Sunday, September 18, 2005
I have my ATM card back
...the lights are back on after their daily hiatus, there is a fine, gentle rain, my bowels are defending their heavyweight title with heart and verve, the Maoists have released 60 military hostages and all is well in Kathmandu. These past two days had me on edge a bit: I realized Friday evening that I had left my ATM card in the machine, and the bank was of course closed by then. Saturday is the day of rest here, so not until 10am this morning was I able to trot over to Nabil Bank and hope that it had somehow been collected. When the man in the card division informed that it had, and here you are, I wanted to hug him. Instead we ended up talking for around ten minutes: he had a sister in Des Moines. He said something interesting, that after Katrina, the whole idea of America as the promised land was reduced to tottering around on rickety, splintery legs. In most countries around the globe, there has always been a sense, at the very least, of confidence in America, and that if one were able to pick up and move there, one's life genuinely would improve. It's less a land of opportunity thing than a land of not getting shot at, blown up, drowned or torched. It's the Land of Security, the Land of Infrastructure. And the thing about Katrina is, we had no one to blame but ourselves--okay, the government has no one to blame but itself. Dickheads. But the disaster represents the total collapse of the vaunted American infrastructure (and believe me, if there's one thing I've learned in weeks of no roads, power outages and impotable water, it's the importance of infrastructure. Never take the interstates for granted). I don't want to sound uncommonly (I hope) sententious, though. The point I want to make is that the submerging of New Orleans (and no city ever deserved it less. NEver did nothing to nobody. I was really looking forward to going there for my 21st, damn it. Caravan to Bourbon County, KY, anyone?) has done far more to damage America's reputation in the eyes of the world than 9/11 ever did. My buddy at the bank said, if there's one more disaster like this, that's it, America's done. The world will be all like, We're over you. Granted, I think that's a bit premature. But he's got a point. The paving on the streets of New York has lost its luster, and these days it seems to be more pyrite than real gold.
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The momentary delirium of being in a western-style city--compared to Lhasa, or worse yet, Old Tingri, Kathmandu is a garden of earthly delights--has relaxed a bit, due mostly to the relentless harassment of the hawkers that grow like weeds in an unkempt garden. They are, and there is no other real way to put this, incredibly fucking obnoxious. They're everywhere, and they're a hundred times worse than they are in China. For where in China, all they can say is, "shoes? Shoes?" or "smoke Ganj?" or "watch. Watch," they can all speak English here. And pretty damn fluent English, too. This presents a number of problems. First, and most obviously, you can't just swear violently at them. They understand what "You go to hell and you die" means, and are more likely to take offense. Secondly, engagement is easier. They all, and I mean ALL, take the same tack. Every conversation goes the same way: "Where you from? How long you been in Kathmandu? This first time in Nepal? How long you stay in Kathmandu? You go trekking? No? Then why you here? You want trekking? You want rafting? You want bungy jump? Anything you want? Need guide, advice? Twenty six years I am guide. You want anything? You want anything? Rickshaw? Taxi? Pashmina? Bracelet? Backpack? Flute? Chess set? Bracelet? Bracelet? You want marijuana? Hash, smoke, opium? Why not?" And so on. It's the Why not that realy gets me, and I find myself hollering over my shoulder, "Because I fucking don't, that's why!" I have heard all of these words, in this order, a hundred times--with one exception: "no." Now, I know there's no word for "no" in Chinese or Tibetan. You have to say, "I don't want." But I know it must exist in Nepalese. They're just pretending not to understand. But the panoply of services each hawker, and they are more legion than I can express (between the hotel and the bank this morning, no less than seven came up to me; fortunately, the iPod is the best insect/hawker repellent I know of), purports to offer is impressive. But they almost never just go into the pitch. They never go right to the point. They always, always, ALWAYS start with "where you from?" It's uncanny. And what are you supposed to say? They cornered you. It's fucking invasive, is what it is, and we've all lost our tempers a number of times. It's like they hijack my language and use it for devious purposes. When I was with Martijn, I hit on an old method of deterrence: pretended not to speak English. That's an generic trick, but not so much when it's a white guy claiming only to speak Chinese. Duibuqi, wo bu hui shuo Yingwen. Ni shuo Zhongwen ma? It turns out I have enough (yes, more than those sentences) to baffle nonspeakers. Not that they believed for an instant I was anything but a native English speaker. It's that it was so simultaneously passive-aggressive and offensive, and plus it made hawking at me like to talking to a brick wall. In any case, it worked beautifully: they went right for Martijn and left me alone. The irony there, of course, being that Martijn was, in fact Dutch. He just was generally too polite to cut them down like the weeds they are. The joy of Chinese also being that I was free to swear as gleefully as I wanted: Ni ta ma ra bi shui. But god damn are they persistent. The tour guides in Durbar square are the worst. Two followed us for three blocks and would not fucking take no for an answer. I have also wanted to deck the guys playing "Oh, Susanna" and they ALL play "Oh, Susanna" on the wooden stringed instruments, of which I intend to buy one, but only from the first guy who doesn't shove it in my face. Bargaining and buying for me is an act of vengeance, irrational and emotional. I got so severely reamed in my first cab ride from Beijing airport (I realized, moments after the cab took off, that I had calculated to the Yen, not the Yuan, and was paying over five times what I should have), that I resolved then and there that one of the missions of this trip was to take Asia, the entire goddamn continent, for everything it was worth. I haggle over everything--everything. Water. Toilet paper. He says 20Rps, I say 10. I routinely find myself fighting ferociously over the equivalent of 20 cents simply because I cannot stand paying their price. It has to be my price. Yesterday I bartered a crappy flashlight from 250Rps to 120, and refused to buy it because they wouldn't come down to my price of 100. 20rps is 40 cents. And at the same time I'm still overtipping (tipping is prevalent here, as opposed to China, where it is nonexistent). It's partly a karma thing (I take tipping karma very seriously), and partly a power thing. There is a twinge of the intoxication of wealth here, of knowing that your means so vastly exceed those of anyone you meet on the street, and the impulse that accompanies that knowledge is caprice: the power to distribute funds how and where and to whom you please. There is no rhyme or reason to it but my own personal whim, and that is liberating. Can't buy me love, maybe, but can definitely buy me liberty.
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I mentioned Martijn. Who is Martijn? I hear you ask. Martijn is my 6'5" flying dutchman, one of the four passengers in the ancient Land Cruiser that clattered from Lhasa to the Nepalese border. We have been sharing one room while Kazu and Toshi, the other two, took the other. Martijn is 35, Toshi 32 (looks, oh, 21) and Kazu 23. They are all making their separate peregrinations. After taking the Trans-Mongolian from Moscow to Ulaan Bataar to Beijing, then flying to Lhasa, Martijn left this morning for Pokhara and is taking three weeks to trek the Annapurna circuit. Kazu and Toshi left the morning before, Kazu to fly back to Tokyo, and Toshi to Hong Kong, to blitz Disneyland (without his five-year old daughter, whom he plans to tell about it when she turns, oh, twenty), before returning to Kanagawa. Kazu has been away for about four months, burning up China and Southeast Asia (reporting that Laotian beer is the finest he has ever tasted), and he met Toshi in Yunnan somewhere. Toshi's a little bit of a cypher, partly because he spoke so little English, partly because he's just so laid back. He's a cool guy. The three of them found me in Lhasa, where they were looking for a fourth for the drive to the border. Toshi's English was none too stellar, so he talked through Kazu, who lived in Port Washington, NY, for five years, and speaks almost entirely without an accent. For four people thrown together in a car for five days, we got along famously, I thought. I rode shotgun the whole way, because shotgun, uncharacteristically, featured the least legroom. On the plus side I got elbowroom, and control over the Michael Jackson tape (meaning mostly that I had to fast forward through "You are not alone," "One More Chance" and the truly nauseous "Heal the World"). Our driver was a guy named Lapa, a fun little Tibetan who also spoke Chinese, but couldn't read it, and whose English consisted mostly of "stop here," "pipi" and "no problem." The reply, "blatant lie," was not amid his vocabulary. The lack, and I mean total lack, of English became an occasion for comedy when we reached Zhangmu, and he was trying to explain to us in Chinese that he couldn't take us the remaining 3km to the border, and that we were going to have to walk (we did not know then how far it was; had we known, we would have protested a bit more. As it was, we did get the satisfaction of actually walking out of China and into Nepal). His inability to write or read Chinese meant Kazu and Toshi were useless (hitherto, they had been marvelously handy: because Japanese and Chinese characters mean the same thing on paper, though the pronunciations are almost entirely different, they could read the Chinese menus, which are invariably priced at a fraction of the English language menus). The fact was that I actually knew more Chinese than he did English, and so our conversation, all in Chinese, save for the words in brackets, went something like this:
ME: Why you no can go there?
LAPA: ---very fast and unintelligible and mostly Tibetan--
ME: I don't understand.
LAPA: Can no go [border.] I am not [guide,] I am driver.
ME: You want we stop here, you go back to Lhasa? This is Zhangmu? We [miming walking] [border.] You no can go because you are driver?
LAPA: Correct.
ME: I'm sorry, I'm not too clear on that. Sonam (travel agent) say to us, we have no guide, we pay 200 kuai [at border]. She say to us you pay. Where you pay?
LAPA: I don't understand.
ME: {Indicating his phone) You speak to Sonam.
(He calls Sonam and jabbers in Tibetan)
LAPA: (Hanging up) I understand. 200 yuen. There, back there (we had already been waved through one checkpoint). Pay there. I stop here. You go border.
ME: Where you eat? You want to eat here?
LAPA: I eat in Nyalam (good call). Go to Lhasa.
ME: Ohh, understand, understand. That's good. You go there, we go there. [Well, that's settled that, then]. That's that.
LAPA: What?
ME: Correct.
Finally we figured it out and we bid him adieu. He was an awesome driver, a genius at inventing roads, but he did leave us three full kilometres from the border, on top of a mountain. That was a most unpleasant schlep, because the way the road kept curling, we couldn't see where the border was, or how far away. We thought it was around every turn, and were bitterly disappointed every time it wasn't. Also Lapa had terrible, terrible taste in music. At least he agreed when Heal the World came on for a tenth time and I told him in my fluent Chinese, "I don't like this song." No problem, he said. No problem.
<<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>>
The momentary delirium of being in a western-style city--compared to Lhasa, or worse yet, Old Tingri, Kathmandu is a garden of earthly delights--has relaxed a bit, due mostly to the relentless harassment of the hawkers that grow like weeds in an unkempt garden. They are, and there is no other real way to put this, incredibly fucking obnoxious. They're everywhere, and they're a hundred times worse than they are in China. For where in China, all they can say is, "shoes? Shoes?" or "smoke Ganj?" or "watch. Watch," they can all speak English here. And pretty damn fluent English, too. This presents a number of problems. First, and most obviously, you can't just swear violently at them. They understand what "You go to hell and you die" means, and are more likely to take offense. Secondly, engagement is easier. They all, and I mean ALL, take the same tack. Every conversation goes the same way: "Where you from? How long you been in Kathmandu? This first time in Nepal? How long you stay in Kathmandu? You go trekking? No? Then why you here? You want trekking? You want rafting? You want bungy jump? Anything you want? Need guide, advice? Twenty six years I am guide. You want anything? You want anything? Rickshaw? Taxi? Pashmina? Bracelet? Backpack? Flute? Chess set? Bracelet? Bracelet? You want marijuana? Hash, smoke, opium? Why not?" And so on. It's the Why not that realy gets me, and I find myself hollering over my shoulder, "Because I fucking don't, that's why!" I have heard all of these words, in this order, a hundred times--with one exception: "no." Now, I know there's no word for "no" in Chinese or Tibetan. You have to say, "I don't want." But I know it must exist in Nepalese. They're just pretending not to understand. But the panoply of services each hawker, and they are more legion than I can express (between the hotel and the bank this morning, no less than seven came up to me; fortunately, the iPod is the best insect/hawker repellent I know of), purports to offer is impressive. But they almost never just go into the pitch. They never go right to the point. They always, always, ALWAYS start with "where you from?" It's uncanny. And what are you supposed to say? They cornered you. It's fucking invasive, is what it is, and we've all lost our tempers a number of times. It's like they hijack my language and use it for devious purposes. When I was with Martijn, I hit on an old method of deterrence: pretended not to speak English. That's an generic trick, but not so much when it's a white guy claiming only to speak Chinese. Duibuqi, wo bu hui shuo Yingwen. Ni shuo Zhongwen ma? It turns out I have enough (yes, more than those sentences) to baffle nonspeakers. Not that they believed for an instant I was anything but a native English speaker. It's that it was so simultaneously passive-aggressive and offensive, and plus it made hawking at me like to talking to a brick wall. In any case, it worked beautifully: they went right for Martijn and left me alone. The irony there, of course, being that Martijn was, in fact Dutch. He just was generally too polite to cut them down like the weeds they are. The joy of Chinese also being that I was free to swear as gleefully as I wanted: Ni ta ma ra bi shui. But god damn are they persistent. The tour guides in Durbar square are the worst. Two followed us for three blocks and would not fucking take no for an answer. I have also wanted to deck the guys playing "Oh, Susanna" and they ALL play "Oh, Susanna" on the wooden stringed instruments, of which I intend to buy one, but only from the first guy who doesn't shove it in my face. Bargaining and buying for me is an act of vengeance, irrational and emotional. I got so severely reamed in my first cab ride from Beijing airport (I realized, moments after the cab took off, that I had calculated to the Yen, not the Yuan, and was paying over five times what I should have), that I resolved then and there that one of the missions of this trip was to take Asia, the entire goddamn continent, for everything it was worth. I haggle over everything--everything. Water. Toilet paper. He says 20Rps, I say 10. I routinely find myself fighting ferociously over the equivalent of 20 cents simply because I cannot stand paying their price. It has to be my price. Yesterday I bartered a crappy flashlight from 250Rps to 120, and refused to buy it because they wouldn't come down to my price of 100. 20rps is 40 cents. And at the same time I'm still overtipping (tipping is prevalent here, as opposed to China, where it is nonexistent). It's partly a karma thing (I take tipping karma very seriously), and partly a power thing. There is a twinge of the intoxication of wealth here, of knowing that your means so vastly exceed those of anyone you meet on the street, and the impulse that accompanies that knowledge is caprice: the power to distribute funds how and where and to whom you please. There is no rhyme or reason to it but my own personal whim, and that is liberating. Can't buy me love, maybe, but can definitely buy me liberty.
<<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>>
I mentioned Martijn. Who is Martijn? I hear you ask. Martijn is my 6'5" flying dutchman, one of the four passengers in the ancient Land Cruiser that clattered from Lhasa to the Nepalese border. We have been sharing one room while Kazu and Toshi, the other two, took the other. Martijn is 35, Toshi 32 (looks, oh, 21) and Kazu 23. They are all making their separate peregrinations. After taking the Trans-Mongolian from Moscow to Ulaan Bataar to Beijing, then flying to Lhasa, Martijn left this morning for Pokhara and is taking three weeks to trek the Annapurna circuit. Kazu and Toshi left the morning before, Kazu to fly back to Tokyo, and Toshi to Hong Kong, to blitz Disneyland (without his five-year old daughter, whom he plans to tell about it when she turns, oh, twenty), before returning to Kanagawa. Kazu has been away for about four months, burning up China and Southeast Asia (reporting that Laotian beer is the finest he has ever tasted), and he met Toshi in Yunnan somewhere. Toshi's a little bit of a cypher, partly because he spoke so little English, partly because he's just so laid back. He's a cool guy. The three of them found me in Lhasa, where they were looking for a fourth for the drive to the border. Toshi's English was none too stellar, so he talked through Kazu, who lived in Port Washington, NY, for five years, and speaks almost entirely without an accent. For four people thrown together in a car for five days, we got along famously, I thought. I rode shotgun the whole way, because shotgun, uncharacteristically, featured the least legroom. On the plus side I got elbowroom, and control over the Michael Jackson tape (meaning mostly that I had to fast forward through "You are not alone," "One More Chance" and the truly nauseous "Heal the World"). Our driver was a guy named Lapa, a fun little Tibetan who also spoke Chinese, but couldn't read it, and whose English consisted mostly of "stop here," "pipi" and "no problem." The reply, "blatant lie," was not amid his vocabulary. The lack, and I mean total lack, of English became an occasion for comedy when we reached Zhangmu, and he was trying to explain to us in Chinese that he couldn't take us the remaining 3km to the border, and that we were going to have to walk (we did not know then how far it was; had we known, we would have protested a bit more. As it was, we did get the satisfaction of actually walking out of China and into Nepal). His inability to write or read Chinese meant Kazu and Toshi were useless (hitherto, they had been marvelously handy: because Japanese and Chinese characters mean the same thing on paper, though the pronunciations are almost entirely different, they could read the Chinese menus, which are invariably priced at a fraction of the English language menus). The fact was that I actually knew more Chinese than he did English, and so our conversation, all in Chinese, save for the words in brackets, went something like this:
ME: Why you no can go there?
LAPA: ---very fast and unintelligible and mostly Tibetan--
ME: I don't understand.
LAPA: Can no go [border.] I am not [guide,] I am driver.
ME: You want we stop here, you go back to Lhasa? This is Zhangmu? We [miming walking] [border.] You no can go because you are driver?
LAPA: Correct.
ME: I'm sorry, I'm not too clear on that. Sonam (travel agent) say to us, we have no guide, we pay 200 kuai [at border]. She say to us you pay. Where you pay?
LAPA: I don't understand.
ME: {Indicating his phone) You speak to Sonam.
(He calls Sonam and jabbers in Tibetan)
LAPA: (Hanging up) I understand. 200 yuen. There, back there (we had already been waved through one checkpoint). Pay there. I stop here. You go border.
ME: Where you eat? You want to eat here?
LAPA: I eat in Nyalam (good call). Go to Lhasa.
ME: Ohh, understand, understand. That's good. You go there, we go there. [Well, that's settled that, then]. That's that.
LAPA: What?
ME: Correct.
Finally we figured it out and we bid him adieu. He was an awesome driver, a genius at inventing roads, but he did leave us three full kilometres from the border, on top of a mountain. That was a most unpleasant schlep, because the way the road kept curling, we couldn't see where the border was, or how far away. We thought it was around every turn, and were bitterly disappointed every time it wasn't. Also Lapa had terrible, terrible taste in music. At least he agreed when Heal the World came on for a tenth time and I told him in my fluent Chinese, "I don't like this song." No problem, he said. No problem.
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