Dogster: Kinda Kathmandu
Was it the Singha beer? Was it the desultory public New Year’s Eve he’d endured the day before? Somewhere mid-Teriyaki, over dinner in Bangkok on the first day of 2010, Dogster had an idea.
Kathmandu. By 9.30 p.m. he’d booked, by 9.30 a.m. he’d boarded - three hours later he was there. Dog doesn’t plan much these days. |
‘It’s our bible,’ Debbie from Dubai said, ‘Trip Advisor is how we choose all our hotels.’
Over the last five years the Hyatt Kathmandu, a five star megalopolis with three hundred rooms, has gathered one hundred and twenty-eight reviews on Trip Advisor. Since March 2008 the Hotel Courtyard in the tourist ghetto of Thamel has garnered one hundred and eleven glowing reviews, pushing it to the top of the list. For a humble establishment with just eighteen rooms that many reviews is a suspicious amount of praise in a very short time. Either a hospitality phenomenon is going on – or someone is cooking the books. http://www.tripadvisor.in/Hotel_Revi...Kathmandu.html In a ridiculous David and Goliath struggle, the two establishments battle it out for the top spot: the coveted No. 1 Hotel in Kathmandu - sometimes the princess gets the crown, sometimes the pretender. In the wonderful world of Trip Advisor, the fact that they are utterly different in every way is unimportant – it’s all about the numbers. As Dogster represents every known minority, he chose the pretender. www.hotelcourtyard.com Actually, he just wanted to see whether those one hundred and eleven glowing reviews were true. |
Settling in for a good story...
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Hotel Courtyard is a very eccentric hotel hidden in Thamel. It’s almost a tourist attraction. If it’s right for you, you’ll know on arrival and forgive all the rest – but if you expect anything faintly resembling five-stars - it ain’t your cup of chai. I could tell you about the rooms – but that isn’t the point. Go look at the pictures. By the time you’ve even made it into one the magic wand will have been waved over your head - even if the floor falls out from under you, you won’t complain.
Check-in can be a lengthy process – some guests cheerfully report gaps of several hours between arrival at the hotel and appearance in their room. One of them was a Mr. Dogster. He arrived at two p.m., made it into his room by six, went out at seven-thirty and finally got back at midnight – already seduced by beer, dinner and conversation with his newest, best-est, instant friends. The owners have realized the simplest of simple things: travelers like to talk. Our sophisticated western culture has removed the mechanism to meet. All we want is permission, a host, an introduction, a location and the occasion. Backpackers share hovels and gossip with great simplicity – yet up-market you struggle to meet a soul. Mid-market there’s an interesting crowd that is attracted to the idea of chatting with like-minded strangers in Kathmandu. I had good luck. My fellow guests were flawed, but they were fabulous. The clientele seemed largely female, fearless, highly intelligent, articulate and fun. There were more solo travelers than couples; in my six days I counted twenty-two visible singles, four pairs and one silent family. Of the singles only six were actually traveling to see Nepal. Fifteen of them were ‘good works fairies’; research workers, advisors-to-be, PHD students, incoming volunteers or their ‘facilitators’. The compassion industry has come to Nepal. The women of the Courtyard in January 2010 were a formidable alien breed – although from which planet I was never really sure. Wherever it was, it was a long, long way away from here. All were so focused on their ‘projects’ they barely noticed they were in Kathmandu. Neither, for my stay at the Courtyard, did I. |
who let the dog out?
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I've been waiting for this tail!
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More tomorrow.
I'll see if anybody's reading first - you know what a sook I am. I need constant reassurance. It's bloody cold in Kathmandu. |
we're reading, we're reading!!!!!
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I'm reading and waiting for more.
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Ruff, ruff. Keep it coming.
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I got a box of dog biscuts if you continue this tail
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‘Meryl Steep or Kate Winslett?’
We were discussing who would play her in the upcoming movie. Margaret was a marvelous killer-babe from London, a barrister, an enthusiast, political-insider, innovator, wild ideas woman with connections everywhere. I liked her enormously. Quite what strange force dropped her and her team into the middle of Kathmandu is still a bit of a mystery to me. She spent a lot of time enthusing about some Nepal-enhancing scheme, a God-given technique that aimed to build the leaders of the future, corrupt them on the way up the ladder then exploit them at the top. The elixir of success? Debating skills. ‘It doesn’t matter, as long as they’re poor,’ she snorted, waving a bejeweled wrist vacantly over the table, ‘poor and smart.’ In a deliciously candid pitch of the pitch, she regaled me with the raison d’etre for her sudden, energetic arrival in the library of the Hotel Courtyard. That none of it made any sense at all was beside the point. She could sell sand to a beach. ‘It’s not the debating… it’s the top one or two percent. They go on to be the members of parliament, prime ministers…’ That she was talking about the U.K. was of no importance at all. Margaret believed with all her mouth that Nepal would be exactly the same. ‘We only want the best of the worst; kids from the most destitute of the poorest rural areas of Nepal. We can transform lives!’ She was brilliant. She could pitch like a Yankee, hurtling spit-balls of wisdom, candor and enthusiasm into the crowd with wild energy. Of course these days, in the time-starved days of Very Important People, a great pitch and a personality are all you need. I was getting a one-on-one demonstration of hers. The barrage left me greatly enthused. It was a great show, right down to the tremble in the voice, the clasp to the breast, the life-changing moment, the ‘I gave it all up to do this’. To all intents and purposes, judging from the names she dropped, everybody from the Pope to David Beckham supported this luvvie-friendly, good works enterprise. No wonder. She was like a pinball machine on speed, endlessly pinging your P.C. buttons, lighting the light in your dumb punter eyes. Having exhausted the condescension, she cut to the chase. ‘I’ve been negotiating the screen rights,’ she stage-whispered, ‘it’ll be ‘Sherpa Slumdog’ meets ‘My Fair Lady!’ Was she serious? Things were very intense. Conversation raged around us as if we were in some SoHo loft, everybody was showing off, wild and wonderful tangents led us both on and off track. Some people were drunk. ‘…And the book rights,’ she was saying, ‘the merchandising, the musical - it’s all ready to go.’ What did this have to do with Nepali debating? Was I in an episode of ‘Absolutely Fabulous’? ‘Meryl Steep or Kate Winslett?’ It had to be Meryl. Of course, Kate will get the job. |
The lady with the fly-away hair sat in the corner looking slightly bewildered. Auntie Esme had slogged twelve hours by bus to get to Kathmandu from a tiny village that starts with ‘B’, somewhere south in the borderlands. Within ten minutes of arrival, she was propped up by cushions, sitting back on a red velvet sofa with a beer in her hand, having her first conversation in English for months. She had the sweet reticence of someone who had just spent a long, long time alone.
Oh, and a broad, enigmatic smile. She wasn’t a handsome woman, nor had she ever been a pretty girl – but to my eyes she was the most beautiful thing in Nepal. She had what we used to call ‘horsey’ features – with time her face had collapsed in an innocent crinkle, illuminated by kind, easily hurt eyes. Shy, sensitive and self-effacing, she’d moved into retirement without remembering to collect a life for herself on the way. Aunty Esme still had a lot of love left and no one to give it to. So she became a volunteer in Nepal. Aunty was at the coal-face – as uncomfortable, as cold and isolated as a human being could be, volunteering for a cause that still escapes me in a village that didn’t want her there. Her martyrdom appeared to be for the stolen circus orphans of Southern Nepal. Child life in Nepal, particularly female, runs cheap these days. You can buy a child – from her father - for 1,200 rupees. Bought or spirited away for a life of trapeze and sin, these utterly naïve children are used up and discarded. Preventing children being stolen for the circus was a noble cause, but to my eyes, kinda specific. However it works, it’s all achieved with mosaics. ‘I don’t go out very much,’ she whispered, ‘everybody stares…’ ‘How long have you been there?’ ‘Four months…’ |
Room 406, three a.m. Dogster’s bladder demands attention. I reach for the light - nothing. The heater is cold. It’s freezing. Power cut – there seems to be a regular one between two and eight a.m. Decide now, Dog – bladder or warmth, warmth or death – go-o-o-o bladder!
Out of the burrow. I heave the doona off me and sit on the edge of the bed, head still swimming from Everest Beer. It’s colder than death and pitch black. I get up and walk directly into the wall. I feel along, along and find the light switches. Click, click - nothing, nothing; click, click, click - nothing, nothing, black nuttin’. I’m lost. Fumble left and find the door. No, don’t go there, that’s the corridor. Go left, bathroom is left. Like a blind mime negotiating a plate-glass window, Dogster ventured forth. A blast of frigid air yawned at me from the bathroom. The tiles are like ice. Freezing. Complete blackness. I can not see my hand in front of my face. Bladder. Bladder. Bladder. Where is the bloody toilet? Bladder. Bladder. Bladder – right now! |
Alice was in her Wonderland.
‘I’m here from C****** University to co-ordinate and lead a Multi-task force starter group to advise on Marketing and Manufacturing techniques on the bio-fuel industry and feeder production in the Nowheri region of Nepal,’ she blurted, thrusting a leaflet at me. Well, something like that. Alice was reciting the grant application, a gobbly-gook of politically correct catch-phrases rattled off in rapid succession - whatever it all meant she believed in it with all her heart. She rolled on with her spiel, an enthusiastic academic finally in the field, brimming with emotion. It turned out to be a marketing plan for a community-run, equal-opportunity, village-based hand-made paper ‘factory’ run by a lesbian dwarf. Well, something like that. This co-operative produced brick shaped lumps of something they called Bio-Erk which, when drowned and pounded into lumpy bits of sludge, eventually dried and was called ‘Ethnic Hand-Made Paper’. So, did these guys apply for a grant from C****** University?’ ‘No-o-o-o-o,’ she replied gaily, ‘we just gave it to them…’ All she needed was somewhere poor, somewhere on the sub-continent - anywhere would do. All she needed was a place that ticked the P.C. boxes, somewhere picturesquely deprived, some photogenic urchins with running noses, lives soon to be transformed with wealth and cyber-expertise, courtesy some ‘good-works’ target in some ‘good-works’ budget of some good-hearted University in Somewhere Good, U.S.A. Dogster wasn’t the only one pissing in the sink. |
That's enough for today.
It's great to know you're reading. [There'll be a secret lurker looking in, too. The management of Hotel Courtyard worked out I was the fabulous dogster within hours of my arrival - so much for anonymity.] And to all the lesbian dwarves reading, I'm sorry. Maybe I should have said 'gay whale'. |
I using google translate to read your story in Thai.
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Quite funny in Tha!
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oopss. that's suppose to be Thai not Tha. Damm google translate.
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Glad you are enjoying yourself again!
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I was getting worried about you --- glad you're back
MP pisses in the sink, too. How does this marriage survive? |
I'm enjoying reading and looking forward to more...
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I don't think I have to tell you that I am following along here and waiting for the next installment...
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Oh, good! I've been awaiting your report from Kathmandu. You've opted for a different group of fellow travelers this time.
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Wow, I go off to grocery shop, and look what I find when I get home! At least you should have had plenty of amusement during the strike. And for some places tripadvisor is totally a snare and a delusion - Marrakesh for instance...
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LOVING the report, cant wait to hear more.
Dear Doggy if you are back in BKK between 21st-23rd of Feb i would LOVE to catch up with you, if you could bear it? (can we tempt you to join our GTG on the 23rd... small select crowd!) |
Ah yes, the Courtyard. We liked it there, but also experienced the bitter cold and lack of power when we were there. I guess they haven't yet been able to procure a generator for the place. Otherwise, it seemed kinda fun. Where are you now dogster? Back in India yet?
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Better get this to the top or he won't write anymore...
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where is he?? broke the plate glass window and is being treated on the 3rd floor in the operating room manned by the woman with the wild hair??
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Dogster, dear dogster? Are you coming back? Your readers (some of whom are currently spending time at candle-burning-at-both-ends jobs in order to get back on the streets...of Oz, in my case) anxiously await their vicarious escape.
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It’s difficult to imagine Dogster having a youth, a time where he was not wise and perfect - but there was once a brief moment when he did not know it all.
In December 1971, to his utter confusion, Dog found himself in Kathmandu, barely twenty-one years old. He was a lost puppy deep on the hippy trail – of course, he behaved accordingly. |
The Inn Eden was painted blood red. Outside, just by the door was a reassuring sign: HOME MADE BROWN BREAD.
Over the window, printed in large red letters on a blue background, were these words: INN EDEN HOTEL. Each letter had white edging, as if it had recently snowed. Below this a darker blue sign: HASHISH GANJA SHOP 1st FLOOR, above the door a long thin sign, white letters on blue: EDEN HASHISH CENTRE. Just in case you couldn’t read, each word was separated by little painted chillums. Little Dog had found what he was looking for. Once inside he had an immediate choice; stumble up the stairs to the Hashish Emporium or take a left into the Coffee Shop, a dungeon with wooden benches and what appeared to be a pig-run under the stairs. Wee Doggie took a left, eased himself into a cubicle and ordered the hashish grilled cheese slices. He woke up nearly forty years later and stumbled outside. Things had changed. |
‘…The Eden Hashish Centre was the largest of several legal storefronts in Kathmandu that provided quality hash and grass to the tourists. Mr. Sharma, the owner, opened two shops. The original location was at 5/1 Basantpur in the famous "Freak Street" hippy district, a location that ironically now is occupied by a bank. The second shop was located at 5/259 Ombahal, said to be in the Thamel area.
In late 1973, soon after the second Eden hash shop opened, threats of the loss of foreign aid from the American administration of Richard Nixon forced Nepal to outlaw hashish and marijuana. The two Eden Hashish Centres, the Central Hashish Centre and the others closed their doors and the pot and hashish business moved underground…’ Business shifted to some empty fields, mid-way on a bicycle ride between Durbar Square and the Monkey Temple. They called the area Thamel. |
There are only three kinds of people in Thamel – travelers, dumb tourists and those who make their living from the first two. Don’t look any further – that’s it. It’s a backpacker crap-hole and getting worse – but we’d better take it seriously; for way too many travelers, Thamel is Kathmandu.
Thamel is a construct, built up around the backpacker brigade during the late-seventies and eighties to service their every need; cheap hotels, fresh coffee, donuts and German cakes, spaghetti and hamburgers, draught beer and easy, underground dope, just like Goa. The tourists created Thamel - now Thamel creates the tourists. Things have been horribly out of control ever since; building piled upon building, burrowing, arching, searching for that elusive door to the street, all boasting a haphazard kamikaze of signage overgrowing alleys in a last desperate attempt to be noticed. In season the streets are chock-a-block - somebody’s making money. Every building is a shop; every doorway leads to a restaurant, a bar, a massage parlor, a barber, a jeweler and fake Adidas shoes. There’s more - mystery doors into mystery places filled with ‘cool Nepali dudes’ trading whispers with craggy trekkers; a thriving sex industry; hustlers galore. In a perverse way I quite like the place; it’s precisely what you want Kathmandu to be – a little bit of Bali, the tang of Amsterdam, a strangled Nepali Marrakech overlaid with sweet Tibet. Thamel is no more ‘real’ Kathmandu than I am. It’s a distorted snapshot of what somebody once thought Kathmandu should be - long after it wasn’t. And it’s all Richard Nixon’s fault. |
More later.
Those interested in a glimpse of the Inn Eden culture might like to click here: http://edenhash.com/Posters-Calendars-for-sale.htm I'm off to Bangkok, suitcases full of Tibetocrap, including two eight foot trumpets. Mercifully, they fold. |
I'm here and enjoying too!
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Ahh.. the lost dog is coming home! You're in for good weather here mate.
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‘Forty-two’.
Dale was dressed in a T-shirt and beanie with a delicate golden pair of women’s flip-flops dangling from his big New Zilland toes. ‘Forty-two dresses,’ he said, jerking his head at the woman beside him, ‘she’s bought forty-two dresses - all like that…’ She sat with her breasts tied up in Rajasthani bundles of beads held up by a shoelace round her neck. Her shoulders were bare, her back naked right down to the small. Her feet were graced with a lattice of string and the merest slither of leather. Samina was a stunning Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Aussie creature with olive skin and black Bollywood eyes. Her neck reached out like a tortoise, framed in flashing long dark hair. ‘I like to be a woman,’ she purred, ‘I like girly things…’ Just one problem with this idyllic scene - it was the dead of a Nepali winter. They were surrounded by a table-full of tourists in hats, scarves, overcoats, stupid Nepali ear hats with bobbles on top, gloves and running noses, hot breath steaming out in clouds around them. We were huddled around a table over a candle, waiting till the power came back on. |
‘We’ve been traveling for five months,’ Samina said gorgeously, ‘India-a-ahh… Nepaw-w-w-w-ll…’
Dale the dress-adder was stony-faced. ‘We went to Goa,’ he said dryly, ‘flew in direct - never left. Three months.’ In my youth, the verb ‘to party’ had not yet been coined - having fun was something you did accidentally on the way to work. Dale and Samina gave new meaning to a new verb, perfect Goa-fodder; young, gorgeous and wonderfully dumb. Three months went by in a snap. ‘Well, we were in New Delhi!’ she protested. Eventually, lugging her forty-two dresses, they left Goa and caught the overnight train to Delhi. After three months on the sub-continent spent partying in a charmless tourist enclave, it was their first actual exposure to India. ‘We walked straight into it,’ Dale mumbled. She’d imploded, burst into tears amid a welter of vexatious taxi drivers, gleeful porters, beggars, pickpockets and all the other low-life who love a scene, then folded loudly into a neat, limp, Princess heap in the arms of big Dale from New Zild who had no idea what to do either. ‘Oh my god, I ha-a-ated India,’ she gushed, ‘we were stuck in Delhi Railway Station for four hours, oh my god, those people surrounding us, screaming at me…’ ‘Does she cry a lot?’ I asked, not very innocently. She didn’t stop weeping till they and the forty-two dresses got to Nepal. On arrival, in a fit of madness, the intrepid couple and her wardrobe went trekking in flip-flops. |
The Tuk-tuk Goose was from Egypt, in the prime of his energetic thirtieth year.
Rommy arrived in Delhi two weeks ago, transited to Kathmandu at that unfamiliar airport in a suitably reasonable period of time, pausing only to be directed out through immigration where his single-entry visa was stamped, then ushered back in through a different immigration to check onwards to Nepal. He didn’t know why, either, but he was. His single entry visa was used up in a two hour lay-over. Not that he noticed. His great enthusiasm of the moment was some epic idiocy involving a tuk-tuk, eighty other idiots and a race from Pokhara to Cochin. So he and his team located each other, their tuk-tuk, their fellow racers and the whole traveling madness, prepared, stumbled to the starting line, drove across razorback ridges from Kathmandu all the way, overnight on hell roads, then overnight again into Sunauli, the exit point at the foot of the mountains, where Nepal bleeds into India. He and his companions cruised up to immigration waving their tuk-tuks, madness and visas. Rommy was stamped out of Nepal and crossed no-man’s land to the Indian side where he learnt, in the middle of a tuk-tuk race, that a single–entry visa is just that. He had no visa, no options and that was that. Enraged, in a fit of madness, he leapt into the tuk-tuk and tried to run the border. He was jumped on by five Indian police, arrested, talked down, eventually make friends with the border cops, was scolded and turned back, un-shot, to make his lonely way all the way back to Kathmandu. As he’d been arrested on the border he was in Nepal illegally so first he had to wait and, after a groveling letter of apology to everybody, apply for a Nepali visa. Then he could get an Indian visa. Then he could get a flight. He just wasn’t quite sure where. All this time his tuk-tuk buddies were heading down, down, ever onwards into India – linked only by technology. He was aiming for a moving tuk-tuk target when I last saw him. I hope he hit dead centre. If there was a more determined man in Kathmandu, I didn’t meet him. |
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