After a quick, illness-be-damned decision Tuesday morning, I left Kanchan and the comforts of her home to board a plane for the extraordinarily bumpy thirty minute ride to Pokhara, where I’ll spend the duration of my summer. Pokhara is west of Kathmandu and Nepal’s second biggest city, as well as one of the major departure points for all manner of long distance trekking during the peak tourist season, September through December. As such, Pokhara has become fairly developed, and has many resources of the level you would expect to find in a major city of a less-developed country.
Pokhara is situated south and southeast of the Annapurna mountains (which are a major segment of Nepal’s famous Himalayas), and on clear days the mountains appear in the sky as if by magic, higher and more crisply beautiful than anything you could have imagined, were you to try and picture how they would look on the many cloudy and hazy days that dominate the off-season. I will be based out of Pokhara in part because it is a good access point from which to do research in the western half of Nepal, but largely because it is the location of Ban (Forest, in Nepali) Campus, or the Institute of Forestry. The IOF has bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. level programs in forestry, and is truly spiritual kin of FES – a relationship that, in my only-occasionally-humble opinion, should be formalized. I’ll return to IOF in a future post, but wanted to at least introduce this amazing place that has become, for me, a temporary home.
On this morning, however, my only other option for getting to Pokhara was a seven-hour, stop-ridden, dusty, bouncy, and uncomfortable bus ride from Kathmandu that some might generously call “the scenic route,” but which is in fact along a winding road that curves through the hills of Nepal, dramatically opening up the west despite being marked along its face by the potholes and pockets of rubble that one anticipates along such a well-used road, in a country with the kind of sweeping hillsides and copious rain that will effortlessly sweep the roadway’s foundation and little bits of the road itself right downhill. I expect to take this local bus along that road at some point in the future (because I love an adventure), but with my two overweight bags, overstuffed school backpack, camera case, topo map tube, and lingering bits of illness, all I was interested in on Tuesday morning was efficiency. And the Buddha Air (say it with me: Boodt–ahhh Ayre) rock skipper is nothing if not a modicum of simple efficiency.
The itty-bitty plane takes off from the domestic part of the Kathmandu airport, a slight, orangey-brick building that has “I was built in the seventies” written all over it, both for its antique Nepali decor, with thick, swirling devanagari script written over doorways, gold and deep red paint just beginning to chip off the walls in the main building, and for the seventies-style office building floor, the kind of fake amalgamated rock pattern that is easy to sweep, and hard to scuff. The information counters, money-changers’ booths, and other services are set up in a way which calls to mind the little storefronts found throughout Nepal, where one long building, garage-style in construction, is set up with an open face to the street and the warm Nepali air, long overhanging roofs of corrugated iron leaning out into the street, catching the monsoonal rains that will soon thunder down and then pour off, all guarded by garage-style doors which are pulled down and locked with a modest padlock. The interior counters lock with padlocks all the same, and behind them sit various Nepali workers, a little bored, sometimes intrigued by their foreign guests, and very willing, should you accidentally overpay, to keep the change.
On this trip I am in the domestic terminal, however, which has less of a passe international air about it and more of the comfortable grunginess of real Nepal. At the door I am stopped (carrying all three bags, and struggling mightily) to have my flight ticket checked, before putting my items into the X-ray machine. There are no bins – everything, laptop included, rattles along on the conveyor and bounces down the other side, one on top of the other. The guard there, if asked whether film will be able to go through safely, will nod in the way of one who perhaps speaks your language but may not, in that moment, wish to extend the requisite effort to do so, and then you are in the terminal. The terminal itself is one long room with booths modeled after those of vendors at a carnival, flanked in the spaces in between by large, old school scales on which one’s bags are weighed, with a great big meter on the top and a hand that swivels around like that of a clock, to indicate the weight. I feel an uncanny love for these scales, for reasons I can’t enumerate or understand. I find I always want to climb aboard and wait them out as the little hand swings furiously around and then settles on my weight (which is certainly more than is allowable for a checked bag).
I was concerned on this trip that I would be charged about $20 in overweight bag fees, as Kanchan and I had called to inquire about weight limits from her house, and knew the per kilo charge for weight excess, as well as how far over my massive bags were. But it has been my experience on this trip (both in the US and in Nepal) that being a tall, blue-eyed woman with an open face (which in other contexts gets me into bad situations – as in, let’s be best friends for the next ten hours of this flight! And I’ll tell you alllllll about my life!!) often helps more than it hurts, and I have learned over the years that a very genuine sounding, “Hello, how are you today?” will relax most airport staff into letting you (and your extra six kilos of weight) slip by, unnoticed. This special treatment continued in the domestic terminal, although perhaps more because it looked like my baggage might legitimately explode and necessitate a serious repacking job by airport staff if opened.
But really, let’s be honest – it should have been opened, and rifled through. TSA checked both my bags on the way out of the country, according to the little slips of paper which fluttered to the floor when I opened them at Kanchan’s, and this is a good thing. My baggage should have looked just like a bomb, on the scanner – all my electronic devices’ wires were in one small bag and thus overlapping on an X-ray image; I had a dense, thick pile of lawn-style flags, complete with metal wires to stick them into the ground; I have two cameras, a GPS unit, and a microphone all in one bag; and I had trekking poles duct-taped onto the side, for goodness sake. I radiated security alerts. But no one checked me in the domestic terminal, and I happily handed over my ungainly bags, breathed a sigh of relief at avoiding the “hefty” $19 fee, and cruised through to the waiting area.
Making my way through security was simple enough – men and women are separated, and you step behind a curtain to a waiting, very bored young policewoman, who very thoroughly runs her hands along your breasts and between your legs, in case you, as a woman, thought that the Nepali sense of propriety would prevent security from searching you there, and allow you to transport unnamed contraband across the country. When nothing more interesting than a bra strap was detected I was allowed to continue to the waiting area, and then to the little shuttle bus to the even littler plane.
On the shuttle on this trip I noticed that one of the youngish Nepali guys my age was perspiring heavily and coughing a lot, even though it wasn’t that warm out. Newly Swine-flu-averse, I made a mental note to avoid sitting next to him at all costs, and instead plopped myself into the first seat in the plane when I saw that the only others left in the slender 25-seater were the three across the back, bus-style. This plane has one seat on each side of an extremely narrow aisle, and the single stewardess (who is generally younger than I am and always female) walks through the plane shortly after take-off and gives out newspapers and little wads cotton to stuff your ears in case you want to deaden the sound of the engine. It’s a modest affair, very efficient, and hard to turn down, when it means saving six and a half hours worth of travel time.
But of course a moment after I’d sat down, relieved to avoid the concerning cougher, the flight attendant asked me very politely to “please get out of her seat,” and where did I find myself but in a human sandwich between Swine Flu dai (older brother in Nepali) and his buddy, looking straight down the central aisle, into the cockpit, over the control panel, and right out into the clouds. Alas, alas!
On any other flight, this vantage point would have been immensely cool. I am a huge fan of flying and flight, and am normally the woman who leans forward with eager anticipation, eyes wide, upon take-off, never ceasing to marvel at the moment when the back wheels leave the tarmac, and the plane lifts up, and soars, rather than falling to the earth like every bit of logic I can employ would imply. I even, sometime in college, decided that if I had to have an ultimate fall-back plan, a plan for if everything else I ever wanted for myself failed, I would be a stewardess. Not a pilot (it takes too long and too much money to get all the requisite flying hours under one’s belt) but a stewardess. Over the years I’ve flown in a lot of small craft, both because of my predisposition towards soaring through the sky, and because of a combination of experiences sky-diving, seeing the Nazca Lines in Peru, and my friendship with Eric, from high school, who got his pilot’s license over the span of time when we both lived in DC and regularly hung out. If I became a flight attendant, I figured, I could fly all over the world for free, meet all different kinds of people, and never stop “taking off.”
But given that my last Buddha Air flight, when I traveled to Nepal in March, was the first one of my life that left me pining for a landing – and keeping in mind that that flight had lasted a scant thirty minutes – I wasn’t quite into the view this time around. Very few things legitimately scare me in life (and the ones that do are generally unutterably banal, like cockroaches, or stinging and biting insects, and mice), but that last flight on BA left me contemplating crossing myself and saying a Hail Mary, just in case. On this flight I noticed with relief that there was a Catholic Priest-cum-missionary on our plane, little white neck collar thingey and all, so let him do the Hail-Marying for us both as we took off, instead focusing on not looking into the clouds, which were completely opaque, while we flew in a rather small plane, that was probably quite ancient and recycled from a larger fleet and a distant country, while in the country with the absolute tallest mountains in all of the world, which of course have a habit of hiding behind said opaque clouds. Because if I did look into those clouds, that might make me panic…even more. And so instead as we bounced, bopped, shimmied and shook our way through the clouds above Nepal I read the American celebrity gossip news in the newspaper, drank some soda, and repeatedly checked my watch. To see if we were landing yet.
And at long last the intercom chimed on, although to my horror I heard an automatic recording instructing us to “Prepare for Evacuation” as I watched the pilots’ forearms flash a little more rapidly across the control panels, cursing them every time it looked like they were gesticulating in ordinary conversation. Because pilot-conversation must involve actually holding onto the controls…right?
But as it turns out, ‘Prepare for Landing’ sounds a lot like ‘Prepare for Evacuation’ to my ears, as rather than bail (which I was actually beginning to mentally prepare myself to do – where do those mask thingeys pop down from?), we landed…hard. Very hard. The plane bounced up and down a bit as the tail end of the plane swung back and forth across the tarmac, in a way I’ve never experienced before, the edge of the runway getting closer first on this side of the plane, now on that one as I looked rapidly back and forth between the windows. All of the passengers braced themselve as even the most casual fliers dropped their newspapers to hold onto the arms of their seats, and I ran contingency plans for the different ways I would cope, should the plane continue right off the runway and into the adjacent rice fields.
But alas, or perhaps of course, in the end we were just fine. We landed safely and quickly, wiggly tail-end aside, and in short order and with a deep breath I was walking down the narrow steps, straight onto the runway, and towards the even smaller Pokhara airport. And it wasn’t until that moment, as I pulled my head up from the tarmac and looked around to see the city of Pokhara laid out to both sides, that I realized I had arrived. “Dear summer of 2009,” I thought, “I am finally here. Let’s do it.”
-M-
