At the end of my last journal entry (in Greece) I said that the next time I wrote I would be in Asia. Well here I am, but the journey to get here was too interesting to pass up relating...

When I arrived in Frankfurt (25 minutes ahead of schedule thanks to some helpful tailwinds) I immediately inquired if there was a Delta flight out to India that day. The ticket agent said yes, but the flight only went to Bombay and back. The Delhi flight was the next day. Oh well - I had hoped to avoid a night's stay in Frankfurt, but 'twas not to be.

Frankfurt is actually not as bad a city as most people say - sure, it doesn't have a heck of a lot to see tourist-wise, but it's good as a place where you can get things done if you need to. I took advantage of the locale and had a decent meal while I had the chance. I wanted to stay away from the hostel as it had a hospital-like atmosphere, and I had had quite enough of hospitals lately. Went on a sojourn to try and find a copy of Doom II, a computer game, to stick on my notebook for those long train rides. I was unsuccesful, but improbably enough when I ate dinner that night there was a guy in the restaurant sporting a Doom II T-shirt. When I asked him if he had played it yet, he looked at me like I was insane.

I was up like a bolt the next morning to get to the airport on time for my 12:35PM flight to Delhi. I went through a hassle with Delta Security over the Turkish Visa in my passport - "Why did you visit Turkey?" "Because it's there." "Where did you get the money for this trip?" "Out of my bank account." After these and the usual slew of bag-packing questions, and the security lady taking off with my passport twice, I was rather cross.

When I boarded the plane I was not cross. This is because our plane was to be an MD-11, the new McDonnell-Douglas biggy built to challenge the long-haul dominance of the 747 series. It even had the nifty wingtips. But the coolest thing of all was that the plane had a capacity of 260, and the passenger complement for this trip was only 58. Not only did that mean that you had your pick of seats to stretch out on, but that there was now an excellent passenger:crew ratio, something like 4:1, which means that there was excellent service the entire time. I even got bored enough (the electrical system was being goofy so we got no in-flight video) that I spent a great amount of time in the back of the plane with the equally bored crew. Hell, one of the pilots even came back for a while. I don't know how, but I got drafted into the crew and ended up helping to prepare dinner. All this time I was occupying a lavatory charging up my laptop, which produced some amusing moments as passengers tried to figure out why there was a computer siting on the toilet.

As luck would have it, I met an American businessman of Indian descent who was on-route to Delhi on behalf of the US Gov't. We were discussing my plans and I informed him that I would only be staying in Delhi until I could get out to Kathmandu. He insisted that I try to stay in Delhi one more day as this was Diwali, the Hindu new year. I decided to give it a try.

He was kind enough to offer to let me stay in his room at the hotel, and as it was 3AM local time I accepted. It turned out that Uncle Sam was paying for him to stay in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel outside Delhi, and that I was welcome. We got to the hotel and I discovered that the name was apt. This was the first time that I had stayed in a "real" hotel the entire trip - I stayed in a $150 room for free (albeit on the sofa in the room, but the champagne and chocolates consoled me).

In the morning (around 10AM) I caught a cab into town and looked around for a cheapie place to stay for the night. When I got in to Delhi it was not long before I left again. My benefactor of the night before had reccomended that I go to Connaught Circus because it was a "tourist place." What I found was a little too intense for my tastes, with bodies laying around and people shooting off cheap fireworks haphazardly. The place is a squalid trash-heap and I decided that anything had to be better. I'll go back someday, but I just can't ignore my instincts when they are screaming in my ear, "Get out now!"

With that I returned to the airport at around 5PM to see what I could do about getting on the night-flight to Kathmandu. A million years and a wounded dignity later I finally boarded the flight. I pondered how I would explain this to Patricia, who seemed so eager that I get to India, and here I had run away before even 24 hours had elapsed. Oh, well, I'm not big into masochism.

Shortly we landed in Kathmandu, and queued up to change money. I was near the head of this line, so I changed $50 in Amex cheques and dashed off to get my visa. As I pulled up to the front of the line, ready to pay my $25 (1250 rupee) fee, the clerk said, "$25 please." I said, "Right-how many rupees?" "No rupees. Only dollars or Indian rupees." "Well, I've got traveler's cheques but no cash..." "Sorry, must have cash dollars." Bloody hell... Off I went to change a cheque for some dollars, not as simple a task as one might think - I had to wait through the whole Change queue again. By the time I left mine was the only bag sitting in the luggage area, and I felt very lucky that it had not mysteriously walked off.

An hour after I got into the airport I stood waiting for a taxi with my rumpled rucksack. As we careened into town it became apparent that the cabbie and his friend were taking me to their friends' hotel and not the one I had requested. I finally had to lay down an ultimatum: "Look, friend, I don't want to go to your hotel. I don't care how much it costs. I don't care where it is. When I got in the car I said 'Take me to the Star Hotel' and you said 'Ok'. That means we are going to the Star Hotel. When we get to the Star Hotel I will pay you, if we don't go to the Star Hotel, no money." They seemed insulted, but their constant badgering on the 20-minute trip in from the airport had worn my nerves thin.

Which serves me right, because when we got to the Star Hotel it was closed for the night, and the Kathmandu Guest House was full for the night. I ended up staying in a little rathole guesthouse which was almost worth the 80 rupees ($1.60) I paid for it.

In the morning I was off like a flash to the Hotel Star to get a room. That I did, at $6/night for a room with a private toilet and shower. Still pretty bare, but not by far the worst place in the trip. I spread out my things in anticipation of a long stay in Kathmandu. To my dismay I discovered that my diarrhea was returning from time to time - was this to plague me for the rest of the trip? It would get old quickly. It was the sort that would have you making several rushed toilet trips in close proximity, then you're fine again for awhile, then it comes back to get you.

For the last two days I have been wandering around Kathmandu, a city which is very hard to describe. Certainly this is not a rich place, but it is charming in a weird sort of way. Mostly I have been in Thamel, where most of the travellers congregate. This weekend has been spiced up by the Hindu New Year, with Nepalis out until the wee hours chanting and setting off fireworks (normally everything shuts down by 10PM).

Tommorrow I am going to try hooking up on the net (there is rumoured to be a connection somewhere in Kathmandu). Also tommorow I will see whether the medicine I bought will rid me of this intestinal parasite. Hope, hope hope....

Looks like I was right - what I had was giardia, a parasite of the upper intestinal tract, as opposed to just plain food poisoning, which is what the doctors in Greece said I had. However, food poisoning would not still be persisting a week out of hospital. I have had "troubles" on and off since I got out of Turkey, and I finally experimented and took some tinidazole yesterday to try and eradicate the little bugger. It worked!

My plumbing appears to be back to normal (or as close to normal as it gets in a third-world country) and a couple more days should provide the final verdict.

Walked to American Express today and also inquired around about an Internet connection. I found one at the Mercantile Trading Post (this was the place I had heard of) but since they have now passed out of their experimental phase and are a real service provider, I would have had to have paid around $60 for a six-month subscription and another $20 to send this simple 64K message. Whew! They recommended me to the RONAST, or Royal Nepal Academy of Science and Technology, who also had a connection but possibly would let me use it for free since I was a student. I started to go, when they said that it wasn't open today... "What?" "Because it's Sunday," he replied. "No, no it's Monday," I said incredulously. He typed "date" on the nearest PC, and sure enough up popped "Sunday." Well I'll be buggered. I've been a day behind since I arrived at the airport.

Been a bit slack on the journals...

That Sunday night during my usual stint at the Blue Note bar watching Nepal go by I hooked up with a great group of six or seven people who were all about to embark on the Annapurna Circuit trek, an 18- to 21-day walk. They invited me along. Now I hadn't been planning on a trek quite this long for the simple reason that it would have me returning only a couple of days before I was to be flying out of Nepal. But I countered that I wasn't likely to find a group like this again, so I said, what the hell, I'll go. This was Sunday night. We were to leave on a three-week trek on Tuesday morning, and I was totally and in all ways unprepared for a trek.

So Monday I rented equipment, bought equipment, bought clothes, got money, applied for a trekking permit, went back later to pick it up, bought a bus ticket, and did and forgot to do about a thousand other things that day. That night a few of us got together for the pre-game huddle (and beer).

Tuesday morning, and after some debate we wrangle ourselves onto the tourist bus to Dumre, the first stop of the day. The ride to Dumre isn't so bad as everyone says, except for the porter next to me trying to practice his English on me intermittently the whole trip. When we got to Dumre we immediately started looking for buses to Besi Sahar. Then we bartered for about 20 minutes, with both sides walking away repeatedly until the bus driver finally agreed to let us ride on top for 100 rupees. We clambered up and the Scot, Pete, and I plunked ourselves right down in front, the one place with no footholds and only a few marginal handholds. And this was a 4-hour bus ride over roads that one would have had to upgrade to call them 'unpaved.' And through streams. And through one or two slow turns that made the bus heel over so badly to one side that all the people on the top would scrabble over to the other side and verbally coordinate how they were going to jump off the bus when it tipped. Fortunately, the bus remained upright, but by a very slim margin. But when we did finally arrive at Besi Sahar we all had our priorities: I was right off to bed. Pete had a joint :).

Wednesday morning should have been a warning signal to me. I awoke with everyone else at 6:30AM, however I had had over twelve hours' sleep and had slept through the previous night's supper. I had breakfast with everyone else though, of coffee and toast. So we set off walking. It wasn't too bad in the morning, aside from my pack being all misadjusted and me never quite getting it to sit right. I had a problem when we stopped in Khudi for lunch because I couldn't eat more than a few bites of my dhal bhat. I knew that there was trouble ahead, but I fooled myself and said that I would get better. So we set off again.

The whole day I had been drinking lots of fluid, no doubt about that, but I just couldn't seem to get any food down me. As the day progressed and we drew nearer to our goal (the village of Bahundanda high on a hilltop) I fell further and further behind, eventually ending up with the Sherpa who was carrying the girls' bags. Then, about two hours from Bahundanda, I sat down and couln't go any further. I just had no energy. My plan was to sit there and snag a porter when he came by. Sure enough, a few minutes later a porter wandered by. I bartered with him a bit, and managed to pay him around $7 for two days' work. He took my pack and we were off to Bahundanda. Slowly, because I still had to rest every now and again, and I was really breathless.

At 4:30 in the afternoon we stumbled into a guesthouse in the lower regions of Bahundanda to find that the other members of the party had only been here for about an half-hour before us. I ordered dinner, then sat down. I was only able to eat about half my dinner, and I turned in early. I was not doing well.

When on Thursday morning I awoke, I was doing a whole lot worse. I could barely walk, didn't want to get out of bed and couldn't eat a damn thing. I told the others to go on; I was going to try and find some medicine around Bahundanda. I ended up staying another night. Friday I decided I had to return to Kathmandu - I was aborting the trek. This did not make me happy, but I didn't see getting better out here and I didn't have a lot of time to play with. So I made inquiries into getting back out of the mountains not on foot. And I stayed another night.

So Saturday morning I left Bahundanda on the back of a porter. All through the day two old and wrinkled porters switched me off, and we made it to Bhulbhule, halfway back to Besi Sahar. In Bhulbhule I met up with a journalist for the Houston Chronicle, who is also aborting her trek due to illness. She at least is ambulatory.

Sunday we covered the remaining distance to Besi Sahar by 2PM, and I was asleep as soon as I got there, not to awaken again until the next morning.

Monday the 14th we boarded the "Express Bus" from Besi Sahar to Kathmandu. I must say that the Besi Sahar-Dumre road is much more bearable on the inside of the bus. We were in for a surprise, though, on the other side of Dumre: A large section of the nice paved road had gone away in a landslide the previous day and had been replaced by a forty-foot boulder! This was inconvenient, as it meant we had to dismount our bus and walk a half-mile up to the boulder, queue up, then clamber in the rubble over the top and to the other side, and then another half-mile to a different set of buses who were to continue the journey to Kathmandu. It really was a bad situation.

Finally we pulled into Kathmandu. I re-checked into the Hotel Star and thanked my porter, Raju, for sticking with me. I never slept so well in my life as I did that night. First thing in the morning I called a doctor at the Embassy who was supposedly from Charleston (my hometown). He reccommended me to the CIWEC clinic. I went, they asked me my symptoms, took a blood count, gave me a specimen jar for a stool sample, and sent me on my way with an enormous bill.

In the meantime Dr. Lucas of the Embassy called to offer to put me up while I was sick. Well, I thought, staying with a doctor probably beats staying in the Hotel Star, so I gathered up a few things and off I went - into the lap of luxury. Their spare bedroom would have been a master bedroom in most schools of thought. It was hard to imagine that this place was jammed into the squalor of Kathmandu. Oh well, I thought, go with the flow. So that's more or less the up and down of it: I stayed with them for a few days, until I was sure I was better. Now I'm here in the Hotel Star yet again. I am trying to get in contact with Patricia to get me out of here a week earlier than planned as I think I have exhausted the sightseeing possibilities of Kathmandu.

Oh, by the way, the diagnosis was bacterial dysentery. On reflection I am still comfortable with my decision: The mountains are permanent and immutable; I however am not.

Today is Thanksgiving back in the States, which evoked a bit of homesickness as I realized the chances of finding a turkey dinner around Kathmandu were pretty damn slim. That's not to say that international dining options in this city are limited; it's just that the interpretations of the various dishes often bewilder and disappoint the prospective diners. If I may allude to Star Trek, it's as if the food replicators have gone buggy and just slightly screw up every order they're given. After awhile one learns to order Asian dishes (to avoid the local versions of western cuisine) and tea by the pot (to avoid the local version of Coca-Cola, which again doesn't taste quite right). I suppose I am broadening my horizons. Plus, the local food's cheaper. I really splurged the other day and ate an incredible meal the other day at the Old Vienna Inn - and got a sizable bill for it. That evening set me back by $5 - my most expensive meal yet here in Nepal, I think.

But enough about culinary adventures - I am waitlisted on the Thai Airways flight to Bangkok tomorrow afternoon - with any luck I'll be on the plane when it takes off. If not, it's another week in Kathmandu, which I fear could drive me mad. I want to be on that plane - there's no two ways about it. Maybe some baksheesh will squeeze me on...