First thing the next day, I bought a bus ticket to Pokhara.
I was totally done with Kathmandu.
The noise, the pollution, the dust and the touts — it was becoming too much. The city was bleak, inhuman, and lonely. I had not met a single other traveler in this city, and my mood was getting blacker by the minute. It was time for a change.
[The featured image will make sense if you read the whole entry. Photo was taken in Feb 2014, two years before I was in Nepal. If you are new to this story, I suggest starting at chapter 1].
When I returned to my room, the gratitude turned to sadness.
The high had faded, and I was alone again.
I sat down at the smoking table, slumping in the chair. I laid the joint down, and looked across the tiny table. A second chair sat empty. No one to smoke with.
I checked my email.
An Austrian company, Runtastic, was trying to recruit me.
We had been going back and forth ever since I lost my job in Bali, sending work samples and writing pieces, discussing the logistics of potentially moving to Austria, obtaining a red-white-red card, learning German. It was an exciting opportunity which had colored the tail end of my trip; an optimistic pallor hanging over a cold and dreary month in Taipei.
Sujan walked me around Kathmandu for a few hours.
As we spent more time together, our chemistry grew and my walls started to drop, a little bit. We went to the monastery, where we spun prayer wheels and spoke of the mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism. Although in the U.S. we are taught the two religions are separate, here, as in many places in Asia, they have intermingled.
“Do not be afraid,” Sujan says when I hesitate to enter a temple. “Is touristic place.”
He shows me an array of butter lamps inside the temple. “Do you have someone to light one for? Good health, good thoughts? Prayers? Love?”
I light a lamp for Holly, and we return to the streets of Kathmandu.
As I stepped out of the barber’s hole in the wall, I enjoyed the feeling of a light breeze on my clean-shaven face. Unfortunately, that selfsame breeze blew a giant cloud of dust down my throat, and I spent the next thirty seconds coughing it up.
Once I had expelled everything that was going to be expelled, I put the buff back over my nose and mouth. Fucking Kathmandu.
The hits kept coming, as yet another young Nepali came up alongside me and started matching pace.
(I must admit to stealing the image from Google here — I’m not such an Instagram whore that I take pictures of my haircuts. Also, if you are new to this story, I humbly suggest you start at Chapter 1. Best!)
I hadn’t had a haircut or a shave since Holly and I left Bali, a month and a half ago.
I’d gotten a spectacularly bad cut from some Balinese woman who had been more preoccupied with trying to sell me a massage than actually focusing on cutting my hair. The trauma had been such that I hadn’t even attempted to negotiate a hair cut in Taiwan, where English was significantly less common than Bali. Trust me, you don’t know “bad hair day” until you’ve tried to communicate what you want to a foreign hairdresser, using some mishmash of pictures, Hollywood stars, and estimating lengths using your fingers.
thisisyouth 