Annapurna Chronicles (mass email 3.0)
Beloved Friends,
I have finally completed my description of trekking among the Annapurnas in Nepal. Though I completed the trek nearly two months ago and am presently in India, up till now I have been unable to commit an adequate rendering of my experiences to paper (indeed to paper: the entire first draft was written on notebook paper, something I haven’t done in a long time, simply because I felt drained of inspiration whenever I faced the computer). I really hope its current form can convey to you the core of my trekking experience. Please enjoy!
As far as informative mass emails … this isn’t one. I will make another update soon that contains some details of our journey post-Annapurna. Haw-Wen (Winnie) and I are fine and going strong, currently in Varanasi, perhaps the holiest city in India. To those who read only Chinese: I apologize for this edition, it has been impossible for me so far to translate the following account. Former HIE students: anyone willing to give the project a stab???
Much love to all,
Bino / Haw-Bin / 柴皓斌
—-
At this moment I feel so full of love for everyone, for the world, for being alive. The sun has finally broken through the clouds, the last wisps retreat far into the ocean of blue, evaporated with the ennui, malaise, boredom of recent forgotten days.
Maybe at thistime I can finally share with you my reflections on trekking in Nepal. In more mundane times it is impossible for me to conjure the real sentiment of those memories. When my restfulness begins to parallel the sublime ease of heart which enveloped me at that time … then perhaps I may be able to relate it all.
> The world is my bathroom <
No, not meant to shock. What would that black-clad, infinitely stylish sunglass-toting, Prada/Gucci-sporting too-busy-for-you New Yorker think, encountering a gargantuan, stinking, cinnamon-roll spiraled pile of shit on 5th Avenue? What is the conditioned response? A comment about unseemliness, disgust? Aversion of the wobbly, slighted, nearly fainting eyes? But she needs to pee, she needs to vacate her bowels in the fashion studio, on the subway, during the staff meeting, and the urge has been so controlled by habit that the feeling doesn't come on so strongly anymore. She reins it in, tightens buttocks ever so slightly, exercises those invisible muscles to keep the obscene hidden inside, until that moment in absolute privacy, she can reveal to herself - and herself only, everyone else agrees never to broach this taboo topic - that she has indeed eaten, that her body is still performing its job admirably, that what she consumes does not mysteriously disappear without a trace into the great cosmos. But what is this? It's not coming out so easily! Lodged in its practiced niche for so long, it will be a fight to persuade it to come out of its den into the cold now!
Dal Bhat is the drill sergeant of my intestines. "Move along!" it barks to all the digested foodstuffs hanging around aimlessly. "No time to stop and smell the roses soldier, make way for the big guns!" Highly dense nuggets of fibrous rice, lentil, and vegetable remains will pause for no one; my internal bugle calls every morning without fail so that I hardly need another alarm clock. I unzip the mummy-style sleeping bag which has served me so well all night long, and warm air whizzes out of it steaming up the blanket of cold resting invisibly on it. "It's time for the poopinator," I croak in a morning voice. Haw-Wen, in the middle of her morning facial massage, nods with complete understanding.
If I fulfill my half of the bargain, my guts never let me down. Almost before I even fully assume the excremental squat, boulders come a' tumbling. It's over in 20 seconds flat. No need to wait around! Neither is it a mystery where this stuff goes. I fill a bucket with water and send it all to the oblivion of the pit in the earth that the toilet drains to; no massive sewage systems and treatment centers, septic tanks or plumbers on duty. Now this is the right way to start off my day!
Donkeys ambling at their languid pace, shaggy dogs with carpet-like coats fending off the cold, purposeful yak-oxen walking who-knows-where, all treat the world as one big toilet. Perhaps it is the stress of starting a rocky, uphill climb that opens the first unabashed fart in what soon becomes a symphony of gaseous release; from the expression of the donkeys one wonders the odds the greatest poker gamblers would have against them! Maybe after a perilous downhill the relaxation of flat ground is most suitably celebrated with multiple poignant depositions. There is a fearful denial of the existence of shit in some parts of the world, but here it is visible, it stinks, it is everywhere, but for its visibility loses some of its repulsiveness. It does not bowl one over like the gusts of manure-tainted air that sweep in from American dairy farms, which appear to be huge cesspools of nothing else. Droppings are distributed sparsely but rather evenly over the path of every animal's movement, markers that dissipate over time. "Why do you leave shit wherever you go?" Because a place isn't significant in my life till I've shat there!
> The horror of western toilets <
It's hard to adjust to life indoors after trekking. Our lodge accommodations are characterized as windbreakers more than cozy havens of warmth; that designation belongs to our sleeping bags. In Nepal, in Tibet, people accept that the heating of large open spaces is expensive and impractical, while keeping the body warm is essentially a matter of wearing double-digit layers of clothing and avoiding contact with "room-temperature" water like the plague. Why O Why do we in the west insist on planting our plushly warm behinds on freezing pieces of plastic, or worse ceramic, simply to take a shit? In Japan we have electric-heated toilet seats; I can't think of many more frivolous or ridiculous wastes of resources and engineering effort. One heated session on the pooper could probably supply light to a Nepalese hillside village for two nights. The "fur-covered" toilet seat is arguably worse. I wouldn't want to clean that crusty crap off after the inevitable splashage!
It's jokingly referred to as a throne, but whether or not one is the King of one's own body is seriously called into question by the continual defiance and frustration of the funky stuff in that upright attitude. Why else do we become accustomed to bringing books into the endeavor? Don't waste time wastin'. Piles of magazines are a common sight in American bathrooms. But when I run to the squat toilet, even the thought of bringing reading material doesn't flit across my mind; the urgency and speed of release are equally astonishing. In that hunched-over position, even grimaces become effective squeezing the guts suggestively; the whole intestinal tract seems optimally aligned for the fire exit. Keen to shed every pound and ounce possible before embarking on the day's trek, I am only happy to make my morning visitations of the outhouse.
When I do eventually buy a home, I will evict all resident western toilets and replace them with squatters. Not only do they do a body good, they are easy to clean, water efficient, and never clog. OK, I may leave one western toilet for those slow to adapt to the joys of liberated pooping.
> How dirty can you get? <
Surprisingly, I am amazingly tolerant of and comfortable with grime, and I am lucky my feet seem the sole perpetrators of unwashed stank. If you think about it, the hot shower is a pretty amazing phenomenon, nearly on par with the western toilet in non-intuitiveness and difficulty in implementation. On a beautiful day in the Kathmandu valley countryside I see women young and old gathered like ducks at the shores of streams and around healthily gushing taps to wash clothes and to wash themselves. To see a woman unselfconsciously bathe in the gracious realm under the generous sun is a truly beautiful thing. They are adept and discreet; instead of a shower curtain, a door, shaded windows and walls the guarantors of privacy, an opaque blanket of cloth loosely draped on her natural curves and cleverly manipulated to use the shadows sustains the mystery. Her strong supple back is bent under the flow of water to wash her dark flowing hair; strong and supple from the endless push and scrub of clothes unclenching their false colors, carrying children, her own or from the great Nepalese family, the laborious harvest of wheat, rice, mustard. She looks up at me, and smiles. Lust welled up in King David's heart; in my heart a sunny clearing of gratitude and well-being.
To have a hot shower first you must have water, a method for elevating it to a height from which it can then sprinkle down upon you, and of course some way to heat the water. In most cases, every step involves the expensive infusion of more energy.
No Tibetans allowed, the adorable Tibetan girl at the front desk has to explain to a couple of Tibetan pilgrims who amble into the hotel lobby as I try unsuccessfully to slurp my over-spiced hotpot noodles. It's a little complicated, the Chinese manager of the Tibetan-styled Lhasa hostel starts unwillingly. Tibetans rarely wash themselves, maybe only once or twice a year, you see, it is too cold where they come from, water is not readily available. A set of white linens costs me 200 yuan, but they sleep in the beds once and they are ruined, ruined! They will never be white again! And I get a measly 20 or 30 yuan from them for it, it is an impossible equation, it is not sound business! You have hot showers, I observe. Why not have them take a long-deserved shower before getting in bed? She stares at me incredulously. How can I do that? They are not in the habit of ever taking showers, they would never agree. It is a cruel logic.
In Ganzi, Sichuan near-scalding showers revive our benumbed extremeties. The kindly, crinkled owner returns from leaving a fresh set of coal bricks under the boiler and good-naturedly mops away the thick black prints we've brought with us from the clay pit which unfortunately leads right up to his door. There is only one knob in the shower. I guarantee the temperature is perfect, he says with infectious certainty. You know, years ago this used to be an army barracks. I had a little shop here back then; Ganzi was nothing more than a few shabby houses flanking a crossroads. But now you see there is so much competition, I had to close the shop and enter this business. He smiles unresentfully and is silent for a moment.
Other places charge 5 yuan per shower. I charge just 4 yuan, my margins are small but I get by with the few extra customers I get. If your price is higher, you can't expect people to come, am I right? I ask what he thinks about my 20 minute shower. That's typical. I have people stay in for 40 minutes, an hour even. No, 20 minutes isn't very long at all. People don't take showers every day. When they do take a shower they want to enjoy it, can you blame them?
No, you can't. Salt streaks mark my clothes like errant blobs of toothpaste, my head itches with phantom lice from wearing my hat day and night, my skin feels like lukewarm gelatinous sludge in contact with the inner lining of my sleeping bag. No contest, this is infinitely preferable to taking a cold shower, when the fantastic myth spun by the lodge owners is inevitably revealed as fallacious propaganda. We have: 24 Hours Running Hot Shower! No, you don't! we contest hotly. Don't even try that shit, we know the water is solar heated at best, today was cloudy, moreover all the light-footed trekkers who got here two hours before us today have already monopolized the shower quota!
You are wrong! the owner defies us, amazingly, in Chamje. Then almost whispering: come and look, see that? He points to a flimsy rubber tube snaking out of the kitchen window to the shower and toilet complex below, a separate wooden structure with a corrugated iron roof. We heat water in the kitchen, you can have a hot shower definitely! This, after quoting us an absurdly high rate for the room.
When the hot water slams into the interminable cold effusing from the slimy cement floor, it immediately recoils into steam. I perch balanced on an ingeniously positioned brick that has the special property of warming as the hot water washes over it, and shrink my skinny torso into more of a pencil than usual to catch all of the water possible. The lightbulb blinks on and off in concert with the ebb and flow of the electric current serving the entire township, the district headquarters no less. My headlamp supplements the elastic moments of shortage with a ghostly, lurid glow. Oh god, to be stuck here naked, in the dark and unable to unlatch the door, and for the water to suddenly turn ice cold. Batteries, don't let me down! The signs in the closet warn, Do Not Waste Hot Water! Do Not Wash Clothes Here! Do Not Spend Longer Than Necesssary In The Shower! I make my escape barefoot back to the drafty wooden room to give a report of the situation to Haw-Wen.
Fresh socks reset the unwashed kilometer ticker. Just like the meals, a shower feels so good when it is deserved.
> The road ahead <
Are we smug when we tell others, no, we have hired neither porter nor guide to help us, to enlighten us, to lean on, as crutches, as excuses for laziness, as evidence for a lapse in willpower? Does it show?
When the body is in motion, so too is the mind in motion, Osho says. My favorite moments are the restful ones. Scrambling up sandy hills, pushing off rusty rocks which may or may not honor their inertial appearances, ducking forward to shift my center of gravity ahead of my toes, reaching a crest and seeing that instead of continuing to climb, the path drops lower as far as the eye can see, marks the perfect occasion for taking a break, collecting my awareness about me. Unclip, unsling, the backpack threatens to topple flat onto the ground until I kick it a few times. Rushing rapids suddenly overtake my senses; I wake up to this static; the trail has followed the river all day, yet only now does the powerful hum penetrate my consciousness.
An orchestra settles into its tuning routine. Hawks skate on the icy currents above. Thorny brush and dessicated nettle quiver as dwarfish mountain goats rip at them matter-of-factly, like eating petrified grapes. A train of tolling bells bobbing along the waves, gentle beasts of burden struggle up behind me, heaving air through their nostrils. I lean on my bamboo pole, my telescoped antennae, and notice my own slowing exchange of breath in waiting for them to pass.
A stroll through Thamel, Kathmandu, usually just makes me want to break things. I want to take those sorry excuses for musical instruments, their whiny, finger lacerating steel strings, their crudely chiseled, barely decorative and highly ineffective sound boxes, raise them high above my head, Hulk Smash them into a thousand satisfying bits, and savor the expression of shocked amazement painted on the seller's face. I want to take a sledgehammer to the infuriating marketing video that loops supposedly invigorating footage of rafters, kayakers, spelunkers, bungee jumpers have a grand old time under our favorite spot for Muesli fruit curd, G's Terrace. The crazed, insipid sound pollution accompanying these images is 80's era pseudo-electronica trash that sets my heart racing in rage. I want to kick in the wobbly, hammer corrected tires of pedicab tycoons who shout, Hello Rickshaw Ne! at me across the street and 10 meters away. I want to spin around unexpectedly and trip up the shifty-eyed youths who shuffle in behind me and whisper, Hashish? Magic Mushroom? I want to shove those Namaste-Have-A-Look shopkeepers so that they tumble arms flailing into their racks of falsely-advertised x-percent Pashmina shawls. I want to clothesline the motorcyclists who rev and honk intimidatingly after turning up roads obviously teeming with people. I want to take a wrecking ball to every building conspiratorially erected to enrobe every street and alley in umbra and obstruct me from my sunlight.
The only object threatening to deprive me of sunlight here rises with a glacial garland across the valley; it stabs into the blue heart of undulating fabric, unrepentant hard edge tracing out the keepsake box for the sun. There is a light feeling that nobody is judging me. Nobody is looking at me, waiting to see what I do next. Nobody is telling me what to do. I am free in my anonymity, uncaged in movement and motive. With the onset of crashing river sounds in my consciousness the streams of my own thought suddenly appear stamped on it. The ink slowly dries and decays in my silence. The question I am left with is, what next? The accomplishment the ego demands - making it to the next town, the next sprinkle of red squares on the cursed map, our preordained destination, before the sun is put away for the day.
It is infuriating when I think about it, but when I accept that egregious errors have been committed to the map, accept the stupefying scale of the cartographic blunders we discover, after the disbelief and frustration have been duly vented, I realize that the map guides us well enough and faithfully leaves us only in as much trouble as we can suffer, no more. Map-making is an art that we perhaps take for granted. Far from a pirate's map where X marks with pinpoint accuracy the trove, up to which lead thickly dotted lines weaving among ridiculously spaced landmarks, the maps of discovered lands, halls, rooms automagically created in the wake of our fearless videogame hero are pixel-perfect, digitally complete. At first I am skeptical that our "Around Annapurna" map is any less reliable. But then the road forks into two clearly stomped-down tracks. We take the high road unknowingly and wheeze all the way up to Temang, a village loosely alluded to by the map. One overcast day the temperature plumets, and an icy gale begins to salt the rocky landscape to taste. The map indicates the next town where we have planned to stop for lunch is just around the next bend of the river. We round one bend, then another. Another. Two hours later we throw our bags down, fatigue the sole mask of apoplexy, ready to shred our unworthy guide with malevolent talons and fangs that unhumanly hunger has caused to spring forth from our nails and teeth. Arrrgh, we play the fool again me matey! We'll blow your PLANET up!
When I start moving forward, I am impelled along by invisible spider thread; it is not a meditation. My mind beings to fill itself with plans, anxieties, impatience, analyses. The other goals in life have not disappeared, but rather have faded to transparency, paradoxes of invisible-detectable. But with each fallen step the road ahead balloons slightly as with a puff of air. A gooey hand is reaching out of my mind to grab hold of the future, when I can set my bag down with enough finality for a day, when I can sit down and just savor the ecstatic moment of touching the menu, opening it, poring over those oh-so-familiar choices. It is moving out from me; my mind is dancing out of my body! I try to reign it in with a series of deep breaths. Walking has become automatic. It's no use. I command myself to stop.
A hiccup, the body slurps up the mind again and the audio, the inner commentary, catches up with the seamless, infinitely resolved video around me. Even if all of the snacks adding kilos to my pack run out and I go hungry, even if my legs sag like cardboard inebriated with sweat, even if the map directs us down a path longer, steeper, with inferior tasting dal bhat, even if night comes on before we have made camp for the day, as long as I am alive, breathing, seeing, no mistakes have been made. The road ahead brings me worry and doubt. The road under my feet is my joyful communion with existence in the here and now.
> You animal! <
Sometimes I have the sensation of beling slowly transformed into an animal. Only I am not a single beast, more of a Chimera or cerberus with different animal heads, able at any moment to let a dog's howl, a mountain goat's bleat, a chicken's cluck issue forth from different mouths. Every day the sounds seem more and more convincing to the animals around me; when I baah sheep stand at attention; when I bawk little chicks scramble for cover. Even if my exterior form has not changed, I am sure that on the inside I have developed a creature's heart and matching gizzard.
The herbivorous animals exude a playful air, though I know they do not mean to play and in fact are simply enacting the stories of their lives. It is soothing to walk among them. I have always been captivated by cute animals, fascinated in a way that perhaps only one who has never lived among animals may be. Far from the anthropomorphically animated, quivering stuffed animal dogs, bears, horses, and leopards under our youthful manipulation, the chicks chirping along the trails as they pass through villages, dogs moping along on unexplained missions, scruff-coated horses standing frozen, inanimate in distant stares, aren't interested in appearing cute, and mostly ignore me. Bouts of mirthful, wicked satisfaction brighten my days when I stomp after pockets of fleeing chicks, woofing menacingly, enthusiastically! Like a madman. Now they respond! Goats, their mouths forever upturned at pleased angles, poke their heads many directions at once, slitted eyes instantly making shallow evaluation of the situation. Never doubting, they march to the next bone-dry branch or ragged leaf to crunch. They are more difficult to distract, consumed as they are in the problem of sampling all of the apparent abundance of natural food everywhere, invisible to my untrained eyes. Even with my dirt-encrusted pack casting my shadow as an unbalanced hulk, sounds of liquid swishing emanating from the water bottle buried in its interior, the ridiculous effort evidently involved simply in transporting myself from remote location to remoter, the goats are neither impressed nor interested. I am transparent as a flawless pane of glass looking out onto greener pastures.
The Nepalis who pass by do notice and acknowledge me, Namaste, always friendly. It is difficult to discern where the earth ends and their wafer-like sandals begin; when they glide over the terrain their feet sink deeply, surely into its idiosyncrasies, the small chinks and facts of every rock perfectly swallows, then releases their feet. Incredible power is packaged in their tiny bodies. Straped to their heads: wooden cages holding twenty or more unhappy looking farm-raised chickens prisoner, white-feathered unlike their free-range counterparts; a bed and mattress; a basket of enormous rocks, probably to be used in constructing a new home; great cisterns of water, hauled up from the river 100 meters below. I envy this strength, borne of this life, a natural, meaningful strength. There is no concept of jogging, of doing pushups or crunches, of obtaining a gym membership and bribing oneself to actually make use of it through contrived incentives. Magazine images of beauty from the other world seem stupid and irrelevant. Unaware of their awesome power, Nepalis go about their lives artfully and harmoniously with the elements, with the animals, with the itinerant trekker. I cannot help but feel they live in a paradise. Having had a glimpse into this exquisite system I am tempted never to leave.
We live the lives of beasts of burden. We sleep with darkness and wake with the light. We eat and drink to a certain contented fullness impossible without being preceded by hours of toil. Our muscles grow firm and wiry, we become aware of the dense strands of bundled might propelling us over suspension bridges in sinusoid oscillation, over and above the treeline, keeping us from slip sliding into white oblivion on sloping patches of ice. We rain sweat and grit teeth, breathe sighs of exhausted relief and nap after meals. We wear our unwashed clothing like coats of fur and down to grow or shed as nature demands. It is enough, this life. I cannot imagine a world beyond the ever rising ridges of rock and snow that protect my valley, bless it with slender coronet waterfalls. Even the clouds are blown off their frozen caps, which somewhere provide safe haven for the razor-eyed hawks that hang suspended on the updrifts. Newspapers spin an ever perplexing, increasingly convoluted myth of civilization, of its egoistic wars, nuclear governments, commercial juggernaut, unfulfilled desires, criminality, comforts, lusts, disease epidemics, disappointments. No, I don't believe any of it actually exists. Fabrication. For the time being I am amnesiac. Until the day comes when I am impelled to remember, I am safe and happy in the womb of the present experience.