fresh n juicy chunks of oyster :: RTW travel blog

Delhi was pure chaos as though Shiva herself had descended on the place. At least that's pretty much all that I could glimpse in the 54 odd hours I will have spent here. I have to admit that after being faced with this chaos I gave up and chose to wind down; the trip as I had known it was ending - a fact I had only become aware of with around 28 hours remaining. Somehow the End had crept up on me silently and I wasn't sure what to do with it.
At that point I had only left Kathmandu 27 hours ago but it felt as though I had been in Delhi for much longer than that. On the other hand I also felt that I had been in Kathmandu for just a few, intense days but alternately it also hits me that I may have spent a lifetime there without knowing. Everything has stopped making sense to me and maybe I have lost the concept of time; I will attempt the unravelling.

Around 40 hours ago I was running late on my way to Kathmandu's airport. I had caught a taxi and was crawling out of the city slowly. Meanwhile the wild emotions the place had thrown at me where all blended together smoothly and undiscernibly: a continual background buzz. Maybe Kathmandu's been rather confusing to me.

On my first day in the land of Tenzing Norgay I was staring and marvelling in true greenhorn fashion at everything. Kathmandu is a pretty exciting city but I guess I must have shown too much excitement. A friendly jewellery seller took pity on me, took me to his office and said I could make 5000 Euros by bringing some pieces of coloured glass back to Germany in exchange for letting him steal my identity. He proudly showed off photocopies of passports and credit cards of previously satisfied customers; it looked more like a police file of murder victims with their photocopied faces staring blankly at me from their passports so I decided to seek my fortunes elsewhere. Back on the street some guy walked up to me wafting at me the most ragged, scruffy $100 dollar bill I have ever seen. "Change to rupees?"
Still, it all didn't bother me too much, even when shopkeepers, drugdealers and hotelowners of Thamel (Delhi's Khao Sarn with a twist) had convinced me that there was an entrance fee to get into Freak Street (the shabbier alternative to Thamel: 30 years ago it was the playground of the hippies, now the place is quietly falling apart - but it's doing so with charm).
I assumed the lie was an effort to keep the few tourists in Thamel; business has hit rock bottom in Kathmandu, it is low season for trekking and the country is in the middle of a civil war which is discouraging even more visitors. From the stories I hear of the Kathmandu of only 10 years ago it is barely a shadow of its former self and some of its people have turned bitter.
And like always it's started from the top. The politicians are corrupt as are the institutions. The locals are hurried off the streets at 10pm by cops armed with whistles and AK-47s. Anyone out after that time is prone to be extorted by the police. The tourists on the other hand can walk through the empty streets completely impervious - the police have orders to leave tourists alone and I have the sneaking suspicion that anyone caught mugging a foreigner will be summarily executed or just disappear. Even the Maoists go out of their way to leave tourists unscathed: they courteously make sure all the foreigners have left a building before bombing it.
One night I overheard a traveller in a bar shouting, "Yeah, I really want one of those Maoist receipts. It'd make a great souvenir!"
Back in Thailand this would have undoubtedly reaffirmed my unjustified loathing for the world and humanity and have swiftly led to the onset of a minor depression. But I'm ok now. I have accepted humanity as essentially flawed, individuals as potentially good and tourism as inevitable. I even ate pizza in Kathmandu.
And I followed the advice of a guesthouse-owner as he took a pause from playing the guitar as the foreigners' conversation started getting too political: "You guys just come here and don't worry about a thing! Nepal is meant for chilling and enjoying yourself."
The dichotomy may be uncomfortable and the political system in shambles but worrying about them is a luxury most people on the streets can not afford.
And Kathmandu is just meant for getting lost in, regardless of politics. Even on the last day I could not quite figure out the layout of the romantic and twisty alleys winding around and away from each other. I would navigate by instinct with a low success rate through the dirt, the traffic without rules and the squares with Hindu stupahs, temples and other stuff I am too uncultured to understand. But it was all incredibly satisfying, never knowing what or whom you will bump into.
The Nepalis in general have to be some of the best people on the planet even though 95% were having identical conversations with me ("which country?", "how long you been in Nepal?", "how long will you stay in Nepal?", followed by "oh, what a shame" in response to my answer.) But they have good hearts and deserve to live in a happier place.

However, in my unfortunate way of travelling I have constantly been leaving places, their worries and their joys behind me. Just like I left behind the taxi driver who had put his meter into a special tourist-hyperactive mode for the last minute of the journey to the airport, doubling the fare. I was relieved that I had made it out of Kathmandu without getting too badly ripped off, losing my identity and/or dignity. And I was happy about the people I'd met and the smoothie of emotions that was still buzzing.
That is, until I exchanged my left-over Nepalese rupees into Indian rupees at the airport without counting them first: an invitation for getting the worst rate possible which I promptly did. No space for argument, the system had gotten its cut from me after all.

And that's about as much unravelling as I'll be able to do. Stuff still doesn't make sense, especially with my plane leaving Asia in a few hours but I will advance the following definitive theory of time in an effort to imbue some reason into my chaos: non-Einsteinian relativity of time is a symptom of being in places for too short a time and of sleeping in too many different beds every night (which sounds either far worse or far more glamorous than it actually is).
Yes, I am very confused at the moment. But at least I'm buzzing still.

[Maybe my confusion will clear up soon with a more constant bed and home: my flight leaves to Frankfurt tonight, followed by Amsterdam and then London. There'll be a final post coming up in a week or so (I write while wiping a tear from my eye).
Meanwhile click here for fuzzy pictures in Album Nepal 1 - Kathmandu and Album India 1 - Delhi.]