NEPALESE LIFE AND PEOPLE
(Note: To write a chapter such as this after one month in the country is of course naive. Take it with a pinch of salt.)
Wonderful People
Before we went to Nepal, we repeatedly heard about the country's wonderful population. The Nepalese are known to be very kind, sympathetic, and service-minded. Once committed to their service, this is true. Then they are very cordial and caring, serving you like a king. But to get to this point, they are willing to use just about any method of persuasion. Often when they see the slightest opportunity to rip you off, they do it. For a good reason: You have dollars, they don't. Aggressive salesmen and beggars are annoying, but I suppose one gets used to it after a while.
Women
The situation of the woman in Nepal is not easy. She works, cooks, and takes care of the children while the man sticks to board and card games or nothing at all. Not always, but more often than not. (It could be because January is not a busy month in general.) To this adds the woman's more private marital responsibilites, carefully described in the Kama Sutra - the Hindu sexual guide. At a first glace it is funny reading, but when you learn that these rules are actually obeyed you suspect that Nepalese women are sadly discriminated, except for those who like it of course. I would not recommend reading the Kama Sutra to feminists.
Living in a Hut
Come on in and have a look!
Gastronomy in memoriam
Dhal bat, rice with lentil soup poured on top, is the traditional dish most Nepalese eat; twice a day, 365 days a year. Or so we heard at least. Sometimes the lentils are green, sometimes they are red, and that's it! In touristic areas where money is abundant, fried spinach and hot peppers are often served as relish on the side. The spinach tastes like metal and burned charcoal, causing nightmares for people with spoiled palates. We never dared to taste the peppers since they looked unusually sinister. Luckily for all tourists, other dishes than dhal bat are available everywhere in touristic areas of Nepal. Even in a lodge at 5100 meters the menu was acceptable, boasting "delicacies" such as thin garlic soup, fried potatoes, yakky yak cheese noodels, and fried eggs. The eggs, by the way, probably came from the fat and exotic-looking, high-altitude mountain hen (a mutated grouse?) that pecked in the icy gravel around the lodge.
Thanks to the westernization of the menu, we ate acceptably tasty food during the whole trip and only had dhal bat once. Although the fried potatoes, noodles, and pizzas were mostly tasty, we got bored of that too after a while. The problem was that all lodges in whole mountain areas had the same menu, by law. What made it bearable were the different interpretations of the same recipies. For example, we tasted a wide variety of pancakes. The most common kind resembled American pancakes but with a less accentuated taste of baking-powder, i.e. it was rather good. The most interesting sample was stiff like a crispbread and could easily have been used as a frisbee or a dog-bone.
Black Tea, Please!
Black tea was the most common drink in the mountains. People drank it everywhere and all the time, almost as fanatically as the Brittish drink their Earl Grey. But there is a difference, as an English astro-physicist pointed out while trying to thaw his bones in some mountain lodge with a pot of the local brew: "Here and in other parts of Asia, where they grow the stuff all over the place, they don't know how to brew it. At home, where we can't grow it, at least we know how to make a good cup of tea!" The concentraion of the tea varied enormously from one tea-bag a cup to one tea-bag for a three-liter pot. Personally, I preferred something in between just to make it taste better than the water and at the same time avoid too much of the low-budget tea taste.
Coffee was a similar matter, but cost more and was not drunk so much by the locals. It was on the menu in almost every lodge and restaurant, but what one got was a watery decoction of roasted chicory - you know the coffee substitute our grandparents drank during World War II. It tasted like American domestic airline coffee mixed with water and gave no caffeine buzz at all. Perhaps we should have tried to "correct it" as the Italians say when they add grappa (spirits) to their coffee?
Curious Spelling
Nepal is not an ideal country for purists of English who fuzz about spelling and grammar. To the Nepalese, spelling seems of less importance. Even their own villages and mountains have at least two or three different spellings; one on the map, one on the lodge sign, and yet another one on the next lodge sign. Of course, one cannot blame them for not knowing English well enough to write signs and menus, but a simple suggestion would be to ask one of the innumerable English-speaking tourists that pass by every day to help them write? Here follows an excerpt from a menu at Chomrong in Annapurna:
- Potato filter (fritter?)
- Plain spageti
- Pizza with cheze
- Sprakling lemonade
- Lemon guice
- Iris coffe
- Snickes spring roil
I had to try the Snickes spring roil [sic] just to see if they were actually serious about it. They were. It was a spring roll with a Snickers inside... ...half-molten, salty chocolate with peanuts in fried dough. (Enter the Ktchin picture above if you want to see.) So how did it taste? Well, it's a bit hard to describe, but I can say that it definitely qualified to enter the already comprehensive list of interesting gustatory memories from the Nepalese cuisine.
Going to the Loo (Warning, contains indecent language)
When talking about taking a shit in Nepal, one can immediately discard the American euphemisms such as "going to the restroom" or "using the bathroom". Even "going to the toilet" is often inadequate, simply because there is no toilet. Instead one is supposed to squat over a hole in the ground. In old shitting huts this is no problem, because the walls are made of stones and there is a good selection of grips with which to keep one's balance. In more modern facilities, the walls are even and there is nothing to hold on to. So while squatting, two possibilities remain: one, to fall backwards and, two, to dump in one's pants. Maybe the female anatomy is somewhat more allowing, I don't know. Still, being a physics student, this little gravitational problem has puzzled me. Except for removing the pants completely, I have found no simple solution.
Perhaps you wonder what happens when a Nepalese encounters a real water closet? After seeing footprints on the toilet ring, we concluded that they simply hop up on the ring and squat there instead! This way is probably more hygienic, maybe one should try it some day? Obviously, their method becomes more precarious when the ring is wetted or when the toilet-goer has drunk a few beers. Here, the Nepalese need handles instead.
The other riddle regarding Nepalese shitting is how they go about wiping themselves clean, if they do. In many places that are somewhat civilized, restaurants for example, there is a water tap or a bucket available. Fancy restaurants even have toilet paper. The situation is quite different in the mountains and other poor areas. When toilet paper is expensive and the water bucket frozen, what to do? This open question is where their left hands start to smell bad and my curiosity stops.
Hygiene
Hygiene is not a commonly known notion in Nepal, at least not among the vast majority. The wide-spread illiteracy makes them happily unaware of bacteria, viruses, and other contagious micro-organisms. Diseases are believed to be caused by evil spells and spirits. Nowadays, at least the Nepalese food industry has realized the need for cleanliness. For example, the local mineral water brands brag about their modern, American purifying techniques and now declare the content of faecal coli (Swedish: bajsbakterier) in the mineral water to be nil, suggesting that this was not the case earlier. Whereas the Nepalese are not overly concerned about micro-organisms, they have significantly larger perils to worry about, ranging from lice to avalanches and earthquakes. In between the two are rabies rats and dogs, bandits, traffic, tigers, rhinos, and local aircraft.
Hare Rama and the Final Ice Cream
The time had come for our very last adventure in Nepal, the taxi ride to the airport. Zig-zagging in the twilight between herds of tuk-tuks (three-wheeled taxis with neither lights nor rear-view mirrors), stray animals and ambulating fruit salesmen for the last time, we concluded once and for all that the Nepalese traffic god had not yet been invented or had become road-kill himself.
The travel agent told us to be at the airport three hours before departure - for very dubious reasons we guessed after a smooth and immediate check-in. The travel agent must have known the candy and soda salesman in the lobby hall where everybody got stranded, because drinking Coke and eating candy was the one and only thing to do until take-off. Aside from watching the meticulous checking and rechecking of the boarding passes, that is: Once when entering the lobby hall, once when exiting the lobby hall and entering an enclosed passage-way, once when exiting the enclosed passage-way and entering a small waiting room, and once before embarking the bus to the aircraft.
It felt good to be on the plane taking us home, almost as if we were already back to safety and civilization. On the opposite side of the aisle sat a Dutch Hare Krishna buff who flirted overtly with an exceptionally beautiful stewardess. She was slim and very elegant, both in physique and manners, whereas he had worn, brown pants with leather braces, an orange shirt, and looked generally savage with his lewd gaze and dishevelled beard, rendering the chances for succesful courtship close to zero. Nice try but tough luck! Apparently his superego regained control after a while and he started chanting and counting on his string of beads. I wondered what he'd just been thinking about that made him look so remorseful? That was the moment where my stomach started churning wildly, probably making me look in deeper agony than the self-condemning bead-counter. The nice aircraft lavatory came as my redemption. Most probably, the culprit was the Baskin' Robins ice cream with cold hot fudge I had revelled in a few hours before departure. I guess Nepalese ice cream is not the optimal preparation for a calm flight home.
During the whole stay in Nepal, we had experienced amazing mountain views, beautiful animals, and so on, but only two really good smells. As described earlier, the first was the little bush with white flowers in the rhododendron forests of the Annapurna region. The second I cannot remember; possibly it was one of the pizzas that qualified? Hence after this month, my nose was deprived of pleasant fragrances. To compensate for this insufficiency, I indulged in the luxury of perfume in the tax free shop at the Amsterdam airport on the way home. Typically, the one I liked the most turned out to be for women ("l'eau par Kenzo, pour femme" I believe), so I had to go for a masculine compromise. No heavenly scents there, but it sure helped me and other nearby passengers stand the last few hours in the foul-smelling fleece jacket.
The end.
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