Hiking is not trekking

In a nutshell, if don't have time to read this whole story:

 trekking is like schlepping when you are not prepared.

       

          In the midst of congested Kathmandu the majestic pearls of the Himalaya's strung across the distant horizon were still far-away gems on a necklace I wanted try on and pretend, for just a moment, I was a dakini; the literal Tibetan translation is "sky goer". To explain the profound and vast meaning of a dakini is like trying to capture one of the clouds beneath the high mountains in which she roams. She represents the enlightened feminine within Buddhism and can be seen on many levels.   In my eyes she represented the gateway to enlightenment, and her dances were the keys to a realm that was outside of me, not within. I ventured to Nepal on a trekking invitation, but deep within I wanted to study the dakini's sacred dances to heal. Anything to to pass through a revolving door of addictions.

     I packed ankle bells, images of the dakinis, Buddhist books and practices, along with a sleeping bag, a water bottle, hiking boots, my favorite t-shirt from the Dali Lama, long under, a fleece, gloves, some water purifying tablets, rain gear, and other winter clothing I picked up from unofficial sponsor, Get-n-Gear in Ashland, Oregon- most importantly the DDD leopard bikini in their dollar bin. I felt prepared for entering the realm of the dakinis until..... Shilpa and I left the trekking office, where the necklace was put back in its case. I could not afford a porter, nor the plane flight directly to the start of the trek, nor any of the gear needed for zero. The dreamy Himalayas were now rocks, which I was expected to climb for eight to ten hours a day, carrying all my own gear. "Landslides from the monsoon rains have washed out the roads. A bus ride to the trek start is dangerous. Can you afford a jeep? Can you carry 40 kilos? (what is kilos to pounds?) You don't have a down jacket, seriously?" 

             My plan for trekking to the base of Mount Kanchenjunga, the third tallest mountain on Earth, would later reveal the way I was living: Relying on more prepared people.

     While I'm planning to wing it, Shilpa, who'd been to the base of Everest, is making the plan that would later save my frozen ass. “We need the guide. I'm telling you. This region is not like Annapurna,” she insists after we leave Ecstasy Nepal, the family-owned trekking agency located in Thamel, Nepal's tourist area originally created by early hippies according to her father, whose seen the area transform over his sixty years from small boutiques selling Nepali crafts, hostels, a handful of trekking shops and tea houses to streets lined with neon signs: New Orleans Cafe, Margarita's Dance club, Spa House.... Within a blink one is peddled by shopkeepers with the same knock off Northface' hoodies (Northfake), Nepali girls handing out menus before being blockaded by those whose shops are displayed on their arms, hand made puppets and flutes dangling above cobblestones.

“Okay, so we split the guide fee but no porters,” I say as I sort through a box of wool hats marked 'sale: 200 rupees'. "I just don't have the money." 

“I guess the guide can carry some of our gear," Shilpa replies. 

“Since you have to get back for Dashin, I'm going to trek the last section solo.” (Dashin is Nepal's Christmas)

"You are crazy."

      And so the itinerary was set: We would trek for 22 days to Kanchenjunga's north and south base camp with a guide. Shilpa would fly back to Kathmandu and I would continue solo through the Milke Dande, a section of the trail my heart was set on after reading this outdated trekking guide a hot outdoorsy guy gave me in Eugene, Oregon when I stayed at his hostel. I imagined returning his guide with pictures from a solo adventure undertaken just like the book's author. 'In the rolling hills of the Milke Dande one can see Kanchenjunga and the whole Himalayan range from Sikkim to Everest.'  This promised view seemed to be perfect closure for the trek, looking back to where I walked, but more importantly, I wanted to know I could walk alone.

       I spent the summer idolizing the authors who inspired me to follow their eastern footsteps: The Heart of he World by Ian Baker, A Journey Across Tibet by Sorrel Wilby, My Journey to Tibet By Alexander Davis Neil. My trek already felt mickey mouse compared to these epic journeys into landscapes far more barren than Nepal's trails lined with tea houses.

“Pick out a hat already or we are going to be late for the doctor,” Shilpa says before picking up the pace like a Nepali New Yorker. Undistracted by sale racks, she weaves us out of Thamel and onto the main road. Popping her head into taxi after taxi, she finds one that would cost me triple.

      The first trekking preparation on Shilpa's 'to do' list is: 'doctor/meds.' I join her on rounds of annual doctor appointments around the city. It was in these offices that I realized the adventure I was really seeking to trek was through the landscapes in my heart, one barren to the idea of motherhood. To arrive perfect and complete enlightenment, 'the view' from which I sought to perform the sacred dance of Vajrayogini, a Buddhist dakini, was only possible through becoming a devout Buddhist, not a wife, nor a mother, a nor maid or any form of domestication that would hinder my practice time. If only I knew then what I know now.

Round one

     'Valley Maternity Nursing Center' is a foreign funded women's care center that opens after five when the doctors leave their hospital jobs. The waiting room is filled with mostly pregnant kurtas, a tradition style of dress, the colors as vibrant as the carnelian streaks from morning puja on their foreheads. The glass bangle bracelets worn by married women holding squirming babies, jingle with the giggles of their toddlers playing on the floor. Indian soap-operas silence some of the otherwise chatty women. I refill my water bottle from the communal machine for the second ultra-sound. “Blatter not full. Come back later,” the nurse said over an hour ago when I laid on the beach towel covered examination table, my head on a pillow case stained with hair oil. The doctor casually sipped her tea in between the women who entered the tiny room with a light knock, thus interrupting each other's exam. We are all women here aren't we? I thought of my gyno at home: the sterile white cold room, his blue scrubs and plastic hands with metal objects ready to prob one's insides. Wearing a soft pink sari as her uniform, the older doctor asked questions that guided her intuition and warm ungloved hands to my problem: ovarian cysts. My intuition trusted hers. I didn't need confirmation of an ultrasound, but complied out of courtesy.

“I can't hold it anymore!” Shilpa knocks for me and within minutes more blue space gel is squirted onto my belly. The nurse's gold and maroon paisley printed cotton scarf and matching gold and ruby rings glide across my belly. I close my eyes and listen to her bangles delicate music and try to take my mind off needing to pee as she presses the wand deeper into my abdomen.

“You married?” I feel my chest tighten, my breath stops.

“No. Why? Am I pregnant?”I look at the monitor, a screen that looks like cloudy blue like a planet in outer space. No oxygen seems to exist until she answers.

“Why did you come in for an ultra-sound?” she looks at me. And it hits me. In her eyes I am western woman without rules, without ritual, without reverence. I won't allow myself to wear Nepal's bangles I love so much until I get back to America's shores, the land where we make my own meaning.

“The doctor thinks I have cysts.” The nurse smiles as if I'd said I have cookies. Her smirk says I'll pour you some milk. She squints into the monitor, and her grin fades with concentration. She begins mapping constellations across my planet. Clicking the mouse to draw lines in the small black holes that I notice in the blue cloud representing my ovaries.

“Oh, yes.” She prints out her constellations on a glossy photo paper and wipes the blue space gel off my belly with a shredded piece of clean cloth. “Take to the doctor.” She hands me the photo of my outer space, which should be the inner space that I understand by now! I feel like an misunderstood alien not only in her eyes, but in own my skin. What have I done to my body?

I sit back down next to Shilpa and her mother, happy she doesn't understand English. “So? Are you-” I ask.

“No.” She looks sad. I feel guilty for being ecstatic that I'm not. She made this appointment to check her body's health because she wants to have a baby with her husband. To her its the miracle I deny.

“I have cysts.” Tears stream from unknown facet of denial.

“Don't worry. I have issues too.”

We wait another two hours to be called back in so the doctor can deliver our equally bad fates. If the cysts grow one more millimeter I must be operated on immediately. I promise her I will find herbs and refuse the list of prescriptions. “I want to see both in two weeks.” Shilpa and I nod knowing next week we will be trekking.

Round two The Dentist office.

Dentist: You have some cavities. Would you like them filled?

Me: How much?

Dentist: For the cleaning and filling 800 rupees. (8 bucks!)

Me: Great!

Dentist: open wide.

Me: FFffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!

Dentist: Americans, so sensitive.

There is no such thing a Novocaine in Nepal.

Round three The eye doctor

This appointment I request, ready to embrace an easier denial I've been carrying for years: I need glasses. We visit the number one eye doctor in Nepal, “Asia's game changer!” according to the newspaper article Shilpa's mother proudly shows me before calling him with genuine concern, as if my eyes were hers. Her love and kindness is the heart of so many Nepali women, in whose homes I was made to feel not only welcomed, but loved as if I was their child too.

The eye doctor returns to Nepal from his global cataract conference in China during my final week in Nepal. Living up to his name- he changes my game. I returned to America seeing in HD, a definition so crisp and vivid some days I don't want to look. Nepal's lens magnifies how in America we suffer from having too much.... too much stuff...too many tasks...too many choices....

         The kind of choices we make in supermarkets. Rice from every country! I wander Wholefood's bright clean isles for the first time in six months, in a state of awe. Until I can't decide which rice will make me the most moral and healthy. I crave the simplicity of Nepali rice sold from a woven sack. Good rice vs bad rice, the familiar game arises. But something in me sees through the emotional saga of what rice. Anxiety is replaced with laughter. I realize the impermanence of this rice and this body that will eat it. I realize this teachings I've spent the last month hearing about conceptually in retreat for a split second, and carries me through the isles. I fill my cart with sheer gratitude. And sadness. Images of hungry eyes that met mine in Kathmandu are still vivid and blinking. 

     By the time I reach the check out line, the impermanence of my bank account hits. In America I'm poor. Back to the reality that here organic food is a privilege, whereas in Nepal, fresh food is affordable by most. In Kathmandu street food is on every corner: baskets of fruits, carts of fried sweets, skewers of meat. Restaurants served thali a daily lentil and rice meal for 150 rupees ($1.50) which most people seem to afford; not so say some people don't starve. In the countryside, agricultural livelihood is the way of life. The concept of America's food deserts (places where fresh food does not reach) did not exist in Nepal.

         I long for Nepali rice harvested in my trekking guide's village and cooked on an open flame beneath the Himalayan canopy of more stars than I ever knew existed returns as I pour the plastic bag of rice onto an electric stove top. I am just like the Nepalis: We want a different life.

         Most Nepali's I met in Kathmandu and the villages near where I trekked, go aboard in search of a modern conveniences, but something deeper too. They want to work in systems that are fair. “If you work hard, you can get ahead in America,” Shilpa says, “In Nepal people remain in their gar (family home) and most can't afford higher education. And a college doesn't mean a good job. Kathmandu is overcrowded and in the villages there is no opportunity. Young Nepalis want out.”

       I think of all the immigrants lined up to work in the American factory I take for granted. I don't believe in this machine, yet reap the benefits. I been clocking out in hopes its different somewhere else. 

         Unable to see greatness is born from the muck of our weakness, I look through duality's lens. I see the pollution coming out of the paper mill's rear, destroying rivers as I look down upon the clean white paper I write upon in search of  'the view' I ventured east to realize.

   

     Back on Peak's Island in Maine, I take off my glasses for a break from HD.