Sapana- Nepali for dream

      

      Shilpa and I board Buddha Air's small plane filled with Nepalis heading home for Dashin, Nepal's Christmas. I am seated across from a young couple I met earlier at the ticket counter. They frantically swapped around the contents of their luggage, carefully packing bottles of Johnny Walker Black and Green amongst boxes of designer perfumes before reweighing the bag. They spend the flight over the majestic Himalayas on their swarvorski crystal studded iphones. Like most flights everyone starts talking only when the plane's wheels hit the runway. Plane etiquette is like a bar. The awkward feeling of being so close to the person next to you for an hour only you attempt to meet each other right before getting up to leave. I learn they have been living in Dubai working as housekeepers at a big resort. Meeting this couple en route to their village for the first time in many years remind me of the exploitation of migrants in the wealthy UAE. Most are promised big salaries, but end up so in debt they cannot return home. They are held like slaves working in the most horrific conditions. I wonder if the couple's story is like the ones I read about, but I don't press Shilpa for more translating. This language barrier forces me to really think about what I want to know. My small talk is becoming painfully apparent. It is as if Nepal is silently asking, what is you really want to know?

     The couple were the first of many young people I would soon see along the paths heading out of Taplejung, the city still nine hours of away by jeep from where we have just landed in the Jhapa District. One boy, carrying a Weenie the pooh bag with the handles across his forehead (Sherpa style), told me he was bringing fresh vegetables to his grandparents who no longer farm. “All those rice fields,” he says pointing to the overgrown tiered fields, "are farmed anymore. There are no young people who stay. Everyone wants to go to Kathmandu. Or even better, out of Nepal.” I walked behind him for miles thinking how I too could not wait to get off the farm I was an intern on two years ago in Maine. I counted down the weeds until I could get back to my book or some writing that simulated my mind. Knowing the phenomena of brain drain leaves countries like Nepal dependent on foreign aid and jeopardizes the very communities I trekked through, I can't say I wouldn't do the same thing, yet I trek along romanticizing agricultural livelihood. Like the Nepalis in pursuit of western materialism, I am in pursuit of their eastern wisdom. The forbidden is always tastier.

      Descending the plane's steep steps into the humid air, as dense as the lush green fields surrounding the runway outside the city of Bhajarpur, I stand with my pack remembering British Guyana's Krpung airstrip. Krpung is a tiny nearly abandoned 1960s diamond mining city, where I began a trek through the Amazon in 2008. I stride off the final step after Shilpa whispering a prayer. Please don't let this guide get me lost. If he fucks up, I will not blame him.

       Memories of wading through Guyana's Esquiba River's blackwaters by moonlight in search of a lost canoe flood through me as I wait with Shilpa under the shelter along the washed out runway for the taxi that will take us to the jeep. I sit on my overstuffed pack reflecting on my Amazon adventure with Samo, the 60 Guyanese ex-diamond miner my friend, Ashley and I convinced to be our guide. He nearly killed us twice in not knowing the mining trails through the jungle had changed over forty years. The river rose over-night so rapidly that when I awoke at midnight from my hammock to pee my foot dangled into rushing water. I turned the headlamp on see the socks and shirts on clothing line hanging on for dear life as I soon would be too. I began yelling at Samo for everything telling him he must go find the canoe while brave Ashley, a flashlight in her mouth, dives into the rushing black in search of the canoe. Samo and I wait for her. And wait. And wait. "This is your fault! What kind of guide are you? We are Americans, this is your fuckin country and you should know it!" The memory comes so vivid, I can see Samo's terrified brown eyes in my flashlight. While I drift further into remorse, Shilpa, as would become usual, has her head in reality flagging down the taxi. As we drive to meet our new guide I recall one of Chogyam Trungpa's slogan's: Drive all blames into one. I silently vow to do this with this Nepalese guide, Bal Krishna, no matter what.

     Writing this, a year later, this vow taxes my every last cell of patience with Bal Krisha who does the same to the payments I send him for a little girl who continues to force my knotted ways to untangle.
 
She was still hundreds of miles away.  
 
      Local buses, eager to get their Dashin passengers off and new ones aboard, end up sliding off the roads and down mountain sides. Seeing news footage of such buses attempting to pass one another on narrow cliff like roads without guard rails in most places was the deciding factor to fly and not to be cheap by a taking said bus from Kathmandu to Taplejung, the city where our twenty day trek to Mount Kanchenjunga would begin and was suppose to end.

     Shilpa and I finally meet our “private jeep” as the itinerary says only to begin collecting the trekking agency's entire family plus one girl whose home was on the way. Apparently, the $180 jeep ride was the ticket to get all their children home for Dashin from Bhajrapat, just twenety miles from the Indian border, where they attend boarding school. The ripped off feeling burns in my chest. So this is why we didn't fly directly to Taplejung? It wasn't anything to do with the bad reputation of Tara air!


        This burn, this grasping of money each time I negotiated with Sujan, the youngest of the seven brothers who started Estasty Nepal, the Thamel based travel agency, tightens my familiar knots. My palm clenchs around foreign bills whenever I travel to the places where I am seen as a walking white ATM. Wondering how much more they are charging the American follows like desperately needing to pee when all the toilets around trigger gag-reflex the instant one steps inside the usually dark room with a hole in the ground. My palm feels like my blatter pressing against my stomach making my thoughts violently agitated, unable to concentrate, all I want to do is release myself/call the vendor out for his price gouging, but can't knowing I need this raingear. I must hold it as I must behold the deeper truth: I have the money. I buy things at twice the price/at least I peed. I can slightly relax into even more unsettling fact that perhaps he needs the money as much as I need the gear: we both are trying to survive. Only his is without choice. His children must eat, whereas I am choosing to put myself in dangerous alpine conditions for no other reason than: its an adventure; which to me is as necessary as food. Life without adventures is like food without salt. 

    My tight-wad palm high fives itself with At least I am not that bad whenever I watch the Isrealis miliant like bartering. They win by exhausting the Nepalis seemingly deeper sense of humanness. I am guilty of romantizing Nepalis, but the gentleness beneath their facade of businessman humbles my heart each time I watch them sell something and then laugh with their fellow vendors or be laughed at. Such a game it is to them, whereas, so many foreigners like myself, are so dead serious.

     The nine hour jeep ride through roads morphing into creeks as the mountain run off inches half way up the tires has everyone on the edge of their seat. One of the twin boys heaves over everytime we stop. When he is finally too weak to puke out the window anymore, he falls asleep. His head bangs against the glass until I put my hat there as a pillow wondering where his mother is. At mid-day we stop in the famous Ilman, land of tea fields. I weave through the labyrinth of waist high dark green glossy leafed tea bushes while everyone finishes lunch inside the roadside tea house. Beyond the fields are the mountains I would traverse. A rainbow appears as I head back to the jeep where I see everyone waiting. “How do you say rainbow in Nepali?” I ask the sick little boy who appears better now.“Indrini,” he shyly replies. This first word in Nepali I learned (beyond hello, thank you and how much) became the opening line of a song I wrote with Shilpa while trekking:
“ilam mati indrini hacio” “the rainbows above ilam are smiling.” A song that was inspired by the child I would soon meet whose name reminds one: its all a dream.

         By midnight the bumpy ride not only has everyone in the jeep feeling nauesa, but the jeep itself seems to be losing its senses. The headlights work when they feel like it, forcing Shilpa and I to be the jeep's eye. We hold our flashlight out the window as the jeep wades across another landslide. At last, the road reaches the mountaintop. A canopy of stars twinkle like the lights in the valley below. We are only a few miles from the Taplejung Hotel, where Shilpa and I would crawl into stiff sheets and ignore the manager's knocking at 7am... 8am ....9am....10am, "Miss, hello? Guide was waiting." Such waiting on behalf would become the guide's dance with Shilpa and I, the out of shape dancers.

     We finally stumble downstairs into the lobby around 11am. Twenty minutes of downloading a single email, I receive the reply from my parents. Hello Dearie,
Might have to evacuate due to Hurricane Matthew. Killed hundreds in Haiti and is heading for South Florida as a class five....

“Miss, its really time to go. We are already behinde schedule,” Bal Krisha says and would come to say almost every morning for the next twenty two days as he pried me away from my journal. I reluctantly power off my ipad and step into the muddy littered streets leading out of Taplejung to Bal Krishna's village, Hangdewa, home to his family and few neighbors and a small school that was founded by an English woman, who I would end up in close relations with upon returning to America as an offical sponsor of her newest student. But all of this was still as far away the Himalayas looming on the horizon past the rice fields and ablone river visible from Bal Krishna's traditional mud home. The abode home was painted like all the Nepali houses in the Himalayan foothills: white, trimmed with cobalt blue and left naturally terra cotta at the base. Thatched roofs are slowly being replaced by zinc panels. Bal Krishna's wife, Tikka, has just given birth to their third daughter. She sat with the baby in her lap and their five year old, Jessica, bashfully was clinging to her wide legs.

The eldest daughter, Monica,home from Kathmandu, was still reconciling with the fact that her cell phone has no reception. Shilpa and I busied ourselves with repacking our backpacks contents into the dufflebag Bal Krishna would carry as our guide/porter. We repacked selfishlessly trying to put as much weigh into his pack. Some items were to be left behind, many of which Shilpa thoughtfully brought along were it not for my naïve scrutiny.  “We don't need so many shirts. Two is fine.”

“But if they get wet we need more changes?”

“Where are we going to put them?”

“Where your books are. Choose one!”

“Fine, put the heavy food in the duffle bag for him to carry.”

“How many socks do you have?”

Back and forth we went, sorting out what felt like all the essential: should I bring my left arm or my right?

    Such an act, would happen for the next few days between our packs and the duffle bag, until we eased into that smooth rhythmn which harmonized the more we trekked stride in stride. Not only did our notes begin to resonate (me always lagging behind, Bal Krisha blazing ahead and Shilpa, the metronome holding us in time, occupied the middle) they created music as we shared our our beds on freezing way below zero nights, our meals when food was little and most of all the stories that reminded us how similar our very different lives were. Such music was, for now, still an off key melody as Bal Krisha could not close the pack, nor did he figure out that he could carry the duffle bag inside his backpack. So terrible I felt that second day as I watched him hike with the duffle bag strap around his neck and balanced on his chest and his own gear on his back, as I skipped along with less than 20 pounds. Even though other Europeans walked with nothing more than camera and water bottle leading their entourage of heavy laden porters shlepping all their extensive camping gear because they did not want to stay in teahouses, I still felt guilty. This was only the beginning of my porter morality dilemma which occupied much of the trek. The ultiamte realization was that while I carried so little on my back, I carried so much in my head. This being the notable difference between myself and the porters I befriended along the way.

I see now how hard physical work creates a steady and humble mind. There are, ofcourse, exceptions to any grandoise statement. Exception: the drunk porters and the American woman who cannot turn off her big deal theory of what the meaning of life is about.

       

   We trek for three days to Lelep, where I met Sapana, the little girl who unknowingly forced me to grow up and take responsibility for a situation that would change our lives forever.