after dinner and put them into the sleeping bag to keep it warm. This works very well, but makes it even harder to get out of the sleeping bag afterwards. Although it was cold that night I had one consolation: It was the one and only time I caught Frau Tucek snoring. Now I admit that I sometimes snore, but I’m very good natured about it, and am the first to apologise and try to stop. In fact, I’m a bit sensitive to subject because I can imagine that it must be hell to be kept awake all night by someone breezily sleeping himself. So when Frau Tucek pointed out that I was a snorer, I encouraged her to not only use vocal persuasion to get me to stop, but also more violent methods. She demurred, but I continued to feel guilty. For the last few nights, however, she didn’t wake me up once and I was wondering if somehow I was cured of the problem. “No”, she said. “I just kept these earplugs they gave me on the plane. They work great!”

Dinner!

Tengboche

I was relieved to see that Frau Tucek was feeling better. She took it easy at breakfast, but it was clear that the worst was over. The other members of our group were also feeling considerably better and that morning’s breakfast was one of the happier ones in a few days. We did, however, come across an American couple who were travelling with their young son, who was about 12 years old and did not look so good. When we ventured that the poor lad might be suffering from our group’s ailment, we were quickly corrected, since both parents were doctors, and they should know. The worrying thing was that it took them 3 days to make the proper diagnosis. They talked shop with Dr Mark for a while, explaining the various symptoms, and why the current circumstances might lead them to a wrong conclusion, but in the end they all agreed: the boy had Typhoid. I’ve heard of Typhoid before but I can’t say I really know the nature of the beast. All I know is that, as they all sat there discussing his case, he looked miserable. Then again, maybe when I was 12 years old, if my parents started talking about my intestinal disorders with strangers, I might look miserable too, Typhoid or not.

At 8,15 we were off on the trail again to the famous Everest View Hotel. This could be the name of just about any tea house in Khumbu, but in this case it was really a nice (and expensive) hotel. It was built and managed by Japanese, who as a Nation, it must be said have some of the highest standards of hygiene I’ve ever seen. There was a roped off hallway leading to the guest rooms and a sign indicating that only guests were permitted beyond that point. I don’t know if each room came with its own toilet but I had a visit to the outhouse, and found it to be the nicest one I'd seen (and smelled!) in a long time. We relaxed on the terrace and ordered coffee. Off in the distance was Everest, although it was partly cloudy that day so perhaps a better name for the establishment would have been Everest Partial View Hotel. “The weather’s never predictable on the world’s highest mountain, guys” was the stock phrase that our tour guide pulled out of his inventory of witticisms for the occasion.

Viewing the Everest View

The coffee was fine however, if a bit expensive, but soon we were off again on a long trek down to cross the river at 3370 meters. We stopped at the river for lunch where our tour guide announced that we would have lunch on a blue tarp. Mark, who has a very sharp yet subtle sense of humour, leaned over and asked me “What kind of blue tarp do you suppose that would be?” “The kind you have to take your boots off before you get on?” I answered.

The worst thing about a steep descent to cross a river was that normally an equally steep ascent awaited you on the other side. And such was the case that fine afternoon. As we made our way up, I noticed that we were back on the main trail to Everest now, and it was crowded. The trails were not only packed with trekkers and their various guides and beasts of burden; there was also a burgeoning industry of carrying all sorts of materials to small towns nestled up in the mountains. There were no roads here and the main logistics solution seemed involve human labour. And to judge from the types of materials being lugged up, there must have been quite a construction boom going on. No Subprime crisis here.

He must be carrying baloons

We ascended for probably 1 ½ hours, up to about 3900 meters to the Tengboche Monastery. Whereas Thame was officially classified as an “Interesting Monastery” on our trekking map, Tengboche was deemed to be an “Important Monastery”, whatever either of those classifications might mean. The clouds really started rolling in when we got there and as we stopped walking and took off our packs, we realised just how cold it had become. It would be nice to get inside the monastery and warm up a bit, but the facility looked closed. As indeed it was – we were obviously visiting outside of established hours. Luckily the Sirdar’s son was a monk there so they opened up just for our group to have a quick look around. As we took off our boots and began to enter the main room, I spied a sign that said something about sitting to the right of the room. This went against the general “counter clockwise” rules we had been observing so far, but if there’s a sign on the wall, it’s best to follow it. Of course as soon as I took three or four steps to the right I was upbraided by our tour guide who reminded me “Go to the Left!” ”…but it’s written there” I weakly explained. “No, that’s only for during services.” Whaaa?

Entrance to Tengboche

Unfortunately I made another faux pas during that “Important Monastery” visit. Photography was permitted, but using a flash was not. Supposedly another person in our group had already violated this unposted rule, but I hadn’t actually witnessed the gentle scolding he received. So of course when I violated the same rule shortly thereafter, the scolding was slightly less gentle, but still no problem. But then, for some inexplicable reason, I was unable to turn off my flash correctly and it lit up again, just a few seconds after I was told not to use it. They were not amused. I hope I didn’t get the Sirdar’s son into any trouble.

Damn flash...Buddha was not amused

Our lodge for the evening was a short walk from the monastery. The fog was rolling in and visibility was really diminished. Our tour guide started singing “Where have all the mountains gone?” to the tune of “Where have all the flowers gone?” He was to regale us with this wit, not to mention his singing skills, every time the clouds came out.

The lodge itself was so far the most basic we had experienced. There was a communal toilet that even flushed, but there was no toilet seat at all and it wasn’t the cleanest facility I’d seen. There was a sink in which to wash up and brush teeth, but it was in the hallway directly outside of the toilet. Yes, it’s true that curtains adorned the window of the room but besides that, the only decoration in the room was a framed photograph of another hotel somewhere far away in a western city. They actually put photographs of other hotels on their walls for decoration. I counted down our descent from the luxury of the Oriental, then to the “down on its luck” feeling of the Yak & Yeti, and through the progression of lodges where basic services became less and less evident. But even this was something, since in the following days we would even be losing the very walls of the lodges – we would be camping in tents. And it was cold outside.

The sad but true decorations

One luxury that lodge did keep in reserve, however, was a shower. There was one shower for the entire lodge and they charged extra for the use of it…300 Rupees, I think. I passed on that, instead using the washing water brought around by the kitchen boys to soak my feet. This felt very good. Frau Tucek, however, did avail herself of the use of the showering facilities, but also found them a bit confusing. The shower, you see, was in a small room, so small that water would reach every spot available. This meant that you could not leave your clothes inside the shower and therefore had to disrobe before entering the room. Indeed, you couldn’t even take a towel inside with you since it would be so soaked by the time you’d finished it would be useless. The only problem with this was that there was no changing room outside the shower – the door to the small room opened directly to a rather public area of the lodge. At the time she told me how she coped with this dilemma but for the life of me I can’t recall now. Maybe she’ll stop by the blog and leave a comment, but don’t hold your breath.

Better than a shower?

There was a fire burning in the stove in the main room when we went up for tea and later dinner. I strategically placed myself next to it. It was getting quite chilly out and the stove was a welcome luxury. In theory we were supposed to be the only guests at the lodge but apart from our table there was another table set for about 15 – 20 people. The mystery was resolved shortly thereafter when a group of young Australian girls trooped in, along with a few adults, and occupied the table. It must have been a school trip. Some of the adults, in inimitable Aussie style, were wearing shorts. They were loud and silly, in only the way a group of young girls can be, and I wondered if they were going to be up to that all night. But shortly after they finished dinner, they marched back out and left the lodge. It turns out they were already camping in tents, up near the monastery. In shorts.

Another One Bites the Dust

The next morning I was awake early, and felt great. It’s wonderful what a relaxing night of sleep will do for you. And the great thing was… I was hungry. It was clear that I had won the battle with the now defeated microbes who were until just recently threatening my body with, well, nothing worse than discomfort I guess, although to judge by the looks on my companions’ faces the day before, it was extreme discomfort. But even they looked somewhat better that fine morning, if not 100%. I had a big breakfast and hit the trail with a new found enthusiasm. We were on our way up to the Thame Monastery for a quick visit. Here we were allowed to walk through the main prayer room, which I found very small, and even to take photos. They even had souvenirs for sale. Our tour guide gave us a short explanation of the various paintings on the wall, which I found alien and confusing, although I attribute this exclusively to my ignorance of Buddhism & Hinduism, and not to any shortcomings in his explanations. These two religions seem to overlap quite a bit in Nepal.

Which way to the G20 Summit?

It was dry that morning as we set off on the trail again. At times breathing was difficult; not because of the altitude but due to the amount of dust that was constantly being kicked up by yaks and trekkers. A lot of it is just dirt, but I had the feeling that a significant portion was dried up yak crap blowing around as well. Mark and Anne had mentioned to me that dust gets so bad that people even get cracked ribs from coughing so much. I kept my bandana up over my mouth and nose for much of the walk, giving me an even more cowboy-like look.

Wanted: Yak Rustling

At one point I noticed that Frau Tucek had gone particularly quiet. I approached her to ask if she was OK, and I could see the look on her face. It was the same exhausted look the rest of our group was wearing the day before and to a certain extent was still wearing today. It’s hard to convey in words the way these people looked but it was certain that this was not just a case of being tired from hiking. One of the first girls to fall ill described the feeling as worse that a 195 mile bike ride she had completed some months before. Anne described it as worse that running two back to back marathons. These descriptions were very scary indeed.

But describe it as you will, the fact was that Frau Tucek was now ill as well. I guess it wasn’t the cholera vaccine that had exempted us after all. Maybe it was just the years of exposure I had to these types of things when living in Southeast Asia. Frau Tucek and I were often drinking from the same water bottles and I wondered, with a spasm of guilt, if I had somehow passed the germs to her. We quickly abandoned that practice and adopted an “every man for himself” water supply guideline. As we walked along I stayed close to the poor young lass, since I could remember from the day before that the victims of this insidious malady often looked like they might require assistance. Once, as we were resting, Frau Tucek looked over at me and just said “You felt like this yesterday and all you could say was that you didn’t feel hungry?!” It sounded like an accusation. She looked bad. I didn’t say anything.

You look marvelous....really...

We stopped for lunch at a nice little spot by a small river. We rolled out the blue tarp (no boots on the blue tarp) but not many people ate lunch that day. Some clouds rolled in and the wind picked up, which was a nice respite for the sunburn I was rapidly generating. I thought briefly about getting my foul weather gear out but our guide confidently predicted that it would not rain as long as the wind was blowing. This seemed to contradict many of the experiences that I had previously had with storms but in the end I have to admit that he was right – it didn’t rain that day.

After lunch we found ourselves heading back towards Namche, but we would eventually take a trail branching off and go up and around Namche to the north. It remained cloudy for most of the afternoon, which obscured the mountains but also kept it cool. Sometime around mid afternoon we passed an old airstrip at Symboche. It was the original airstrip that was used for Everest expeditions before Lukla was constructed. Unfortunately it wasn’t long enough for anything more than single engine planes and today was used almost exclusively for cargo laden helicopters. I tried, but failed, to imagine a landing scarier than Lukla. The only one that comes close is the old Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong.

Yes, that's an airstrip

Passing the airstrip and the yak (or was it zopkio) breeding farm, we began a descent towards the town of Khumjung. It was close to Namche here and the size of the town was relatively large for Khumbu. As we passed a school that was founded by Hillary, we were told that some of the classrooms were built out of old expedition boxes and that the school bell was an old used oxygen canister. Opposite the school was the longest wall of mani stones that we’d seen. If you made a mistake and went around the right side of the stones, you’d be risking the wrath of the gods for a few hundred meters.

Prayer stones approaching Khumjung

Around 4 or 5 o’clock, when we finally got to our hotel in Khumjung, Frau Tucek went straight to bed. I brought her some rice and tea after dinner and she looked better. The food wasn’t bad but unfortunately the facilities were more basic here and the whole group had to share a common toilet (maybe the Brazilians paid extra for their own private toilet, who knows?). I was thankful to our tour leader that he put Frau Tucek across the hall from the toilet and I considered painting pedestrian crossing stripes on the floor from her room to the WC, so that she would always have the right of way. I checked out the facilities…common toilet and sink, no hot water. And this was just getting us ready for roughing it. In two more days we’d be sleeping in tents. Thank god everyone got sick while we were still living in relative luxury.

You'll feel better in the morning

Another meaning of “Yak”

Despite my initial fears of bedbugs, I had slept like a baby that night. It was so nice, I found it a little difficult to get out of bed the next morning. Maybe I was getting used to this lodge living. But as I showered and got dressed for breakfast I still felt tired; and this despite the kitchen boys’ 6,00 room service delivery of coffee. When I got down to breakfast, I realised I had no appetite at all and that my stomach wasn’t 100% OK. I had a bit of a headache as well and I briefly wondered if I could be suffering from altitude sickness since lack of appetite and headache are two of the symptoms. But I just as quickly dismissed this idea since we were no higher than 3400 meters. I had another cup of coffee and put the thought out of my mind.

After packing my gear, I met up with the other members of our group who were assembling for a short visit to the Namche Saturday market. The market, it was said, drew locals from as far away as Tibet and would be an interesting cultural diversion before we hit the trail again and resumed our trek. But before setting off for the market, I found out from our assembled group that two of our members had fallen ill during the night. The fact that it was two of the three people who I had last seen marching merrily off to a night of drinking at “the office” made me a wee bit suspicious that their “illness” might be self inflicted. Looking at them didn’t dispel my suspicions, especially when the young man was vomiting into the flower pots on the patio of the lodge.

After chatting with them for a bit, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. Weak stomachs often occur within the first few days of visiting the third world, and as we were touring the Saturday morning market, my stomach was still a little unsettled as well. Maybe it was something we had for dinner the night before. This created a few worries in my mind that maybe I too would soon fall ill with the mystery malady.

Namche Saturday Market

It couldn’t have been fun being sick on the trail, and we had to make a few vomit breaks (one near a lovely Hydro-electric complex that we found out was donated by the Austrian Government). Just as I became convinced that this was something more than a hangover, the third partier from the night before also became sick. “Probably the Yak cheese”, said one of the Brazilian sisters, who had claimed to have gotten sick from Yak cheese a few days before we arrived. This somehow came as little surprise since the Brazilians were always ahead of us in everything, and I think they liked it that way. On the trail, they would blow past the leading guides who were marking the pace; just ignoring them when the guides would ask them to stop and wait for the rest to catch up. They were very standoffish, which started to suit us more and more.

Today we were on our way to the town of Thame, which was up at about 3800 meters. From there we would visit the Thame Monastery (which was described on our trekking map as “Interesting Monastery”), before heading back down towards Namche the next day. It seemed a bit of a long diversion just to see a monastery, but I guess it was not only the monastery itself but the slow, steady gain in altitude that was driving this two day detour from our goal of Everest. We were now in the Sagarmatha National Park, which I negligently omitted to mention that we had actually entered a few days earlier on the trail to Namche. Most of Khumbu is inside this park, which is named after the Nepali word for Everest (not to be confused with Chomolungma, which is the Sherpa word for Sagarmatha). As we crossed through the gate to enter the place, our tour guide, now famous for his witticisms, declared “From here on it’s just a walk in the park, guys”.

Buddha sees all

Frau Tucek insisted that I wear sunscreen that morning starting out in Namche, which I refused. Later that day I got sunburned. Figures.

By the time we stopped at a lodge along the way for lunch, we found that the Brazilians, who had probably arrived hours in advance of us, had already ordered their own separate lunch rather than wait for us. Our three sick travellers spent the whole time inside the lodge on the benches sleeping, while the rest of us sat outside sipping “lemon tea”. I was feeling somewhat better and decided to have a bit of lunch. This probably wasn’t such a good idea because about halfway through the meal I started feeling not so well again. Best to stay away from food for a while, I reasoned with myself. Someone had mentioned they had met another trekker on the path earlier that day who had been with a larger group but had split off to continue on his own. He said that 32 people out of a group of 35 had gotten ill and he separated from them rather than run the risk of getting it himself. He was on his way back down and reported a rumour that there was a violent flu going around Everest Base Camp. Supposedly it struck hard but didn’t last for long. The first part definitely sounded like our bug. The last piece was a bit of a consolation although it didn’t make any of us feel any better at the moment.

Just a spot of lemon tea, thank you

Going was slow for the rest of the afternoon, except naturally for the Brazilians who were light years ahead of us. Our three infirmed companions had the look of complete exhaustion in their faces. Then I noticed that Dr Mark and Anne had dropped far behind so I went back to take a look. Uh, oh. Dr Mark was hit as well.

A few people fell ill...

As the afternoon dragged on and on, I was wondering when the moment would arrive when the sickness would take its toll on me as well. I was feeling “on and off” for most of the morning but it seemed that as long as I avoided food, I was OK. I contemplated why this might be. So far half of our group (Brazilians excluded, naturally) had fallen ill. Frau Tucek was fine, and we contemplated that it might have been the Cholera vaccine we had taken before leaving Vienna. Not that the current illness might be cholera, but the standard cholera vaccine is also good against different types of traveller’s diarrhea, so who knows? I definitely had something swimming around inside my body, and could feel my immune system taking up arms, but I couldn’t tell which side was winning the battle.

...and a few more

We straggled in, one by one, to our lodge in Thame. It was more basic than Namche: there was no hot water or shower, but at least there was a private toilet in each room (which I'm sure my sicker companions must have appreciated more than me). I was tired and had a headache; even shortness of breath. I couldn’t tell if this was from the altitude or if the dreaded microbes were winning. We met for afternoon tea in the main room of the lodge. The kitchen boys were there with their tea and coffee but I stayed clear of the food. There were only a few of us that managed to make it to dinner, and it was during dinner that I found out than Anne had also fallen victim to the strange virus. That left only three of us, and I was still on the fence. I had half a bowl of rice and went to bed by 8,30, hoping I wouldn’t wake up sick.


Pondering who's winning

“From Toothpicks to Ice Axes”

Namche was famed for being a marketplace. Almost all people climbing Everest from the Nepal side came through this town and everybody needs something or another. All manner of trekking, camping and climbing equipment was available here, almost always at suspiciously and ridiculously low prices. The souvenir trade was also big. T shirts, Ghurkha knives, hand held prayer wheels, brass bowls that would vibrate a sound when rubbed with a stick (called “singing bowls”), statues of Buddha, jewellery…everything. In the words of our tour guide, “you can buy everything from toothpicks to ice axes here.” It was no surprise that the full name of the town was Namche Bazaar.

Namche stood at about 3400 meters, which is about the level where you need to start thinking about acclimatisation. So far I was feeling no ill effects but then again, I’d never felt any altitude sickness except on that one summit day on Kilimanjaro some three years earlier. And a year before Namche I’d been to the Andes up to 4500 meters and felt no ill effects at all except for a throbbing pain in one of my fingers. But many tours take an “acclimatisation day” break from ascending around this altitude and I guess if we had to do that, Namche was probably the best place in Khumbu to do it. So today would be a rest day at Namche.

The night before at dinner we were formally introduced to the Sherpa trekking staff. (Sherpa, just so that you know, is an ethnic group and not a profession. Same goes for Ghurkha). The most important person in the trek hierarchy was the Sirdar, a position that is the overall leader of the expedition. Then going down the hierarchy are the other guides, the cook, the kitchen boys, the zopkio herder and other assorted professions that I can’t remember. It’s important to remember who’s where in the hierarchy when tipping time comes along, In fact that might have been one of the reasons for the introduction ceremony.

So we had a leisurely wakeup call at 6,00 by our now familiar kitchen boys offering “tea coffeeee?” and then like clockwork a half hour later with “Excuse meeee. Washing water?”. I took my basin of water this time, just to be sure, but it was unnecessary this time since the shower functioned impeccably. But an even bigger positive impression awaited me when I pulled back the curtains (yes, this lodge had curtains!) revealing massive snow capped peaks on every side. The clouds had lifted during the night, revealing the majesty of the Khumbu Region. We were so exited we took photos of the mountains through the windows, which now seems like a very silly thing, since we would be seeing so many spectacular mountains over the next two weeks that eventually we would get overload.

Room with a View

After breakfast the group gathered for a short hike up to a plateau where the mountain views were purportedly even more impressive. We were told that there was a museum up there that was dedicated to the Khumbu Region, but as we got closer, the ditches and barbed wire we encountered seemed to indicate the presence of something different. Shortly thereafter, at the top of the hill, we were greeted by a sign that said something like “Photography of Military Installations Prohibited”. As I looked around there were several buildings that might plausibly be considered to be military installations, although only if you consider a barracks to be an installation. None of these had any identification markings, although there was a small little coffee shop up there that, judging from the number of western tourists inside, was not a military installation. Somewhere among these buildings lurked the museum. There were maybe half a dozen armed soldiers mulling around the perimeter of the plateau.

At first I was afraid to take any photos at all, even though the mountain views were even more gorgeous here than down in town. But then I saw that there were other tourist groups snapping away and the soldiers really didn’t seem interested in anything we were doing. We gathered around our tour leader’s now famous map of the region as he pointed out each of the mountains and where each was on the map. Then we saw it, just a small truncated triangle above a ridge impossibly far away in the distance. It was our first view of Everest. And then we were introduced to the other local mountains: The ridge in front of Everest was actually another mountain called Nuptse (7861 meters), and off to the right was Lhoptse (8516). Then following around in a clockwise direction Ama Dablam (6812), Kusum Kanguru (6367), Kongdi Ri, and finally rising up above Namche was the sacred mountain of Khumbiyu Lha (5761), for which the Region of Khumbu is named. With the exception of Khumbiyu Lha, all of these mountains were higher than I’d ever climbed before, and given Khumbiyu Lha’s status as sacred, it was prohibited to climb it. The entire panorama was truly impressive.

Extreme Closeup of Everest above Nuptse

We took photos for at least a half hour while other tour groups came and went. Eventually we were told which building housed the museum and slowly filed down there to check it out. I wasn’t expecting much from the museum and probably because of that I was pleasantly surprised. There was much on the flora and fauna of Khumbu, how the Himalaya were formed from what was originally the bottom of the ocean, and on the history and culture of the Sherpas. I even learned one of the official spellings of Zopkio...the one I use today. But the part that grabbed my imagination was, as is likely to suspect, the exhibit about the history of climbing Everest, particularly the early attempts. Of course I had heard long before of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first confirmed men to summit in 1953. But to see their faces and look into their eyes, even just in photographs, made the entire experience seem more real and immediate. I’m really here, following in the footsteps of giants….well, at least part of the way.

There were also displays of some of the original gear that was used in the early days. Looking at some of the gentleman climbers wearing what appeared to be formal wear, I was utterly astonished. Climb Everest wearing a tie and a dinner jacket? One of the more prominent of these climbers was named George Mallory, perhaps best known as being the one who, when asked why he wanted to climb the mountain, reportedly answered, “Because it’s there.” Mallory had attempted Everest actually back in the 20s, when the equipment was really primitive, and died in the attempt. Since he never came back, there’s still some debate as to whether or not he made it to the top, which if true would have beat Hillary by 30 years. His body was eventually found in the late 90s some 700 or so meters below the summit, leading some to question again if he was on his way up or down. His body was still remarkably preserved due to the cold and dry oxygenless air. Even so, the photos I’ve seen of his body are, well, gnarly. His companion, Andrew Irvine, was carrying a camera but his body was never found, and so the debate continues if they actually made it to the top. Supposedly Hillary poured cold water on the whole controversy by saying that if you can’t make it back down again, it doesn’t really count at all.

But even if Hillary hadn’t been the first, he would still be a larger than life figure among the Sherpas. The region was dirt poor when he arrived, and although I can personally attest that it’s not one of the richer places I’ve been to even today, much of the infrastructure that it has, including hospitals and schools are there only as a result of the personal efforts and fundraising of Hillary. The only two people more famous here are Tenzing and the Dalai Lama.

As we made our way back down past the trenches and the razor wire, we got another glimpse of Namche in its totality. It was really not big at all, and it was the top metropolis in Khumbu. I remembered reading in my guide book that there were only 4000 inhabitants in all of Khumbu, which seemed about right, but when I mentioned this to our tour leader, all he said was “Don’t believe everything you read in guide books.” “Fair enough, I responded. So how many people are here?” I asked. He had no idea. Hmm.

Namche Bazaar, in all her glory

We had a leisurely lunch since the rest of the day was free and there really wasn’t a whole lot to do in Namche. There was a bar in town, however, of which several of the younger members of our group seemed to make extensive use. They referred to it by the charming euphemism of “the office”. But that was exclusively an evening diversion, and as we leisurely finished our lunch and discussed what we might do afterwards, I momentarily got caught up in the excitement of our trek and did something foolish: I ate an orange.

Now to the casual reader of this blog, eating an orange might seem like a quite reasonable thing to do. But those of you who have been with me from the beginning know that I have a checkered history with fruit of all kinds, and oranges in particular have shared a large degree of the blame for the existing antipathy between fruit and myself. This is largely due to an incident that occurred back in 1984 when I ate an orange that caused an abscess in my chin, creating a golf ball sized infection that could only be cured by a sadistic Spanish dentist drilling down through my tooth into the flesh to relieve the pressure. Oh yeah… and he didn’t use anaesthesia.

But I was feeling carefree and reckless that early afternoon in Namche and so I tempted fate. Within 5 to 10 seconds of eating the juicy little slice of orange, a lump started to rapidly form on the right side of my neck, just underneath the jaw. Within 30 seconds, the lump had reached the size of a golf ball…again! It was like a goiter! God… Luckily I took advantage of our resident Thyroid Specialist, Dr Mark, to give me an on the spot diagnosis, since I really didn’t want to have a dentist drilling through my jaw at the Everest Base Camp. He took a look.

“That’s, um, your submandibular gland”, he said, in a sort of a way that reminded me of the way Cliff from Cheers might diagnose an ailment. “No worries. Your salivary gland is just blocked. You’ll be ok soon.” I felt my neck. It was a gnarly bump.

The bump did indeed start to slowly recede but at a rate far less rapid than that at which it had originally inflated. I renewed my everlasting vows of antipathy towards fruit. But I had no time to nurse a grudge since were right away off to explore the markets of Namche. Frau Tucek, practical as ever, had her mind set on a quick drying towel. We had seen such a thing at a specialty climbing shop back in Vienna for about 20 Euros earlier in the year. That seemed a bit expensive to us at the time for a towel, but lacking any at all, and considering that my conventional towel was taking days to dry when left in a plastic bag all day, it started to seem like a smart idea. Most of the camping gear shops in Namche stock very similar goods so it’s easy to compare prices. At the end she got one for 500 Rupees, or about 5 Euros.

Meanwhile, my fears of the cold started coming back to me. Not content with all of the gear that I had purchased so far to ward off the cold, I felt compelled to spend even more money because I was sure I was going to freeze to death if I didn’t. We walked past a stall selling knitted booties with flannel inside. Perfect for inside the tent…Sold! Then I started to think about the sleeping bag liner that Frau Tucek had bought for the Peru trip and that it provided an extra 5-10 degrees of warmth. Well, I needed something like that! All I could find, however, was a very large one hanging in the market, almost too large to go inside the sleeping bag, but could easily fit around it on the outside. It was fleece though and branded Patagonia, so it had to be good. The price? 500 Rupees…what a bargain! “Unless it’s used”, someone told me…after I bought it. Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. After all, in a bazaar people buy and sell things.

We continued to stroll through the small market town for a while, making mental notes about gifts and souvenirs we might want to buy on the way back down, but soon we had exhausted the possibilities the town had to offer. We stopped in “ Hermann Helmers German Bakery” thinking that there might be some tasty coffee and cakes in there but the shelves were a bit bare and the business card on offer identified the proprietor of Hermann’s as Gyalbu Sherpa. So we eventually left the town and explored some of the heights above. We came upon a circular outcrop off at the far end of one of the prongs of the horseshoe shaped town. There were two or three young boys there throwing rocks over the cliff down into the deep valley below. They were very insistent in not having their photograph taken, probably because they were afraid that if their mother ever caught them throwing those rocks, they’d be in for some trouble. We later found out that the circular outcrop was a helipad for emergency flights in and out of Namche.

Hope your mom reads my blog

After a wonderful dinner that featured more vegetables and plenty of gnarly yak cheese, some of the younger members of our group went off to “the office” while I turned in for bed. The night before had only been marginally less suffocating in the sleeping bag than the night in Phakding – my sleeping bag was just too warm for these temperatures. The hotel seemed really clean – maybe I could sleep under the sheets. Then I remembered: I had a brand new fleece sleeping bag liner that would do just the trick. As I settled into the comfy liner and lay there with the lights out, a thought struck me. I hadn’t even washed the thing. I had been afraid of sleeping in dirty hotel sheets, but here I was lying in a bag that was probably hanging in the open yak-crap-dust infected public market for the last few months…dang!

Nobody's perfect

Namche: “The unofficial capital of the Khumbu Region”

That evening I barely slept; I must have awoken at least 15 times. The walls were paper thin and there was somebody very close by who had a hacking cough all night long. But that wasn’t the worst: I had planned for cold weather and had a sleeping bag good to -30 degrees. But it was quite warm in Phakding that night and as a result I was sweating like mad. I unzipped the sleeping bag but was afraid to get out of it or even move around all that much because the plastic garbage bag protecting me from the suspected bedbugs was narrow and did not cover the full width of the bed. Even so, the sleeping bag became soaked with sweat, so much so that I was afraid it wouldn’t properly dry out before I had to pack it the next morning.

Given my lack of sleep, waking up was less of a transition than usual. We were greeted with a knock on the door by two of the “kitchen boys” who offered “Excuuuse meee. Tea coffeeeee?” Well this was a nice touch. I had expected something like this while camping but to have room service in a lodge was quite nice. And a half hour later they were back. “Excuuuse meee…Washing water?”
“Sorry?” This was a little too much. We were in a lodge with a fully functional bathroom. Why would we need to have washing water delivered to our room? I declined but Frau Tucek happily accepted a basin of steaming hot water.

Why she took the washing water I couldn’t tell. Frau Tucek had taken a shower the night before and afterwards she realised that one of the luxuries not provided by the lodge was towel service. Not having brought her own towel along with her on this trip, she happily helped herself to my towel, which afterwards was in such a state of dampness as to be practically unusable for several hours. So I had postponed my ablutions until the following morning and now as the kitchen boys left for the second time I was looking forward to a nice hot shower. Unfortunately for me there was no hot water available that morning in the lodge and my lovely dream of a hot shower faded fast. I was reminded of our visit to Peru, where it seemed that Frau Tucek always seemed to get in the shower when the water was hot and I always got stuck with cold water. In fact there was only one place in Peru where we both got stuck with cold water, and that was misnamed town of “Aguas Calientes”.

I looked over at Frau Tucek, still clean from her luxurious shower from the night before, washing her face and arms with the steaming hot bowl of washing water that I had so recently declined. I still had the trail dirt on me from yesterday. “Tonight” I thought, “I’m getting’ in that shower first.”

After a leisurely breakfast we were back on the trail and headed to the town of Namche. Our tour guide had described Namche as the “Unofficial capital of Khumbu”. I don’t know how you get a designation such as that but there must have been something to it because he mentioned enough times for it to stick in my memory. Repeating himself was a common habit however, and we all quickly became used to his oft repeated witticisms. Among some of the more memorable are “You have to give something to get something” (meaning “stop complaining”), or “One step at a time, one day at a time” (meaning “don’t ask me what we’re doing tomorrow”), or “What a view, eh guys?”, or even “Happy to be here guys?”

Phakding was at 2640 meters and we would be going up to 3400 to get to Namche. The first part of the day would be “Nepali flat” but after lunch we were told we would cross a river and then begin the steep ascent to Namche. As we were sitting at a mid morning tea break, Mark and Anne told us that they knew someone who’d done this trek before and had warned that the last stretch up to Namche was one of the hardest parts. It was during this tea break that we were introduced to the concept of “lemon tea”. I had heard of iced tea with lemon in it before, but never lemon tea. I decided to give it a try since it sounded a bit exotic and not particularly sweet. So you can imagine my disappointment when I realised that it was just hot lemonade, probably powdered lemonade, mixed with boiling hot water. It was probably promoted as “tea” because they needed some reason to explain the boiling hot water necessary to kill all the bacteria living in it.

No roads here...everything brought up by people...or yaks

One of the first rules we encountered was related to Nepali hiking etiquette. Now normally I associated etiquette with rules governing relations between people. But here it seemed that it governed your relations with inanimate objects, or just possibly with the divine entities that those objects symbolised. And the most important rule is treat holy objects in, well, a clockwise manner. One of these objects is known as “mani” stones or prayer stones and are flat tablets into which some words, presumably prayers, are carved. These are often collected in public places, sometimes stacked on top of each other, normally in a way that would allow passersby to read the prayers. Sometimes they’re collected into circular groups and sometimes into long walls, but the most important thing is to always keep them on your right hand side. Whenever we approached mani stones, the trail invariably split in two and we were to take the left hand side, so as to keep the stones on our right. This is probably the most respected traffic rule in Nepal. They should be mandatory on all the streets of Kathmandu.

Lovely....just keep them on your right...

We also came in contact with prayer wheels, which, as the name implies, are vertical cylinders that can spin on a central axel. Passersby are invited to spin the wheels, which I guess is a method to gain good fortune. But, as you might guess, you should keep them to your right and only spin them in a clockwise fashion.

Our guide was insistent about enforcing these rules and anytime he mentioned prayer stones we would not forget to mention that we absolutely needed to keep them to the right. This we did initially with enthusiasm, showing that we were culturally sensitive to Nepali customs and not ignorant tourists. But after a while it became a bit tiresome, especially when the right hand side was short and downhill and the left hand side was longer and uphill. Then I started to notice that sometimes I saw locals going around on the right side…hmmm…I guess it really was just like the traffic in Kathmandu after all…only tourist follow the rules?

Some more rules...can you read them?

We had lunch alongside a small river. The kitchen boys spread out a blue tarp which would serve as our dining area. Our guide gave specific instructions “We’re going to spread out a blue tarp. No boots on the blue tarp.” That sounded reasonable enough and so we removed out boots before getting on the blue tarp for lunch. But our guide repeatedly mentioned this phrase every time we ate lunch on the blue tarp over the course of the following two weeks. He seemed congenitally unable to mention the words “blue tarp” without adding the additional information that there could be no boots on his blue tarp. He must have had a very bad “boots on the blue tarp experience” some time in his youth in order for it to leave such a lasting impression.

We walked along the side of the riverbed for while after lunch. The riverbed seemed wide for such a small river but we were told that the river was relatively narrow during this time of year and that this would all be flooded during the monsoon season in the summer. The thought of seeing this river four times its current width was a little frightening. I might not have had as much confidence with the bridges as I was showing heretofore if the river were a monster like that. As I was thinking this, slowly, the sight of a faraway bridge came into sight. It was a footbridge, suspended by what appeared to threads, far, far above the confluence of two rivers. One of these rivers was called Bhote Kosi, which meant Tibet River since it flowed down from Tibet, and the other was called Dudh Kosi, meaning Milk River from the colour of the splashing white water. Did I mention the bridge was far, far above these rivers?

You've got to be kidding...

I had gained a large degree of confidence in my ability to cross high footbridges since I saw how sturdy and well constructed the first ones were. But this bridge was in a league all its own. As we began the ascent up to the bridgehead, I was questioning if I would be able to do it. When we arrived, I took a breath. The wind was blowing quite strongly and I could see the prayer flags tied to it fluttering violently. I grasped my Indiana Jones hat so it wouldn’t fly off my head and made my way across the bridge, looking down at the metal floor and holding on to the cables on both sides. Before I knew it I was across, no sweat. “That’s easy!” I thought, similar to the knight in the Monty Python and the Holy Grail film. Luckily for me there was no old man asking five (no, three!) questions.

"What is your quest?"

The next two or three hours did generate a bit of sweat, however, since the path was indeed a steep one. The pace was still quite moderate though, and it wasn’t an extraordinary effort to get to Namche. If this was going to be one of the worst stretches, maybe this trek wouldn’t be so difficult after all. Keeping the pace was easy and we soon learned the Nepali expression “Bistari, Bistari”, meaning “Pole, Pole” in Swahili (for those few of you who can’t speak Swahili, that means “Slowly, Slowly” in English). And as we were progressing “bistarily” up this incline it started getting cloudy, which was a pity because we were beginning to enter serious mountain territory now and we were being deprived of the views. During one break, our guide told us “Everest is right over there” but there was nothing to see but clouds…dang!

We got into Namche around mid-afternoon and the sky was still completely clouded over. The town itself was a bit strange: It was shaped like a horseshoe, arranged in terraces on the side of a mountain. So this was the largest town in Khumbu. As we walked through the streets, I got the feeling of Aguas Calientes again, only at 3400 meters above sea level. This was a two yak town that existed purely to funnel trekkers to Everest. Actually there were considerably more than two yaks in town but most were only passing through and you needed to be careful in the narrow streets, especially when they came along in groups. This gave rise to a serious of childish expressions on our part such as “Careful or you’ll have a Yaksident” or “Yak Attack!”. But the yaks all seemed to know where they were going and it didn’t appear they were being led by anyone in particular. The same went for horses; they all seemed to be wandering along with no one minding them or even caring. These horses looked determined though, making their way through town slowly but with an air of authority. They knew exactly what they were doing. I had the feeling that one of them shook his head and gave me sneer like “bloody tourist”.

Our first view of Namche

We got to the lodge and I must say it was really quite OK, if a bit cold. There was no heating except in the main dining room but there was hot water, a shower, and toilets in the room. It looked clean enough that I might even sleep under the blanket. Thinking about that, maybe my memory is playing tricks with me, because as I remember, I actually did sleep in my sleeping bag on top of the plastic garbage bag that night.

But before that we were downstairs to meet some new members of our group that were already waiting for us in Namche. They were three Brazilians, a father and two daughters. They had been in country for some time already and got an early start up to Namche to get fully acclimatised. By now we were all wondering what they would be like but they were a bit standoffish and seemed to keep to themselves.

For dinner that evening we were served “momos”, a delicious dumpling that was kind of like Gyoza, and which was translated into English as something like “pot stickers”. I had never heard this term before, but I was getting used to this feeling for some time now since all of the other members of our group were Americans and using quite a few vocabulary words that were completely alien to me. There were times Frau Tucek would ask me to translate but I had to admit I had no idea. One word that made it into our conversations with increasing frequency was “Gnarly”. I hadn’t heard that word in at least 20 years, but one of the members of our group was a 19 year old guy from California, and it was clear that this word occupied a rather important place in the young man’s lexicon. I was really unsure how to translate this word for Frau Tucek, so I just began using it in sentences where it might fit so she would get the idea. So gnarly started to be used as an adjective to describe everything …gnarly cliff, gnarly bridge, gnarly yak, etc. We probably went too far when we asked Mark to tell one of his patients back home “That’s one gnarly thyroid you got there”.

Besides the momos, we got to sample the famous yak cheese, which was greasy and not at all as delicious as advertised. Indeed, it was gnarly. Actually, I was informed by my fellow trekkers, who had obviously done much more homework than I did, that there’s no such thing as yak cheese. Yaks are only the male of the species; the females are called naks. I didn’t know if this was a joke or not but it certainly didn’t change the taste of the cheese. But we were also served many other healthy things; things that under normal circumstances I would probably avoid. While trekking, particularly at high altitudes, I make certain concessions, like no cigars and cognac. I also force myself to eat healthy things and that night I consumed plentiful amounts of coli flower. I even ate fruit.

The Most Dangerous Airport in the World

The hotel telephone rang at 4,00 in the morning, disturbing my peaceful slumber and indicating that I had only an hour before we had to be in the lobby with our bags packed and ready to go to catch the 6,00 flight to Lukla. We had already separated out the things that we wouldn’t need for the trek and packed them in a roller bag that we would leave behind at the Yak & Yeti. Characteristically, our tour leader insisted that we turn over any valuables we might want to store in the hotel safe to him and he would gather it all together and only make use of one safe. More efficient that way. Hmmm. We followed his instructions but there were still quite a few valuables that would be stored in the roller bag, such as two boxes of Montecristo No2 that I wasn’t planning on smoking above 4000 meters. I was betting that it might be hard to get a good VSOP cognac on the trail, and a cigar without the cognac, is well, like a day without sunshine.

We were also advised to check out and pay our bills the night before so that we would be able get out to the airport as quickly as possibly. So by the time 5,00 rolled around, we were all gathered in the hotel restaurant finishing some breakfast and waiting to get onto the bus. I was called over by our tour leader to talk to the reception clerk. “He says there’s an outstanding item on your bill you haven’t paid for. He says you haven’t cleared your bar tab.” Well, this was clearly a mistake, but I didn’t want to be responsible for delaying the group and us potentially missing our flights, so I quickly tried to remember where I had packed the receipt from the night before. I had already dropped the roller bag off with the porters and so had to go and retrieve it in order to find the receipt. I rummaged through the roller bag for a few minutes, imagining my fellow travellers sitting on the bus looking at their watches and cursing me. Finally I found the receipt and tried to repack all of the items I had to take out to find it. We had spent quite some time the night before carefully arranging everything in the small bag so that it would just fit. Now I was stuffing everything back in the bag haphazardly and trying to get it closed again. It wasn’t working very well and as I forced everything in, the zipper came off of the track from the pressure of the contents inside. I tried for what seemed like an eternity to get the zipper together again but I just couldn’t do it. It seemed to me that I might have to cut the heavy nylon bag in order to replace the zipper in its proper grooves. Fifteen minutes must have gone by while I struggled with that damn bag in the suffocating heat of the Yak & Yeti baggage store room. Half covered in sweat, I finally gave up and decided to put the bag back on the store room shelf. It looked closed and at a glance no one would see that they could open it with no effort. Still it would be sitting there for a few weeks while I was off trekking and god knows how safe it would be.

As I hurriedly made my way to reception to clear up the misunderstanding with the bar tab, I saw that my group was still sitting in the restaurant even though by now it was 5,30 and the flight was scheduled to leave at 6,00. I sat down with them hoping that somehow my temporary absence wasn’t the cause of the delay. It seemed not to be and soon thereafter our leader came up to say that he had just called the airport and there would be a delay so we should just sit tight for a bit. I very briefly considered going back to wrestle with the bag again but quickly abandoned the thought. I was going to relax now for the next two weeks and worry about what to do with the bag when I got back.

Sometime after 6,00 we got the call and bundled onto the bus bound for the airport. It was not a long ride at that time of the morning and in a half an hour or so we were queuing to get into the airport. But our leader had everything under control and soon came back with boarding passes for Yeti Air Flight Number 1 to Lukla. We needed to show the boarding passes to get into the airport and at several security checks. They x-rayed our luggage, and then did a physical hand search of our carry-on bags. During the search, some time after the x-ray, they discovered that I was carrying batteries in my pockets. For some reason they didn’t like this and insisted that I store them in my carry-on bag instead…as if I wouldn’t have access to my carry-on during the flight?

We finally got to the boarding zone but found that it was already full of hundreds of queuing passengers. Our leader disappeared for quite a long time, but occasionally stopped back to see us and urge us to stay patient. After seeing the throngs of people who were here before us all queuing for flights, I had given up trying to understand what was going on. I just decided to relax and take it easy. After about an hour or two our flight was finally called and our guide was back with a “Let’s go guys!” We funnelled past the attendant collecting the boarding passes and got onto a bus where…we waited for another 30 minutes. This was the return of hurry up and wait with a vengeance.

Finally the bus got underway and we drove out to a small Yeti Airlines plane at the edge of the airport. It couldn’t have held more than 15 to 20 seats The bus opened its doors and we all filed out and boarded the plane where…we waited for another 15 minutes until they told us to get out of the plane and wait on the tarmac for a while. Strangely I didn’t mind at all any more. These types of things would aggravate me to no end on a business trip, but somehow I was just taking it in stride. We had no schedule to meet anyway. It’s good to be on holiday.

Some time later a shipment of all sorts of containers arrived. It looked like provisions for an expedition or something. And shortly thereafter our own bags arrived, a very good sign to see they would be on the same flight as us. Then some men began entering and exiting the airplane and talking hurriedly about god knows what. Finally we all knew when we saw them dismantling and removing some of the seats. We would be sharing the plane with a shipment of cargo. After loading all the gear into passenger cabin of the airplane, they signalled that we also could board. The cargo got priority boarding.

As I said, the plane was small, only two seats across. I took the first seat on the port side, directly behind the pilot. There was no cockpit door and I sat close enough to touch the co-pilot. I guess the fear of terrorism wasn’t great enough for them to think of installing a door on the cockpit. And considering that they stored our checked-in luggage in the main cabin of the aircraft where we had access to it seemed to indicate that they didn’t think these things through very thoroughly anyway.

As we sat there on the plane waiting for takeoff, I could see the co-pilot speaking with the pilot. At first it seemed like he was asking him quite a few questions but since the conversation was in Nepali I could understand none of it at all. Often his questions seemed to be related to the instruments since he would point to them with a quizzical look on his face. In other cases he would indicate an instrument and then make some gestures with his hands like wingtips moving up and down while saying something that had to mean, “If I move the wheel this way, the plane fly sideways like this, right?” Some of the gestures were truly frightening, like banging the palm of his hand along the console a few times as if to indicate “rough landing”. This went on for quite some time until slowly I wasn’t able to tell if he was asking questions or explaining how an airplane worked. Either way it was a frightening prospect because the person he was talking to would be the captain, who in theory should know at least as much as the co-pilot. By the time it got to the point when I didn’t know if I should laugh or be really scared, I took out my camera to film the exchange. But alas, the best parts were already past. And eventually, whoever was in the pilot’s seat (I couldn’t see because I was sitting directly behind him) exited the plane. Maybe he was a student or just another airport employee, but a few minutes later the real pilot boarded and the co-pilot immediately straightened up and began to act considerably more professionally.

...missed the best part but you get the idea

A flight attendant came through the cabin offering candy and wads of cotton. The wads of cotton were to be used as earplugs since the propellers were presumably going to generate a considerable amount of noise. Playing the fool, I took my time like I was considering which was the best one to choose, and then took a piece of cotton and moved it towards my mouth like I was going to eat it. This elicited a look of shock on the poor girl’s face and a motion that seemed to indicate “No!” But I smiled slyly and eased the cotton away from my mouth and she just continued on with here duties. A sense of humour please, my dear.

The engines were started and I saw the co-pilot remove a laminated piece of paper with “Pre Take-Off Checklist” printed at the top and he proceeded to check off each item. I guess this is a good thing, but the seed of doubt had already been planted in my mind. Soon we were off, however, and the flight was short and smooth. In no time we were in the SoluKhumbu region and mountains loomed large on both sides of the aircraft. I strained to see the altimeter in the cockpit but it must have been on the pilot’s side because I couldn’t locate it. As I lifted my eyes up from the instrument panel, I was shocked by what I saw through the cockpit window. The entire window was covered by mountains, dead ahead, not a spot of sky to be seen. I had a very bad feeling in my stomach. Looking out of the side window I could see that the ground was still very far down. I was sure we were flying directly into the side of a mountain, and we were close. Then I could see it: a short runway dead ahead that seemed to end in the side of a mountain. A few seconds later and the ground came up to meet us. Typically an airplane tends to descend to the ground in order to land, but I’m firmly convinced the land rose up to the wheels of the plane. As soon as we hit the runway, the loud roar of the engines increased and the pilots tried to slow us down. I could sense that we were going uphill. The runway was not flat: the airstrip is literally built on the side of a hill – the first time I’d ever experienced that. I looked back through the cockpit window and saw the end of the runway and the side of the mountain rapidly approaching. But the pilot’s braking and the uphill drag combined to slow the plane sufficiently just at the time when the pilot turned sharply to the right, swung around in a tight semi-circle and brought the plane to a halt, cutting off the engines. Whew! No wonder some people call Lukla the most dangerous airport in the world.

Right behind me is a mountain and at the end of the runway is a sheer drop-off

As we exited the aircraft and walked the ten meters to the airport exit, I reflected upon the fact that the airport had had its latest fatal accident only some six months before. 18 people were killed instantly when the ground came up just a bit too fast and the plane crashed short of the runway. It reminded me of the headlines of the five French tourists that were killed while viewing the Nazca lines in Peru two months before I also took that same flight. Or the three climbers that were killed in a rockslide on Kilimanjaro two weeks before I made that climb. At least these coincidences were becoming farther away in time rather than closer.

It was about lunch time now so we set up in the upper room of one of the lodges next to the airport and relaxed for a bit. These lodges or “tea houses” normally have some very cheap rooms and a main room for communal eating and keeping warm, as there’s normally a stove in the center of the room. As we were sitting there waiting for our lunch, we suddenly heard a loud wine the got even louder very quickly. It was another airplane coming in for a landing. From up in the second floor room of the lodge we had a view of the entire runway, which couldn’t have been more than 500 meters long. We all ran to the windows to take photos. Even though we had just gone through it ourselves, it was still thrilling to see it again.

After lunch we started the trek proper. It would be an easy three and a half hour walk to the village of Phakding, where we would spend the night. There would be no gain in elevation, but that did not at all mean that it would be flat. In fact, it was described by our guide as “Nepali flat” meaning that it was constantly up and down, but with no overall net gain or loss in elevation. Actually I don’t think there was any place during the trek that you could say was flat at all, even in the towns…even in the airport.

So we set out from Lukla thinking that the place was pretty small and wretched, but not about to start complaining knowing that what lie ahead could be significantly less cosmopolitan and civilised. Watching where you walked was a constant necessity, and not only to ensure you didn’t stumble. It was also required to avoid the almost continuous trail of yak poop. It was scattered literally every few meters. Frau Tucek showed her wonderful sense of humour by gracefully pointing them out for my attention with a subtle yet refined twist of wrist, rivalling the waitress from The Oriental Breakfast Buffet for gracefulness and functionality.

When I think about it, I’m not completely sure that the yak poop actually came from a yak at all because they were using other beasts of burden as well. As it turns out, or at least as our guide informed us, yaks can’t descend below a certain elevation, or at least not carry heavy loads there. Maybe it was because of the heat. In any event we were introduced to a new beast known as a zopkio (actually I have no idea of the spelling but I don’t think it matters very much since everyone I met seemed to have their own distinct spelling). A zopkio is a cross between a yak and a cow and they were the animals that were carrying our gear. Often times, however, we referred to them all as yaks, I guess to avoid any rude inquiries as to their ancestry.

Neither Cows nor Yaks.. Zopkios!

The walking that afternoon was at a relatively leisurely pace. Besides our fearless leader we had 2 or three other guides even though we hadn’t really been introduced to them. They seemed to break our group into pieces and keep pace with the faster and slower trekkers. The guide assigned to the front of the group was actually quite slow compared to the pace that Frau Tucek and I normally set, but we realised that it was still the first day and that we should respect the pace.

This is a town

So we were really not tired at all when we arrived at the “town” of Phakding. But not before that I had to confront the fact that there would be bridges we would need to cross. I don’t mean this metaphorically, I mean we needed to cross foot bridges that were hanging over chasms and rivers and such. I must admit that I approached the first bridge with a bit of trepidation, but my darkest fears of missing floorboards and fraying ropes were soon allayed as I found that all of the bridges were of quite solid construction. Another whew.

Crossing the bridge to Phakding

I mention Phakding as a town, but this is a relatively loose term in the Khumbu Region. It could actually just refer to two or three lodges grouped together, which was kind of the case in Phakding. But the lodge we stayed in was not a bad one as these things go. There was a shower with hot water, and a flush toilet…all good stuff. We had heard quite a few horror stories about staying in lodges, including ones that the sheets weren’t changed with a sufficient frequency as to be conducive to human hygiene. One guide book recommended sleeping on top of the blankets in your sleeping bag. But not only that, the book also suggested cutting up a large plastic trash bag and laying it on top of the blankets to avoid fleas and bedbugs getting onto your sleeping bag. Hmmm.

The view from our room...at least we had a roof

After Frau Tucek and I cut up a few trash bags and covered our beds, we started thinking about rearranging and repacking our gear. Maybe it was thought of the bedbugs still in my mind but she suggested that we should “take out our fleece tomorrow”. I was convinced, however, that she had said “let’s take out our fleas tomorrow” and was bit alarmed until we sorted out the miscommunication. I thought briefly that maybe I was having problem with my ears and perhaps our tour guide in Bhaktapur was speaking the Queens English. But no, Frau Tucek couldn’t understand that guy either.

But if my ears were still working, my eyes were still suffering. My contact lenses were still prohibiting me for focusing on anything close up. I had a different set I had brought with me that allowed me to see perfectly, but that brand had caused eye infections previously after only a few weeks use. I figured the trek would be over in a few weeks so decided to change the lenses. But when I was taking them out of the package, I tore one. Dang!

Bisket in Bhaktapur

A relatively leisurely wakeup call the next morning was appreciated by all. After an equally leisurely breakfast we were bundled into a minibus by our tour leader and introduced to another gentleman who would be our tour guide for the day. Another subcontractor, I thought, and wondered if he would ask for a tip. Even if he had, I probably wouldn’t have understood because his accent was such that I could only make out two of every three words he spoke. To be fair, I was sitting towards the back of the bus and so somewhat distant from the guide, who was sitting in the front, but even after we got out at the medieval town of Bhaktapur, and stood beside the man, my comprehension hadn’t increased appreciably.

From out of the Past

Bhaktapur is a town not too far from Kathmandu and I believe it was once the capital of a kingdom that ruled a large part of Nepal. Supposedly it was also a holy city and was inhabited mainly by a certain ethnic or religious minority. Something like that; that was as much as I could understand from the guide. The town itself is quite impressive and has the feel of a place that time forgot. The architecture seemed to be of an ancient style and the buildings quite frankly looked very old as well. There was none of the bustle of Kathmandu and the town seemed more relaxed, even though there was motorbike traffic on some of the streets. But then suddenly as we were walking down one small road, a band approached us. Well, not really so much a band as a parade. The guide explained that we were lucky because today was the Bisket Festival (I had to ask to see if he meant “biscuit”), which was an ancient festival that had something to do with a king and a snake. I wondered if it was the equivalent of Baktapuri New Year’s Eve, just to carry on the tradition of having New Year's Eve every day, but was disappointed by the guide to find out it was not.

Bisket Parade

As we walked from square to square I began to lose my orientation. This seemed like a very small town, yet it also seemed to have no end. There is even a Durbar Square in Bhaktapur as well as Kathmandu. I have no idea what Durbar means or why it exists in more than one town; maybe it means “Main Square” or something. So each square that we approached I assumed was the Durbar Square. After four or five impressive squares full of various temples and other incomprehensible edifices, I gave up guessing. But looking at the architecture, I was wondering if the religion here was Hindu, Buddhist, or some combination. I still don’t know. It's an intriguing place.

Not Durbar Square

The Bisket parades became more numerous, and it seemed that practically everybody could take part. It reminded me of a little of the Inti Raymi processions that blocked access to the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco for days on end. But no, this was a smaller affair here in Bhaktapur, but no less interesting. Our trusty guide mentioned something about a “Festival of Lights” which Frau Tucek heard as “Festival of Lice”. Hmmm…or maybe I heard it wrong.

Have Chicken will Ride

As we entered one small plaza that seemed to be a marketplace, we noticed a long pole, maybe 20 meters long, sticking out of the ground at a strange angle and with various ropes attached to it. Our guide explained to us that, during the Bisket Festival, the town divides into teams and engages in a sort of tug of war to pull the pole down to their side. It’s very dangerous and sometimes results in deaths, we were told. When the pole is finally pulled down by one team, the new year officially begins….I knew it was New Year! (OK, I looked this last part up in my guide book).

Durbar Square at last

As we finally entered the true Durbar Square, I was duly impressed. This square was clearly larger than anything we had seen so far, and the number of impressive stupas and temples almost caused an overload of impressions. Off to one side stood the entrance to the former royal palace, which we proceeded to explore. Somewhere inside here there is a very holy Hindu place, which non-Hindus are not permitted to enter. Photography is equally forbidden, which is the only place I saw this in Nepal apart from military installations. As conversion to Hinduism for the occasion was not an option, we continued on to see the king’s bathtub. To call it a bathtub is really an injustice, it’s more like a deep swimming pool and fountain. The fountain in this case was in the shape on an enormous cobra, from whose mouth the water would emerge. I say “would” because the fountain was unfortunately not functioning at the time, and indeed appeared to have not been functioning for quite some time. The whole pool seemed like it had seen better days, kind of like the facilities in the Yak & Yeti.

Royal Bathing Facilities

The Snake Fountain

The day was hot and the place was dusty and we soon grew tired. We stopped to take some photographs in Durbar Square, and at that point I saw that my memory card was full. As I looked for my backup, I saw that it was only 256MB and the not the 1 GB card I had intended to bring. Oops. We were on our second day and I was almost out of memory. We were hustled back to the bus and returned to the hotel for lunch, after which we would receive our official trek briefing.

The briefing was actually quite comprehensive. Our leader spread out a large map of the Khumbu Region and explained where we would be on each day of the trek. The typical unaswerable questions followed like “how hard will that part be?” This made me think of the Kilimanjaro climb several years before, when faced with similar questions, our Tour leader would normally respond with “It’s doable”. Here, however, our leader was indicating that anything a Yak can do, we could probably handle as well, which of course led to the inevitable expression “It’s Yakable”.

After making a few wisecracks, my only serious questions had to do with the existence any places where I might possibly plummet to my death, as my fear of heights sometimes kicks in at these places. No information was given that any such place might exist, which since I was going to the highest mountains on earth, I must say I found a bit dubious. I was beginning to think our leader would be very economical with the information he thought might be useful to us.

Then the subject turned to the question of the weather. Our leader mostly repeated the previous information that we had received from the tour company. Frau Tucek and I felt comfortable, since we had read that sometimes the temperatures went down below 0 and we had brought enough gear to deal with that. But then a dreadful realisation took hold of us. This was an American tour group and they didn’t use the metric system in America. When they were talking about temperatures going down below 0, they meant 0 degrees Fahrenheit. This was the equivalent of something like -20 degrees in Celsius! Hmmm…maybe after the briefing we’d take a short shopping trip to Thamel and see what kind of cold weather gear they had. Finally we were told that tomorrow we would get a 4,30 wake up call in order to catch the 6,00 flight to Lukla, our departure point for the Trek.

We strolled through Thamel again that afternoon. First stop was a camera shop, where, in order to make up for my foolishness of only bringing 512MB of memory cards, I committed an equally foolish act of buying two more cards of 2GB each. After that we were off the Mountain Hardware retail outlet. I’d never heard of Mountain Hardware having retail shops but I figured if they were going to set one up, here would be as good a place as any. Thamel was teeming with fake brand names, almost all of them associated with trekking or climbing. To be honest I couldn’t tell the difference between the fakes and the authetic articles, but I didn’t want to find out when I was halfway up the mountain in the freezing cold. So I decided to buy some outrageously huge mittens at the Mountain Hardware shop, just to be sure they were authentic. These were serious expedition strength mittens and I was sure that they would withstand all manners of cold weather. I was initially delighted with the price: only 1100 rupees, which was about 10 or 11 Euros, but then I thought that gloves like this would probably cost over 100 Euros in Vienna and my valuation of all brands sold in Nepal plummeted. Could they really set up an entire store on the main road in Thamel and use someone else’s trademark? I bought the mittens anyway – it was good deal.

The Yak & Yeti

After having spent the previous night at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, almost anything that followed was likely to be a let down. The economy class Thai Air flight to Kathmandu was pleasant however and I recalled that I considered Thai service a bit inconsistent when I used to live to Asia. This was probably due to the fact that I was flying first and business class in Singapore Airlines most of time and compared to that, nothing really comes close. But the current Thai economy class flight was one of the more pleasant flights I’d had in a while, presumably because I was comparing it to the generally inferior European service.

As we disembarked from the plane in Kathmandu, I was brought back to reality. I had assumed that Kathmandu was a big city and would have a modern airport, but it was really quite small. There were no extendable passageways leading from the terminal to the plane, only the rolling stairs type. And there were no buses to take us from the plane to the terminal, so we walked the short distance. This was not a problem in itself, just an indication of a lack of scale. And there’s nothing wrong with smallness. In fact I find that small airports function much better than large ones.

As far as I could see, the Kathmandu airport was empty apart from our arriving flight. The feel of the building seemed somehow familiar, like a combination of India and Indonesia. I saw that most people were queuing to get a visa upon arrival, but we had taken care of that formality before leaving and so made our way through passport control in minutes. Collecting our bags and clearing customs was also a breeze. It’s true – small airports work better!

We were warned in advance by our tour operator that there would be a chaos of people waiting just outside in the public area offering to carry our bags or give us a ride. We were instructed to ignore these people and look for our local tour representative who would be carrying a sign with the company’s name on it. After a bit of searching, we found some dishevelled looking gentlemen standing outside the terminal holding the company’s sign. They saw the luggage tags on our bags that also displayed the company’s logo and sprang into action, taking our bags and loading them onto trolleys. They proceeded to push the trolleys through the airport parking lot as we tried to keep up with them. As they loaded our gear into the back of a van, we were greeted by another gentleman who placed some silk scarves around our necks and bid up to enter the van. As we were entering, however, the original gentlemen who had met us at the terminal and carried our bags began to demand payment for the service. I deduced that they weren’t really employees of the tour operator at all but that somehow the tour operator had given them the signs and told them go and collect us while he waited in the van. No one seemed to dissuade them from demanding money but none of us felt like paying them (I think no one had changed any cash at the airport but this was a semi-lame excuse as I’m sure these gentlemen would have accepted most major currencies). After we were all on board the van and the doors closed, they persisted in demanding payment, rapping on the windows and the doors. The tour operators waited for a bit and after they presumably came to the conclusion that we would not pay their subcontractors, drove off.

The drive from the airport was not along any new superhighway. We took back roads that seemed to be leading through perpetual slums. The cars zigzagged in every direction and even the concept that traffic should remain to the right seemed more like a guideline than a rule. Anne asked me if this was better or worse than Manila and I had to admit “worse”. It reminded me quite a bit of India, which I guess made sense since it neighboured the country and shared many cultural influences. I hadn’t considered that Nepal might be as crappy as India but here the prospect presented itself in all its glory. Just as I was contemplating that, the van was pulled over at a police checkpoint and a rather lengthy conversation between the police and our driver dragged out for quite a few minutes. I guessed it was a shakedown but in the end no money changed hands, so perhaps this is what took so long. Someone in the group innocently asked “Why’d they pull us over?” “The driver failed to use his indicator when changing lanes back there” I said sarcastically, as if the concept of a lane existed here.

But soon after this minor pause we were back on our way and as we got closer and closer to the city, the cars gained new competition for space and right of way from motorbikes, pedestrians, bicyclists and rickshaws. Horns were blowing constantly. It would take a bit of time to get used to this environment. We turned into a large avenue and saw a long line of people queuing along a high fence and into the distance around the corner of a block. There were gardens on the other side of the fence and a large building in the distance. “Indian Embassy?” I mused to myself, thinking about the conditions in a country where people would queue to get a visa for India (actually this is just a joke – I think they have visa free travel between Nepal and India). But then I saw the entrance gate and some words like “Royal Palace Museum” above the gate. This brought back to mind an article I had read in The Economist the week before about the government opening up the previous royal palace to the public. Several years before, the crown prince had opened up with an automatic weapon and murdered the entire royal family in that building before killing himself (and avoiding the country of the dilemma of what to do about the only heir to the throne also being a regicide and mass murderer). More recently, the Maoist insurgency that had been battling a guerrilla war for years agreed a peaceful resolution to the conflict that included the abolition of the monarchy. The Maoists rehabilitated themselves, taking part in democratic elections, and even won. They now headed a shaky coalition government but there were dark rumours circulating that they were having difficulties getting the army to live up to some of the agreements that ended the insurgency. In any event, according to The Economist article, the government had just recently opened the Palace to visitors and the common citizenry was flocking in droves to see the heretofore forbidden to view trappings of royalty. Unfortunately, it was said that most of the royal decorations were a bit tacky and kitsch, which as I looked at most of the rest of the Nepali culture lining the roads seemed to make at least some sense.

Just as I was thinking this we pulled up in front of a large, colonial style building. This was the Yak & Yeti, one of the most prestigious hotels in Kathmandu. I had first heard of the stately pile back some eight or so years earlier when I was living in Southeast Asia. Our roving salesman in the area used to stay here whenever he came to town and recommended it highly. Our tour operator had booked us into the hotel, similar to the way it worked in Lima when we were booked into that other Grande Dame “The Maury”. In fact, as I looked around the lobby of the Yak & Yeti, it kind of reminded me of the Maury a bit. Both seemed like they once might have been the most prestigious addresses in town but that their popularity might have peaked many years before had definitely seen better days. Of course, I had biases, having spent the prior night in the Oriental in Bangkok, known as “The Legend on the River” and the Yak & Yeti just couldn’t compare. When Frau Tucek and I were debating to fly via Bangkok or Delhi, the Delhi option would have delivered us one day earlier to Kathmandu. I was considering spending this night at the Yak & Yeti as well, but then I checked the Hyatt since I have lots of leftover frequent traveller points with them and the Hyatt are famed throughout Asia for superior service. I saw in their website that they had a Hyatt Regency in Kathmandu. Usually the Regency is Hyatt’s less prestigious brand, having the more luxurious hotels branded as Grand Hyatt or Park Hyatt. But as I saw the photos on the internet, the Hyatt Regency Kathmandu looked very nice, considerably nicer than the somewhat down on its luck Yak & Yeti.

We took a short stroll in the Yak & Yeti gardens before our first trek briefing in the lobby. The gardens were actually a bit nice, a welcome contrast to hustle and bustle of the city streets beyond. Close to the newer wing of the hotel there was a boulder in the garden that had a large footprint pressed into it. There was plaque underneath the footprint saying that this was curiosity was “discovered” when they were building the new wing. An obviously intended comical allusion to the mythological Yeti, this exuded kitsch and I started to imagine what the interior of the Royal Palace might look like.

Relaxing in the gardens of the Yak & Yeti

Off to one side of the gardens there was a largish swimming pool, in fact two swimming pools, although upon closer inspection, one of the pools was half empty and the bottom was covered with sand, and the second was an unhealthy cloudy colour. It immediately reminded Frau Tucek and me of the swimming facilities in Aguas Calientes, and our level of expectations went down another notch from the stratospheric levels achieved at the Oriental. But no matter, we knew that soon we would be staying at lodges or “tea houses” while trekking, where we “would be lucky if there was nail in the wall to hang gear” and after that we’d be camping in tents. I guess it was better to have the luxury let down be gradual and the Yak & Yet was perfect for this purpose.

The "warm waters" of the Yak & Yeti

The trek briefing was more of an administrative collecting of documents that any information being delivered to us. We needed to fill out forms registering ourselves in the US Embassy, something I’ve never really felt comfortable with on an instinctive level. They even insisted that Frau Tucek fill out the form, despite the fact that she’s not a US citizen. No explanations were given by our evasive tour guide, even though the registration seemed to be authorisation of release of information in case of an accident. I felt like mentioning I didn’t even want the US Embassy notified in case of an accident, but I didn’t make a fuss, well, not much, and I signed the forms. As soon as I got back from the trip several weeks later I started receiving unsolicited Emails (otherwise known as spam) from the US Embassy in Kathmandu updating me on various events taking place in Nepal. Thanks guys.

Our tour guide also collected photographs of us for our “trekking permits” which had become mandatory for all national park treks in Nepal just a short while before. He also insisted on collecting our passports and return flight tickets for some reason. This is a classic routine with human traffickers, which puts you at their mercy. Not that I suspected anything so sinister but I felt justified to at least ask why. When I enquired as to the reason, his first response was “You’ll get them back after the trek”.
“Nice to know, but not the answer to my question”.
“You won’t need them on the trek, you might just lose them. We’ll keep them safe.”
I handed over my docs but had to admit to myself there was something about this guy that made me think he wasn’t always giving me the whole story.

After the briefing Frau Tucek and I decided to venture out and explore a bit. I had read in my guidebook that the main touristic place to see in Kathmandu was Durbar Square. I unfolded my city map and squinted, trying to read anything with the out of focus contact lenses I was wearing. With Frau Tucek’s assistance we finally located ourselves on the map along with Durbar Square and a neighbourhood off to the west called Thamel that was reputed to have some good shops and bookstores. We would walk through the ritziest part of town to get to Thamel, check out some shops and then maybe down to Durbar Square.

As we stepped out of the small side street on which the Yak & Yeti is located, the bustle and chaos of the city hit us even stronger than before. This was one of the nicest parts of town, and crossing the street looked to be an extremely dangerous undertaking. Unfortunately this would be required several times in order for us to reach our destination. Maybe I had lived in safe and conservative Vienna for too long, but I had actually assumed that cars might yield to pedestrians in the painted crosswalks. The horns were so loud that they often made Frau Tucek and me physically jump at times. But after a while, some of my old Developing World habits started coming back and I learned how to cross the street with confidence. What was harder to get used to was the incessant habit of spitting. Now I know there’s a lot of pollution in Kathmandu and there might be some reason that one’s respiratory system might produce above-average amounts of mucous in response (actually I don’t even know if it’s your respiratory system that produces mucous – I’ll leave that question to Mark, who is by the way, a licensed medical practitioner), but it seemed to me that this was more a cultural habit. The last time I had encountered any hocking even approaching this level was in Beijing back in 2002. It seemed that Nepalis took most of their cultural influences from India (which is by itself something to watch out for) but of all the cultural influences they might have absorbed from China, why spitting and Maoism? Frau Tucek’s opinion of this phenomenon was slightly less laudatory than mine.

The hutsle and bustle of Thamel


Some streets were paved, others not

Thamel turned out to be a maze of tiny streets crowded with even more bikers, rickshaws, motorbikes and cars. It seemed that no rules but common sense applied here. There were hawkers everywhere and shops selling all matter of trinkets, souvenirs and trekking gear. We wandered along the streets, taking photos of the chaos and just generally orienting ourselves to such a foreign place. The streets seemed to radiate in and out of various intersections that had grown up to become squares, normally complete with some sort of temple or other devotional structure. After a while, the streets and the squares all kind of looked the same but we didn’t mind getting lost for a while since we having such a good time window shopping. We decided not to buy anything immediately but take some mental notes so that after the trek we could come back and pick up some nifty gifts and souvenirs.

For all your trumpet needs...

After a few hours, however, we needed to get back to the hotel since our tour guide had arranged a dinner for us in a nearby typical Nepali restaurant (is it Nepali or Nepalese?… I guess I should have figured that one out by now – I’ll use them interchangeably, I guess). We were advised to bring our head lamps with us since power outages were quite common and not every establishment had back up generators like the Yak & Yeti. Just like India, I thought.

Lost in Thamel....Let's see..if that's the river...


Electricity comes to Thamel....

We arrived at the restaurant but before dinner we were led up to a large room just under the roof where we sat on pillows around a low table. Here we were served drinks and some appetisers. They passed around a local alcoholic specialty that I think they called Rakshi, served in small cups that looked like they were quite literally made out of dirt. I rubbed my nail along the edge and it started to come apart (the dirt cup I mean, not my nail). I drank my Rakshi quickly, thinking that it might dissolve the cup if I let it sit for too long.

There followed a show of dancing girls in that attic; a sort of a cultural show where the girls dressed up in typical dress from each of the regions of Nepal and performed traditional dances from each area. The girls were actually quite beautiful and much more Chinese looking than the vast majority of the people I’d seen in the street, who were much darker and more southern looking. I wondered why that was. I made some notes during the trip that the lights in the restaurant actually went out about this time due to a power failure, but I don’t recall it now. Maybe a bit too many Rakshis.

After the cultural show, we went downstairs for dinner. There was a set menu, although Frau Tucek and another young lady in our group declared themselves as vegetarians when signing up for the tour, so they got a special menu. When I saw the main course, which was something dubiously called “Domesticated Wild Boar”, I passed and seriously considered signing up for the vegetarian plan.

We walked back to the hotel with our headlamps out since the city seemed to have many scattered areas of darkness and the sidewalks and roads sometimes had the surface quality of construction zones. When we arrived at the hotel, I was thinking of a relaxing cigar in the cool gardens of the Yak & Yeti. We soon found, however, that a party was going on. “Happy New Year 2066!” the banners said.
“Excuse me, 2066?”
“Yes, our guide explained. Tonight is Nepali New Year’s Eve and tomorrow it will be 2066 according to our calendar.”
“Well isn’t that a coincidence” I thought. Yesterday I was in Thailand and they were celebrating their New Years Eve called Songkran. Today I come to Nepal and it’s New Years Eve here too. A New Years Eve party every day? I wonder how many days I can keep this up?

Songkran 2009

The flight didn’t leave until around 23,00 so I stopped by the airport to smoke a cigar before the flight. I hadn’t been travelling much recently but in the past I had been quite a frequent patron of the Schwechat Airport located just to the southeast of Vienna. The first unpleasant surprise I had was that the price of a box Montecristo No2 had increased by 10%. The second unpleasant surprise, or rather confrontation with reality since I had theoretically known about it in advance, was that I had lost my “Senator” status on the Austrian Airlines frequent flyer programme “Miles and More”. In order to keep this status, which is equivalent in the Star Alliance to Gold level, you need to fly at least 100,000 miles per year. Certainly when I lived in Asia I was flying more than twice that, and during the first five or so years living in Vienna I was travelling enough to maintain it. But obviously I hadn’t hit my quota in 2008 and I was downgraded to “Frequent Traveller” or Silver status. This barred me from all of the Star Alliance Gold lounges in the world and only permitted access to the Silver lounges (which I think only exist in Germany and Austria anyway). “So goodbye Dr Charles”, I thought, harking back to the grovelling service Senators received whenever flying intercontinental flights even in economy class.

So armed with my newly purchased but expensive cigars, I made my way to the only open bar. Typically I would smoke in the Brahms & Liszt bar in Terminal C, but to add another disappointment, it was closed. I made my way through passport control to Terminal A, where I knew of another restaurant that allowed cigar smoking. Unfortunately for me they had toughened up that rule. Smoking was still allowed, but only in a specially constructed glass booth that looked like an oversized test tube. Now smoking a cigar is supposed to be a pleasant experience and I seriously considered giving the whole thing a miss. But I still had more than an hour before my flight and would need to kill it somehow. So I ordered a cognac and entered the test tube for a cigar. It wasn’t a great experience but not as bad as I expected. When I finally boarded the flight and found my seat next to Frau Tucek, I was exhausted (11,00 being after by habitual bedtime). I sat down and fell immediately asleep, not waking until the next morning.

The flight was headed for Bangkok. There are no direct flights from Vienna to Kathmandu and there are two basic options: to fly via Delhi or via Bangkok. The flight via Delhi was about 300 Euros cheaper. It got in at about 11,00 at night and the connecting flight to Kathmandu left at 6,00 or 7,00 the following morning. This really wasn’t even enough time to leave the airport and stay at a hotel. And even if there were enough time, it would require an additional visa to enter India. It appeared that if we chose the cheap option we would be spending 6 hours on the floor of the Delhi Airport. Anyone who’s ever been to Delhi Airport can attest that this is not an attractive option. Now flying through Bangkok would be more expensive, even excluding the extra 300 Euros that the flight ticket would cost. The flight would get in around 2,00 in the afternoon, and the next flight to Kathmandu wouldn’t leave until 10,30 the following morning. This meant we’d need a hotel, so we had to balance the extra cost against the, well, pleasantness of the trip. I’d been to both Delhi and Bangkok so for me the choice was obvious. The best hotel I’d ever been to was in Bangkok and even if it was expensive, I would love the opportunity to spend some time there again. Frau Tucek, on the other hand had never visited Bangkok or Delhi and it took me some convincing to get her to agree on the higher priced option.

Our flight arrived in the new Suvarnobhumi airport in the early afternoon. I was shocked at the moderness of Suvarnobhumi, as the last time I had been to Bangkok was back in 2002, and that time the old somewhat decrepit and shabby Don Muang airport was still in its heyday. I had remembered reading about the new airport and seeing footage on the television during the episode when protestors had taken over the airport for several days in 2008, not allowing anyone to enter or leave the premises. When I was debating the Delhi vs Bangkok question with Frau Tucek, this episode certainly made its way into our calculation, but then suddenly the enormous tragedy of the Mumbai attacks in India weighed in on the other side and at least balanced out the risk of a delayed flight.

As we stood in the short queue for passport control (which also included the taking of a photograph of each person entering), I was amazed at how modern and up to date the facilities were. I remembered, however, that normally in the old airport the real fun began after you collected your bags and entered into the public area of the airport. Even just finding your hotel driver was sometimes an adventure. As we stepped out into spacious, bright and clean arrivals hall, I could see that all non-passengers were standing behind low fences. It was orderly! In Bangkok! I changed some Euros for Baht and saw a man in a smart uniform with the unmistakeable sign for the Oriental Hotel. As I approached him he said “Welcome back to the Oriental, Mr Charles.”

He motioned for someone to collect our bags and bid us to follow him to our waiting car. It was the standard beige BMW 7 series that are emblematic of the Oriental. As they loaded our bags into the trunk, a uniformed driver opened the doors for us and started up the car. After agreeing with us the correct level of air conditioning and volume of music, he offered us cold towels and bottles of mineral water. He also introduced us to the various reading material available to us during our short drive to the hotel. Short drive to the hotel, do you say? I recalled that Bangkok traffic was quite bad, although I had to admit that after they built the BTS elevated train, it got much better. But the driver explained that this sunny Sunday morning would be especially clear of traffic, since the Songkran festival, or Thai New Year, would be starting tomorrow and many people had already gone home to provinces to celebrate.

We passed billboards that were celebrating the fact that this year’s ASEAN summit was being held in Pattaya, in southern Thailand. This was a bit of an embarrassment because the anti-government protests were still going on and they had moved down to Pattaya with the declared intention of disrupting the summit. Maybe that was another reason why the traffic was so scarce in the capital. In any event, faced with the threat of violence, the government felt compelled to cancel the summit. These protestors were different than the earlier “yellow shirt” Airport protestors. The two political factions in Thailand define themselves as being pro-monarchy or pro-Thaksinite, referring to supporters of a populist former prime minister ejected from power a few years earlier. The monarchists wear yellow shirts and the Thaksinists wear red shirts. Each time one party is in power, the other colour shirts take to streets to try to bring the government down. A few months before, the monarchists had placed a western educated, fluent English speaker in the prime minister’s role and since then the red shirts have been protesting for his removal. Sometimes it’s easy to take sides…but stay away from this one.

As we descended from the elevated motorway, I realised that the driver was right; it was going to be a short ride. And then he tentatively asked, “May I have your permission to speak on my cell phone to the alert the hotel of your arrival sir?” “Of course”, I said, without missing a beat. Frau Tucek just looked at me with an expression that seemed to ask “What planet have we just landed on?”

Two minutes later the doors of the car were being opened and we were shown to the lobby of the hotel. As the large glass doors to the lobby were opened, we were given a garland of scented flowers by some young ladies, as a woman greeted us with her hands together as if in prayer and the traditional Thai greeting of “Sawasdee Ka. Welcome back to the Oriental, Mr Charles. This way to your room please.” Frau Tucek looked at me with wide eyes and a look of incomprehension on her face. This was far better than the Dr Charles treatment. Of course I had stayed at the Oriental before so I was aware of the excellent, individualised service at which they excel, but it was a treat to see Frau Tucek experience it for the first time. The woman led us to our room and proceeded with the check in procedure. Then with a “Kap Khun Ka”, she was gone.

"Welcome back to the Oriental, Mr Charles"

The room was great, although they hadn’t upgraded me to a suite as I had fantasised about. Still, it was in the River Wing and had a great view of the Chao Praya flowing to the south. As I looked out at the river, memories came back of the first time I stayed at the Oriental; of waking up and looking out the window to see the barges loaded with orchids and spices coming down the river. It was an image I couldn’t forget. Then I was brought back to reality with a detail of the room that I couldn’t quite understand. The bathroom was huge and marvellous, but the toilet and the shower were set off in another semi room at the end. Beyond the toilet there was a full length window looking out to the bedroom. This meant that if you were in bed, you could look out and clearly see any activity going on in the shower or toilet. “Why would they do that?” I wondered, but then saw that there was a door that could be closed over the window like a shutter. But even the shutter had moveable slats that could open and close, so it was impossible to completely block the visibility. Hmmm.

My old friend the Chao Praya

On the desk were some papers explaining the nature of the Songkran festival that was going on in Thailand at the moment. The official Songkran celebration would be the following day but it seems that people had already started celebrating. Most of the Songkran activities, you see, revolve around splashing people with water. I understood it originated as a ritual where younger people would sprinkle or pour a small amount of water on older people as a sign of respect. It somehow evolved into everyone splashing everyone, so the hotel was offering tips to keep water sensitive valuables dry.

Frau Tucek and I had plans to cram a bit of sightseeing into our short stay in Bangkok. For all of the times I’d been here, I’d only been sightseeing once in Bangkok and that was when my boss from New York flew in and got tired with the business reviews and asked to see the town. On that occasion we had visited the Royal Palace so I figured we might start there. A quick call to Mark and Anne yielded only an answering machine so I left a message and we set off to the concierge to see if they could recommend anything to see. Concierge unfortunately informed us that the Royal Palace would be closing at 3,00 that afternoon but that there was a large temple complex across the street that might be interesting. I had also promised Frau Tucek an authentic tuk-tuk ride but the Corcierge at the Oriental seemed a bit scandalised at the idea. To be honest, it’s not really the most luxurious way to travel, and I had only taken one once before (also on the occasion of my previous boss’s visit) but it’s a missed tick to come to Bangkok on tourism and to have never ridden in a tuk-tuk. But Concierge talked about the inconvenience, the price, etc. and definitely recommended a metered taxi. Maybe they just didn’t want the spectacle of a tuk-tuk driving up to the staid entrance of the Oriental, or maybe they were worried about their guests’ safety (since there have been reports of ugly incidents), but whatever the motivation, they eventually dissuaded us from taking the tuk-tuk, asking instead if they could call us a taxi. We declined and walked out of the entrance of the hotel. Immediately at the end of the drive to the hotel was a line of taxis. In retrospect, if you’re trying to negotiate a bargain in Bangkok, you probably shouldn’t begin by being seen to walk out of the Oriental, but taxi driver only wanted 400 Baht, which was only about 8,50 Euros, so we agreed immediately.

The taxi driver, perhaps sensing easy pickings, insisted on waiting at the temple complex (the name of this place somehow escapes me now) and driving us back later. He said he would wait for an hour or more but I kept politely declining. He kept insisting as if my opinion wasn’t registering with him, so Frau Tucek and I started ignoring him entirely and talking between ourselves about taking a water taxi back. As we got to the temples, he repeated his insistence that he would be waiting for us but as I handed him the 400 Baht, he got the message and even pointed out the direction to the nearest water taxi station.

As we exited the taxi, we could see a small stand on the other side of the street with “Songkran” written on top of it. There were some children hanging about with dishes and buckets of water. One even had a high powered water-gun. They were busy dowsing cars and tuk-tuks passing by on the street. A bus stopped 10 meters or so down the street and we could see the driver warn everyone to move to the far side of the bus. Then he sped up but the kids were still successful of launching a major barrage through the open windows on the near side of the bus. We gave these kids a wide berth and went down a side street to the entrance of the temple complex. The side street had many improvised fountains that seemed to be sponsored by different regions in Thailand. There were more stands with more people armed with more water here. It seems we had stumbled in to Songkran Central. They were very polite about it however, as Thais generally are, and they gave me time to put my camera, wallet and mobile phone in Frau Tucek’s bag before soaking us. They approached very gingerly, tentatively, gently pulling the collar of my shirt back, and then they poured a bowl of water down my shirt. Frau Tucek got a similar treatment. It was a hot day so the water actually felt refreshing and I could see that our gentle attackers were pleased that we smiled afterwards and even thanked them.

Best to travel with your windows up during Songkran

Inside the temple complex, the Songkran festivities continued. There were musicians from various parts of Thailand and stands set up to sell food. I was initially impressed with an exhibition of sand sculptured temples until, upon closer inspection, it was clear that they were really plastic temples with a thin layer of sand pasted on top.

Fake sand temples

The temple complex was, well complex, although after a while it became clear that there was a pattern to the layout of the various buildings. As we passed signs indicating the directions to the “Crocodile Pool” (I looked hard and saw no crocs), the “Contorted Hermit Mount” (no idea what that was) and the various statues of Buddha, it started feeling hot again. At this time we saw a monk who was sitting up on a raised platform splashing all passersby with water. We managed to go back to that spot a few more times. Songkran was actually a bit convenient…like a waterpark

But of course...

There were more statues of Buddhas and Boddhisatvas than I had ever seen. There were even some rooms that looked like they were excess Buddha statue warehouses. The nicest Buddhas were located in what I took to be temples. My belief was based mostly on the fact that we were required to remove our shoes before entering these places. This was no problem for Frau Tucek, since she was wearing some easily removable sandals. But I was wearing my heavy hiking boots and didn’t want to remove them every few minutes. In the end I gave a few of the Buddhas a miss, which turned out to be a mistake since the photos Frau Tucek took were stunning.

For Frau Tucek's eyes only

The city map we had picked up at concierge had a drawing of a Buddha lying down where the temple complex was and I remember that concierge had mentioned something of a “Reclining Buddha” so I took that to be the major attraction of this place. But we had been walking around here for an hour or two and hadn’t seen it. We retraced our steps and finally found an entrance to an area of the temple complex we hadn’t explored yet. Sure enough, there was a sign indicating the direction to the Reclining Buddha. Of course I had to remove my boots again but as we entered, it was clear that we were looking at Buddha’s backside. It was an enormous statue and looked like it was covered in gold, but it was still his backside nonetheless. It wasn’t possible to go around inside the building to see his front side, but we could see another entrance where that would be possible. I wasn’t going to lace up my boots for the short walk so I just put on the boots and held the laces in my hand. Unfortunately the entrance to Buddha’s front side was actually an exit, so we walked around to the other side of the building where the entrance was, only to be greeted by a sign that indicated that the entrance was on the other side. We walked back and forth a few times, each time with me holding my laces before we realised that the building was configured in such a way as to deny us the possibility of seeing the Buddha’s front side. Intriguingly, there was a side door half way along the building, but unfortunately that had a sign on it that said “Thai people only” and I thought I might be detected rather easily had I tried to sneak in. In the end I think that this ban on seeing the front of the Buddha was a temporary thing since there appeared to be some sort of religious ceremony going on inside and they probably didn’t want gawking tourists interrupting the liturgy.

Walk this way to see the Buddha's backside

By now it was becoming late afternoon so we decided to head back to the hotel and try to catch up with Mark & Anne for dinner. We started exploring in the general direction that taxi driver indicated for the water taxi, but each street we tried led to the river, but no docks. After three or four dead ends, we finally found the water taxi station. The system was not complicated to understand and it cost only 30 Baht for the two of us to be dropped off at the dock of the Oriental about 20 minutes later. Ahh, the river.

As we picked up our room key from Reception and walked to the Elevator, a uniformed employee saw us approaching and called the elevator for us. As we stepped inside, he also stepped one foot inside and pushed our floor number, and the stepped back out with a smile. That was his job, elevator boy. “How did he know what floor we were going to” asked Frau Tucek. I shrugged. “Maybe he saw the number on our key” I suggested. Sometimes you stop trying to figure these things out and just enjoy the luxury.

I saw on my telephone that I had a message. It was Mark saying they were sorry they missed us but were having Thai Massage. I called him back and we agreed to meet in the lobby for drinks and dinner. As soon as I hung up the phone, the doorbell rang. It was the floor butler (yes each floor has its own butler, a sort of a mini concierge) with an Easter basket in his hands. “Happy Easter for the lady” he said, and handed me the basket. With all of the talk of Songkran, I had forgotten that today was Easter. Still, at that point I was happier to receive an Easter basket, even on Frau Tucek’s behalf, that receive another soaking of water there in the entrance to my hotel room.

Frau Tucek's Easter Surprise

As we left the room to meet Mark and Anne, we waited for the elevator to arrive (alas elevator boys are only posted in the lobby, not on every floor). A chambermaid or some other low ranking employee happened to be walking down the hallway as we stood in front of the lift. As she approached she bent over and started bowing as she walked past, making sure to never have her back turned toward us, and backing away after she had passed us. As she grovelled by, her whole demeanour exuded an attitude of “Please forgive my miserable presence.” Once again, Frau Tucek was nonplussed.

We met Mark and Anne and went out to the veranda by the river for drinks and dinner. Unfortunately, I had been having problems with my contact lenses for some time, and it seemed that only certain types of contacts didn’t create eye infections for me. Unfortunately, this brand had the draw-back of not permitting me to see close-up properly and there in the darkness I had a difficult time reading the menu. Likewise, when the bill came I strained for several seconds to make out any character at all and then finally just signed it, barely making out my own handwriting. Hopefully I wouldn’t need any close-up vision in the Himalaya.

One of the nicest things about the Oriental is the breakfast buffet, also served by the river. So the next morning, as Frau Tucek and I followed the hostess to our table, we both noticed the graceful gestures the hostess was employing to draw our attention each time there was a step down in our path: just a graceful turn of the wrist with the hand every so slightly away from the body. Just a subtle gesture, but enough to be noticed. I’ll bet no one ever stumbled on her watch. I wasn’t particularly hungry that morning, which was a shame since the buffet really is wonderful. As I finished my coffee and croissant, a waiter approached and asked if I’d like any more coffee. After I declined, he asked ”No coffee? How about cappuccino or latte macchiato?” “Umm..no thanks.”


I caught a view of the local newspapers at breakfast..."Red Shirts Run Amok"..."PM Orders State of Emergency"...."Tanks Ordered to Centres in Bangkok"...hmmm. Maybe better to leave after all.

We met up with Mark and Anne at the airport again and as we sat in the departure lounge, Mark lent me a guide book he had on trekking in the Everest Region. I had bought two overpriced and semi out of date guidebooks on Nepal but nothing as specific and focused as hiking near Everest. That’s part of the hazards of living in a non English speaking country. I find it difficult to judge the quality of a book on Amazon – I need to leaf through it. Unfortunately the selection of books in Vienna on such a topic as trekking in Nepal is limited and expensive. I was jealous of Mark’s book. So I read through it in the departure hall it and realised it provided a lot of really good information that would have been even better if I had read it a few weeks before. There were some useful tips that I could still apply however. For example, when hiking along narrow mountain trails and a group of yaks approach, try to get on the mountain side of the path and not the cliff side. There’s been case of yaks bumping people off of cliffs. “End of trek, end of trekker” was how they described it. Great

Nepal 2009 – Preparations

Sometime in the Spring of 2008, I was exchanging Emails with some friends (who we’ll call Anne and Mark) in Florida. I was planning my trip to Peru at the time and I remembered that they had hiked the Inca Trail (in fact, got engaged on the Inca trail!) a few years before and so I asked them for any travel advice they had. We had first met a few years earlier when we climbed Kilimanjaro together in 2006, and I had attended their wedding in Switzerland later that year. They’re always up for interesting travel ideas; in fact they invited me to accompany them on a bicycling tour of Indochina in December 2007, finishing up with a half marathon through the temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. It was a cool plan and I really wanted to go, but unfortunately I had other plans at the time and so had to decline. In any event, as we discussed the things to see and places to stay in Peru, we also discussed ideas of other possible future adventures we might contemplate together. I had been partial to the idea of sailing to Antarctica for quite some time, but somehow this idea never gained enough critical mass of interest to take off. Anne made a few counter-proposals, the most intriguing of which was to hike to the base camp of Mount Everest, either from Tibet or Nepal.

After the Peru visit came and went, and summer slowly turned to Autumn, we began to get more serious about really going to Everest. We decided to book it as a package through an adventure travel company, similar to the way we booked both the Kilimanjaro and Machu Picchu trips. In the end we chose one of the shorter trips, even though it would still be three weeks long. I asked my long time close friend and tax advisor Frau Tucek to join along (the avid blog reader will remember her for her unmatchable contributions to our adventures in Peru). At first she was a little reluctant to join in the Everest Trek, thinking that she wouldn’t be able to do it. After all, it was 14 consecutive days of hiking for five to eight hours a day, and most of that at relatively high altitude. 8 of those days would be spent in rough mountain lodges where “if you were lucky there would be a nail sticking out of the wall where you could hang your clothes” and the other six days would be camping in tents, I thought about that for a while and wondered if I would be able to do it myself. After all, the toughest trekking I had accomplished to date was Kilimanjaro, and that was only six days. Sure, Kili was higher than the base camp of Everest (5895 meters vs 5300), but there was only one day above 5000 meters on Kilimanjaro and I suffered from altitude sickness. On this Nepal trip there would be several days above 5000 meters. Hiking 14 consecutive days sounded daunting. But I pulled myself together and eventually got Frau Tucek to agree to come.

I must say that the adventure travel company that we chose did its best to weed out people not completely committed to making the effort. This, I realise, is a good thing because if you get onto the mountain and realise that you don’t have what it takes, you ruin both your holiday and the holiday of the people around you. So I had to have an interview with someone in California and tell them about my exercise habits. I even had to get a physician to sign some papers to attest that I was fit enough for the trek. Maybe most of this was just because the company was based in the USA and they were afraid of lawsuits, but it nonetheless had its intended effect and Frau Tucek started taking exercise seriously.

We were already used to running more or less regularly and both had some experience with distance running, so this would aid in the endurance necessary for such a trip. But we began to also take long walks on the weekends in the lovely hills around Vienna as additional practice. There’s not much vertical gain here, but the best preparation you can do for hiking is to hike. And I must admit, most of the day trips we took were fun in and of themselves. We kept a fast pace though and after a typical four or five hour walk covering about 25 km, we would be dead tired. It was hard to imagine keeping up that pace for 14 days in a row. I reflected that on one or two of the days, including the day at base camp, the estimate was for 10 hours of hiking. I shuddered.

And in fact, I shuddered again when we read that the temperatures would be quite extreme. Although Kathmandu, where the Trek would start, had a relatively warm climate, I knew that the temperature rapidly drops as you gain altitude. The company’s website warned us that the lodges would not have heating, except for maybe a communal stove, which the company discouraged them from using just for our benefit (…thanks!). And of course there would be no heating in tents.

So off we went shopping for cold weather gear. We were recommended by the trekking company to have a sleeping bag good to -30 degrees! We bought all kinds of gear, as if spending money would somehow fix the fact that it would be cold. We also started taking especially long hikes in the winter cold, just to get used to it. We even took a weekend trip out to a ski resort called Ramstein or Ramstau or Sauberg or something in Styria just to practice consecutive days hiking. This place was in the shadow of Dachstein, a large mountain of about 3000 meters, although we got more practice walking through one meter high snow than climbing since most of the hairier trails were closed for the winter. But as we got more and more accustomed to walking in the cold, the travel company’s materials didn’t seem so bad after all. It said that the temperature during the day could go below 0 degrees, even though it would get much colder at night. Zero degrees wasn’t that bad. After all, we were doing four hour hikes in the snow at -8. It might just be OK.

Is this really the trail?

Unfortunately for my friends in Florida, their geographical surroundings did not lend themselves to low temperature, high altitude, up and down trekking. They were working out in the gym however, with some gadgets that reproduced the feeling of climbing (it has a name but I can’t recall – “spinning” or something). They became serious about training, which of course only reinforced my doubts about my own abilities. They even cut down on their consumption of alcohol, which I personally considered a sacrifice too far.

So as the departure date approached we went over our checklists and bought more gear. Anne had asked me about which backpack I had used on Kilimanjaro and as I was looking up the technical specifications on the internet I found out that it “was specially designed to fit the shape of a woman’s body”. Frau Tucek gave me no end of grief for carrying around a “girlie pack”. This had nothing to do, of course, with the fact that I subsequently went out and bought another, smaller pack, since the old one really was a bit too big for a simple day pack.

Girlie man with a girlie pack

So I packed up all of my possessions and weighed them. There was a strict 30 lb limit of the duffels we could bring since we would have porters and animals carry the duffels. There was no limit to the daypack, so I packed the heavy stuff in there, even though I would need to carry it. Finally, I pulled the old Indiana Jones hat off of the shelf (the one that almost cost me a finger in Peru) and set off for the mountains.

Real time Update: Another Missed Deadline

Well, back almost one year ago when I started this blog, my original intention was to write a short summary of my life, using personal anecdotes to serve as a sort of a travelogue. Ok, maybe I wasn’t so sure of the purpose at the time but it sounds much better that way. So I thought that in a few months I’d be able to bring you all (all!) up to date and then begin writing about my new travels in real time. I had an upcoming trip to Peru planned in a month or so and figured that if could briefly describe my travels so far, I would be able to pick up with my hike to Machu Picchu. Soon I realised that this deadline was completely unrealistic and so faced a dilemma. Would I interrupt my blog and give a real time update, or would I plough on with my chronological history and append the Peru piece to the end? I had many fresh memories coming back from Peru and wanted to preserve the feeling of the trip when it still in the front of my mind so I decided to interrupt the story of my life and recount the Peruvian adventure. Even this was not easy, since it took me almost a month to write the Peru story. I even needed to interrupt it for an even realer time update during a trip to the USA.

I mention all of this because a few months after the Peruvian / USA updates, I started investigating a new trip, this time a trekking tour in the Everest Region of the Himalaya. The highlight of the trip was to be a stopover at the Everest Base Camp, up at about 5,400 meters. Since this trip was scheduled for April 2009, I was overwhelmingly confident that I would be able to bring the blog up to date before I left. Unfortunately in the last few months the blog output ratio has suffered a bit and I find that I’ll now need to take another parenthesis and provide another real time update. So starting tomorrow I’ll be gone for three weeks and will then begin to scrawl my impressions of walking in Nepal. Sometime after that, I’ll pick up and tell you all about living in Austria.

The silence is deafening.

The Bauernhof

The drive from Koblenz to East Tirol actually took less that I thought it would. I can’t quite recall if we took two cars – I remember it as one, but that would have been six of us in one car and I can’t believe that I wouldn’t have any memory of that. As we drove down through Bavaria and into Austria, memories came flooding back of my rowdy days living in Munich in the early 1990s. And then beyond there was Austria. Apart from a weekend in Vienna, all that I knew of Austria was Salzburg, and all I really knew about Salzburg was Mozart’s Geburtshaus. To be honest I did also attend a enormous house warming party on a farm somewhere near Braunau once, near where Hitler was born, but now we were headed up to the Alps, to a small village called Praegraten, where we had reservations at a Kinder Bauernhof. A Bauernhof literally is a farm and this case it was also a sort of a hotel, actually more of a guest house, located on a former farm. I don’t know, maybe it was a still functioning farm, but I didn’t see any fields around. I found out that these types of guest houses are a popular, cheap component of rural tourism, and I guess far more popular during the skiing season. But this individual Bauernhof had branched out into a speciality – kids. It was designed especially for families with kids, although the only real thing that I noticed that would indicate this fact was a playroom inside and a playground outside. Other than that it looked like a slightly run down bed and breakfast. I didn’t know about Austria but if it was anything like Germany, I could imagine that it was a wise move to book at a Kinder Bauernhof. German attitudes towards children were verging on the intolerant. It’s usually easier to get your dog into a restaurant than a child in Germany (I’m really not joking).

Well, I knew we were in a small town when I tried to get a glass of cognac. It appeared there was no cognac available for hundreds of kilometres. Talk about roughing it. The food as well was not gourmet, lots of potatoes and heavy meats, sausages for breakfast, etc. I hunkered down to make the best of it. Although the Austrians hate to hear it, the place seemed just like Germany to me.

The one really nice aspect of this place was the mountains. Back in those days I really didn’t practice any sports, and even my most challenging physical activity consisted of rushing across Changi Airport to catch a connecting flight. I thought I would be quickly tired out after a few minutes walking but it turned out that I really enjoyed the hiking and had a surprising amount of stamina. The Austrians obviously took this activity seriously since all of the trails were clearly marked and maintained. There were maps available of the various trails leading through the hills. We spent hours hiking, often times taking a taxi to trail head. Apart from the occasional cardiac arrest from looking down sheer drop offs, it was the most fun I’d had in quite a while. But the cliffs came with too much regularity for me to stay comfortable for long. My impression was that Austrians liked to live dangerously. My wife and In-laws told me that they had a reputation of being crazy drivers, which I initially dismissed as the kind of thing that everybody says about his neighbour but no one admits to about himself. But a few times finding myself driving along a narrow road and seeing a local car come approaching at what had to be far over the speed limit, I almost had to jerk the steering wheel to avoid what I thought would be a sure crash. But each time the car passed with what seemed like only inches to spare. What made this all the more harrowing was that there were rarely guardrails on the sides of the road, and nothing but air if you drove off. Once on a narrow mountain road I needed to turn around and was reminded of the time in Greece where I got stuck on the side of a mountain and my wife-to-be had to drive us out. Clearly the US overdoes it on safety, but it certainly seemed to me at the time that Austria underdid it.

Praegraten, from somewhere slightly higher

...And it's all real

Besides the stunning beauty, lack of luxury and constant sheer terror of falling to my death, there was one other thing I wasn’t used to: Cold…in the summer. I had felt cold In August before, but that was in Melbourne where it was technically winter. But this must have been one of the few times I had seen snow in August. I’m not sure how high we were there but I vaguely recall a mountain lodge called Johanneshutte near the Gross Venediger, so whoever wants to can look it up. There was something new about climbing up here in the scenic majesty that gave me energy to keep going, even if my family were all begging me to turn back. But we always did turn back, just in time for the children’s menu at the Bauernhof and bedtime at 8,00. There wasn’t much else to do in Praegraten in the evening.

Bundle up for an August walk in East Tirol

This might just be the Gross Venediger

For the kids though there were a few activities. We went to see the engines at the volunteer fire department (the fire fighters even allowed us to spray the hose). There were also hay rides on “Opa Willi’s” tractor. I think Opa Willi was the retired farmer whose offspring actually ran the hotel, and they found various things to keep him busy. Once we also arranged with for the kids to have pony rides but somehow the message with the Bauernhof management seemed to get garbled. I recall them telling us to go into the barn and Opa Willi would come out and set us up with ponies. When he didn’t show up we went to track him down and he kind of walked over and pointed at the ponies and some equipment and told us to get on with it. Was he suggesting that we city slickers would know how to saddle a horse? I would have needed lessons just on how to mount a horse and there was no way I was qualified to teach my children. My wife told me she had some experience, but didn’t convince me when I lifted my daughter up into the saddle and the whole saddle slid around the side of the horse and sent my daughter tumbling to the ground. Austrian safety standards. Opa Willi must have woken up from his nap because he came out and yelled at us for being so ignorant and fixed the saddle. My daughter was in tears and didn’t want to have anything to do with the horse, which only made Opa Willi even crosser since he went to the trouble of saddling the horse properly.

Smile for Opa Willi kids

We did a few more hikes, most of them with absolutely stunning views. One took almost a full day, with a stop off for lunch at a huette, which is a sort of a restaurant cum guest house in the middle of nowhere. Coming back, my son and I went on ahead and got separated from my wife and daughter (which of course subsequently got me into all sorts of hot water). We lost the trail and eventually ended up in cow pasture. The cows somehow looked aggressive to me, and they’re bigger than you think when you see them up close. We tried going around them but had to climb through a barbed wire fence. My son got through with no problems but of course I became entangled and tore my clothes. The cows were looking at me now, and all except for one seemed to be laughing at me. The serious one was still intimidating me so my son and I hightailed it back to the Bauernhof.

The end of our idyllic week finally arrived and I was driven the train station in Lienz for the trip to Vienna. My knowledge of Austria was still quite limited at this point so I wasn’t sure how much I would like living in this country. It was Europe, though and therefore there would be quality. It had to be better than Manila. But Austria is a small country and not that many people know anything about it. If asked, I’ll bet most Americans couldn’t provide any answer that didn’t include “The Sound of Music”. Certainly back in Asia no one had heard of Austria. In fact, given the difference in the native scripts, any letter mailed from Asia to Austria has a very high probability of being delivered to Australia (no joke!). I’ve heard a rumour that the Australian Postal Authorities have a special department for rerouting letters to Austria. Insiders tip: If you’re sending a transcontinental letter to Austria, include “Europe” in the address.

Is that Julie Andrews?

Austria (the one without the kangaroos)

A few weeks after getting my hopes up of returning to Spain, I got another call saying that the Spanish Finance Director wouldn’t be leaving after all and that therefore the position wouldn’t be open. But the fact that they considered me for the position was a clear message that they were ready for me to move on and that another offer would be coming soon. And sure enough, my old friend and mentor that hired me years ago in Menorca called me up shortly thereafter. He was now the president of a region encompassing Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and all of Africa. Geographically it was an immense chunk of the Earth, although our presence in most of these markets was relatively small and undeveloped. He told me he had two jobs open that I might be interested in. The first one was a CFO role in Moscow, where we had just made a sizeable acquisition. The other was a more specialised finance role in the regional headquarters located in Vienna, Austria. After what I had put my family through during the last two and half years in Manila, there was no way I was going to ask them to move to Moscow, and my wife might just have refused if I had asked her. I had been in touch with my once and future boss for the whole time I was living in Manila and I had shared with him my many frustrations, so he understood the reason why I opted for the Vienna based job. He asked me to come out for an interview, which I knew was just a formality in this case.

During the summer of 2002, like every other summer, my wife had her escape plans from Manila meticulously prepared. She would be spending most of the summer at her parents’ house near Koblenz in Germany. For a week or two, however, she had booked a room at a small rural guesthouse up in the Alps in East Tirol, Austria. Well, what a coincidence. I suddenly came up with a plan to kill several birds with one stone. I asked her to set up an appointment for a full physical exam with a doctor in Germany. I would take two weeks holiday, fly to Germany, get a full physical, drive down to Tyrol with my family, spending a relaxing week in the mountains, and then go on to Vienna by train for my interview. The company would pick up the cost of the flight since the interview part was a business trip. Great!

Visiting my in-laws’ house is always a bit more pleasant in the summertime. German summers can be quite nice, the only problem being that if you blink, you might miss it entirely. But I had my own selfish reasons for preferring to visit in the summer. By now I was pretty much confirmed as a cigar smoker, and my father in law (“Opa”) was leading one of the German regional anti-cancer societies. This made cigar smoking a rather discreet affair, and definitely not in the house.

As requested, my wife set me up with a full day of all sorts of medical tests with a local doctor. My most pressing worry was the lump in my crotch, followed by the fear of Diabetes. The doctor assuaged my first fear immediately. “You’ve got a little hernia there”, he said. “You should probably get it fixed up, but no rush.” Whew, I hadn’t thought of that. The rest of the day was spent on all sorts of tests, including one in which blood was taken, then I was given an incredibly sickly sweet liquid to drink, and then blood was taken again at certain intervals. Presumably this was designed to measure my body’s ability to process sugar. At the end of the day he called my wife and me into his office and said that as far as he could see, everything (apart from the hernia) was perfect. There was one test that still hadn’t come back but he was confident everything was fine.

“Really? No problem with the sugar?” I asked. He confirmed that I was OK and even that I didn’t need to change my lifestyle at all. Cigars! Cognac! No exercise! He said it all in front of my wife, which made it even better than the diagnosis of the Spanish doctor some three or four years earlier who confirmed that cigars didn’t qualify as smoking and classified my daily alcohol intake as “seldom”.

Later that evening, the Doctor called Opa’s house. The last test had come back and indicated that my blood sugar levels were very high and were not decreasing at a normal rate. I wasn’t diabetic but he recommended that I cut out sweets and perhaps start exercising a bit. I briefly considered that my wife might have bribed him after the first meeting but then dismissed this. This doctor was German, after all. But he kept asking “How could you know in advance that it was the sugar?” “I don’t know” I responded. “Can’t you feel these things?”

I wasn’t sure what to do with the news of my sugar levels but at least I knew what it was. Armed with this I could certainly modify my behaviour as soon as I felt that strange feeling coming on. For the time being I put the issue aside and joined my family for the drive down to Austria.

Feeling Sick in Manila, or Spain Round 5?

I often didn’t feel well in Manila, and I’m not referring to my reactions to the corruption and lack of culture. I often didn’t feel physically well. Now normally I would think that there would be an element of psycho-somatic disorder here, but the purely somatic influences were such that the psyche never had a chance to grab the stage. Initially I was sick about twice a month with various digestive illnesses for about 3 or 4 days at a time. Of course we bought bottled water, and even brushed out teeth with bottled water, but merely showering or swimming would expose you to the untreated water that would some way or another make its way to your intestines. I guess I never really had a strong stomach to begin with. I had been sick a few times before, most notably when I vomited in front of our Joint Venture partners in Korea (although this isn’t half as bad as when George Bush pater vomited on the Japanese Prime Minister during a banquet in Tokyo). I was also sick for three weeks with a raging dysentery contracted in Delhi. Hell, I even got sick eating oysters in Paris. But something strange started happening, slowly, over the course of the two and a half years that I lived in Manila. I started to develop a resistance to the little buggers. And not only was I gaining a resistance to the Manila bugs. Since I was travelling so frequently, I must have picked up most of the parasites swimming around the greater part of Southeast Asia. My body was now so polluted, it was stronger than ever. By the summer of 2002 I was getting sick only once out of every three or four months.

There was another ill feeling that started asserting itself around that time however. I noticed a strange feeling after eating (or at least after those meals that weren’t followed by a cigar and cognac) especially when eating lunch at the office or otherwise away from home. It became especially intense if I had a cup of coffee. It was a strange feeling, like a dull pain in my arms and a general feeling of fatigue. It became hard to concentrate and I found my mind wandering off, like I was about to slowly fall asleep even though I wasn't tired. I tried to isolate what was causing it, and found that it wasn’t as bad when I didn’t have coffee. That was indeed strange but then when I had a coffee with no sugar of milk, the feeling didn’t get worse. I immediately suspected the sugar, since I was getting on in years and did no exercise. These, along with a poor diet, are the three main causes of Type 2 Diabetes.

I must say that I never really watched my diet too closely, but it never seemed to matter. I’ve always had perfect blood pressure, even though my father had a history of dangerously high blood pressure. But the one thing that I did have in my favour, and that puzzled me then, was the fact that once I hit adolescence, I lost the appetite for all manner of sweets. In the course of a year or two back in the mid to late 70s, I stopped eating candy, cakes, ice cream, all desserts…even fruit. In fact, the only time I would ever willing take sugar at all was, you guessed it, in coffee.

Well, this was bad news then, because if I was becoming diabetic without eating any sugar, how could I possibly treat it? But I was busy enough back in those days and it was easy to subscribe to the theory of “Just ignore it and it’ll go away.” I certainly didn’t want to see a doctor in Manila unless under extreme emergency circumstances. Given the Filipino’s fondness for sweets he would probably give me a bon bon and tell me everything was fine. I tried to start running a bit, but it was maybe a half a kilometre at a time, just a jog through the village. Sometimes when the feeling was strong I would skip coffee entirely, but that was the extent that I was willing to pay any attention to the problem.

And just when I thought it wasn’t possible to get more stressed out, I noticed a small bump in the crotch of my left leg. Sometimes it hurt and sometimes it didn’t, but it was always there. This started to really alarm me and I realised I would need to get this checked out. I felt like a wreck.

Around this time I also got a call from the VP of Finance for the Asia Region. He started telling me that most likely the position of Finance Director in Spain would open up shortly and asked me if I was interested. I had a lot of unfinished work still in Southeast Asia and I kind of felt that I had moved past a country FD level, but the opportunity to get out of Manila and into a liveable country, both for my sake and my family’s sake, was overwhelming. I played it cool but was really hoping it would work out.

A Great Wall Part 3: A Great Wall

Of course no holiday trip to Beijing is really complete without visiting the Great Wall. I was really enthusiastic about seeing this world famous construction, rumoured to be the only man made structure to be visible from space (I’ve no idea if that’s true since I haven’t got the space tick yet). We booked a package tour though the hotel that turned out to be not so bad. We started out in early morning for a scheduled stop to the Ming Tombs. The Tombs are often combined with a trip to the Wall, I guess to make it a full day trip. I found the Tombs to be a little boring to be honest. There really wasn’t much to see apart from a few buildings with artefacts in them. The artefacts, I guess, were articles buried with the emperors. Or empresses, as the case may be, since most of the objects seemed to be robes, dresses, combs and other female accessories. The whole exhibition seemed like it was scavenged and thrown together. I recall vaguely having read somewhere that the Ming Tombs had been desecrated during the Cultural Revolution, and that would certainly explain it. Or maybe it was just that I was anxious to get on and see the Great Wall.

In either case, I would still need to be patient since our next stop was at a jade factory. Later I heard that just about every tour to the Great Wall follows this same itinerary: Ming Tombs, Jade Factory, Great Wall. The factory tour was actually not as bad as I thought it would be, even though it was clear that they were setting us up to sell us all kids of jade objects after the tour. My wife really enjoyed it, which was the important part, and was happy to learn all of the tricks of how to tell authentic jade from the fakes. Of course, all the jade in the attached gift shop passed all these tests. She bought a nice jade bracelet. “I should have thought of that” I mumbled to myself.

Finally we made our way back to the bus and set off for the wall. I had this image of the wall being in the middle of nowhere, a border in the desolate nether regions. But part of the wall is only about an hour’s drive from Beijing. If the invaders ever got through the wall, they would be in Beijing in no time. But then again, I guess the wall really didn’t work that well because if my history is correct, the Mongols and Manchus ruled China from Beijing for hundreds of years.

We finally reached the wall, or at least caught a faraway glimpse of it from where we parked. I recall it was a warm day and the kids didn’t feel like walking. Too bad, because if there’s one thing you need to do to visit the Great Wall, it’s walking. And it’s not just like a leisurely stroll along the boardwalk – very little of the wall that I saw was horizontal at all. In fact, most of it seemed like the Great Stairs…great, steep stairs. We were all worn out after a short time. We pressed on, however, but the kids were getting crankier and crankier. We set a goal of the highest tower visible. Once we made it up there we agreed to turn back. It was not an easy climb, but then again back in those days I really wasn’t in the best of shape. The view from the top was of, well, a lot more hills, and a wall that snaked over and around those hills, losing itself somewhere in the distance. It was an impressive sight, especially if you consider that it went on for thousands of kilometres. Some years later I heard that there was actually a Great Wall Marathon run each year, not exactly covering the full length of the wall but still an incredible feat. Just to run a normal marathon on a flat surface is unbelievably hard. I can’t imagine having to do it up and down all of those steps. The steps were in fact so steep that my irrational fear of falling off of high places kicked in a few times and I think I actually needed to go down a few steps sliding down on my butt.

The Wall was indeed great, or as Richard Nixon once said “I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall”, although the throngs of tourists took something away from it. I could imagine walking along here on a misty morning, maybe as the sun came up, and being all by myself. Instead I would have to content myself with sharing it with the other ten thousand people that seemed to be there that day.

Soon our holidays were over, however, and it was time to go home to Manila. Home to Manila – the thought was not enticing. We were all getting a bit tired of Philippines and when even China seems like an oasis of civilisation and order, you know you live in a crappy place. Nonetheless, I rolled up my sleeves and got back to work.

Is everybody happy?

A Great Wall Part 2: Communicating in Beijing

On Sunday we boarded our Dragon Air flight to Beijing. We even took the train to the new Chek Lap Kok airport. Hong Kong is one of the few places I would take public transport in Southeast Asia. In most of my travels in Southeast Asia I would even avoid local taxis, instead opting for the safer and more efficient hotel cars. In Hong Kong however, taxis were perfectly acceptable, but public transport was almost just as convenient and much cheaper. It was like being in the real world again.

As my giggling daughter said “Ni hao” for the 20th time to the patient and courteous flight attendant, I was contemplating what Beijing would be like. Living in Asia, one hears a number of stories about China, but sometimes the stories are so contradictory that I think it tells more about storyteller’s background and expectations than anything innately Chinese. I, for my part, imagined something similar to Manila, with less glamour and glitz than typically exists in countries with large inequalities in the distribution of income. The airport itself was a bit chaotic, with the standard lack of queuing typical in developing Asia, but certainly no worse than those countries. As we left the airport, found the hotel car (yes, Grand Hyatt again, folks – I should charge a royalty for plugging them so much in this blog) and sped down the wide, spacious streets, there was a feeling that I couldn’t quite place. This city was clearly part of the developing world, but without many of the attendant ills. I’ve read dozens of reports complaining about the chaos of the traffic, the pollution, the garbage. I saw none of this; it looked clean and orderly to me. Doubtless these maladies were there, but I was so used to Manila, that I must have become numb to such things. At the time the only word that came to me to describe Beijing was … “civilisation”.

After checking into the hotel (no upgrade…dang!) we decided to walk the few blocks down to the famous Tiananmen Square. Another complaint commonly directed at Beijing is that it’s not walker-friendly, but we relished the short walk. This was something we wouldn’t consider doing in Manila. I was armed with my complimentary hotel map and would lead my family safely to the Square.

Tiananmen Square held such an immense place in my imagination that, thinking back on it, it was inevitable that the reality would not live up to the hype. When we got there my overall impression was “Is this it?” OK, it certainly is large, but it’s just a large, open space. I read on my map the titles of the various drab buildings surrounding the square, but the only one that could inspire any imagination was the true “Gate of Heavenly Peace”, the entrance to the Forbidden City. I struggled to read the Chinese Characters written above the portrait of Chairman Mao ... something about the people of China. In retrospect it was amazing how many of the characters I could actually read, since some of them differ significantly from Japanese and I hadn’t lived in Japan in more than seven years.

It was already mid afternoon and I had read in my guidebook that a tour of the Forbidden City would last several hours, potentially a full day, so we decided to leave that for the next morning and just walk around a bit. We got back to the hotel in early evening and saw in the hotel guide that they had a swimming pool. Not having much else to do, we decided to check it out, eventually successfully getting the children to cease jumping on the bed (why do kids always do this?) while simultaneously being hypnotised by Cartoon Network. We had expected the pool to be on the roof of the hotel, as is normally the case, but we were surprised to find that it was in the sub-basement. We stopped to consider if this would make it nicer or worse. I imagined a scene of leaky, rusty pipes. Maybe they put it in the basement because of the famous pollution outside, although as I say, coming in from Manila I found the air to be quite agreeable, certainly no worse than Manila. So we put on our bathing suits and our bathrobes and went down to the basement to check out the pool. As the doors opened and we made our way into the pool room proper, we were stunned. It was dark and so took a few moments for our eyes to adjust, but even then it was hard to believe what we were seeing. The room was large, probably as big as a football field, and I had the feeling of entering a large, dimly lit cavern. The pool was designed as a replica of a tropical sea, with a soft kind of rubber beach slowly leading down to the water. Out in the water there were artificial islands with palms and other tropical plants growing on them. And there were little secluded pockets of water tucked off into remote corners, like smaller private baths, some of which had Jacuzzi-like bubbles and were heated more than the rest of the pool. It was amazing, but the truly amazing thing was that practically the only source of light came from hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny pinpricks of light in the ceiling, mimicking the effect of a cloudless, starry sky. Done any other way, this could have seemed quite hokey or kitsch, but it was done quite well. Looking around, it was difficult to imagine we were in the basement of a building in the centre of Beijing. It was so cool that we came back at least once a day, whenever we had a bit of spare time.

We got an early start the next morning and made our way down to Tiananmen Square again, although for some reason the walk seemed a bit longer than the day before. We queued up at the ticket window and purchased our entrance passes. I’m not completely sure now so many years later, but I seem to recall that taking a guided tour was required: you couldn’t just wander around by yourself. And so our guide stifled a yawn and introduced himself to us, uttering some syllables we took to be his name but that we wouldn’t remember two seconds later. He could almost speak English, and it’s a pity he had no enthusiasm for his work apart from telling my kids not to climb on the stonework. We followed behind him trying to understand his memorised speech, which I wondered if he really understood himself. Something about the Manchus…The empress’s private quarters were here, and then 10 minutes later here, and then yet again in maybe three or four more places. But apart from the confusion generated in trying to understand our tour guide, the complex of buildings that is the Forbidden City instilled a sense of awe in me. Just the size itself is overwhelming. When you go through the outer gate, you enter an immense courtyard, at the end of which is a large structure surrounding another gate. We passed a few of theses barriers, these entrances to cities within cities, until I was totally disoriented as to where we were on the map. After wandering around four hours or so, we were overloaded and the kids were getting cranky. It was a shame because we were in the back of the palace now, where gentle gardens and wells were hidden in quiet courtyards. This must have been a part of the palace where the royal family had its most intimate moments. I would have liked to linger a bit more but the kids were screaming for pizza, and it would still take us quite a while to find our way back to the front gate.

That evening we asked for a recommendation from the hotel for a good restaurant for dinner. They told us about a place that not only served good food but had entertainment as well. We rejected the hotel car as too expensive and decided to take a taxi instead. For some reason I had a feeling of civilisation here in Beijing and I was willing to take “first world” risks like riding in taxis. I knew enough to have concierge write down in Chinese the name and location of the restaurant and off we set. It took a long time to get there; I recall even driving on a highway for awhile. Wherever we were, it wasn’t the centre of Beijing. As the taxi driver stopped the car in what appeared to be in the middle of nowhere, he indicated that we should walk down a path. I reluctantly paid him and he was gone. Luckily at the end of the path there was a house that looked like a restaurant. We entered inside and I gave the card the hotel prepared for me to the first person who came up and spoke to me. He walked away with the card and I noticed that the place was very lively, with people laughing and shouting and otherwise enjoying themselves. I also noticed we were the only westerners there, but luckily we didn’t experience that “Animal House” moment when all activity ceased and all eyes fell upon the White people when they walked into the Black bar. Another person approached us and started asking questions but now I was stripped of my only defense since the first person had walked away with the card from the hotel; the card that hopefully instructed them to feed us and treat us nicely. I started making a series gestures trying to indicate that “sorry that I don’t speak your language but I had given a card with my wishes on it to a colleague of yours and I’m expecting his return any time now.” This, it turns out, is very difficult to gesture and I’m not completely sure that he understood some of the finer points of my message. He walked away shaking his head and muttering something. This happened one or two more times before the first guy came back, or was it a different guy? Well, at least he was holding my card in his hand and he led us to a small table off to the side of the room. Just as they brought the menus, a spotlight hit a stage only four or five meters away. Some performers came out and proceeded to do a song and dance routine. “This must be the entertainment that the Concierge mentioned” I thought, although it looked a bit more like vaudeville than anything else. I concentrated on the menu. It was clear that this place did not have English menus. Luckily, all the basic food groups use the same characters in Japanese and Chinese so I could be sure to order fish, beef, chicken (or at least bird) and pork with no problem. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be sure at all what part of the animal I might be ordering, so I might just be ordering chicken’s feet, bull’s testicles and a pig’s brain, but at least I knew I wasn’t ordering dog…unless of course they weren’t honest with the menu…but no… surely not in China.

Well we watched the show and ate a lot of rice (no way mistaking rice on the menu) and reordering dishes that turned out to be close to what we wanted. The show went on for a long time and did indeed turn out to be some sort of cabaret. We had left the kids back in the hotel with a babysitter so we didn’t feel much pressure to get back early. I had learned the Chinese word for beer and was practicing it often, you know, just to make sure I wouldn’t forget it. It obviously didn’t work too well since I can’t remember it clearly now, but it sounded something like the analogous Russian word “pivo”. The evening turned out to be much better than I had thought and indeed the food turned out to be quite good. As we were finishing up and paying, however, a thought occurred to me. There wouldn’t be a row of taxis lined up in front of this remote house and we hadn’t made any other arrangements for transportation back to our hotel. I did my best charades gestures to convey the message that I needed a taxi. Finally I realised that I could remember the characters used for taxi and wrote them down. There was much nodding and bowing and we were told to wait outside, or at least pushed in that direction. We waiting a long time, but eventually a taxi did show up. Luckily I still had the hotel card, which not only had the address written in Chinese but also a small map of where it was located. Saved!

The next morning as we were reading our ever trusty guidebook, my wife discovered that there was another impressive site nearby called the Temple of Heaven Park. I had never heard of this before, but when we entered the park, I noticed that I had seen the temple many times before in photographs. It’s a circular structure, raised up on a platform with many steps leading up. I have the recollection that it was very old, maybe 500 or more years, but other than that I can’t remember much except that it was so crowded that I couldn’t get a good look inside. Luckily the Park was large and most of the tourists were clustered around this main structure, which gave us a chance to go off and see some of the other temples and building on the site with relative calm.

I somehow remember more crowds

As we sat in the park trying to decide what to do next, my wife spotted on the map a sort of a natural history museum that was not far away, close enough to walk even. As we looked it up in the guide book, we were informed that there were quite a few dinosaur fossils there. Well, that decided it for my son. At this point in time my son was going through the typical dinosaur phase of male youth (having completed the “choo choo train” phase several years before) and was very much interested in anything having to do with the great extinct beasts. Ok then boy, off to the Beijing Dinosaur Museum!

We walked a long way and still couldn’t find the dinosaur museum. It just wasn’t where it was supposed to be on the map. We walked up and down the street several times while my wife kept badgering me “Just ask someone. Why can’t men ask for directions?” So finally I broke down and showed the map (that conveniently had the Chinese characters next to the English name) to a passerby. After a few blank stares and scratched heads, we were finally pointed to a non-descript building that was in the general vicinity of where the dinosaur museum should be. It certainly didn’t look like a museum. We entered, however, and there was something that looked like a ticket booth. Hopefully it would be, I thought, to avoid any undue embarrassment. There were no signs in English. I walked up to the booth and held up four fingers, then sweeping my hand toward my family to indicate “Two adult tickets and two children’s tickets, please.” I don’t know what the clerk said in return but I could see the price clearly on the calculator she held up. Sieh Sieh! This is getting easy!

We entered a door and climbed down some stairs that were storing old cleaning equipment. We entered into a cellar where there was a cheesy fake automated robot dinosaur head popping in and out of a fake cave as a recording of (what was supposed to be) a dinosaur roar played somewhere in the background. Well, well, so this was the Beijing dinosaur museum. As we moved through the subsequent rooms, however, slowly my opinion began to improve. The organisation and display of the various artefacts was dismal but some of the objects were truly incredible: enormous fossilised plants, delicate objects appearing to be fossilised feathers, and all manner of things I could only guess as to what they were. The sheer number of objects that didn’t even have any identification at all, not even a number, led me to believe that they hadn’t even catalogued all of this stuff yet. And when we finally entered the dinosaur room, the sight was breathtaking and terrible at the same time. There were literally dozens of beautiful dinosaur skeletons, including some very large ones, but all jumbled together in relatively small cramped room. It was as if they had all died and become fossilised in the middle of a huge dinosaur orgy. Any museum in the west that had so many fossils and full skeletons would have built a new museum taking up a city block just for the amount of fossils that were in this one small room. There were small dinosaurs tucked between the legs of big dinosaurs, and no rhyme of reason to the display whatsoever. Could it be that they didn’t know what they had here, or did they just not care?

Finally our tour route led us back to the fake mechanical dinosaur at the beginning of the tour and we stumbled out of the nondescript building into the street. We were getting hungry and my wife had read about a world famous restaurant that specialised in Peking Duck that just happened to be nearby. The kids didn’t like the sound of that and vociferously expressed their preference for pizza, or at least spaghetti, but my wife held firm and we ended up searching the streets for the famous Peking Duck restaurant. It was much easier to find than the dinosaur museum, and housed in a much more impressive looking building. “This must be capitalism with Chinese characteristics” I thought. We entered and immediately a waiter came up and started speaking English to us with a thick Chinese accent… just like in a Chinese restaurant anywhere else in the world. He bade us to follow him and as we quickly passed the other tables I could see that the walls were covered with photographs of the various famous people who had eaten here, I only recognised a few of them, George Bush (the father)…Margaret Thatcher….and was that Luciano Pavarotti… as the waiter whizzed us past to our table. There was a portrait of Boris Yeltsin on the wall above our table. He had a contented, yet serious face. “Just keep saying pivo, Boris”, I thought.

And so we naturally ordered the duck, which came with assembly line efficiency. Unfortunately it also tasted like it was prepared on an assembly line. It was greasy and kind of thrown together. I’m not sure if all of visitors got this type of meal, but it impressed me as only slightly more personalised experience than McDonalds. The food at the cabaret place was much better, even though we only had a vague idea of what it actually was.

Early Sunday morning we decided to take a leisurely stroll through Beihai Park, which is just off to the north of the Forbidden City. We weren’t really expecting much, just looking for a leisurely way to kill the morning before we went to visit our Spanish friends who had just recently moved to Beijing. But the visit to the park was actually one of the nicest surprises we encountered. I think the best thing about it was that there seemed to be no tourists present, or at least if there were tourists, they were Chinese visiting from the provinces. Mostly it seemed to be filled with normal Beijingers enjoying their spring Sunday morning. There were groups of people singing, others practicing waltzing (waltzing?) and a few who were practicing elaborate calligraphy on the stone floors with nothing more than a brush and water. The calligraphy was beautiful, yet ephemeral. It would vanish without a trace after a minute or two. Most westerners, I’ll bet, would look upon such an activity as pointless, yet somehow I felt it intriguing for reasons I still can’t understand today.

Beihai Park

Sunday Cruise

In the lake in the park, there’s an island. And there’s a very tall temple on a hill on the island. I can’t remember the name of the temple now, but it was a fantastic climb to the top and the views were stunning. The Forbidden City was just slightly off to the left and for once I was able to take in the enormity of it all. I’m sure we could have spent a few more hours in there and still not seen everything.

Forbidden City from Beihai

Maybe there was a bit of pollution after all

As we were walking around the back side of the island (where’s there a little dock with a boat that will ferry you across the lake), we came upon a restaurant that looked like they were just opening up for lunch. There were a few waitresses mulling around in some sort of traditional dress, so we weren’t sure if we would be walking into a tourist trap or not, but we decided to give it a try. We were the first diners, which did nothing to assuage our anxiety. They didn’t speak any English but I seem to recall that they had the menus in a version of English that we could sort of semi-understand. But lo and behold – the food was excellent, by far the best we’d tried so far on this trip. And after a bit, locals started coming in, quite a few of them in fact. Soon we realised we were the only westerners in the restaurant. It was a great accidental find.

The vanishing calligraphy

That evening we visited our friends from Spain. They lived in an expat ghetto just like we did, although it was a bit different from our village in Manila. Their ghetto was much more organised, but much less luxurious. They showed us their house, almost 200 sq meters they said with unintended but evident pride. My wife and I just looked at each other and didn’t say a thing about our 800 Sq meter palatial prison. It would make complaining about Manila all the more incomprehensible. They had two kids who were slightly younger than ours but they hit it off as kids do and they went off to play. We sat chatting and exchanging war stories about adapting to Asia. They were very new so we did most of the talking. I hope we didn’t scare them too much; we also had experiences living in Japan, which was a world away from Manila and actually not bad. Of course, our friends had their stories as well. Indeed many of the best stories occur in the first few weeks and months as you adapt to the local culture. They, for example, wanted to try out typical Chinese food and so went into a randomly chosen restaurant and ordered hot pot. This is kind of like tossing the dice – you can never really be sure what’s in hot pot and that’s enough reason to assume it’s going to be something disgusting. My friend also had his office stories to share, although nothing on the scale I was experiencing in Manila. He told me that every morning there would be a pile of checks that needed to be signed to pay suppliers and so on. He, as the Finance Director, would review each payment and sign each check. But the next day, the amount of checks seemed to be twice as much as the day before. But he signed them all. The next day, the pile of checks in his in-box was even bigger, and this time he recognised that some of the payments were for the same amounts to the same payee. Uh oh. Was he making duplicate payments? He went to his Treasurer and asked him what was going on, but his Treasurer humbly told him that unfortunately in China checks needed to be signed in black ink only and he had been using a blue pen. They didn’t want to embarrass him with his mistake so they destroyed all of the blue signature checks each day and replaced them the next day in the hope that he might be using a black pen that day. It might have gone on forever if he hadn’t asked.

A Great Wall Part 1: Why I Needed a Holiday in China

I often travelled to Hong Kong for business. We had some regional offices there and often times when the bigwigs from our parent company came to visit, instead of travelling to all the various hellholes in the region, they would insist on meeting in Hong Kong. The guys weren’t stupid, but they were spoiled. Once, many years before, when I was living in Tokyo, we were all busy working on presentations because the CEO of our parent company was flying in to review our budgets (Obviously Tokyo was also considered an acceptable place for the CEO to visit). A few days before the presentation, however, we were informed that his private jet was denied a landing spot at Narita airport, and so instead of taking a commercial flight, he diverted his jet to Australia (his next stop). But instead of cancelling the presentation, he made the Japanese Board of Management fly to Australia (which is just about as far from Tokyo as New York) to present the budget.

In early 2002, as luck would have it, an old friend of mine who I had hired many years before in Spain was just promoted to be Finance Director for our Chinese affiliate and was now living in Beijing with his young family. Our wives had also known each other in Madrid and so I thought it would be a great chance for the two families to catch up. I had an upcoming trip to Hong Kong anyway, so I figured I would take the family along and then we could then take a few days and go further up to Beijing. It would help to get away from the whole Southeast Asia environment and reconnect with friends from Europe. My wife and I were having more and more misunderstandings, some arising from living in Manila and some from me working too much. For example, one time when I was in Bangkok, I got from a friend the name of a jeweller who would give special prices to select clients. Once introduced into the ranks of “privileged customers” I decided to get some earrings and a matching necklace for my wife’s upcoming birthday. But when I got back to Manila and gave the gift to my wife, she acted insulted.

“This isn’t what I told you to get me!”
“… you told me…?”
“They’re rubies. They’re for kids. And look at how small the diamonds are! I told you I wanted diamonds, and gold!”
She handed the box back to me, rejected.

I honestly didn’t remember her telling me anything about what to buy, but I don’t deny it either. She probably did and I had forgotten. Maybe that’s why she got upset, I guess. I just didn’t care enough for her.

Of course at the time I saw it quite differently. I was crushed that she had rejected a gift that I had come up with on my own and that I personally thought was quite nice. I thought she would be very happy to get such an expensive gift, and the fact that she coldly rejected it, left me reeling. She could have quietly accepted them and then never worn them, but she thought I was purposely trying to insult her. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her for days. I felt a wall of miscommunication building between us.

The Offending Items

And so I thought that a change of scenery might help a bit. We had been to Hong Kong together only once, back when we were applying for our Japanese residence permits, but it was the first time for the kids. Instead of staying in the Island Shang, I opted for the Grand Hyatt, down on the water by the convention center in Central. My company was paying for the room but I used points to upgrade to a suite for the comfort of the whole family.

I was in meetings all day long but skipped the traditional dinner to be with the family. The kids had tales to tell me of their visit to Seaworld on the other side of the island. I knew that there was a new Disneyland on one of the islands out towards the new airport, but I had never heard of Seaworld. But it must have been nice because the kids raved about it even more that the night visit to the Singapore zoo earlier that year. Maybe it was just that they had gotten so used to Manila, where the most culturally uplifting events take place in a mall, that any “first world” attraction sparkled in comparison.

On the second day, I was invited out on the company’s junk that was docked in Hong Kong harbour also right in Central. I was always playfully complaining to my colleagues that they never took me out on the company junk, so they finally found a date when it wasn’t being used for entertaining customers and they booked it. Since it was an informal invitation they said that I could bring my family along. Great! So I brought the family onboard the junk and we took off to Lamma Island for dinner at one of the superb seafood restaurants they have along the coast.

Recalling that the kids were usually not on their best behaviour in restaurants that didn’t supply colouring books, I resolved to buy them each a small souvenir to keep them entertained during the meal. For the boy I bought a small jet airplane and for the girl a chairman Mao hat. But no matter, within a few minutes they were both asleep, waking only when we were boarding the junk again at the end of the evening. On the way back my son sat on the bow with one of my colleagues who regaled him with tales of pirates that cruised the waters. This guy was from the tax department and was probably talking about people evading customs duties or pirating fake DVDs, but for my son, who scanned the horizon, there must have been images of Johnny Depp dancing about in his mind. And in fact, the waters really were filled with pirates, real pirates. At the time, until certain Somali miscreants stripped them of the title, the South China Sea was known to have the largest concentration on piracy in the world. Often times, pirated vessels would turn up several days later in a Chinese port with a new coat of paint and a different name. Many suspected the Chinese Navy of complicity.

Tsukiji Chooses Dinner

The next day was Saturday, and we all took a funicular ride up to Victoria Peak. Unfortunately it was cloudy and the views of the Fragrant Harbour and Kowloon beyond were poor. So we walked around a bit and browsed the souvenir shops at the top. We watched the synchronised fountains for what must have been a long time. This was the first time I had seen something like that and it really captivated us. I felt a bit like a hick visiting the big city. I wondered if other Filipinos felt this way. For Lunch we stopped in a TGIFridays-like bar called “Shooters” where the kids loved the Americana décor, especially the model train running along a narrow track above the diners’ heads. But then we were on the move again and we visited a science museum over in Kowloon designed for kids. This is the type of fascinating museum designed to challenge and inspire young curious minds to become future scientists. You find them scattered across many countries, I even recall one from my youth in Philadelphia called “The Franklin Institute”. I compared this with cultural attractions available in Manila and I really noticed that even apart from the everyday hassles of infrastructure, Manila was a dump. I had clearly been living there too long.

El Nido

And so every chance that my wife got she started booking flights anywhere out of Manila. I was often invited to join her but if not, she was happy to go alone with the kids. At least I made good on my promise to take the family to the USA the following Christmas. The kids absolutely loved it there, not only because they were able to visit with all of their relatives and get lots of Christmas presents, but also because this time they could play in the snow, which was quite a novelty at that point. Even I was quite unused to the cold weather by this time and my affinity for cigars had to take a small vacation. And while on the subject of cold weather, I’m reminded of a visit we made one winter to my wife’s parents’ house in Germany. It was cold, and as good Germans, they kept the heating off in the corridors and stairways, and kept all the inside doors closed so as to heat only the rooms that they would spend time in and not the passages they would only briefly pass through. My daughter didn’t like it and was begging with her Grandfather to “turn the air con down”. She was so used to tropical weather that it didn’t occur to her that cold might occur naturally and that you might need to artificially provide heat.

I think we even managed two trips to the USA that year, such were the frequent flyer miles accumulating for me. As soon as school was out for summer, my family had flown the long way around so that they could stop off in Germany and I followed over the Pacific for only two weeks in the USA. By this time my wife had the entire summer vacation planned for her and the kids somewhere outside of Manila. I couldn’t complain because anyway I was working long hours and usually travelling so they wouldn’t see much of me anyway. This might have been around the same time when the famous “dead uncle” maid ran off with my food money. It was certainly the occasion of an incident that still puzzles me. My wife had become now very distrustful of the household staff. When she went away she locked up anything of value in our bedroom and left me with instructions to lock the door when I wasn’t there. When I left for the USA, I was given strict instructions to turn on the air conditioning full blast in the bedroom and lock the door. Even though I wasn’t paying the bills, this seemed incredibly wasteful to me. And so I left it turned off – my wife would never even know. When I returned home two weeks later and unlocked the door, I saw that our large antique standing mirror had a crack through the middle of it. It couldn’t be because of the heat, I thought…could it? I looked around and everything else was completely normal. There were even candles that didn’t show the slightest sign of melting. How hot would it have to be for a mirror to crack but yet for candles not to melt? Naah, impossible. Of course my wife didn’t see it that way and she berated me as if I were one of her servants. I had ignored her explicit instructions and now the mirror was broken. In my opinion she was getting a little too used to giving instructions to people who didn’t think, but she saw it differently and mercilessly hammered me for destroying her beloved mirror. “But look at the candles, dear…”

Despite the mirror incident, or perhaps because of it (maybe it wasn’t safe to leave me home alone), I was permitted to tag along on her next “getaway from Manila” excursion, which was a short flight away to the eastern island of Palawan, in the direction towards Malaysia. Actually, our final destination was a somewhat smaller island just off the west coast of Palawan. There was a resort here called El Nido that was quite well known in Manila as a dream escape. As we flew over the South China Sea to Palawan in the small 20 person turbo-prop, the scenery certainly was stunning. We saw every shade of green and blue as we flew over small jungle covered islands scattered throughout the sea. As we came in for a landing my daughter shrieked with delight “Look! We’re going to land on the grass!” Both my wife and I assumed that the landing strip was narrow and therefore wouldn’t be visible until the last moment, but even at the last moment it still hadn’t appeared. My daughter was right; we were landing on the grass. Ok, I thought… so this will be a remote location.

From there we sat in a small hut that kind of served as a staging point. It seems that the resort was split between two different islands. And so the tourists as well were split into groups depending on their ultimate destination. One resort was called Miniloc and was very basic. Here the huts were made out of thatched palm leaves and the rest of the facilities were equally Spartan. The other resort was called Lagen and was slightly more upscale. Here the huts were made of wood on top of a concrete base, very useful during a typhoon, I reflected. My wife had chosen Miniloc to save money, and she thought it would be nicer to be close to nature….Toto, We’re not in the Grand Hyatt anymore.

I really wasn’t very adventurous or nature-oriented in those days but of course went with the programme. Getting onto the “banka” or outrigger boat with my laptop was already the first problem I was encountering. I was told that this wouldn’t be like Boracay, where you have to “get your feet wet” in order to get to your hotel, but in the end I was misinformed. I had to get my feet wet (or go through the humiliation of a resort employee carrying me from the boat to the beach). I got my feet wet, and my legs and my hips, carrying the laptop above my head. Taking along a laptop to El Nido was not only stupid, it was completely useless. There were no internet facilities at all; even telephone calls had to be routed through a central switchboard. But they only had telephones in Lagen anyway I was informed, so that wouldn’t matter. Mobile phones briefly had coverage about 500 or so meters offshore. If you want to get away from it all, it’s the place to go. Too bad I was in a period of my life when I just couldn’t afford to.

As we made our way up the beach we saw just how basic our accommodations would be. It’s one thing to have the idea of a thatched hut in your mind, but it’s another thing when you step inside and see that the walls and roof really are made of nothing but leaves (ok, they had wooden floors) and only bamboo poles holding the thing up. And the worst thing, as we would come to realise, was that most of the huts were not "stand-alone" structures. Most contained two separate guest rooms, and these rooms were separated also only by leaves. We were in bed early that night, since there’s not much to do in Miniloc once the sun goes down, and we noticed that we could see the light coming through the cracks in the palm fronds from our neighbors’ room. But this still wasn’t the worst part. Our neighbors must have been honeymooners, or at least very much in love with each other judging from the noises coming from the other side of the leaves. The rooms were arranged in such a way that the head of each room’s bed was against the internal “leaf wall” dividing the two rooms. In fact, the “wall” was so flimsy I had the feeling that the only thing that kept it standing up was that the two beds were pressed against it on both sides. It was difficult to sleep with such noises clearly coming from no more that one or two feet from your ears. The children were naturally curious about what it was all about. They lasted a long time.

The next morning I was happily relieved when my wife asked me if I wouldn’t mind paying a bit more and moving to Lagen for the remainder of the stay. “Why, not at all” was my enthusiastic reply. Don’t get me wrong – today I would probably like Miniloc quite a bit more. The problem was me. Travel had become a means to and end and not an end in itself. It was an inconvenience to be managed, not an adventure to be savoured. And therefore I was completely tuned in to luxury travel and business travel. And here in Miniloc I was clearly out of my element.

So early that morning we made arrangements to move to Lagen after lunch. Luckily they had rooms available. Bookings were down since this was the area where Abu Sayyaf (the same ones who threatened to severe my wife’s head from her body) traditionally carried out many tourist kidnappings). Consequently, the Philippine Navy had a patrolling presence in the waters practically every day, but this didn’t reassure. It would have been so simple to slip in during the night and carry away all of the guests that I didn’t even want to think about it. Slightly more assuring was that this was after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and it was said that the USA had the whole area under constant satellite surveillance. It was also rumoured that there were many, many US troops (or advisors, as they were called) operating (or training local troops, as it were) in the area around Mindanao, where the Abu Sayyaf traditionally is based.

In those days I thought that I was in reasonably good physical condition. But the many years of office work, family life and creeping middle age had taken their toll. I was thoroughly out of shape and even starting to grow a bit too much about the midsection. But, as often happens, I didn’t notice this at all since it crept up on me slowly. But this fact rudely made itself clear that morning when my son and I took out a sea kayak. My wife and daughter also came along in another boat. We went out with a guide who more or less towed us through the surf and took us around the bend of the island and into a small lagoon. Once inside the lagoon, he cut us loose and we paddled around leisurely for an hour or so. As we were heading back out to sea for the return trip, the wind was blowing in strong from the sea and it was hard to make progress. So our guide attached his line to my wife and daughter’s kayak and towed them back to the resort. I guess he figured that my son and I would be able to make it back safely alone, because he didn’t come back. My arms, getting no more physical exercise for many years except typing on a keyboard and maybe an occasional golf swing, were already tired from the hour or so of light rowing inside the lagoon. But soon I was straining with everything I had, my arms were killing me, and I wasn’t even moving forward. If I stopped to take a break, we would immediately drift backward and any hard won meters of progress would be instantly erased. And my son would point ahead and say “That way, papa!”

After about 20 minutes of scant progress, an idea presented itself to me. The water was crystal clear and I could see the bottom was not far away. I could just get out and push the boat. Ok, the fact that this took me 20 minutes to figure out demonstrates that, apart from being not strong, you can add a distinct lack of common sense to my list of deficiencies (probably all of those heavy metals unconsciously being absorbed in Manila). So I got out of the boat and found that the water was only waist high. This was great. I pushed the boat about 100 meters almost to the mouth of the lagoon. But as I was progressing closer and closer to the open sea, I noticed that the water was getting deeper and deeper. Soon it was up to my shoulders and I needed a new strategy. So I decided I would get back in the boat and try paddling again. But then I noticed something that should have been obvious: Getting into a kayak when the water is at waist level is considerably easier than when the water is up to your neck. I couldn’t make it back into the boat. As I struggled more and more desperately to pull myself up, I unfortunately capsized the boat and sent my son flying into the water, something that he understandably didn’t appreciate at all.

So now we had two problems. I started running down our options. Now if we just waited here for another three hours or so, someone might come to look for us. I felt really very useless - I couldn’t even paddle my son out of a lagoon. Finally we took the kayak to one of the shores on the side of the lagoon, held the boat stable while each of us got back on board, and with superhuman effort paddled our way out of the lagoon and back to the resort. It was a humbling moment.

The 30 to 40 minute cruise on the banka to Lagen was thankfully much more boring. I’ve always liked boats, particularly when I don’t have to paddle and was happy to see when we arrived in Lagen that there was even a dock. I disembarked with my feet dry and the small bit of my remaining pride intact. I looked around. My expectations weren’t high but this place was more my style. The buildings looked solid and large. I relaxed a bit. We spent the afternoon just looking around and participating in the “fish feeding” activities for the kids at the end of the dock. The kids loved this so we made it a part of our daily ritual.

At dinner that evening, one of the activity organisers came around to our table and asked us if we wanted to sign up for any activities the next day. I was unused to this style of vacation but we figured we would sign up for a boat ride to a beach on another island. For all its splendour, Lagen itself has a pretty poor beach. But the beaches within reach of a short boat ride are really quite impressive. In fact, the natural beauty of the area started to strike me as truly one of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen. Maybe it was just that I was lightening up again since I didn’t have access to Email or mobile phone. Or maybe it was just that there was nothing manmade to be seen to spoil the view, but it was impressive. Then it dawned on me. The Philippines would actually be a paradise if just left alone by man. Unfortunately everything touched by man there has turned to caca.

Let's go to that beach...

After lunch back in Lagen the kids played around in the pool (yes, Lagen had a pool) but after a few hours we were back out on the banka, on our way to go fishing. I was surprised that the kids wanted to do this. At their ages I would have thought that they would think it was icky or something. But my son especially really enjoyed it. They even caught a few small ones, all thrown back folks.

The next few days were just as leisurely. I tried once in the hotel office to connect to their telephone line to download Email but I couldn’t keep the line long enough for the modem to connect so I gave that idea up and went back to beach. I would have hundreds of Emails waiting for me when I returned but I actually put it out of my mind and enjoyed a few days at the beach. And so we went snorkelling one day, which was truly amazing. The colours under the sea become much more alive when you see it first hand. We even saw a sea turtle make his way along and fade off into the darkness. The next day we went off to still another island for a beach / shell collecting expedition. This time we would be out the whole day, so around lunch time, another banka arrived with barbecue equipment, and also many types of fish, lobsters, fruit, even steaks. We sat under a small awning erected for us. It was great. I could tell that I was starting to lighten up a bit and enjoy myself.

Unfortunately there’s no nightlife at El Nido, but no matter. Each night at dinner we would plan out the activities for the following day. Once when we were served our food it struck me that the plates were made out of leaves, very big leaves, and I thought back to that morning when we saw some workers cutting up some banana trees. The leaves looked exactly the same and probably were. Plates made out of leaves. So for a change we planned a jungle tour for the next day to give the kids a rest from the water (although we still did the fishing and fish feeding activities every day). The jungle walk was nice but I soon found out that the beauty of these islands come from the fact that not much of the surface in horizontal. So we walked up and down the steep hills, with our guide telling us about the various flora and fauna, but my children only complaining that they were tired. I carried my daughter on my shoulders for a while to keep her happy, but I soon lost my balance climbing down a hill. Instead of letting her tumble over and fall off I moved my leg in direction of the fall in order to regain my balance. A sharp stick had already occupied that piece of real estate however and didn’t seem to want to cede it to me. The result was a large gash in my leg that at least made the kids stop complaining. The next day we went back to beach and it was just as well. As the resort nurse was tending to my scratch, she told me the story of her first week here when a tourist took the jungle walk and was bit by a poisonous snake. She had to accompany him to nearest medical facility which was an overnight banka ride away. I suddenly remembered the scene in Apocalypse now where Chef went into the jungle to pick mangos and found a tiger instead. I made a mental note to stay out of the jungle.

Hey, Monkey Boy

Bali – An Oasis of Peace

Cebu was a nice break from work and a good chance to reconnect with the family. But an even better trip was coming soon thereafter. I’d been travelling to Indonesia often for work but really only in Jakarta and the surrounding suburbs on Java. I had been to Bandung a few times, which is actually a nicer town than I thought it would be. It’s in the mountains so it’s cooler than Jakarta and it’s a home to a university and therefore has a youthful feeling about it. Driving in on the Puncak Road from Jakarta offers great scenery of the onyx mountains if you can handle the curves and the driving habits of Indonesians. Normally I was a guest in the Hyatt Regency but I’ve also stayed in the very nice Chedi hotel in Bandung, which is built into the side of a cliff. The road leads to Reception which is on one of the intermediate floors. I took the elevator down to my room, where I had stunning views of the partially mist covered valley beyond. After dinner I repaired to the lobby for a cigar, where they actually had a big fire burning in the fireplace – the only time in Southeast Asia I’ve seen or appreciated that.

I’d also been to Medan, on Sumatra once, where I had a series of meetings with some Chinese business partners there. They were really very hospitable, and one of the guys even brought a colleague and me to his house where his mother brought us fresh juice and snacks. I felt a little uncomfortable and kept making excuses that we needed to get to the airport but he kept deflecting the idea by saying that the airport was just across the street and he could get me checked-in in a flash. Finally, when there were only about 20 minutes left to go before the departure of our flight, we got into his car and literally drove across the street to the Medan International Airport. This was better timing than in Menorca, and even shorter than the ride from our Hotel to the Nazca Airport in Peru. We were on board the aircraft with time to spare.

But I must say that one of the nicest places I’ve been to in Southeast Asia has to be Bali. There are many different sides to Bali, which is all the more remarkable for such a small island. At the low end of the market there’s Kuta, which is full of budget Aussies and surfers. This is where the Jemaah Islamiya bombs went off back in 2002 and was a tragedy on many levels. Bali is not only one of the most peaceful places I’ve been but the population is majority Hindu, and not really direct players in the “jihad vs war on terror” clash. But back in those days we avoided Kuta more because of its mass market tourism reputation and instead stayed in Nusa Dua. Nusa Dua, which I think means “two islands” in Bahasa, is a peninsula in the southernmost part of Bali and is actually quite exclusive. There’s a kind of a secluded zone where the expensive hotels are, which at one time I probably would not have enjoyed because you can’t see the “real local culture”. But I was by now getting used to living in an expat bubble and in the words of Arthur Bach, “it doesn’t suck.” Plus, a family we knew from Manila were also staying in the same hotel at the time and the wife was Indonesian, so she set us up with all of the interesting things to see outside of the hotel complex.

Leaving Manila on an international flight can be expensive since there’s a hefty airport tax of around $50. On business I became quite used to paying this, and never really noticed since I always recovered it on my expense report. But travelling with the family as we left for Bali, I noticed the extra $200 expense…ouch. I think they only charge foreigners for this fee and even then only foreigners who are resident in Philippines at the time. It certainly puts another grain of sand on the side of the scale for leaving and not coming back. I guess they did this just as another revenue raising effort, but as with many countries, the customs and immigration authorities sometimes operate as if they’re from another planet. Upon entering the Philippines, for example, you are often requested to show your return trip ticket - like Philippines suffers from some problem of illegal immigration or something. Their biggest export, after all, is Filipinos.

Anyway, we arrived in Bali with no hassles to speak of and headed for the Grand Hyatt, of course, in Nusa Dua. This time, however, I used points to pay for a week in the Regency Club (free flights and hotel stays are one of the big recompenses of the hassles of business travel). The hotel was gorgeous. To start with it’s large; I think something like 40 acres of lush gardens along the sea. The rooms are spread out and partially covered by the gardens and jungle, so that it really doesn’t have the feel of a hotel at all. There are fountains and streams and waterfalls throughout the gardens so that no matter where you are, there’s always the sound of trickling water nearby. This not only provides a peaceful, relaxed feeling, but also actually somehow psychologically “cools you down” on a hot day. And the other sound that was omnipresent was the gentle clunking sound of the typical Balinese wooden wind chimes. We bought some of these chimes to take back and the sound of them still today brings back the peaceful feeling of Bali. I’m really not known as a sensitive guy and never notice these types of things so trust me on this – If I say it’s peaceful and tranquil, it really is.

The Regency Club Lounge

Apart from the beach, which actually wasn’t as nice as I had expected, the Grand Hyatt had a number of swimming pools to bathe in, one of which was very popular with the kids because it had a water slide curving around the side of a small hill of maybe 10 or 20 meters. Swooshing down through the lush vegetation beat the standard wooden structures of the more aesthetically challenged water parks I’d seen heretofore.

Again, papa!

There's a beach too

But after a day or two of this hedonistic luxury, we needed to get out and explore the island a bit. We hired a car and driver (our Indonesian friend providing the haggling service) and took off to Ubud, which is an inland town with many temples and other structures nestled in the heavily forested hills. We visited the famous “Monkey Temple”, which as its name suggests, is overrun with monkeys. The kids loved them but I had read to be wary. The monkeys here were already quite familiar with humans and had no ethical dilemmas about stealing food or even camera equipment. They were known to bite if they didn’t get their way and I briefly considered that maybe the kids liked them so much was because they had that much in common. We spent the whole day exploring the various trails that led through the jungle, thinking that it was so pristine that it must not have changed for hundreds of years. And then suddenly, we came upon an ancient looking stone bridge covered with moss and vines guarded by oversized stone dragons. It seemed like something out of an Indiana Jones film. Or imagine coming upon a stone pool being naturally fed by small waterfalls coming down the rocks, only to overflow and fall down to fill another pool. It was really nice and not at all like anything else manmade that I’d seen in Southeast Asia.

Makes you think twice about pressing on

None shall pass

Shall we just ring the doorbell?

I have no idea what that is

The next day we set off with our car and driver for an elephant ride through the jungle. This was a lot of fun, especially for the kids, but I must say I enjoyed it quite a bit as well. Maybe I wasn’t completely spoiled for travel quite yet. Or maybe I just needed some time to lighten up and forget about my office for a while. In either case, Bali is a great escape. On the way back we stopped off at some sort of private reptile zoo, where the kids had fun messing with a King Cobra through the glass of its cage until he suddenly opened his hood and struck towards the glass. They both jumped back and were considerably more timid after that. It took them some time before they would even touch the giant iguana I picked up for them to pet.

Jungle Taxi

Kick the tyres before you buy one

Papa, It moved!

Back in the hotel, we got the kids room service and arranged a babysitter from the hotel while my wife and I attended the dinner show of the Ramayana Epic. It was a music and dance show with traditional instruments and masks that tells one of the basic stories of Hinduism. I’m really not knowledgeable at all about Hinduism or what the story was meant to convey, but even in my simpleminded ignorance I enjoyed the music and the dance. I had always for some reason associated Hinduism with a slightly less peaceful version of Buddhism, I guess because of some of the more chauvinist elements from the BJP in India, but I really gained a new appreciation of the aesthetic peacefulness of Hinduism on this trip to Bali.

Is it modern?

Christmas in Cebu

When I was home, my wife was very insistent that we get out of the house for a bit, even just dinner out with the kids at the California Pizza Kitchen was enough. Or at least she was insistent that she get out of the house together with me as I was almost constantly out of the house anyway. I was sympathetic with her – it must be torture to spend the whole day with no one to talk to except 4 year old kids or maids who would look at you in confusion if you ever asked them anything that required thinking. Sure she had a few friends, but very few. She threw most of her time into school related activities such as the time she tried to start a movement to lobby for seat belts on the school bus. I was more worried about terrorists taking over the school but as long as she was keeping busy it was good.

Unfortunately, as much as my wife wanted to go out, I just wanted to stay home and lie on the couch. Travelling for work really does spoil you for tourism. But of course we always compromised in the end, meaning that I did what she told me to do. We took a few day trips, most memorably down to Tagaytay, where there’s a stunning view of a island rising up in the middle of a lake formed in a giant crater, like the small cone you see for a split second in the center of rings produced when a drop falls into water. But these types of day trips tended to be a long drive to see one thing and then turn around and drive home. The kids wouldn’t hold still for long on multiple hour drives. We never, for example, made it to the famous Rice Terraces at Banaue. It was something like an eight hour drive from Manila and the few foreigners I knew who had made the journey said that sure it was nice but to drive eight hours to get there, and then just turn around, just wasn’t worth it.


It's just a lake papa

The first Christmas in Manila my wife wanted to fly back to Europe or the USA but I was far too busy at work to get a week or two of holidays. This was back in the early days when my wife would still compromise on these types of things. Later on she would just book the flights and say that if I wanted to come I could, but that she was going anyway. I promised her next year we would fly to USA for Christmas… promised! But that first year we compromised and flew to the Island of Mactan near Cebu where there’s a nice little Shangri La resort. It was run by a Frenchman, a genial fellow who seemed to really enjoy life. He used to work at Club Med until the family owners’ feuds drove many of the better employees away. He definitely left his stamp on the resort, especially the restaurants. He introduced me to the cook of the Italian restaurant who was, unbelievably, Italian. The French have their faults, but they know quality.

As we bundled up the family early that winter morning and headed off to the airport, the day was already hot. We had no misgivings about leaving the servants alone in the house back in those early days. Back then we attributed servant horror stories to cynical expats who had atypical experiences.

My wife had booked business class, even though we were paying for the tickets ourselves. I think that they were anyway outrageously cheap, maybe because it was a domestic flight on Philippine Air Lines (PAL ) and therefore probably subsidised. We checked in and headed for the lounge, which came up a bit short when measured against the Singapore Lounge in Changi, or even the Singapore lounge in Manila. No announcement was made as the time to depart got closer and closer. The lounge attendant said not to worry; she’d make an announcement when the plane was ready. After an hour or so, they made an announcement that the plane would leave in another hour or so. The short flight to Cebu only lasted an hour anyway, so we would be waiting twice as long to board as the flight would take. But then just when the flight was scheduled to leave a new announcement was made indicating that it would be delayed an additional two hours. We left the lounge since the kids by this time were going stir crazy and wandered around the domestic terminal, which at least was considerably cleaner and more modern than the international one. As we tried to kill time I remembered the Filipino saying that PAL really stood for “Plane Always Late” and considered that for me at least, they had a 100% late rating. I mused over some of the other clever witticisms that were bandied about regarding the promptness and safety of Filipino airlines. The invented motto of Asia-Pacific airlines was “Take off in Asia, Land in the Pacific”, or even better, the rumoured motto of Asian Spirit airlines was “Take off as an Asian, Land as a Spirit”.

Some time later, the announcement came out that our PAL flight to Cebu would be boarding. We rushed to the gate and about a half hour later the boarding process started. It was now mid afternoon and we were getting a bit hungry. The food in the terminal was noxious but thank god my wife was ready with a packed lunch for the kids. We were settled in the plane about a half hour later and ready to go when…nothing happened at all. After sitting at the gate for quite some time, we pushed back and sat on the tarmac for some more time. The engines were switched off, along with the air conditioning, which sent the temperature soaring inside the aircraft. The flight attendants graciously offered fruit juices to the passengers in Business Class. The thought of going through this in Economy Class made me appreciate all the more my wife’s astute clinching of a bargain. When I tried to get a beer, however, I saw that “out of stock, sir” look in the attendant’s eye, before she responded that no alcohol was ever served on domestic flights. One more reason to leave the country, I thought.

Finally the plane took off and things proceeded normally (if you can call a flight without alcohol normal). The flight time to Cebu was just over an hour and things were going unexpectedly smoothly. Of course it had taken us more than eight hours to get this short distance. It might have been faster to drive. We were sweaty and tired. The kids were cranky and we still had a one hour ride in the hotel van before we arrived at the hotel itself. But as we sat waiting for our bags to come out, we felt a sense of relief and accomplishment for having actually made it as far as Cebu. Soon we would be in our wonderful hotel and everything would be great. Except that the bags never came out.

You can kind of understand when your luggage gets lost if you have a tight connection, but this was the only time when I’ve had luggage lost on a non-stop flight where I'd checked in 8 hours before takeoff. We sat around for another hour or so filling out forms and describing our bags. We were originally scheduled to check into our hotel at mid-day or so, but it was after 10 in the evening when we finally got there. It had taken us literally the entire day to get to a place only about 500 km away. In retrospect, we were even lucky they didn’t give our room away since we hadn’t booked late arrival. That would have been the perfect ending to the day.

Early the next morning, our luggage arrived and things began to look up. The hotel was beautiful in the daylight, with the lobby a vast area open on all sides allowing gentle breezes to provide natural air conditioning. There were pools for the kids and also a nice, clean beach. If you could forget for a moment that it was Christmas, it would have been ideal. But somehow spending Christmas in the tropics was a bit depressing in a way I couldn’t bring myself to accept. I never liked the cold weather, and constantly complained about it when I was in a cold place. But cold weather and Christmas always went together, and this hot Christmas experience seemed really very alien. And in the Philippines it’s impossible not to notice Christmas. The season starts as early as September, judging from the first Christmas Carols being played in the malls. People compete with each other to have the most garish display of lights outside their houses. Some even hire professionals to string up even more outrageous displays just to outdo the neighbours: another wonderful American tradition co-opted by the Filipinos. The kids were delighted to see Santa waterskiing, but I could only shake my head and mutter like the old man I was rapidly becoming.

The only red nose we spotted was from sunburn

And yet more business travel

For all of the comments I’ve made on working in the Philippines, I was actually not there very often. At least two weeks out of the month I was off travelling to other countries. I needed to keep track of my schedule for US tax purposes (yes, if you’re an American citizen living outside the USA, you need to document where you are every day of the year…or pay higher taxes) so it was easy to calculate the exact amount – I was travelling something like 66% of the time. This was really hard on my family life. In Madrid, I used to read my children a book every night before they went to sleep. But travelling so much kind of killed that tradition in Manila. I recall one night after reading a book to my son and kissing him goodnight, I said “I love you.” He replied playfully “I love you even more.” And I replied “I love you more than anything.” Then he sat up and looked serious. “Do you love me more than your work?” he asked innocently. “Of course I do, waaaay more.” “Then why do you spend so much more time at your work and not so much time with me?” I was floored. It was a horrible moment. I tried to explain to him that I had to work so that he would have a nice house and food and could go to school but I couldn’t even convince myself.

Although I couldn’t avoid business travel, I did try to make it home on weekends, even if it meant more flights and hassles. One of the biggest problems, however, was that my wife was bored silly sitting around the house all day with no one to even talk with. When I got home, usually late on Friday night or sometimes Saturday morning, she would immediately want to go out and do something together. Unfortunately I was so tired that I just wanted to rest. After a week of flights, hotels and restaurants, the last thing I wanted was to travel on the weekend. I was happy just to lie on the couch and play with the kids. Unfortunately that’s what my wife had been doing all week long and she needed a break as well. It was a hard time for both of us.

And when I was travelling, even though I was distracted by the pressures of work, I often was worrying about the family. There were a few occasions of coup rumours in Manila when I was travelling, and this made it hard to be away. And when Erap Estrada was finally overthrown, and no one was sure who was really in charge in the country, I could only watch on TV from my hotel room and call the family on the phone. Once when I was in Jakarta there were riots, mostly anti-Chinese but also some directed against Americans, and all I could think about was how my family back in Manila was coping.

Of course even my wife had to admit that there were some benefits to my travelling. Often times, for no known reason, some rather basic goods would disappear from the shop shelves in Manila and international travel was the only solution. Razor blades? “Out of stock, sir” “Do you know when they’ll be in?” …blank stare. But other things that you might imagine would be readily available were not available at all, ever. For example, spray anti-perspirant. For some reason Filipinos like the hard stick and no spray was available to be found (OK, they had spray deodorant, but it was hot and I really didn’t want to sweat that much, even if it smelled good). But the real problem for my wife was that it was absolutely impossible to purchase tampons in Manila. It therefore became my responsibility to pick up tampons each time I travelled. My favourite spot for buying tampons in Southeast Asia was Mannings, in the Hong Kong airport, where I became known as a regular customer.

I also took advantage of Singapore as a regional hub and did a bit of shopping there. In fact I’ve probably spent more money in Changi Airport than in Manila. Most people in the West have a bit of a snotty attitude towards Singapore because the government tends to be more authoritarian than Western Governments. I used to ignorantly share this attitude until I lived in Southeast Asia. Once there, I realised that Singapore is an oasis of tranquillity and civilisation that is unrivalled for thousands of miles. My hat’s off to them for creating a truly efficient and well functioning society in bad neighbourhood and with the most meagre of resources. It’s like Dubai in this respect.

So I used to transit through Singapore several times a month, usually en route to Jakarta or Melbourne. Once I was in Jakarta talking with our lawyers and tax consultants about a merger we were contemplating. I had to cut the meeting short to catch a flight to Bangkok via Singapore. When I switched on my mobile in Changi, I had a strange message from my FD back in Jakarta. It said something about my country being under attack. The World Trade Center in NY was knocked down by a surprise attack and the Pentagon was on fire. I called him back and asked him if he’d been drinking. The news was so unreal as to be completely unbelievable. I looked around the airport and it looked normal. One or two people were also having animated discussions on mobile phones, but this was nothing unusual. I caught a taxi. The driver had the radio on and there was no indication of any major news event. When I got to the hotel I immediately turned on CNN. It was all true, unbelievably true.

The next morning I caught the first flight to Bangkok. My company hadn’t yet imposed a travel ban and even if they had I wouldn’t have known about it since I hadn’t checked my Email in Singapore. When I got to my hotel, The Grand Hyatt Erawan, there were crowds across the street at a shopping mall. I asked the taxi driver what was up. He said the name of the shopping mall was “The World Trade Center” and many people, when they heard the news of the night before had mistakenly thought the attacks were in Bangkok and came out to have a look.

I stayed at the Grand Hyatt in Erawan quite often. Along with the Grand Hyatt’s in Jakarta and Singapore, many of the staff came to know me. Normally the service was excellent, especially on the club floor where I stayed due to my “Diamond Level” status and I was almost always upgraded to a suite. Only once did I have a problem at the Erawan. When presented with my bill, I saw that it had a charge for the mini bar. “Pringles Chips” the clerk said with a smile. I promised him that I hadn’t consumed Pringles Chips in 20 years and that I wouldn’t pay for it. It was only a dollar or so but it was the principle. After a bit of back and forth, he dropped the charge and printed the bill again. I now noticed that it included a charge for a limousine from the airport, which I normally took but didn’t on that occasion. The clerk insisted and I asked that he show me my signature on the car receipt. They took five minutes looking through documents until they came back and told me that sorry, it was my wife who had taken the car, not me. “I’m sure my wife would be interested in hearing that, since she’s in Manila” I answered. I asked to see the manager, who came out and apologised. He said the confusion was that they had another guest registered with my exact name and had confused the car charge. Hmmm

But on the club floor the GH Erawan couldn’t be beat. Once I was in town during the 2002 World Cup that was joint-hosted by Japan and Korea. The fact that it was held in Asia really made the event super popular not just in Japan and Korea, but in all of the Asian countries that I visited. I normally never went out when I was on business travel, just a meal in the hotel restaurant followed by a cigar and cognac. But this time I decided to go out and watch the football game in a bar. Unfortunately the government was holding elections the next day and the law in Thailand (or Bangkok at least) is that no alcohol can be served in a public place for 24 hours before an election. All bars were closed and all restaurants were completely dry. I had only come across this dilemma once before, in Indonesia, during the first day of Ramadan. It wasn’t a law in Indonesia, however, just that the prior year thugs had gone around vandalising places serving alcohol and beating up patrons, so most places voluntarily banned alcohol. But in Thailand it was a law and I couldn’t even get a small glass of cognac in the hotel lobby to accompany my cigar. I mentioned this to the concierge on the club floor and they said that they would have some cognac sent up to my room. Well, that was one solution but I really didn’t want to smoke a cigar in my room since it would stink up all of my clothes and stuff. So the young concierge lady actually provided me another room for an hour just to smoke a cigar, before going back to my smokeless suite for pleasant dreams. Best Service Award.

Some time later we got a corporate rate of something like $125 at the Oriental on the river and I couldn’t pass it up. I missed the old Hyatt for sure, but staying at the Oriental was a luxury that could not be turned down.

As I briefly mentioned, transiting through Singapore was also required when I flew to our Regional Office in Melbourne. Once I had truly long flight, from the London to Melbourne, transiting through Changi. The flight from Heathrow was more than 14 hours and the onward flight to Melbourne another 7 or so. It was a killer trip but made much more comfortable by the impeccable service of Singapore Airlines. The showers in the First Class Lounge in Changi really helped as well. I really liked that lounge and find myself still missing it today sometimes. They had Hennessey XO and separate room to smoke cigars. The fun started when I finally got to Melbourne. They’re very careful about bringing in outside plants and animals, probably because the Australian ecosystem is very sensitive since, as an island, it developed in isolation from much of the rest of the world. So they go through extra steps to protect against contamination. Most animals can’t enter or need to be quarantined for a time. Just recently I heard a case of a man who was arrested at the Melbourne airport for trying to smuggle in live pigeons hidden in his long underwear.



As I stood in the customs and passport control queue, the thought occurred to me that I might have a few problems. Luckily I didn’t have any pigeons in my pants but I was coming in from the UK. Just at that time there was a massive outbreak of hoof and mouth disease in the UK and the government was burning thousands of animals in an attempt to contain it. Although not fatal for humans, hoof and mouth is a very contagious disease for livestock and people can even carry it even on their shoes or clothing. I thought I was in for a bit of hassle when they asked me where I was coming from. Just as I was about to answer, a flash occurred to me. “Singapore”, I said, which was true. No problems.

But I don’t blame the Aussies for trying to keep the country clean of these things. They have had their share of infestations over the years, the most famous one being rabbits. But the isolation does make travel abroad sometimes problematic since often times common childhood diseases in other countries are rare in Australia and so vaccination isn’t always necessary. This can cause misdiagnoses if an Aussie catches something overseas. This actually occurred to the Aussie wife of my FD in Philippines, who suddenly got sick and was taken to a local hospital in Manila. If it were my wife, I think she would have had to be unconscious to go to a Philippines hospital. She would rather bleed to death on a Cathay Pacific plane en route to a hospital in Hong Kong than be admitted to a Filipino hospital. We both lived in constant fear of having a medical emergency. It’s not so much that Filipinos are naturally poor at providing medical services. It’s more the fact that any of them with talent have left the country to practice abroad. And there’s a silly nationalistic law that says that only Filipino nationals are permitted to practice medicine there. Luckily for us there was a Western Pediatrician working in Manila who has Filipino citizenship since she was born there when her parents were stationed there many years ago as missionaries. She has quite a franchise – every expat I knew took their kids to her.

Anyway, my FD’s wife was rushed to the hospital with fever and god knows what other symptoms. For days the Filipino doctors were perplexed at what the cause could be. My friend was considering sending her back to Oz for “real” treatment but the doctors said that it wasn’t advisable since she was too sick for the journey. They recommended, as an alternative, a full body blood transfusion. That’s to say that they wanted to change every drop of blood in her body as a last ditch effort to remove whatever infection might be in there. I was stunned. I didn’t know that this was possible, and even if it were, whether or not it would work. Luckily they were continuing to run tests while my friend was debating this and they suddenly realised what the problem was: She had measles.

Another Aussie friend of mine named (I swear) Bruce had a harrowing medical experience in Singapore. He also had fever and some problems with an infection on his leg. The doctors were puzzled, thinking at first that it was Dengue and running all kinds of tests. At one point of time they thought he might actually lose his leg. After three or four days he was “cured” through massive amounts of antibiotics and the doctors gave him the diagnosis. He was Diabetic.

Australia’s really not an Asian country, despite the increasing Asian population. Melbourne has the feel of a European city, in many senses. The first time I went to Melbourne on business (staying at the Grand Hyatt, of course) I remembered something that I should have known all along. There are places on earth where it still gets cold. And at the moment Melbourne was very cold. I had only a short sleeved shirt on, and the most I had packed was suit coat. This was how I travelled everywhere, never a thought for a climate that might vary that much in temperature. Indeed, generally in Southeast Asia, cold is synonymous with comfortable.

Two Deaths and an Exorcism

One day my secretary came in to see me and closed the door behind her. I had noticed here that Secretaries were intensely loyal to their bosses, more than in other places I had worked. We had a friendly enough relationship but since she was also my predecessor’s secretary I wasn’t always sure if they were in contact and if so, what things they might be telling each other. So I normally kept her at an arm’s length, especially on things relating to the pending legal case.

I wondered what she wanted to tell me in confidentiality. The last time that a secretary (actually my previous boss’s secretary) had come into my office and closed the door, she confided in me some very personal details of her inability to conceive children and burst out into tears. I’ve always cared deeply about my employees but I didn’t know what to do at that point. Should I give her a hug? I’m really not a physical person like that, even in Spain. And I had a large window in my office in front of which people were constantly passing. I think she just wanted to unload a bit with someone she could trust, but it still took me entirely by surprise. The only other time I saw an employee cry was when I had to fire a guy and it broke my heart. Imagine a 40 year old man breaking down and crying. He took the dismissal badly, I guess because it was the second time he had been fired by the company (why he came back after the first time I’ll never know). Another guy I fired weighed even more heavily on me. He had been promoted above his abilities by my predecessor who, it was said, was his close friend. One thing folks – I’ve you have a friend, don’t promote him above his ability; you're doing him no favour. His lack of competence will become readily noticeable to everyone and unless he can grow into it very quickly, will likely end up being fired. So I inherited a guy who was in over his head and he didn’t realise it. I needed to take some responsibilities away from him as I was getting too many complaints from other departments in the company. He was indignant as he was continuously told beforehand how great he was and that he had special skills we couldn’t afford to lose. Often he would complain loudly in front of the staff that if we didn’t use him to his potential, we might as just fire him. I think he was bluffing but he actually formally requested a severance package. I took it to my boss, who had a chat with him during which he reiterated his request for a package. So we fired him. I heard that six months later, he still couldn’t find a job. His wife threw him out of the house and divorced him. Then we all lost touch with him. This still weighs heavily on me today.

But to get back on track, my secretary came in to tell me that she had cancer. Filipinos are very superstitious and she refused to even speak the name of the disease. She just whispered “I have the C”. It took me a while to get it but I was very discreet. She said that she would prefer to leave her job because she was going to be very sick, and could we arrange a severance package (if you quit you get nothing, but if you’re fired you get a big payoff). I said sure and took to the question to the HR Director, who also agreed. Six months later she was dead.

Not that long after, when I was on holiday in the USA, I received a strange text message. It said that one of my employees in the IT Department had died the night before of asphyxiation in his sleep. The official cause of death was an evil spirit (I forget the Filipino name) that supposedly sits on your chest and suffocates you in your sleep. Black fingers were noted as one of the obvious symptoms. If someone hadn’t actually died I would have been tempted to laugh.

Although I didn’t realise it at the time, the whole organisation was really quite shaken up by both of these tragedies. And the people in my department were downright nervous. Two people had died in my department in a year, and of course, there was constant speculation who would be the third one (because these things always happen in threes). Suddenly everyone remembered seeing ghosts when working late at night. It didn’t help that it was usually the finance department that worked late. So the HR Director went out and hired some professionals help to deal with this problem. No, not psychologists or counsellors – he hired an exorcist from the Catholic Church and a Feng Shui man. Both of these are experts in their own distinct areas but share in common the goal of ridding a place of evil spirits. Now I knew a bit about Feng Shui and the influence of architecture and construction on the spirit world, but I had thought that only a person could be exorcised. I had no idea that entire buildings could be possessed. These two gentlemen arrived and went about spotting ghosts and other assorted spirits and generally scaring all of the staff. Finally they agreed that the vortex to the spirit world was in the Finance Director’s Office (not mine thank God; it was the Philippines Country FD's office). Well, this was just great – at least the Philippines FD at the time was an Australian and not influenced by any of this, but the rest of the department was frantic. Both experts concurred that the spirits were undoubtedly entering from a large cemetery that was located next to our facility. The Feng Shui man recommended some structural changes to part of the building the Finance Department was in as well as covering the side of the building facing the cemetery with mirrors. As I said, I knew nothing of this at the time, and remained ignorant until I got a request to spend the money for these “renovations”. I didn’t want to laugh, because these guys really believed in all this, but there was no way I was going to put my signature to this thing. Eventually, I got them to rewrite the request and scale it down to some minor refurbishment (like painting and so on) of the Finance Department. It must have worked because I never heard any more complaints from the spirit world from then on. But then again, I never checked the wall facing the cemetery.

Working next to the cemetery also had it’s more practical disadvantages. On the 1st of November, the place fills up with so many people wanting to visit their dead relatives that it’s gridlock on the road in front of the office. In so many respects Filipino culture hasn’t really given up it’s ancient pre-Christian customs; it’s rather layered them on top of the Catholic culture that was imposed on them. I heard of some people in the West visiting a cemetery on 1 November, but in Manila they spent days there. It was like a carnival atmosphere almost, with food vendors and other hawkers set up inside the cemetery to provide for the needs of the throngs of mourners.

Typhoons, Brownouts and a few more Work Stories

It’s said that there’s two types of weather in Philippines: hot, and really hot. I didn’t mind the heat that much, but what I didn’t like was the air conditioning that was normally set at far too low a temperature. In the office, some people would have their air conditioners set as low as 14 degrees. Invariably I always had the bad luck to take the seat that had the cold air blowing down my neck. I would often wear my suit coat when I left my office for a meeting and started looking for old sweaters at home. And even in my house, where I didn’t keep it that cool, the air conditioners were running constantly. I have no idea what my electricity bill might have been since this was paid by my employer, but it must have been astronomical. In fact, the air conditioners themselves were purchased by my employer, a fact that I wasn’t aware of until I came across a listing for them in the company’s fixed asset register. This smelled fishy to me, kind of like the art hanging in the home of the previous General Manager. The last thing I needed was to be accused of impropriety just when I was firing people for these kinds of things. I wondered how it could get approved without my knowledge so I got a copy of the original request and saw that it was signed between my house hunting visit to Manila and my starting date. In theory I was clean but I sent all of this off to our Regional Office for them to sort out, at least disclosing what I knew. Later I had to hand a similar case over to the Regional Legal folks when I found out that the lease contract for my house, which was signed with the company, did not provide for payment of VAT, which was required under Filipino law.

But returning to the thought of air conditioners, there were several refrigerator sized units throughout the house. This made it possible to turn some of them off at night, or in rooms we weren’t using, which was much more efficient (and cheaper) than central air conditioning. And thinking about it, another reason why the electricity bill might not have been so expensive was that I rarely received an uninterrupted supply of it. Blackouts (inexplicably called “Brownouts” here) were very common, especially during the rainy season. Yes, there really are two types of weather in Philippines – dry and wet. The dry season lasts roughly the first half of the year and the wet season last the back half. Typhoons are a common occurrence during rainy season and the first one of the year invariably causes more flooding that usual. This is because of all the garbage that has accumulated in the gutters and sewers and makes the water not drain properly. It usually takes the pressure of a few good storms to get things flowing again.

The brownouts were really an inconvenience. The first few times we tried to make it fun by lighting candles and playing games and such, but after a while you realise just how much of modern life is based on electricity. If the power was lost for more than a few hours, we would need to throw out practically all of the contents in the refrigerator, which could add up to $200. After two or three of these experiences we decided to buy a generator.

The generator we bought was the largest one available at the hardware store and it was still only big enough to power the kitchen, my office and the master bedroom. In fact, the generator was above the limit designated by sound restrictions of the village of Alabang. I thought that this was just another Filipino rule to be ignored by the rich and powerful but someone from the village actually stopped by one time and told us to switch it off. The servants managed the whole conversation and 5 minutes after the man was gone, the generator was back on. I can only assume some money changed hands but who knows? I must admit that the generator was loud however. We could clearly hear it in the bedroom on the far side of the house, with the windows closed and the air conditioning on. At times I had to pity our poor neighbours on the other side. They would have to sit there, sweating in the dark and listen to the illegal noise of my generator just outside their window, knowing that I was sleeping peacefully in air conditioned luxury. Sometimes they needed to leave the windows open because of the heat, which would make the noise worse. Other times they would need to keep the windows closed because of the typhoons, which would make the heat unbearable. There were times I really felt bad for them; they were a nice family from Houston, the father of which was an engineer for Shell. One Thanksgiving they invited us over for Cajun Turkey, boiled in oil (cooking oil that is). I was thinking that it would taste greasy, but actually it was great, even better than the normally dry turkey of Thanksgiving memories past. They did have one problem, however, and that was finding a pot big enough to boil a turkey. Since the father was an engineer, a resourceful breed, he improvised by cutting off a section of the pipeline Shell was working on and welding a steel plate to one of the ends.

The generator was also connected to a very important appliance in the cellar. I’m not sure if I mentioned this previously but there was a pump in the cellar. Cellars are rare in Manila, and after they’ve flooded once of twice it’s easy to see why. Unfortunately the famous brownouts would normally occur during a Typhoon, just when you would want to pump at its very best.

One morning I woke up during a typhoon. It had been battering us for a few days already but today was by far the worst. I looked out of the window and was shocked to see that the house was completely surrounded by water, like we were on an island, or like a castle with a moat around it. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t sure if I would even be able to get to work. I decided to take a shower and then call the office. I had my laptop – if not many people had made it to the office, I would work from home. The shower was always a frustration. The water pressure was pitiful, just a sort of a mist coming down. It would have been a far more powerful rinse to just stand outside in the rain. Some expats bought holding tanks and pressure pumps to deal with the problem but we never got around to that level of sophistication. It was anyway a better idea to avoid any contact with tap water. I never drank the stuff, and we even brushed our teeth with bottled water. But inevitably I would get sick…often. For the first year or so I was sick two to three times a month, although after two and a half years I could easy go three months without any diarrhoea at all. That’s how polluted my body had become. Anyway, that one typhoon day when I got out of the shower and went to the window, to my amazement, the flood water was gone…completely gone. It was still raining, but the water must have drained off somewhere. Just another Manila mystery, I figured, and put it out of my mind.

I went downstairs to my office to check my Emails. As I sat there I heard a strange trickling sound. Oh my, I thought, and rushed down to the cellar. Yes, the cellar was filling up with water at a rapid rate and the pump was working full speed. And then I saw from where the water was entering: from the electrical sockets on the walls. I looked down at my bare feet standing in the water and thanked God that I hadn’t turned the light on. I went back up, shut the door and tried to forget about the whole thing. Yes, just ignore your problems and maybe they’ll go away. Was I going native (or even better “troppo” as the Brits would call it)?

Like me, many people skip coming to work during typhoons. It’s normally a good idea because so many areas flood, it makes driving sometimes impossible, and the road in front of our office was particularly susceptible. Worse still, some people found themselves at work, with access to their homes cut off. It wasn’t unheard of for people to spend a one or two nights in a row in the office.

It turns out that some employees liked to spend quite a bit of time in the office and not only during typhoons. Even though we certainly weren’t understaffed, I saw quite a lot of overtime reports from my department. Initially I thought this was a way to make some extra money since the wages were pretty bad. But it turned out that only some of the people even qualified for overtime pay. Given the dwelling in which some of these people lived, the fact that they had a nice quiet air conditioned place to stay was enough of a benefit in itself. Just like the airport.

It was such a nice working environment that some people would go to some lengths just to get in. Normally the guards at the gate to the office (yes, we had armed guards patrolling the grounds) would just waive my car through. But one day they stopped the car and made the driver open the trunk. This was standard operating procedure for all cars leaving the company (because people would steal all kinds of things) but I had never experienced a search while entering. Later in the day I ran into the Human Resources Director and asked him why the new rule. It turned out that my predecessor in the job, who had been dismissed, was still fighting the company in a legal battle to be reinstated. She showed up (disguised, I heard) and tried to get into the facility. I don’t know why she would do that, except maybe to get some publicity if the company needed to forcibly remove her. I could just imagine walking into my office one morning and finding a strange woman chained to my desk checking my Emails.

A Death Threat, and more Guards

It was a stressful time. Just living and working in another country can be stressful enough, but having to deal with so much corruption every day was making it impossible. At times I felt like I was making no progress and sometimes found myself questioning whether it was all worth it. And just around the time that I was firing employees and my wife was firing maids, the telephone rang. My wife answered it.
A woman’s voice:
“We’re from the Abu Sayyaf and we’re going to behead you.”
“What?!”
Click……
“I just got a death threat”, she mumbled

I’m not a security expert, but of course I had heard of the Abu Sayyaf. They were a local terrorist group operating in Southern Philippines and were actually affiliated to Al Qaeda long before most people had ever heard of Al Qaeda. Beheadings were often among their specialities but I had never heard of them announcing their intentions in advance. They were known to kidnap Westerners but mostly for hostage money. They rarely worked as far north as Manila and usually not in urban areas. That it was genuinely a threat from Abu Sayyaf was doubtful. But it was a threat nonetheless.

The next morning when I got to work I called up the Human Resources Department and told them that my wife had just received a death threat. They treated this very seriously. That afternoon both I and my wife each had personal, plainclothes bodyguards. They introduced themselves to us. They were both attached to the Malacanang Palace, which is the residence of the President of the Philippines. Of course, they both carried guns. These guys were much more professional than the uniformed rent-a-cops that guarded my house. My wife’s guard introduced himself with “I want you to know ma’am that I’d take a bullet for you.” “Oh great”, I thought. “That’s just what she wants to hear right now.”

The next day when I got home from work my wife asked who else knew about the phone call. “Well, quite a few people at work know.”
“Pick up the phone and tell me what you think” she answered.
I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear. “Calunk. Chika chika chika chika…” My phone was bugged! And it was obviously bugged with 1950s KGB technology. “Well, let’s hope it’s from the government” I said “It could have been the body guards who told them. But then again, our Sales Director’s cousin is the Director of the National Bureau of Investigation.” The NBI is the Philippine version of the FBI but due to national pride reasons, I guess, the switched the F for the N.

The wire tap was dropped in a few weeks and by that time we got used to being followed around by our shadow body guards. Whenever there was a police check or a metal detector to go through, they would show some papers and there were no problems. They would even go through the metal detectors with their guns and there would be no alarm. It was as if when they showed their papers, the metal detector operator could temporarily switch the machine off. That, or maybe the machines never really worked at all. In Philippines both possibilities are equally probable.

Occasionally our personal guards needed a day off, and when they did, they very professionally introduced us to their temporary replacements beforehand. Their high professionalism didn’t extend to all aspects of honour and honesty however, since one openly explained that he needed return to the Malacanang Palace for an annual performance review. He was up for promotion and unfortunately couldn’t avoid it. These guys were on the payroll for the Presidential Bodyguards (like the Filipino Secret Service) and they spent their days moonlighting for me! And they even apologised for having to check in once in a while at their “real” job. Was this entire country corrupt or what?

Later I heard expat horror stories even about bodyguards. It seems that most crimes are committed by insiders, or at least the most successful ones involve some sort of inside information. I had heard that an alarming number of kidnappings were actually carried out by the same bodyguards who were assigned to protect the kidnapped. Think about it, they know all of your routines and habits, and will be completely trusted by you and your family. And they do have quite a bit of information on you. Once I was attending a function when a middle aged woman I had never seen before approached me.
“Mr Charles! So nice to meet you. I’m T- S-. I own the security company that provides your guards.”
I was nonplussed. “How do you know what I look like? Do you have a photograph of me on your wall?”
“Why yes, we do.”
I felt a shiver. I had never provided any photographs.

If you stick around long enough the stories of kidnapping almost seem normal. Luckily, Americans were rarely kidnapped for money. The kidnappers know that this would make CNN and they prefer to be a bit more low key. While Abu Sayyaf might like CNN coverage, the professionals preferred discretion. Their favourite target was the ethnic Chinese, both because they normally had lots of money (they’re like the Jews of Southeast Asia) and they usually won’t even call the police. I heard a story of Chinese guy who was kidnapped and paid so quickly without much negotiating that the kidnappers felt they asked for too little and kidnapped him again a month later. I heard another story of a German couple that were attached to the German Embassy in Manila. They were kidnapped in the Mount Pinatubo area, which for some reason seems to be quite a fashionable kidnap location. They were held in some dingy location and taken once a day to extract the maximum daily limit on their ATM card. When the money ran out after a week or two, they were released. I even met a guy of ethnic Indian origin who had been kidnapped himself. Just hearing someone tell the story firsthand makes it seem so much more real.

With the presence of the body guards at the house, the existing security guards felt more, well, secure. They became increasingly irrelevant to us. As far as I could see, their main function consisted of opening the gate when the driver pulled up. After a while though, I noticed a strange routine. The driver would always blow the horn several times when he approached the gate, even if the guard was standing outside. Often times the guard would take some time to open the gate. One day we realised the reason. It was to give time to warn the maids that we were coming so that they would be able to wake up and pretend they were working. And so it seems the main function of the guards was to guard the other servants against us.

One day my wife went out with a friend. She went in her friend’s car so her friend’s driver drove. When she got back, she had some trouble getting in. Finally, when the guard had opened the gate and she went into the house, she found out the reason why it had taken so long. The servants were having a party in our house, in the TV room actually. The guard had given them enough time to get out of the house but not enough time to clean up. They obviously did not expect my wife to be back so soon.

She fired all of the servants and requested a new guard from the security company. Although the driver was in on the party, I convinced her not to fire him until I could find someone else. I looked for a while but couldn’t find another driver, so let it pass. But he never got any trust from that point on from me or my wife. In an amazing display of chutzpah, the driver actually asked me for a letter of recommendation when I finally left Manila.

So the house guards really couldn’t be trusted either. Apart from that, they were quite often cavalier about leaving their guns laying around, which made me nervous with small children running throughout the house and garden. Once Tsukiji, when he was about six or maybe seven years old, told me a story of how he watched the guard shoot a mosquito. I pressed him on details but it he maintained that he had seen the guard shoot a mosquito with his gun. Was this just the overactive imagination of a normal child, or did something actually happen? Who knows?

The kids were actually our weakest point, as I guess they are for loving parents everywhere. We considered that both my wife and I had personal body guards but that the children were still being taken to school in a bus and spending the whole day in a large facility, aside a major highway with approach and escape routes. The next time I went to school, I checked it out. The chances of even Philippines level terrorists successfully attacking and taking the school hostage would be quite high. I ran through the imaginary scenario. The children of Manila’s richest families and sons and daughters of western ambassadors and executives, being held hostage here for money or worse. I felt a physical shaft of pain in my stomach as the thought of losing my children presented itself in this hypothetical scenario. This place was getting to be too much for me.

Tilting at the Windmills of Corruption

And as I started to say at the beginning of the prior post, when I was in Manila, I was spending most of my time cleaning up corruption, or at least trying to. I hired an ex-auditor from Luxembourg to help me in this respect. I couldn’t help making jokes about his tiny country. “What? It has an airport? Do you need to get your passport stamped halfway down the runway?” “You have a lake there?!” “I heard that when the Nazis invaded in WW2, by the time you mobilised your troops they had already passed through to France. Etc etc. All good clean fun, folks.

I had my fun, and he took it in the friendly way intended, but more seriously I really needed this guy to help me clean up the company. It was necessary to have someone from outside. The culture was just too contaminated to recruit locally. This may sound like an unfair thing to say but I recall a conversation that set my mind clear. I was once talking with a few employees and I explained to them that if their boss ever told them to do anything illegal, immoral or unethical, they should not only refuse, but they should report it immediately to me. One of them actually laughed out loud at that point. “You’re only going to be here for a few years” she said. “I’ll be living the rest of my life here. They’re my people. Why should I create problems for myself just because you say so?” I mumbled some sort of “do the right thing” answer but in effect she was right. I was stunned. I understood now why the mafia was impossible to eliminate from Sicily. This job was going to be really difficult.

We had a few scandals, like a salesman running a Ponzi scheme with customer receipts, and one guy selling products to his relatives at special prices. There were also violations of company policies, such as not supporting any religions, for example. In Philippines it was practically impossible not to support religion (meaning the Catholic Religion only) in one way or another. The company sponsored a mass each month for all employees and paid the priest a “stipend” for his services. We also discovered “facilitating payments” to doctors for certifying employee physicals and to the motor vehicle office for approving inspections of company vehicles. Amazingly, sometimes the doctor never saw the employees and the vehicle never made it to the government facility.

Some of the stuff got a little more serious. The previous General Manager had bought some raffle tickets from a Catholic Charity and claimed reimbursement on his expense report. Technically this was supporting religion and therefore theoretically forbidden, but this was nothing when one of the tickets turned out to be a winner, and he claimed the prize (a new car) for himself. We had to put into effect a new policy for raffle tickets after that. In future any raffle tickets charged to the company would need to be turned over the Human Resource department. If any of them won, HR would hold a drawing, pulling a name (out of a list of all employees) out of a hat. Whichever lucky employee’s name was chosen would win the prize. This seemed fair to me. Not more than a month or two later, a raffle ticket we had from the American Chamber of Commerce won a prize. In accordance with our new policy, the ticket had been duly turned over to HR and a drawing was held by them to determine who would get the prize. No extra points guessing who won: It was the Human Resources Director himself!

Most of the corruption is petty like this, and the system reinforces itself by allowing those at the bottom to get a little bit so that they don’t make too much noise and ruin it for the next level up. The really big stuff goes to the ones at the top. So I needed to apply a no tolerance approach across all levels. Unfortunately it was easier to catch the people at the bottom, who were less sophisticated, if petty. I cut out the practice of my subordinates always scheduling meetings right before lunch so that they could order food and get the company to pay for it (yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch in the Philippines). I even had to fire a key member of my own staff for putting a $400 dinner with his friends on an expense report. If that wasn’t bad enough, he even made one his subordinates pay and had her submit the expense report so that he, as her boss, could approve it. I only found out about it by chance. His poor subordinate was brand new to the company, being initiated right away in the ways that things worked here. The culture of corruption was overwhelming.

And so I was disrupting their system and they weren’t happy about it. Occasionally a few of the higher placed employees slipped up and were caught, but normally just by accident. An early glance at our balance sheet revealed that we owned several pieces of expensive art. After a bit of investigation it turned out they were in the previous GM’s house, even though he had left the company a year before. If he hadn’t capitalised the costs I would have never seen it.

It seemed that whenever I saw a transaction that I couldn’t immediately and fully understand, there was something dirty behind it. Not all of it personally benefitted the employees, but was nonetheless illegal. I guess it actually did benefit them if they got bigger bonuses or promotions that they didn’t deserve. Why, for example, were we using a middleman in Singapore to act as an intermediary on certain transactions? Answer 1: to reissue invoices with lower sales prices, resulting in lower customs duties. Answer 2: To ship US origin goods exported at deep “developing market” discounts back to the US at a big mark-up. Answer 3: All the other stuff that I never figured out.

And normally most of this went undetected. Indeed, the Philippines subsidiary had year after year of completely clean audits. The auditors that flew in to inspect the books were never able to find anything. In fact, if they hadn’t received an inside tip, the whole scandal that resulted in the dismissal of my predecessor would have never happened. It seems that the previous Human Resources Director and Finance Director didn’t like each other too much. The FD, thinking herself safe, gave some juicy information to the auditors: The HR director had set up an employment agency and had MME hire all its temporary employees through her company. There was no bidding process. But the Finance Director had broken an unwritten law in the world of corruption: Never cast the first stone. The HR Director was of course fired, but not before turning over to the auditors all the dirt she had on the Finance Director. It was like Christmas for the auditors. They were all given big bonuses and the manager got a promotion for “uncovering” all this.

This reminds me of another audit story I once heard. There was once a member of an audit team who was a real jerk, quite obnoxious and always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. None of his colleagues wanted to work with him and he was therefore always given the crappiest assignments. Once when they were auditing a bank, he was given the job of counting the bonds in the vault. This is one of the most tedious jobs you can imagine for an auditor, just above getting coffee and making photocopies. Anyway, he was in the vault with the head accountant from the bank when, as a stupid joke, he suddenly said “Hey, It looks like you’re a couple bonds short here.” The accountant stood up and starting shaking. “Please don’t tell anyone! I needed the money. My wife was sick, etc” The guy became a hero for “detecting” the theft of the bonds and was given a promotion.

My Luxembourger friend, meanwhile, had acquired a Filipina girlfriend, and I guess he shared some of these stories with her. It turned out that she knew more about this than he did, since she was able to explain the various angles you could play to rip-off your employer with low chance of detection. The best jobs were in the Procurement Department. It wasn’t difficult to verbally agree with a supplier to grant a contract for a certain side payment. Proving this type of arrangement is difficult, especially if you could somehow waive or manipulate a competitive bidding process. It turned out that her observations hit closer to home that I had imagined.

One day I got a call from a woman in India. She said that she knew a distributor in India who was telling her that in order to do business with MME, certain special payments needed to be made. He had been approached by a Manila based employee who had asked him directly for kickbacks as a price to doing business with us. I asked her the name of the employee. “Of Course, “she said with that singsong Indian accent. “He even showed me his business card. His name was –.”

God! The man she had just mentioned was formerly in charge of the Export Division but was recently promoted to be General Manager of the Philippines. Less than six months ago, in a highly publicised event, he was personally given an award by the International President of MME for the best business results. I had better be careful and very sure of what I was doing.

"Lux" began going through the files, looking for evidence of impropriety. He found plenty of transactions with India that contained no proof that we received what we were paying for, but this was just bad controls, not evidence of wrongdoing. He took the invoices that we had paid and flew to India “undercover”. He went to the businesses that had sent us the invoices and giving a false name, enquired if he could buy the same types of goods. Some of the companies said that they didn’t deal in those types of products and in one or two cases the