Escape From Kathmandu Read online

  But when I left Kunga Norbu at the Tibetan camp in Patan and went back to the Hotel Star to approach George about it, he was reluctant. “No way,” he said. “Not a chance. You and your guru buddy already nearly killed me.”

  “Ah come on,” says I. “It’s just a little road project we need stopped.”

  “No way, Freds! I have to hassle with the bureaucrats here all the time, why would I deliberately expose myself to more?”

  “That’s just it, George. We need an expert. And listen, there’s more to it than I can tell you. You know, mystical reasons.”

  George frowned and said “Now don’t you go trying to twilight zone me again, Freds,” meaning I wasn’t to step outside the two-and-a-half-foot radius of his Betty Crocker worldview. But he had already been dragged outside that circle once or twice before and once outside you can never get all the way back in again no matter how hard you try, which was why there was a little crease of worry growing between George’s eyes as he wagged his finger at me.

  “Come on,” says I.

  “No fucking way.”

  It turned out he was in a bad mood because of something he had read in The International Herald Tribune. There he was, kicked back in his lawn chair, soaking up the morning rays on the sun deck located on the roof of the Hotel Star lobby, occasionally chatting with two Danish gals in bikinis, stoned and eating Nebico wafers and drinking a Budweiser and reading his week-old copy of the Tribbie, and it should have been Kathmandu in Monsoon Heaven but he was sitting there all dejected because of an article he had just read. He tore through the pages to show it to me. “See that? Can you believe it? A group from the University of Washington used a satellite and damned if they didn’t find out that K2 is taller than Everest.”

  “I would have thought that would be hard to judge from a satellite.”

  “‘K2 is now known to be 29,064 feet tall, while Everest’s official height is still listed at 29,028 feet.’ Can you believe it?” He was really aggrieved. “I mean all those expeditions to Everest, all the heroics and people getting killed, and all for the second highest mountain? It’s too fucking ironic, man. It’s horrible.”

  “Especially since you yourself are now amongst those deluded climbers who risked all for number two,” says I.

  “Don’t say that so loud,” he says, glancing around. “But sure I’m disappointed, I mean, aren’t you?”

  “We had to drag your ass up that mountain, George. You hated it.”

  “Of course I did, it was a stupid thing the way you guys did it, no support, no plan. But, you know—since we did do it, I mean that was the whole point. We bagged the biggie.”

  “We can always take you up K2.”

  No reply from George.

  “In fact,” says I, seeing an opening, “Kunga Norbu may just have to climb it to fulfill his obligation to Dorjee Lama. And of course his companions would be mystically obliged to accompany him.”

  “Ha,” George said, the crease between his eyes getting deeper.

  “And you know one of Kunga’s powers is getting people to do what he wants. Like when he convinced you to go for the peak of Chomolungma.”

  He frowned. “Just don’t tell him about this recalculation thing.”

  “Of course I don’t really have time to tell him about that, George. Being as how we’ve got this other matter we need your help on. Your help here in Kathmandu. Just making a few trips into the government offices, in your spare time. During the monsoon when you got nothing to do and are near dead with boredom anyway.”

  “All right, all right.” He sighed. “So what’s this big problem.”

  “They’re building a road to Chhule.” I’m going to call the village that even though it is not the village’s real name.

  “So?”

  “George,” says I. “They’re building a road into an unspoiled area of the Himal, where there’s never been any road before!”

  “Ah,” says he. “That is a drag. Chalk off one more good trekking area. But that’s not a very popular route anyway, is it?”

  That was George all over. Like a lot of Western climbing freaks in Nepal he saw the country as no more than the ultimate mountain playground, with plenty of hash and a lot of exotic quaint cheap local culture on the side. A place where for a couple thou a year you could live like cut-rate royalty providing you didn’t mind disease and bad food. So he grooved in the sun and led his treks and climbed the mountains and paid no mind to the rest of it, and like the other longtime regulars he had gotten to a point where he hated the tourists because they were ignorant, and despised the locals because they were ignorant, until in fact there was nobody in Nepal doing it exactly right except him and his buddies, and as the saying goes, even they were suspect.

  So he didn’t understand at first. But he wasn’t as bad as some, or so I believed. “Come on, George, let me take you to Marco Polo’s for lunch, I need to tell you more about this in private. There’s ramifications, like I told you.”

  So George put on his T-shirt and his Vuarnets and we went downstairs past the zoned-out clerks in the lobby. It was noonish, hot and muggy, the day’s rains about to hit, and everyone in the hotel looked like they were in a trance except for the woman with the kid strapped to her back bent over out front halfway through her daily task of sweeping the courtyard with a hand whisk. Then we were out the hotel gates and past the Tantric Used Book Shop and into Thamel, the hotel quarter of Kathmandu. This area gets pretty dead in the monsoon but that only meant the taxi drivers and carpet shop people and hash dealers and money changers and beggars were all more eager than ever to attract our business. “Hey, Mr. No!” they yelled at George, laughing at him as he hopped down the muddy strip between puddles doing his usual “No, no, no, no,” routine to everyone he passed, no matter if they had accosted him or not. He was relaxed and breezy, having a good time, doing his turn and everyone digging it, your typical L.A. thrillseeker, about six two and built like a quarterback, dark-haired and good-looking in a Steve Garvey-gone-to-seed style and so cool you could use him to kill warts, so cool in fact that all the street folk actually enjoyed his No No No routine, and all was well except for the fact that they were as low on rupees after George passed as before. I really should learn to do that myself but I haven’t yet and so I usually walk the neighborhood with no rupes at all on me so I can’t be giving them all away, but this time I had what it would take to buy George and me lunch, and who did we run into but one of the local beggars we saw all the time, a guy who cruised Thamel homeless with his little daughter in tow, they would stand there holding hands and the man would smile a gap-toothed smile and the little girl about six would do likewise and they would both hold out their free hands toward you and they did tolerably well that way, certainly I could never resist them, and in fact on this day after George noed them I gave them our lunch money, figuring that I would get George to bail me and then it could be said that he had helped out the beggar and his little sidekick, whilst I had bought the lunch as I intended to.

  George was unaware of my intentions, but when he looked back and noticed what I was doing he was still disgusted with me. “You only encourage them, Freds.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  George had no sympathy whatsoever for that beggar or any other, or for any of the rest of the street operators for that matter. Like one time I remember after we had had a particularly bad time getting down the narrow main street he had looked back at the whole crowd of them, all staring at us, and he had flipped out. “They’re just like bowling pins in a bowling alley, aren’t they Freds? Standing there they look like you could, hey, wait just a sec,” and he had rushed into the German Pumpernickel Bakery and come back out with a big dark angelfood cake which did upon reflection indeed resemble a bowling ball in weight and general consistency, and he punched finger and thumb holes in it and took a long run and wind-up, and he bowled that cake right down the middle of them, laughing like a loon.

  “You are risking reincarnation as something
small and revolting,” I told him. But he didn’t hear me.

  * * *

  This time, however, we got to lunch without incident.

  “Look, George,” I told him as we ate pizza in our little private window nook at Marco Polo’s, “you know what happens when they put a road through one of the hill villages.”

  “People drive there.”

  “Exactly! People drive there, people drive away from there. The whole village goes to hell. Wiped out forever.”

  “Don’t get too melodramatic, Freds.”

  “I’m not! You know Jiri?”

  “Yeah.” He wrinkled his nose.

  “That was a beautiful village until the road was built to it.”

  He didn’t believe me. “Freds, they study shit like that before they do it, they make sure it’s gonna be okay.”

  Now this was such a stupid thing to say that I knew he didn’t mean it. He was just putting me off. “Cockroach.”

  “Where?”

  “That’s what you’re gonna come back as.”

  I stared out the window. Usually the view out the third-story window of the Marco Polo is one I enjoy, the colorful carpets on display at street level, the balconies above covered by tick mattresses faintly steaming in the sun, above that prayer flags and telephone wires tangled in the air, on roofs so old that great lawns of weedy green and yellow grass grow out of them. And then the huge pines of the palace in the background, with maybe a glimpse of the Himal beyond. But on that day the monsoon clouds were lowering the boom, the carpets and mattresses had been hauled in and the buildings looked ramshackle in the dark rainy air. Back in the gloom of the restaurant’s main room diners were steadfastly munching away trying to ignore the notion that they had been orwelled off to a world where all food tasted like cardboard, not just pizza dough but also tomato paste and cheese and vegetables, everything in fact except for the big twisty black Chinese mushrooms that writhed on the slices looking just like the bizarre fungoid growths they were and suggesting with every rank rubbery chew that a bad mistake in mycology had been made back at the canning factory.

  It was not a cheery sight. And I had a stubborn wily lazy friend to deal with, and it was clear it was going to take a serious breach of security to get him to do what we wanted. “George,” I said wearily, “can you keep a secret?”

  “Sure.”

  “This is important, George. This is like Nathan and Buddha, you know?”

  “Okay,” he said, looking offended. “Did I ever tell anyone about that?”

  “I don’t know. But you sure as hell can’t tell anyone about this. See there’s a village just beyond the end of this road they’re planning to build, in the next valley over. And this is no ordinary village. It’s Kunga Norbu’s village.”

  “I thought he was Tibetan.”

  “It’s a Tibetan village.”

  “A Tibetan village in Nepal?”

  “It’s up there on the border, right on the crest where the border gets a little chancy. Up there in ——.” Which is one of them semi-independent little old kingdoms that are part of Nepal but stick into the body of Tibet, following curlicues in the crest of the Himalayan range.

  George nodded. He knew that a lot of the highland Nepalis were Tibetan in origin, the Sherpas in the east, the Bhotians in the west (“Bhotian” meaning “Tibetan” in Nepalese), so that this situation wasn’t that uncommon. “That’s near where we let Buddha go,” he said.

  “That’s right. It’s a special area.” I told him how wonderful it was, like the Khumbu only completely untouched, with Buddha and a lot of other yetis living in the high forest, and all kinds of other special properties, and he chewed and nodded and didn’t look at all like he was going to do anything about it.

  “So what’s the secret?” he said.

  He just wanted to know for the sake of knowing a secret, I could tell. But there is a big difference between knowledge that has been pressed on you and knowledge you have asked for, so I leaned over quick and said in a real low voice,

  “The village is actually Shangri-La.”

  “Come on, Freds. That’s a made-up name out of a movie. Lost Horizon.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t think you’d know that much about it. The real name is Shambhala. Whatever you call it, it’s the same place.”

  “I thought Shambhala was in northern Tibet, or Mongolia.”

  “They’ve spread a lot of disinformation about it. But it’s up on the border, and it’s in big trouble because of this road they’re planning to build.”

  George stared at me. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Was I kidding you about Kunga Norbu being a tulku? Were Nathan and I kidding you about Buddha?”

  He chomped away for a while thinking about it. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “You wouldn’t lie, Freds, but you could get fooled. I mean, how do you know it’s Shambhala?”

  “I’ve been there. I spent about six months there.”

  He stared at me again. “Freds, just how the hell did you come to spend six months in Shambhala?”

  * * *

  Now you may have wondered about this yourself, and to tell the truth so have I. How did Freds Fredericks, star linebacker for the Razorbacks and all-American vet school dropout, come to be a Tibetan Buddhist monk well acquainted with the sacred hidden valley of Shambhala?

  I don’t really know. Some of us have weird karmas to work through in this life, and that’s all you can say about it. But certainly it began for me in a small way when I was in The Graduate in Davis, California. As I tried to explain to George. I was drinking pitchers of beer in there after an intramural football game around 1976, and I overheard a gal at our picnic table explaining how she couldn’t eat one of their fine hamburgers because she was a vegetarian because she didn’t believe in the killing of animals because she was a Buddhist. And I thought how interesting. And then that night still drunk I was taking a bag of trash from our lab out to the dumpsters behind the building, and when I tossed the bag in I heard a whimper come from inside the dumpster. I checked it out pulling out bags of trash getting spooked by this whimper, and finally I found the source which was a dog that had been used in one of the tutorials. They put them under and then do a variety of surgical work on them to teach how the insides of living animals look, and then they put them down. Happens all the time in vet schools. But this time there had been a fuckup or the dog was especially tough because they hadn’t killed it off, and there it was without its hind legs and most of its intestines, whimpering and looking up at me as if I could help it. The best I could do was to try to put it out of its misery and it snapped weakly at me as I tried hands and boots and plastic bags, it fended off every effort until I broke its neck with the dumpster lid and I wandered for a time and found myself on the women’s softball field feeling horrible. And then I looked up across the street and the parking lot and I saw the round The Graduate sign blinking on and off and something turned in me, what I later understood to be my bodhi or awakening to the true nature of reality, and I said to the softball diamond, “God damn it, I am a Buddhist.”

  I didn’t even know what I meant by it. But I quit vet school and as it turned out some of my buddies were going to Nepal at that same time to score some hash, so I went with them. None of us knew the first thing about Nepal except that it was supposed to be big on hash and Buddhism, and we were right about one so we had a fine time in Kathmandu but after a while we got bored so we decided to go trekking as this seemed to be all the rage there. This was around August 1st, right in the middle of a bad monsoon, but we were so ignorant we had no idea there were trekking seasons and nontrekking seasons, and the people in the shops were happy to rent us gear and so we took off on the bus to Lamosangu and started trekking toward Everest. Naturally the clouds were constant and the trails were deluged, and we ate all the wrong food and drank the water from the streams which looked so clear and clean and so we got horribly sick
, and we were bit all over by leeches and it seemed to us we were not exactly catching on as to what the appeal of this trekking was. I mean we were so ignorant that we thought when they said “mani walls” they were saying “money walls,” we thought that every time we passed a mani wall we were going by the village bank, each stone a thousand-dollar bill or something like that and it seemed to us that they had figured out a very clever way to stop bank robberies, only we were mystified as well, passing wall after wall after wall we said to each other if these folks have got so much cash how come they don’t buy no toilets? Which is stupid if you think about it but we didn’t we just kept on trekking, sick as dogs but bound and determined to catch sight of Everest or die trying, and it was going to be a close thing.

  But one morning I got up early to go out and pee, and I walked out of the teahouse and all the clouds were gone. It was the first time we weren’t completely socked in, we’d never seen anything higher than the top of our hats and had hiked through mist and forest like we were in a lumpy Amazon without the slightest idea of what was all around us, so when I walked out the door that morning I was still completely innocent of any real sight of the Himalayas, and I am from Arkansas. I think that everyone gets their sense of how big things should be from their home and their childhood, and where I came from valleys were farm-sized things, rivers were creeks you could ford most anywhere, and mountains were hills a couple hundred feet high at best—the landscape had a certain scale and that to me was the way things were, that was the natural order, that was what I was used to. So when I walked out that teahouse door in the Dudh Kosi and looked around blinking in the dawn light, deep down in this enormous gap in the world which apparently was a valley which it would take at least a day to cross and a week to walk up—and then, standing behind this mile-deep valley and way, way, way above it, these vertical spiky snow-and-rock monster towers that were obviously unbelievably big mountains—! Well, if I hadn’t clapped my teeth together my heart would have jumped straight out of my mouth. And since that day I have never left the Himalayas.