Inner Child

DAY 341: Slurping your noodles in a restaurant in the Western World isn't exactly proper manners, but in Japan it is actually encouraged; the intake of air is supposed to enhance the flavor of the them. Slurping is something that I believe is an intrinsic habit of human nature -- it is upbringing in a non-slurping society that trains us not too. In Japan it was great to get back with my inner slurping child; there's something about it that just gives you that innocent unrestricted sensation that kids have before they get too old. Eating soba noodles the Japanese way made me feel blended in with the locals, until I was told I was resting my chopsticks on the wrong thing.

"Uh, that's an ashtray," Liz informed me.

Liz and I were in a noodle shop in the small town of Chuzenji, about a 30-minute bus ride up the mountain from Nikko, along a crazy curvy road with twenty hairpin turns in a row. We had come to see the natural sights in the Nikko area and if possible, Japanese snow monkeys -- monkeys I had wanted to see since they appeared in the opening scene of Baraka.

The sound of slurping noodles turned into the sound of rushing water at Kegon Falls, one of Japan's three great waterfalls, taking water from the nearby Lake Chuzenji down 318 feet off the edge of a cliff to a river below. We took an elevator down to an observation deck for a spectacular view (picture above) -- for Liz it was the first time seeing the entire falls on a clear day; usually it was shrouded in fog and mist. To the side of the falls was an impressive display of cobalt rock formations -- but alas, no monkeys. The only monkeys around were the cute stuffed ones at the nearby gift shop.

Cute images aren't just a thing for kids; in Japan they seem to just be a social norm for any age as childish as it may seen, and it was evident with the picture of a fireman in a samurai outfit on a public manhole cover to mark its use for the fire department. The manhole was on a road along the shore of the source of Kegon Falls, Lake Chuzenji, a scenic lake (also monkey free) with many different kinds of paddleboats for rent -- the more popular ones in the shape of big swans. The lake was the perfect place to chill out and watch the fall foliage begin to change color (just ask the French), or to visit the nearby Futara-san-jinji Shrine, another Japanese Buddhist shrine with temple buildings with guardian demons and a tower with a big bell that every Japanese tourist constantly rang after I rang it the first time that morning. Nearby was a little memorial area of small statues representing dead children in the area. Loved ones dressed the symbols of their fallen kin to keep from getting cold as if they were still alive -- even after death, the memory of children never fades away.

"JAPANESE HONEYMOONS ARE FIVE DAYS and three of those are spent shopping for gifts for friends and co-workers," Liz told me. Although Nikko was just north of Tokyo, it counted as "going away," which meant that she was to follow the Japanese custom of bringing back various snacky treats for people in the office, and more importantly, the group of old ladies in the suburbs that she taught English to once a week. Perhaps Liz spent a little too much shopping for them -- one minute exactly -- because we had missed the 12:59 train back to Tokyo. Why they didn't schedule a train for exactly 1:00 p.m. I don't know.

Since Liz had to be in Tokyo for a class to teach, we had no choice but to upgrade to the next train available, a direct train with cushioned reclining seats. That train would leave from a different station one stop away, so we went there and waited for it to arrive.

We were the only two waiting around on the platform when a bubbly female conductor in uniform approached us. Apparently the woman was excited to see foreigners and wanted to practice her English. "Where are you from?" she said in her Japanese accent with a big welcoming smile.

"Canada," Liz answered.

"Look, magic!" she said with the enthusiasm of a little schoolgirl on a sugar rush. She pulled out a little rectangular stick a little bit bigger than a match with two dots painted on both ends of the front. She did a little magical motion with her hands, shook the stick downward and "magically" moved the dot on the left side to the right. Even though the trick was easy enough to figure out -- she simply twisted the stick to show us another side -- her enthusiasm made us laugh in "amazement." She reciprocated with one of those cute and bubbly girlish laughs, the kind that the obligatory Japanese actress judge on Food Network's Iron Chef always seems to do. She ran away like a little girl down the platform as if her magic trick to us was something she snuck in behind her bosses back.

A couple of minutes later she was back waiting to supervise the arrival of the next train.

"Do you have any more magic?" I called to her.

Excited to entertain us again -- it must have been boring working there on a lonely platform in the middle of nowhere, so she probably took any advantage to entertain -- she took a 1000 yen note and held it in front of her face. "Look," she instructed. She folded the bill downwards then sideways and back out again to magically make the bill appear upside down before our very eyes. I couldn't help but laugh at the otherwise lame trick because it was the same trick my brother and I used to perform for each other whenever we got bored in church.

The conductor giggled her bubbly Japanese laugh and then ran off again like a little hyper girl to attend to her duties. The Tokyo-bound train arrived shortly afterwards, and playtime was over. We bid her goodbye and got on the train.

OUR TRIP TO NIKKO AND THE COUNTRYSIDE officially ended a couple of hours later when we were back in the madness of Mega-Tokyo, a madness so hectic that it probably sucked away the inner child in most people -- even the real little schoolgirl on the city train that was apparently too tired to even think about slurping, monkeys or magic.

Goldilocks and The Three Bowls

DAY 342: Of all the amazing technology in Japan, I must give honorable mention to the advancements in the toilet industry. Yes, the Japanese even use technology to make the daily experience of taking a dump easier. When I first arrived at Liz's apartment's bathroom, I was already amazed that even without the integration of an electric device, the Japanese figured a way to improve the toilet: after flushing the toilet, the water that fills the tank for the next flush doesn't come straight from the pipeline. Instead, it goes to a faucet of a sink atop the tank so that you can wash your hands with fresh water -- from there, the sink drains into the tank, resulting in an added conservation of water.

Another example is the little hook on the side of a urinal in the (very clean) public men's rooms in the train stations, put there specifically to hang an umbrella so that a guy can shake his drips clean after taking a piss. And I must not forget to mention that Japanese hand dryers, unlike American hand dryers, actually dry your hands without the need to wipe your hands on your pants afterwards, with a blast of air that makes your hands' skin jiggle like they're doing MACH 3.

"Where are the hi-tech robot toilets?" I asked Liz. I knew that Japan had hi-tech toilets somewhere, I just wanted to know where.

"Probably in the department stores in Shibuya," she answered. And so, while Liz went to work, I went off to do her suggested agenda to see two neighborhoods of Tokyo: Harajuku, known for its famous Meiji-jingu Shrine and youth culture; and Shibuya, known for its crowded shopping district -- although I'd soon know it for its hi-tech toilets.

THE MEIJI-JINGU SHRINE, a 1958 reconstruction of the original 1920 one built in memory of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken, was the most noteworthy highlight of the Harajuku district, especially for those newlyweds that just got married since it was the setting for many wedding photos -- taken by American tourists. Some people not involved in a wedding party might come to Harajuku for its toys for all ages (kids, teens, nostalgic twentysomething guys and adults); some might come for a bite at Nathan's, but most come for the crazy youth fashions.

The stereotypical Japanese person may be characterized by a shy, reserved demeanor, but that has rapidly changed with Japanese youth. Alienated teens find their way of expression in Japan through what they wear.

The easiest and most widely seen hip Japanese fashion for girls is the schoolgirl uniform look -- it's not just in Sailor Moon and Kill Bill Vol. 1. From what I'd seen, the uniforms are often worn -- even when it isn't a school day -- for its inherent sex appeal. Some teenage girls have been known to hike up their skirts (when Mom isn't looking) almost up to their ass cheeks for full effect. As hot as that sounds for all you horny guys out there, let us not forget that many of these girls are only twelve.

Harajuku was the center of unique Japanese fashion, from the guy dressed up as an non-color coordinated Magritte figure (complete with derby hat) to the girl in a pink outfit suitable for the arcade game Dance Revolution to the group dressed up in A Clockwork Orange-style meets Jackson Pollack. These fashion rebels were found around Takeshita Street, a hip pedestrian mall of shops selling counterculture t-shirts and knee-high striped legwarmers, the popular retro fashion trend for girls who aren't daring enough to wear the other stuff.

One of the funniest-looking fashion trends that I'd seen on girls all around Tokyo was the retro fairy tale look. Girls dressed up in fancy dresses usually seen on small old-fashion dolls, sometimes with a lacey hat, resulting in a look that was reminiscent of Goldilocks.

FASHION IN SHIBUYA WAS A TAD DIFFERENT than that of Harajuku with its fancy modern-style department stores catering to the young trendy set. The neighborhood was particularly busy on weekends when crowds of people arrived by the thousands (when traffic wasn't passing through) out the Shibuya station's Hachiko Exit, named after the loyal dog who came back to the station every day to find his master -- not knowing he had died at work one day.

As heartwarming as the story of Hachiko was, I only really cared about one thing in Shibuya: the hi-tech toilets of the department stores. The first department store I checked out was Seibu, a multi-level store with mostly trendy clothes for young women. I found the men's room on an upper level and saw that I had two options in the stalls: the squat toilet or the Western style -- I chose the latter. I sat on the throne and expelled the Nathan's chili and cheese dog I had in Harajuku, thinking the experience would be a bit enhanced than one I might have had at home -- but Seibu's toilet bowls were just regular toilets with no fancy gadgets.

This toilet is too plain, I thought.

Consulting Liz's Lonely Planet book I wandered down the block to the OICITY department store, a Bloomingdale's-like multi-level shopping experience. I found the icon for the men's room on the store directory and rushed to the toilet even though I had no urge for a Number Two. Inside the toilet stall (picture above) I saw an electric control panel on the side of the seat similar to the armrest on an airplane. I sat on the seat and took it out for a test ride. The labels were in English and it was easy to navigate -- one button triggered a robotic arm to come from underneath and started spraying water up my ass. I thought I'd flinch with a sudden spurt of cold water, but it was nice and warm already -- plus I could control the water pressure to my liking.

The only problem with the toilet bowl was that after sitting in the built-in bidet function for a while, I was pretty wet down there, and water just dripped down my butt and my scrotum when I got up -- my underwear had to soak up the excess water.

This toilet is too wet.

There was a big event going on across the street that Saturday in Shibuya -- it was the first weekend of the grand opening of OICITY's sibling store OIOIJAM, a multi-level fashion palace marketed to a younger hip crowd (although there weren't any Goldilocks dresses). I ignored the opening sales and head on up to one of the upper floors to check out the hip toilet scene. Inside the men's room was another robotic toilet, this one more complicated than the other one, with a control panel suitable for the captain's chair on the Starship Enterprise. Despite no urge to expel a "captain's log" (say that like Shatner), I pulled down my pants and boxer briefs (there's the answer to that question if you were wondering) and sat down -- the robotic bidets don't activate unless there was someone sitting on the seat (believe me, I tried). The buttons and knobs were labeled in Japanese but I managed to figure out the pressure and temperature control for the upside-down shower.

But wait, there's more! There were two options for nozzle positioning -- one for cleaning the butt, one for cleaning a woman's privates after a Number One -- plus seat temperature control, a deodorizer (of varied levels) and more importantly, a dryer. This "Starship Enterprise" toilet took toilets to where no toilet had gone before.

Ah, this toilet is just right.

It was a shame I didn't have any urge to "drop some kids off at the pool," otherwise I would have had the true hi-tech toilet experience. Perhaps I should have had more Nathan's hot dogs like that Japanese guy who wins the Nathan's hot dog eating contest in Brooklyn's Coney Island every summer, but I just wasn't in the mood. (By the way, I'm sure that guy has a hi-tech toilet in his house after all he eats.)

AS THE SONG GOES, "The freaks come out at night," and in this case, around sundown. I went back to Harajuku to check out what "freaks" were out, like the group of girls all made up to look like cats and the usual goth types. Harajuku in the weekend afternoons was also known for its indie band scene; anyone could set up an area with speakers and instruments and put on a little concert. As I wondered around nearby Yoyogi Park, usually frequented by cyclists, I saw music groups set up in different areas of the park, playing all different genres, from rock bands to hard rock bands (complete with their own groupies), jazz bands to one band that played Irish jig music.

As good as these indie bands were, they were no match for the freaks that came out to the karaoke bar that night. Liz had invited a bunch of friends and co-workers to come out to perform the traditional Japanese custom of embarrassing yourself singing in front of others, but only one friend, a half-Japanese American ex-pat named Cal came out. Apparently he was more American than Japanese because he refused to grab the mic and burst into song. Liz and I encouraged him, but he still refused -- although we did catch him get into it when Joan Osborne's "One of Us" came on. The karaoke bar was part of a full night of beer and yakitori (grilled food, Japanese style) at a lively yakitori bar in Liz's neighborhood where the cooks playfully shouted orders to each other.

After feeding on the Japanese delicacies of beef tongue and chicken cartilage, I finally had a little more material in my bowels for a Number Two. I wished I could have gone into OIOIJAM that night to do my business on the Starship Enterprise toilet, but they had already closed by that time.

Sensory Overload

DAY 343: I am probably a bit biased when I say this, but I think my generation, the generation whose childhood took place in the 1980s, is the best generation. It was in the 80s that the video game revolution began, when an Atari 2600 or ColecoVision was on the top of every boy's Christmas list, when visions of sugarplum game cartridges danced in our heads. Yes, you can blame us for being that first generation that would rather play video games than do a boring thing like reading or taking out the garbage. Why do anything else when you could switch your switchbox on the back of the TV from "TV" to "GAME CONSOLE" and play a game like Atari's Combat, where you could fire a non-descript looking shape that was supposed to be a tank with such a force that it knocked the other non-descript shape all the way to the other side of the screen?

Video games, one of the biggest exports out of Japan, have come along way since the days of Combat and Donkey Kong; nowadays, video game tanks actually look like tanks and Donkey Kong has a family of his own. Video games get more sophisticated each year and every fall the latest ones are showcased at the Tokyo Game Show, the world's largest video game expo. Liz didn't think I'd be interested in such an event when her friend Cal told her it was going on that weekend, but Cal knew very well that I was in the target demographic for it: young, male and jaded from reality. When he showed me the article of the expo in the local newspaper, my eyes lit up with the same excitement of first finding the hidden Warp Zone at the end of Super Mario Bros. Level 1-2.

I immediately sent an e-mail to my friend and Blogreader LovePenny; I knew for a fact that he would share my enthusiasm of going to Tokyo Game Show 2004. I mean, the guy lives and breathes video games. When his daughter Penny was born (the namesake of his Blog handle), he joked that she would just run around in dirty diapers because all his money would still go towards his hobby of video games. A frequent poster on video game bulletin boards, he knew the workings of a video game expo and sent me on a mission since he could not be in Tokyo himself:

"Take at least 10 pictures WITH the Game Hotties (the japanese chicks!)!!!!"

A TRAIN TOOK LIZ AND ME to the convention center in nearby Chiba, just a bit farther out of the city center than Tokyo Disneyland. We met Cal at a coffee shop and then followed the crowd of teenagers and young adults -- not exclusively male and not exclusively Japanese -- to the ticket line. Neither Liz or Cal were really up-to-date on the latest video games and so I played guide as best I could, geeking them out with trivia like a 3-D rendering engine that uses bump mapping uses less polygons than one without bump mapping, so less math is involved. (If you are confused as to what that means, ask resident Blog video game nerd LovePenny.)

"My friend has sent me on a mission," I told Cal. "To take a photo with at least then Japanese models."

"Models?" he questioned, confused at the ambiguity in language.

"As in women."

"Oh, you'll probably get that in the first fifteen minutes." Cal, who worked in the tech sector, was no stranger to the strategies companies used at trade shows to entice the public -- more specifically the use of sexy women in front of their booths, also known as "booth bunnies." In the first couple of minutes after entering the first exhibition hall, we already had two photos down: one with (1) an SNK girl and (2) a girl selling toys and accessories.

If you're not familiar with the tech expo, it is not just a bunch of generic-looking booths and tables that might be mistaken for a real estate convention or community bake sale. No, companies spend millions on trade shows, each building a huge pavilion with flashy lights, big TV monitors and often a stage for presentations. Each company tries to outdo the other, and the end result is an all out sensory overload that makes you feel like you are in some sort of giant pinball machine (picture above).

VIDEO GAME ENTHUSIASTS (a.k.a. "gamers") came from every direction, searching for the latest in video games for computers, mobile phones and game consoles, which they all knew by their acronyms: RE4, MGS3, GT4 to name a few. Companies hyped them up with music and sometimes free giveaways -- one company even had dancers performing to a loud taiko drum performance -- and of course, booth bunnies like the ones at (3) KDDI, (4) Atari's Driver 3, and (5) Koei. Booths for driving games like Need for Speed 2: Underground treated their showcase like it was at an import car show, having their booth bunnies sprawled out on a car instead of passing out flyers. Nothing else mattered when a new model came out to pose -- (A) one from Wayi literally stopped the flow of traffic since every drooling guy with a camera walking by couldn't help but stop to point and shoot.

The horniness at the expo translated to the virtual world too. A couple of years back, Tecmo released Dead or Alive for Microsoft's X-BOX, a traditional one-on-one fighting game. While the fighting in DOA was fast and furious, many gamers responded mainly to the female fighters in the game, particularly the way they were rendered in the bust region. These voluptuous virtual women became such a hit with horny teens that the producers of DOA took them and put them in a different gaming environment altogether to show off their curves and bump maps: beach volleyball! The women of DOA were put in bikinis and swimsuits so that owners of the X-BOX could put them in different outfits and wack a volleyball back and forth. (That's not all they were wacking.) Perhaps these virtual babes were on X-BOX in lieu of X-BOX's real babes; pictures with X-BOX's booth bunnies were denied every time I asked. (Microsoft bitches!)

Models, like the ones for (B) Taito and (C) Konami weren't the only ones dress for the occasion; many attendees dressed up as their favorite video game character, revealing yet another subculture within the already outrageous culture of young fashion rebels. "I can't tell if they're dressed up as a character or if they normally dress like that," Liz said.

"I would have expected the [exhibitors] to dress up but not the attendees," Cal added.

With so many games to choose from, there were many outfits going around, some familiar, some not. "Hey, I actually know who that is!" Cal exclaimed. The girl in blue was just one of a group of people who had collectively worn different outfits for a big group photo of Japanese video game heroes.

Another group in costume that was more recognizable was a team of people promoting the latest Star Wars games by LucasArts: one dressed as C3PO next to an R2-D2 unit and a bunch of Stormtroopers. One by one, people in the crowd were allowed to pose with them, and eventually it was our turn. I stood next to C3PO, the droid I grew up with in my childhood, and put my arm around his shoulder like we were old pals -- but C3PO got all defensive and shoved me aside. What? C3PO? C'mon now, after all the love I've given you all these years? A Stormtrooper noticed the commotion and restrained me from C3PO, who stood there all pompous-like, waddling in his standard droid pose with his arms out, all high on fame like I was beneath him. We posed anyway, with the group from that galaxy far, far away, but if you'll notice in the photo, the Stormtrooper held a grip on me in case I "assaulted" C3PO again. (C3PO, you bastard!)

THE THREE OF US WANDERED THE CROWDED EXPO, taking more photos with booth bunnies -- (6) Game Excite, (7) Taito, (8) Rumble Roses, (9) Gung Ho Online -- trying out this game and that game for Playstation 2 and X-BOX, and watching others play not only with game controllers but with their entire bodies to show off motion sensor devices that are now coming from the arcades and into the home. In one of these motion sensor games you had to throw virtual jam at dancing fish, while at the same time be beware of the attacking toast man. How's that for Japanese pop culture?

I thought everything we had seen in the first hall was a sensory overload until we entered the Sony-dominated second hall, with perhaps twice as many people, bigger booths with bigger screens and more sounds -- so much that Liz had reached her threshold.

"I'm going to have to take a time out," she told Cal and me. She went off to find a quiet place on the side where other attendees were sitting on the floor from exhaustion.

The big showcase game in the second hall was one I was really looking forward to playing after seeing its "E3 2004 Trailer": Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (also with its own (10) MG3S booth bunny), the latest in a franchise that combined dramatic storylines with action, strategy and espionage, created by not only a team of programmers and electronic artists and a military advisor, but with a title sequence designer and score composer from the Hollywood movie biz. As much as I wanted to try it out, the crowd for it was so big the waiting time to get on a station to play it was over an hour (like most games at the expo) and I just didn't have the patience. Instead I used my time more constructively and by that I mean take more pictures with booth bunnies (even though I had already reached LovePenny's quota): (11) Electronic Arts, (12) Namco and (13) Hudson.

I finally made it out to arguably the highlight of the show, the pavilion for Sony's new portable gaming unit, the PSP. Trying it out was easier than trying out MGS3 because not only were there multiple stations to play, but Sony's booth bunnies went around with PSPs strapped to their belts for people to try them out. I played a fighter game on one while admiring the PSP's sleek design, hi-res graphics and stereo sound. Unlike the snobby bitches at Microsoft's X-BOX booth, (14) the Sony PSP booth bunny was more than willing to pose with me, even with the PSP unit despite the signs posted all over that photos of products were forbidden.

AFTER THE SENSORY OVERLOAD OF JAPANESE ELECTRONIC POP CULTURE (and even more photos with (15) booth bunnies that I'm not sure what game or company they represented (although (16) one was an "actual booth bunny" [said Cal]), it was fitting that I found the perfect refuge from such a chaotic scene: the quiet insides of a capsule in a Japanese capsule hotel since Liz had to go out of town that night to meet her husband Hiroshi at her in-law's. I lay my head to rest in my own little pod that night (which was roomier than expected), secluded from the flashy graphics and loud sounds of video games, as visions of sugarplum booth bunnies danced in my head.

Searching For Godzilla

DAY 344: I never really realized how much Japanese pop culture had become world pop culture until I got to Japan. From video games to anime films, Japan has contributed many things to international pop culture, and none is bigger (at least in size) than the big monster known as Godzilla.

Godzilla has come a long way since that 1954 black and white original film starring Raymond Burr. Over the years (particularly in those drug-inducing sixties and seventies), the Godzilla universe has expanded to include the five-headed dragon Ghidora, the giant pterodactyl Rodan, the robotic Mecha-Godzilla and those two little Japanese girls that sing to summon Mothra. The Japanese Godzilla phenomenon has become so big it spawned many homages in American pop culture, like the "Mecha-Streisand" episode of South Park and the overly hyped 1998 Hollywood movie from the producers of Independence Day. The Hollywood remake flopped, leaving public opinion to believe that Godzilla movies are best left to the Japanese. Japan still makes Godzilla movies today, the latest (at the time of writing) being Final Wars to come out December 2004.

THE GINZA DISTRICT OF TOKYO is where people with money come to shop; Ginza's Hamuri-dori is like New York's Fifth Avenue, Paris' Champs des Elysées. Those without a big fashion budget might come to Ginza for Kabuki Theater or the Imperial Palace or to see the latest gadgets at the Sony Showcase Gallery (which includes a look at Sony's upmarket "Qualia" brand, not yet available in North America). But I came for another reason altogether: to find Godzilla.

Liz told me that there existed a Godzilla statue somewhere in Ginza, but it was "small" and "disappointing" (even though she hadn't seen it herself). This was most likely the case because it was never mentioned in a guidebook or any local tourist map -- you just had to know where it was. It didn't stop me from pursuing it though, even with the rain coming down from the gray skies.

I walked to the first street map I found on a sidewalk when I exited from the JR stop near Ginza. I looked all over for an icon or label, thinking the statue would at least be some local pop culture shrine or something noted on the map, but there was nothing. The map directed me to an information stand down the block but when I walked over, it was just another street map, also with no sign of Godzilla.

There was a cop nearby and I asked him a question using the extent of my Japanese: "Godzilla wa doko?" ("Where is Godzilla?")

"Oh, Gojira?" He led me into a police booth to show me on a schematic of the city and gave me directions in simple single English words: here, two, JR track, left, Gojira. I got the gist of it.

I followed the cop's directions and walked through the rain. According to what I think he told me, I was to go two traffic lights from the overpassing rail tracks and make a left. As I walked down the sidewalk, I felt closer and closer to the legendary movie monster and heard the foreboding music of drums and brass in my head -- and yet a nearby directional sign with points of interest still gave no mention of him. The cop's directions led me to the entrance of Hibiya Park so I figured the statue was in there. I continued to search under the rain, passed ponds and fountains, but was still turning up blanks.

No, not a decorated monolith from the Vikings, I want Godzilla! Where is he? I wish there was some way to just summon him, but he always just sort of shows up conveniently to save the day when other monsters attack. Looking at the park map I saw no signs of the statue, but luckily I managed to stumble upon a park rangers' office.

"Uh Gojira wa doko?" Funny how with no context that comes out of nowhere, but they all seemed to get it.

"Gojira? Oh..." The ranger went to pull out a map he had and showed me. He even photocopied the map, enlarging the section I needed and drew on it. He showed me a route out of the park and down the block, around the corner to a rectangle that I figured was a small plaza or something. "Gojira, here. Across Imperial Hotel."

Raindrops kept falling on the umbrella I borrowed from Liz as I ventured on. This search for Godzilla is turning into a wild goose chase. But I felt the presence of Godzilla again, with the drums and brass in my head. I found the Imperial Hotel and the rectangle across the street from it, but it wasn't a plaza like I had thought but a building. On the sidewalk of the building was the statue of a human figure and I thought maybe the Godzilla one would be nearby. I walked around the entire thing but found nothing more, so I walked inside.

"Gojira wa doko?"

"Godzilla?" He spoke English. He knew exactly where the statue was, at a forecourt of the building behind the one we were in. Upon walking out of the lobby I realized just why he had to know the location of the statue; I was in the Toho Building, offices of Toho Pictures, the production company that produced and owned the rights to Godzilla.

The drums and brass filled my inner ears again. I was close. I could even imagine the sounds of distant, thunderous footsteps and Godzilla's classic shrieks fill the air. Down the block, behind a wall fountain that I had walked by before, there he was immortalized in bronze, textured skin, teeth, scales and all. The statue was a lot bigger than I expected -- Liz said it'd only be about two fee tall -- which was a pleasant surprise. It was nowhere as big as the real Godzilla in the movies, not even the size of his poor excuse of a son (as seen in Monster Island). However, with a little tweaking of camera positions, he still could appear larger than life (picture above) from front and behind.

Standing out in the rain got to be a bit much for me so I left Godzilla there in that plaza in peace, knowing very well that no matter how big he may have been immortalized in bronze, he was still the big badass movie monster to me.

I MET LIZ BACK at her apartment, who had come home with a new face for me to meet: her husband Hiroshi, who had come back from his mother's to handle some family matters. The three of us went out to dinner at a kaiten-zushi, one of those restaurants where different kinds of sushi go around and around on a conveyor belt for people sitting at a bar or at a table can choose each freely according to his/her taste and appetite. At the end, the server simply counts your plates (each priced according to color) and figures out the bill.

I had been to a place like this many times before in the States, but this one had items I had not tried, like: daigaku imo (honeyed potatoes), salmon roe wrapped in salmon, seaweed with sweet seaweed jam, hatched roe, (imitation) shark fin and (real) crab claw. The wildest thing that night was the raw shrimp Liz and Hiroshi special-ordered -- so raw they were still moving. The chef took two feisty shrimps, cut their heads off to fry separately, then peeled and deveined the bodies. He put the two tails on the beds of rice like any other kind of sushi, only this kind was still moving. Hiroshi took it like a man and ate the semi-squirming shrimp tail in one bite, while Liz was a little freaked out about her moving food.

"Cut the [end of the tail] off!" she asked her husband. The end we noticed, seemed to be the feistiest, still twitching its semi-live muscle. There aren't exactly any knives at the table in a Japanese restaurant so he tried using his chopsticks -- in doing so the tail jumped off the bed of rice and onto the plate, causing Liz to flinch in nervous laughter. In the end he managed to take the tail end off. Liz quickly popped the shrimp in her mouth and didn't look back.

WE HAD A LOT OF SUSHI that night (not all of it still half-alive) and in the end we had a tower of empty plates the size of a building -- the size of a building if you put it in the scale of that Godzilla statue of course.

School Day

DAY 345: Liz's job in Japan was a corporate trainer and English teacher for businesspeople. Most of her clients were Japanese businessmen and businesswomen who needed to learn English for their employers, to reach a particular rating by the Foreign Services Institute so that they could communicate overseas. Most companies required a rating of 2.2 to 2.4 (on a scale of 0.0-5.0), which was fairly okay. (By comparison, George W. Bush scored a 3.4 and Bill Clinton scored a 4.2.)

Every Tuesday afternoon, Liz got a break from the corporate scene and went out to the suburbs north of Tokyo to teach English to a group of old Japanese suburban housewife-types -- one of them had a son who had taken the corporate training and turned them on to it.

"[The women] aren't really interested in learning the English so much," Liz told me as we rode off to the suburbs. "They see it as more of a social thing." (Just like real school -- not that there's anything wrong with that.)

The previous Tuesday she told the class that she'd bring a guest speaker to the next (me) and that their homework was to prepare an introduction and two questions to ask me.

A TRAIN AND BUS RIDE LATER, we arrived at the Saitama prefecture, a suburban area that reminded me a lot like suburban New Jersey. We walked into a multipurpose room in a local community center where tables and chairs were arranged in a rectangle, forum style, so people could look at each other and discuss things. Placed at every spot was an assortment of snacks brought in by the students following the old rule of bringing food to class: If you're going to bring food to class, you have to bring enough for everyone. The snacks followed the Japanese tradition of bringing sweets back from places you've gone away. I passed around the snack treats Liz bought in Nikko, while one woman named Yukiko passed snacks she brought back from a recent vacation to Canada: maple syrup cookies.

I sat at the head of the class like a teacher's pet. The faces of middle-aged Japanese women stared back at me while Mrs. Atsumi (Liz) took attendance. "This is Erik," she introduced me. "Did you do your assignment? You were supposed to write two questions for him."

The women shyly nodded yes.

"Now who wants to volunteer and introduce herself to Erik?"

The women, shy that they'd have to actually use their English in a "real" situation other than just to talk to their familiar English-speaking Canadian teacher of over a year, looked a bit nervous.

"If no one volunteers, can I pick someone?" I asked Mrs. Atsumi at the front table. "Because I always used to hate it when teachers did that to us."

"If no one volunteers," Liz announced to the class, "Erik is going to pick someone. So who wants to volunteer? Anyone?"

Threatened by the ultimatum, the women came out of their shells one by one -- sometimes by force of another volunteering for her. Eventually I met all the Japanese Golden Girls, who primarily didn't define themselves by what they did, but what their husbands or kids did. There was: Yukiko, the one who had just come back from Canada, who was also taking Tai Chi lessons; Mieko, who was quite an avid golfer; Yasuko, who had spent some time living in New York City and was happy to meet a New Yorker; Haruyo, reptile lover and wife of graphic novelist/illustrator Yasuo Ohtagaki of Moonlight Magic; and Yoshiko, originally from the Hiroshima area (and had been there when the A-Bomb dropped in 1945).

Each of them asked questions in varied levels of English fluency, and as predicted, it was the usual "What's your favorite country?" sort of thing -- to keep from thinking about it too long, my pre-thought out answer is always "Bolivia." I told them about my anaconda episode in the Amazon and the lesser-known fact that across the street from the Great Pyramids of Giza was a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

"And Pizza Hut!" Yasuko said. She had seen it on some Japanese television show.

THE LESSON OF THE DAY was comparatives and superlatives, i.e. when to "bigger," "biggest," "more" or "most." I never realized how hard it might be to learn English as a Second Language with all the exceptions, and I really appreciated those who made the effort. Mrs. Atsumi wrote examples on the board so they could understand and write their own examples (picture above). As an exercise, Mrs. Atsumi divided the class into three groups for a game; each "team" would try and stump the other two with a true or false statement using comparatives and superlatives. Since I, the guest speaking traveler was to be the judge of whether something was correct or not, the subject was world geography.

The Golden Girls were smart enough to stump each other, and even me with some tough hard-to-call statements:

TRUE OR FALSE:

1. Monaco is bigger than the Vatican.
   
2. Japan is more expensive than France.
   
3. Germans are the most polite people in the world.
   

(Answers below)

At the end of the school day, the class, Mrs. Atsumi and I gathered around for an old-fashioned class picture. Class that afternoon went well -- so well in fact that teacher Mrs. Atsumi didn't assign any homework.

LIZ WAS AMONGST A SPECIAL (BUT NOT EXCLUSIVE) GROUP of readers of this Blog that had rapidly elevated in the ranks, from "SBR" (Silent Blog Reader) status to Blogreader to Blog Hog to "character on 'The Trinidad Show.'" However, she wasn't the only Blogreader in Japan. No, there was another: Szlachta, who had e-mailed me from the other side of Tokyo. His name was actually John and he too was an American on a trip around the world with his Nicaraguan doctor girlfriend Melissa. After a couple of e-mails and phone calls, it was his turn to appear on "the show," as our itineraries had crossed paths.

At the suggestion of Liz, we went out to an onomono-yaki place, which specialized in the Japanese delicacy that is pretty much like a stuffed savory pancake with eggs, meat, noodles, mayonaisse and sauce. The restaurant was on the upper floor of a hi-rise in the Yebisu district on a nice moonlit night, where we sat around a hot griddle in the center of the table to cook up our onomono-yaki ourselves -- although Liz did all the honors so we wouldn't be too sloppy, particularly with the sprinkling of dried fish flake garnish.

"Wow, you work for [world-famous architect] Frank Gehry?" I said to John in our introductory conversation. "Do you know who Frank Gehry is?" I asked Liz. "That's like being in film and saying you know Steven Spielburg."

"I know him too," John said. "And Brad Pitt. He's a big fan of architecture."

As exciting as that sounded, John too had grown tired of the corporate scene in his late twenties and unplugged himself out of The Matrix to explore the world for six months with Melissa at his side. So far they were having a good time, particularly in Tokyo, a city they had decided to spend more time than they originally alotted.

The four of us had our pancakes and washed them down the Japanese way (with beer), all while admiring the lights come on below us.

For Liz it was a school night, so John, Melissa and I went out for drinks in another part of town at Cube Zen, this trendy Euro/Japanese lounge that served up a mean shochu (Japanese hard liquor similar to vodka and sake) on the rocks. We sat around and talked the usual traveler talk in addition to raving about our impressions of Japan -- its cleanliness, its modern culture and its pay telephones with the animated woman on the LCD screen that bows thank you when you hang up. John too was amazed, just as I was, just how polite the Japanese could be -- he would have probably have gotten question number three correct if he had been in class that afternoon.

_{ANSWERS: 1. T; 2. T (based on the priced I'd seen at McDonald's); 3. F (that honor goes to the Japanese!)}

Indoor Fun

DAY 346: Typhoon season in Japan occurs during the change in climate around the coming of autumn, from about August to October, much like the hurricanes that hit the Caribbean and the eastern seaboard of North America. Unlike the American hurricanes, which are given plain American names in alphabetical order ("Albert," "Bobby," "Chris," etc.), typhoons are simply given plain numbers in Japan in ascending order. That Wednesday, "Typhoon 21" was on its way up from the South China Sea and on through southern Japan.

While Typhoon 21 hadn't yet reached the metropolitan Tokyo area yet, its outer rain clouds poured down for most of the day, leaving me indoors to catch up on Blog duties in the apartment without much desire to go out and do more. Liz had to train a client in the late afternoon in the Asakusa neighborhood, and so she dragged me out so that I could get out of the house for a little fresh air -- and more importantly, to pose with the two Ultra Man statues outside the TBS television station that broadcasts the show in Tokyo.

The rain continued that evening while I was meant to explore Asakusa's shops and restaurants, built into the neighborhood's buildings that Liz described to me as "old" -- and by that she meant twenty years, which is practically ancient in modern Tokyo. The rains of the coming typhoon came down pretty steady and I found refuge in an American embassy (McDonald's) and wrote over some Fish McNuggets with wasabi dipping sauce. I was in the dining room a bit longer than anticipated because I couldn't resist listening to the continual 80s pop music they kept playing, from Eurhythmics' "Sweet Dreams" to Stevie Wonder's "Ebony and Ivory." Not even a typhoon could put a damper on the joys of a little 80s nostalgia for me.

That evening the rain continued, although not at typhoon proportions just yet. With three umbrellas, Liz, Hiroshi and I went out to an udon chain restaurant with a seemingly cute cartoon mascot. Like almost every other store and restaurant in Tokyo, it was well-prepared for customers with wet umbrellas and had an automatic umbrella wrapper that put umbrellas into convenient plastic bags -- Liz referred to them as "umbrella condoms." We sat at a table and had our udon, the Japanese white broad rice noodles in broth with an assortment of extras, including seaweed, sesame and fish flakes. Although it was filling, we went out for beers and more Japanese fast food anyway (grilled chicken cartilage, beef tongue, chicken wing "popsicles," etc.) at the local yakitori place; there was something about the energy of the three happy guys working the grills and playfully shouting to each other and their funny old man boss that brought joy and a little excitement to an otherwise gloomy evening.

I THINK HIROSHI LIKED THE IDEA of having another guy in the house because in what seemed to be an ongoing debate in his marriage with Liz -- Should we go to the video arcade or not? -- I tipped the scales in his favor. We continued the theme of staying indoors to escape the rain and went to the local Club Sega to close the night off. The Japanese video arcade market, probably to fill the void during typhoon season, simulated things one could do outside; Liz played a public bus driver simulator (on a virtual sunny day), while I walked a virtual dog (picture above) and kept it happy until I accidentally almost got it run over by a guy on a virtual bicycle. Hiroshi on the other hand, kept to more manly games like a robotic mech Gundam game and video strip mahjong. In the end, we all tried our skills at a taikyo drum game, beating the percussion to Bach's "Toccato and Fugue in D Minor."

Back in the apartment that night Liz turned on the local television news for the weather report. On the map, Typhoon 21 had already crossed over to the other side of the island, its path circumventing Tokyo altogether. The next day would bring forth sunnier skies, although I'm sure if it didn't, there'd still be plenty of fun to have indoors.

Live-Action Japanimation

DAY 347: Voltron. Pokémon. G-Force. Yu-Gi-Oh. Speed Racer. Unless you've been hiding in a cave for the past fifty years (without a TV), you must recognize at least one of these titles (each one representing a decade since the 1960s). They are the titles of some of the more popular cartoons to be exported out of Japan and into the screens of American television, after being redubbed into English.

Cartoons, like video games, are another of Japan's major exports. Often referred to as "Japanimation" or "anime," Japanese cartoons are usually characterized by elements like "speed lines" and wide-eyed characters. Anime isn't exclusive to the small screen; it is a world capable of being more fantastic than anything live-action film could create, and the genre has spawned many feature-length stories worthy enough to grace celluloid -- including the more well-known anime films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell. These two examples, like many anime films, aren't for kids, with dramatic sci-fi storylines and gratuitous animated sex and violence. In some movies, "violence" is an understatement with really explicit, almost jaw-dropping scenes of gore and blood. One particular adult anime film even involves a race of demonic aliens with about a dozen penises each that come to earth to go around raping women. (Anime fans reading this are smirking because they know just exactly which one I'm talking about.)

This is not to say that all feature-length anime films are ultra-violent. Studio Ghibli, the studio that produces the animated works of world-renowned Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, exports many anime movies with compelling storylines good for the whole family. Miyazaki, a "Japanese Disney" if you will, has created a world of many characters over the years, cherished not only by Japanese children and adults, but people around the world (with the global distribution help of the Disney corporation). If you've seen Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away, you've already seen fantastic worlds that Miyazaki has created.

Unlike Disney, Miyazaki hasn't aspired to make an empire of theme parks, but instead has created just one museum inspired by the Studio Ghibli films, located in Mitaka, just outside of central Tokyo. Opened in 2001, the museum is "the kind of museum [Miyazaki] wanted to make," with the philosophies noted in the museum's color pamphlet:

"The building must be: put together as it were a film; not an overbearing, flamboyant, gaudy or suffocating building; something to make people want to touch things in it. The museum must be run in such a way as to: treat small children as if they were grown-ups; not force visitors to follow a pre-determined, fixed course; provide exhibits that will stimulate a wealth of ideas, while avoiding worn out displays covered with dust. The displays will be: not only for the benefit of people who are already fans of Studio Ghibli; not memorials to Studio Ghibli with only exhibits from its past films; things and spaces that will allow visitors to appreciate, just by looking, what it's like to be an animator and to gain a new appreciation for animation... [The museum will not be:] a pretentious museum; an arrogant museum; a museum that treats its contents as if they were more important than people; a museum that displays uninteresting works as if they were significant."

With that all said, it sounded like a museum-goer's ultimate dream. However, the pamphlet neglected one other philosophy:

The museum will not: allow photography or video recording.

JOHN (A.K.A. BLOGREADER SZLACHTA) HAD GOTTEN US advance tickets for the museum -- required to insure crowd control -- and met me at the entrance gate with his girlfriend Melissa. "Hey there's Totoro!" he said, pointing out the iconic Ghibli character (Ghibli's Mickey Mouse if you will) at the fake "Totoro entrance" (picture above). Seeing Totoro and the whimsical exterior of the museum, we knew we were at a place for the young and the young at heart. Not only was Totoro there, but the giant robot soldier from Laputa: The Castle in the Sky stood on the roof's wooden garden.

Despite the no photography rule, John and I managed to sneak in a few shots here and there as we wandered the fairy tale house adorned with Ghibli-inspired stained-glass windows. There were exhibits of the process of animation, from concept art to scriptwriting to drawing, coloring and animating. In a crowded room with a classic-looking animator's drawing board, there was a hands-on camera where one could pan and zoom a scene with a hot air balloon floating over a city.

Only about 60% of the museum exhibited things from Studio Ghibli; a substantial portion was allotted for Pixar, the computer-animation studio under Disney's distribution wing that brought us Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo. They too exhibited fun examples on the process of animation, from storyboarding to animatics. One room was even a promotional room for the upcoming The Invincibles movie. What the exact partnership between Pixar and Studio Ghibli had together to spawn such an exhibit in Japan I wasn't sure of; fans speculate Pixar will animate an upcoming Miyazaki film, but no details have been given (at the time of writing). Perhaps secrets were a good thing to keep people wondering...

THE ENTIRE MUSEUM WAS CROWDED WITH PEOPLE in every section, not just the kids playing on the big plush Cat Bus inspired by the Cat Bus in My Neighbor Totoro. It was so crowded that the three of us got separated somewhere between the bookstore, the gallery of Pixar posters and the gift shop selling everything from Totoro key chains to Innocence (the sequel to Ghost in the Shell) on DVD. I eventually found Melissa and we tried to find John -- which was easier said than done with the museum interior sometimes feeling like an M.C. Escher drawing. It took a while to find him but we eventually did, and we all went to the in-house Saturn Theater to watch Hayao Miyazaki's latest short film (at the time of writing), The Whale Hunt, about a class of schoolchildren with imaginations so powerful that takes them out to sea.

WE LEFT THE IMAGINARY CHILD WORLD OF STUDIO GHIBLI and re-entered the real world on the way back to Tokyo. Like within the spectrum of anime, John moved from children themes to adult ones. "So do you get lonely on the road?" he asked me.

"Nah, there's always someone around wherever I go."

"No, you know what I mean," he said with a smirk. He was probably speaking for many male Blogreaders wondering the same thing. (Funny how many guys come to this travel Blog for sex, when there are exactly 1.3 gojillion websites specifically for that already.)

I smirked back. "I've had my moments."

"Oh, so you do!" he said excitedly. "Because you never write about that stuff."

"There's a line I draw between stuff that goes public and stuff that remains private," I told him. "That stuff stays outside the boundaries."

"[Yeah, I figured it gets pretty lonely on the road,]" he said. "That's why I brought her along," he joked, pointing at Melissa.

"OKAY, WHERE'S FUJI?" Nicaraguan doctor Melissa said like an stern E.R. surgeon as the elevator doors opened. We had arrived at the 45th floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building for the free look out the observation deck. Typhoon 21 had swept away all the lingering rain clouds and pollution over Tokyo, leaving a clear sky to see the big expanse of Mega-Tokyo. The sky was clear enough that we could see the famous Mt. Fuji to the west, which was closer than I thought it was -- or perhaps just a lot bigger -- flanking Tokyo in a glowing orange sky. The orange turned to darkness and the sparkly lights of Tokyo came out.

With multiple voicemails to Liz (since I didn't have a number for her to call me back), Liz directed us to the kaiten-zuchi (conveyor belt sushi) place we went to before, since I raved about it to John and Melissa. The three of us sat at a table for beers, green tea and plenty of sushi -- Melissa and I even had the moving shrimp sushi, with tail ends that jiggled outside our lips when we took our bites.

At the end of my animated day with John and Melissa, we split up to go our own ways, all before the Tokyo subway system closed at the painfully early weekday closing time of ten o'clock. In Tokyo, no matter if you were into the family-oriented anime of Studio Ghibli or the grown up kind with demonic sex-crazed aliens -- or a little of both like John -- the train lines always seemed to keep everyone in line like it was a school night.

Bullet Time

DAY 348: "I'm quite envious that you're going to Kyoto," Liz confessed to me at the dining table that morning. She had lived in Japan for five odd years, but had never made it out to tour the former Imperial capital. I supposed Liz exhibited the same behavior found in most people -- to not tour the home country. (Besides, a flight and a week's stay in Thailand was cheaper than spending a weekend in Kyoto.)

I didn't yet have the ticket for Kyoto just yet, but Liz came with me to the JR office to organize the seat reservation to Kyoto, beyond and back, a trip that would take six days while I was "stuck in Japan" waiting for my visa to process at the Indian embassy. The ticket agent managed to figure a way to discount the itinerary, but it required me passing the conductor this additional ticket that Liz couldn't understand. Hiroshi translated the agent's explanation over the phone and everything was good in the end.* As The Beatles once sang, "I get by with a little help from my friends."

Liz left for work while I went to arrange more tickets, this time for planes, not trains. I was recommended Hit Travel, a travel agency with offices all around Tokyo; in the Ebisu branch I met Tandin, a friendly Bhutanese guy who told me, like others who had wrote me from in Katmandu, that all the violence in Nepal has been overly exaggerated by the media. He recommended not flying to Katmandu directly from Tokyo not for safety reasons, but for money reasons; it'd be a lot cheaper to fly to Bangkok and get tickets from there. He put me on a waiting list on the cheapest flight to Bangkok and all I could do was wait.

* _{For those using this Blog as research for their own trip to Japan, don't buy tickets this way -- you MUST get a JR Railpass before you enter Japan for unlimited travel in X amount of time at a much cheaper price (like the Eurailpass in Europe). If I had known better (I might have, but writing this Blog sucked away all my free time for research), I might have saved hundreds of dollars!}

FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET IS SOMETHING that might rival the speed of Superman: the Shinkansen, more commonly known by foreigners as Japan's "bullet train" -- and with good reason, because the head car does look like a bullet (picture above), a bullet from the future that is. At speeds of up to 270 km/hr, the bullet train zooms people between the major Japanese cities faster than you can say "blueberry pancakes."

...

Well, not that fast, but pretty fast. Unlike old traditional railway tracks, the rails on the Shinkansen are welded together in a continuous way, allowing the train a super fast, super smooth ride that gives you the sensation of flying in a jet plane -- there hasn't been a fatality yet since its beginnings. Actually, when a train leaves a station it feels like when you're in a plane accelerating down the runway for takeoff, only this vehicle never leaves the ground; it stays at that take-off speed and only goes faster until the next station. For some people, the experience is nauseating and causes vertigo, but that could probably be avoided by not looking out the window. Perhaps riding the bullet train inspired anime's speed line effect because entire neighborhoods whizzed by in seconds, entire cities in minutes. In a couple of hours later I found myself before I knew it in Kyoto station.

MODERN KYOTO, AS LONELY PLANET DESCRIBES, is "just like any modern Japanese city," which was true when I left the station and saw the familiar shops, restaurants and pachinko parlors. Like Tokyo, Kyoto had no shortage of Starbucks -- the Japanese calls them "Sta Ba" -- but the point of me leaving Tokyo wasn't to see a familiar scene of Iced Cafe Lattés (grande) and Matcha Cream (green tea) Frappucinos (venti). Instead, I had made a reservation at a hostel in the northwestern suburbs, an area known to be full of old temples and shrines. Coffee there came out of one of the vending machines (seen on almost every street corner in all of Japan).

A public bus took me to the "Yusu Hostero-mae" stop ("Youth Hostel" in a Japanese accent) away from the madness of the city. No neon, no electronic chimes, no street noise; in fact I actually heard crickets. In the hostel's backyard was a little serene garden. Walking inside, I reentered in the familiar backpacker scene of beer, labeling your juice in the shared refrigerator and pimply teenagers -- a scene I hadn't been in for the past three weeks while staying with ex-pats. Everything came back to me, except for that Japanese rule of not wearing your shoes indoors (they provided slippers).

That night, along with other travelers and members of an Australian high school class on a big field trip, I made yatsuhashi, a sweet doughy desert indigenous to the Kyoto region. Kai, one of the girls at the hostel, set up the ingredients for people to use, and guided us on the creation of it: mixing, kneading, microwaving, rolling and flavoring. The end result was desert dough with cinnamon and the consistency of pre-chewed gum, cut into strips. Mine came out really sloppy, but tasty nonetheless.

With homemade cinnamon treats in my stomach and the sounds of crickets outside, I felt it was great to get out of Japanese city life for a while. No wonder why Liz felt envious.

Zen and The Art of Bicycle Maintenance

DAY 349: Kyoto is the other must-see city (aside from Tokyo) for anyone with a short amount of time in Japan, according to the 1997 Lonely Planet guide. "More than any other city in Japan, if you care to seek it out, Kyoto offers what all westerners long for of Japan -- raked pebble gardens, the sensuous contours of a temple roof, the tripping step of a latter-day geisha in pursuit of a taxi." The center of the Japanese empire was based in Kyoto from the 7th to the 19th centuries, and in that time many classic buildings were constructed to serve the rulers, the people and the religions they believed in.

One of these religions was Zen Buddhism, probably the most famous one out of Japan for westerners since it has been often referenced in American pop culture, from The Simpsons to The Karate Kid. It is an Asian religion that focuses on the mind and the appreciation of nature.

Zen's roots, like all Buddhism, lies not in Japan but in India. It wasn't until about the 13th century that Zen Buddhism reached Japan, evolving into two schools of thought: zazen, based on quiet, sit-down meditation; and koan, the Rinzai School of Zen, based on the contemplation of riddles. You may have heard these riddles before: What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree in the forest falls down and no one is around, does it make a sound? They are questions one must sit and ponder, and it is this meditation that is pivotal in the Rinzai school.

Many of the Zen temples in Kyoto's northwestern suburbs were all a bike ride away from my hostel, so I rented a bicycle all day for about six dollars and used it to cruise around town despite the rain coming down. I started things off at the Kinkaku-Ji Temple, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, originally built in 1397 as the residence for Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, known for its famed Golden Temple. It was while wandering the temple grounds that I bumped into an American guy rushing around with a camera like he was only in town for a day and wanted to quickly snap shots of things to say he was there.

"Where are you going next? I asked him.

"The Nanzen-Ji Temple," he said. It was another must-take-a-photo place on the other side of town. I told him about my next destination, the nearby Ryoan-Ji Temple known for its Zen rock gardens. He seemed intrigued and hopped in a cab while I went to go wipe the rain off my bicycle seat.

THE RYOAN-JI TEMPLE, founded in 1450 by a former military leader, is a well-known sit in the Rinzai School of Zen. It is the site of a scenic pond and karesansui, a "dry landscape" or rock garden. You may have seen smaller versions of these rock gardens sold in new age stores in the mall, usually in a store that also sells glow-in-the-dark star stickers to put on your ceiling. In the Ryoan-ji's rock garden were fifteen rocks, placed not randomly, but in a thought-out way by an unknown designer. Many people flocked to this garden, young and old to try and figure out its meaning, but as the author of a book I flipped through in the gift shop said, the point is not to find the meaning, but the meditation in trying to find the meaning; too many Zen scholars try to spin interpretations, forgetting that the "answer" is not the answer, just like those Rinzai riddles. Interpretation or not, I was too busy contemplating how old the MILF nearby with her kids was.

"I paid five bucks to see a bunch of rocks?" the American guy I met at Kinkaku-Ji said when I bumped into him there. He took my suggestion after all.

"It's a Zen rock garden," I told him.

"Ehh, I should have just gone to the other one." He rushed off and left the "mere collection of rocks," to find something else worth taking a photo of. I suppose not everyone gets the principles of Zen -- or doesn't have the time to think about it.

WITH SO MANY TEMPLES AND SHRINES to see in Kyoto, it gets a bit overwhelming and after a while, they all start looking the same. It is key to choose and plan wisely ahead so that you can get the most out of your time -- and your wallet. At almost five bucks per temple with over twenty to see, it just makes good financial sense to pick and choose the ones you really want to see.

Lonely Planet turned me onto another temple (Shinto, not Zen), the Jingo-Ji Temple, nestled even farther out from Kyoto's center in Takao, a northwestern town high in the mountains. It didn't seem too far at the time I decided to go by bicycle, but on my way up, struggling to pedal up the mountain road for hours under the rain with no rain gear, I really started to meditate on some questions: Why are you doing this? Why are you so stubborn not to ever bring rain gear or an umbrella? How come these bicycle gears are working funny? Why is gravity so cruel? And really, how old was that MILF back at the rock garden?

After getting lost and asking directions from the local sheriffีs office (the living room of his house I believe), I eventually made it to the top of the hill without making that wrong turn onto the freeway. I parked my bike and proceeded on foot up a big cruel flight of stairs that probably wouldn't have been so bad if I just took a bus up the mountain like everyone else. Unlike the temples in town, there was only a handful of people visiting, leaving me more at peace to appreciate the mountain forest nature around me and contemplate some the Rinzai riddles while walking mountain paths. If a tree fell here and I wasn't, would it make a sound? If I farted right now and no one else was around, would it smell like I had broccoli for breakfast?

I visited the Gold Hall and the pagoda and then the look out point of the beautiful valley below. It was customary to throw these little clay disks out into the valley to rid of bad karma, and I flung mine away to provide me a clearer future.

Soon, the sun started to come out. I took advantage and rode around the mountainous region by the river, off the beaten path (picture above) despite not having a mountain bike and eventually found a "secret" hiking trail up a hill near a lesser-known shrine in seemingly the middle of nowhere. I only made it up halfway up the heavily eroded hill until I turned back for fear of spider bites and the fact that no one would know where to look for me if I turned up lost.

BACK IN TOWN, I had a couple hours of daylight left and went to visit one more Zen temple, the Daitoku-Ji Temple of the Rinzai school. They "temple" was more like a little self-contained village with many monks, temples, subtemples, rock gardens and bamboo ones. The Daisen-In Subtemple seemed to be the big draw of the few places open to the public so I went to check it out. An old man in monk attire that looked like he had some seniority over the others approached me with a smile and words in Japanese -- until i told him I was from New York.

"Oh, New York?" he said in English. "Start spreading the news..." he sang in his Japanese accent. "I'm leaving today... I want to be a part of it, New York, New York..."

The Sinatra of Zen wasn't some random monk with a penchant for American standards; I had met Soen Ozeki, the Zen master of the Daitoku-Ji Temple, who broke all stereotypes of the reserved contemplating monk with a boyish charm and demeanor. "Look here! It is a sinking ship, and a little turtle swimming against the current," he said, explaining his interpretation of the nearby rock garden he designed near his more well-known Great Ocean garden. But he really blew me away with one of his quotes he conjured up in a meditative session:

"Each day in life is training
Training for myself
Though failure is possible
Living each moment
Equal to anything
Ready for everything
I am alive -- I am this moment
My future is here and now
For if I cannot endure today
When and where will I?"

I bought his wisdom on a scroll that he autographed for me -- before posing for a photo: Erik and the Sinatra-singin' Zen Master.

AT THE END OF THE DAY, standing with my bike before the Arashiyama Bridge over the Katsura River, I felt fulfilled with a new understanding of Zen and the art of bicycle maintenance. If only that American guy took the time out to think about it, perhaps those rocks would have been photo-worthy after all.

The Japanese Connection

DAY 350: When I was on a tour to ride camels in the Sahara desert of Morocco, I met a young Japanese guy in my group named Muzza. He, along with the cartoon philosophical Vancouverite Sebastian and others including myself, rode camels into the sunset, slept in a Bedouin camp and climb big Saharan sand dunes. My times with Muzza were short but he gave me his contact info and told me to get in touch with him once I got to Japan.

Muzza lived in a small town west of Tokyo near Mt. Fuji, where in the summers he worked as a guide. In the typhoon season and winter times he worked in a teahouse and poured tea all day, all week -- which was the reason why he couldn't managed to find a time to meet me.

The next best thing he did for me was to put me in touch with his "friend" in Kyoto, and it was perfect timing when I received his email in Kyoto. I put "friend" in quotes because when I finally met the guy, he told me that he probably knew Muzza just as much as I did; they had merely crossed paths on a Mt. Fuji trek. Nevertheless I depended on the kindness of strangers yet again, and met him under Kyoto Tower near the train station.

"Are you Yusuke?" I asked the confused-looking Japanese guy waiting by the entrance at noon. He seemed surprised that the "American" he was supposed to meet looked more "Asian."

"Erik?"

Yusuke was used to meeting strangers since he was a member of the Free Guide Club at his school, Kyoto University for Foreign Studies, where students volunteered to show foreigners around to practice their English skills. He was all set to give me the "standard" tour until I told him that I had been to most of those places already.

"Where do you want to go?" he asked me.

"I don't know. Can we go east? I haven't seen the east."

EASTERN KYOTO, LIKE THE NORTHWEST, was also full of many temples built in the ages of feudalism, way back before Nintendo and the PlayStation, many of which had been destroyed but reconstructed over the centuries. Yusuke and I took a bus out east to sample a few; it took an hour to get there and in that hour we just sort of sat on the bus with less than small talk. There must have been something lost in translation in everything that we said because we really didn't make a connection. Possibly it was because he already had a whole spiel to tell me if we did the "standard tour" but he was at a loss.

An hour later we awoke and arrived at the Ginkaku-Ji Temple, the former retreat house of Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa built in 1482, now a Zen temple of the Rinzai school. The street leading there from the bus stop was adorned with touristy shops selling everything from cheap samurai swords to yatsuhashi (the Kyoto sweet), so people could buy them and bring them home for friends and co-workers -- or, if you were like me, so you could eat the free samples offered at the front tables.

We wandered Ginkaku-Ji Temple, with its high-hedge corridor that lead to the main building and meticulously landscaped gardens. The pathway was so crowded with weekend tourists that there wasn't much of an opportunity to just wander off the designated "usual route" marked with arrows.

"What do you think of this place?" Yusuke asked me.

"All the gardens are very beautiful."

"It makes me feel very comfortable."

That was the gist of our disjointed conversations, until we went back to the shop lane and got more sweet samples.

TO DITCH THE CROWDS FOR A WHILE, we walked along the scenic Path of Philosophy, a nearby walkway and tourist trap during April's big cherry blossom season, and then up path up Mt. Daimonji-yama, the site of an annual August 16th festival when a big patch of the mountain is set in flames in the form of the character for "great," believed to guide the souls of the dead home. It took us a good long hour up the inclined nature trail and up a long stone staircase, but at the end we were rewarded with a perfect view of the entire expanse of Kyoto and the surrounding mountains. Japanese eagles soared above while old Japanese men in full hiking attire (boots, hiking poles, hat) made their way up below us.

"Temple or shrine?" Yusuke asked me.

Temple or shrine? I thought. I think I'm templed and shrined out in Kyoto already. "If I wasn't here, where would you go?"

"Temple?"

"No, if you weren't showing me around today, what would you be doing? Where would you go?" I was interested in seeing how Kyotoites kicked it on the weekends.

"Maybe a fast food shop or a coffee shop."

"Hmmm..."

"Oh, can we go to the [yatsuhashi] store? I love that place because you eat for free."

"Okay." If we had any common bond, it was the belief in the motto: If it's free, it's for me.

We descended the mountain and got some more free samples at the store down the hill before hopping on a bus southbound to the famous Teapot Lane, near the even more famous Kiyomiza-Ji Temple, with geishas in training and its big center veranda that looked out to the sunset (picture above), made of multiple tiers but no nails. We walked by these things, following the weekend crowd pedestrian traffic, also passed the pagoda and Jishu Shrine -- frequented by women for its matchmaking power -- and then sacred triple waterfall that invited hordes of tourists for cleansing. We sort of rushed through it all because we knew that the store with the free food would be closing soon.

We made it inside before they closed the door and were offered cups of tea. Then, for maybe twenty minutes straight we just went to the sales counter and ate free samples of different flavors of yatsuhashi and other sweets, pretending we were interested in buying some -- the best were the strawberry and the chocolate and banana ones. I eventually caved and bought some packs to bring back to Liz and Hiroshi.

"I think I ate too much," Yusuke told me, holding his stomach.

I GOT FINALLY GOT A TASTE OF REAL KYOTO LIFE when I went with Yusuke beyond the tourist draws (like the nearby Yasaka shrine), and went to the Gion District, Kyoto's lively center of nightlife. Yusuke called up a friend and we went out to do the quinessential Japanese pastime: karaoke.

"How many times do you go karaoke?" I asked Yusuke.

"Maybe once a month. How about you?"

"Maybe twice a year," I told him. Karaoke wasn't exactly the quintessential American pastime; that honors goes to watching other people sing on reality TV programs like American Idol.

"Wow, that's so little."

"I have friends who have karaoke machines in their house."

"Oh, so you don't have to go out to the karaoke bars then."

"Actually, karaoke isn't that popular in the States."

"How long do you get at the bars? One hour, two hours?"

"It depends how drunk I am."

Beers and cocktails warranted a whole two hour session and we rocked the mic in a private room at the karaoke place where Yusuke and his friends go to all the time. We were only met by one friend named Yoske, who was the best singer out of the three of us. I thought I did okay (bar a couple of off-notes and voice cracks of course), and as for Yusuke -- let's just say Simon Cowell would have wanted to jump out the window, particularly when he sang many songs by the Backstreet Boys.

With the younger crowd of about five years, I strayed away from the classic 80s and sang more familiar tunes of Avril Lavigne and Linkin Park -- plus I had enough alcohol in me for Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way." In the end, it was karaoke that finally connected the estranged Kyotoite with me.

"Do you want me to put you in touch with my friend in Osaka?" he asked before we parted ways on two different bus routes.

"Sure!"

And so, my Japanese connection that had started all the way in Morocco would be extended another day, all thanks to free food and the Backstreet Boys.

A Castle Tale

DAY 351: Osaka, as Lonely Planet says, is a big modern city concerned with money, food and drink but "if you go looking for beauty, [it] will surely disappoint." However, when I got off the local JR train (cheaper than taking the bullet train from Kyoto since it was less than an hour away), I found Lonely Planet to be the disappointing one -- their Osaka street map neglected to label any of the streets, and I just got lost. Really, what's the point of a map if there are no street names on it?

I found my way anyway by asking directions and made it to the Excelsior Cafe (Japan's big Starbucks competitor), the meeting point set up by Yusuke's friend in Osaka.

"Are you Erik?" A Japanese girl had recognized me from the photo she received that Yusuke had taken the night before with his mobile phone. Her name was Yukari and she was a senior at Kyoto University for Foreign Studies. Like Yusuke, she was in the Free Guide Club and was no stranger to leading foreign strangers around her hometown.

"Where do you want to go?" she asked.

"Can we go to the castle?"

OSAKA CASTLE, the former stronghold of Toyotomi Hideyoshi that was supposed to be impregnable -- only to be destroyed 32 years after its completion by Tokugawa Ieyasu and his army -- is Osaka's one major historical sight, attracting tourists and field trips of elementary school kids wearing their yellow school baseball caps. The building today is actually a reconstruction of the original built not exactly the same way; this new one was built to code with modern elevators and wheelchair accessibility. "Only in Osaka," Yukari told me.

Yukari had crossed Paradise Bridge over the moat (picture above) to the castle many times before, but didn't seem to mind going again; all comes with the territory of being in the Free Guide Club I guessed. Besides, it seemed like she was having a good time anyway; unlike my disjointed conversations with Yusuke the day before in Kyoto, Yukari and I hit it off pretty easily with conversation that bordered on flirtation. In just a few moments she was an admirer of me and my travels; she had recently been bitten by the travel bug on a trip to India two weeks prior and was excited to hear my plans to go there. However, she had school and a part-time job at Kyocera to take care off.

We went up to the top floor of the castle to admire the views from all sides of deck on what turned out to be a very clear day. Yukari pointed out where things were and gave me little bit of history of the building with meanings of some of the architectural elements. From there we went down to the exhibition galleries on the other floors with displays of war battles using little action figures, and some of the castle's historical artifacts. "All the Japanese [war] paintings [take place] in the clouds," she told me. "So they don't have to draw that much."

One floor was dedicated to a holographic diorama presentation of the life of Toyotomi Hideoshi, who had risen to power from a poor farmer family, and climbed the ranks until he became the unifier of all of Japan. The presentation was all in Japanese but Yukari was happy to translate everything for me.

"You have to have the takoyaki," she told me. It was the definite food of Osaka, grilled dough balls with octopus inside. There were dozens of stands selling it in the park surrounding the castle, and so we got a platter of them, garnished with seasonings and fish flakes, and sat at a picnic table for over drinks at sundown and joked about Yusuke's behavior in the karaoke bars.

Nearby there was one of those cardboard cut out displays so you could put your face over a cheesy drawing of characters in old Japanese garb. "Oh, we have to take a picture here," I told her.

"Really?"

"Yeah, why not, let's go." We had a passerby shoot the photo for us while we stuck our heads in the holes. "I'll put it on my website."

"No!" she said in embarrassment.

"Let's take another photo at the castle then."

"Okay, put that one up instead."

I DIDN'T HAVE MUCH TIME ALOTTED FOR OSAKA; Lonely Planet made it sound like it'd be another big city and I already had a reservation to move on that night. Yukari and I walked back to the subway station, with talks of life and travel. "India was the first time I went to a poor country," she told me. "I want to go back." There was something about going to an undeveloped country that just touched her soul or something. "So you will go to India after Japan?"

"Actually, Nepal, then India."

"Really?! I want to go there too!"

"You could come, just quit your job."

I was hoping I could squeeze in a trip to Dotomburi, the trendy nightlife district that Lonely Planet says looks like a scene from Blade Runner, to extend my time with my volunteer guide, but there was no time before my train reservation on the bullet train. Yukari and I were about to split ways on two different transfer trains, until she decided, "I'll come with you. I'm not doing anything." She escorted me to the very end, all the way to the turnstiles of the Shinkansen tracks at Shin-Osaka station, the last point before no passengers were allowed. Before my departure, we said our goodbyes.

"You have to come back," she told me.

"Or you can come to New York."

"Really?"

"Sure, I should be back in March."

There was something about the moment that just struck me to embrace her for that classic train station goodbye -- but I think I made a faux pas because she didn't reciprocate. Instead she just extended her hand for a handshake. Whoops. Man, That was embarrassing. I walked to the turnstile and she went on her way back home.

"Wait!" she called to me. Was she having second thoughts? "You forgot about your ticket." No.

THE SHINKANSEN BULLET TRAIN GOT ME TO HIROSHIMA in just under two hours and from the station I took a bus to the Hiroshima Youth Hostel, on top of a hill. About a week later, that photo of Yukari and me in the cardboard cut out ended up on my website.

Fahrenheit 8/6

DAY 352: August 6, 1945, 8:14 a.m. It was a clear, sunny day over the city of Hiroshima, a city that prided itself as a center of education. People of the Saragakucho district, a vibrant neighborhood of actors and artisans, were going about the beginning of their day like any other -- kids went to school, adults went to work. One person's anecdote of that beautiful morning started, "A dragonfly flitted in front of me and stopped on a fence. I stood up, took my cap in my hands, and was about to catch the dragonfly when..."

8:15 a.m. A flash of light. A boom that rattled the ground like an earthquake out of Hell. A fireball with a core temperature of over 18,000° Fahrenheit exploded just 580 meters above the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall in the city center. In a couple of seconds the radiation and heat of the blast expanded to the surrounding three kilometers, bringing it to scorching temperature of 5400-7200° Fahrenheit. The whole thing happened so fast that the innocent people whose clothes had suddenly burst into flames, exposing their skin to be charred and even melted, had no idea what had just happened. The explosion decimated the area and killed close to 75,000 people in an instant, with more radiation-related deaths to come in the coming months.

Meanwhile, high in the sky over the sea, the force of the blast was so powerful it turbulently shook the US warplane Enola Gay as it flew back to base with its news: Mission accomplished. The first atomic bomb to be used in human history had been deployed.

IN TODAY'S WORLD, such an act of terror would spawn a major grudge of global proportions and hmm, let's say, an all out war in "search of weapons of mass destruction" (hypothetically speaking, of course). However, the Japanese didn't retaliate. In fact, the city of Hiroshima, after picking up the pieces and reconstructing the city, dedicated itself to the promotion of world peace and the disarmament of nuclear weapons. To this day, a ceremony is still held each August 6th in remembrance of the tragedy that day and more importantly, to persuade world leaders that Hiroshima's history should not repeat itself anywhere else on the planet.

This annual ceremony takes place in Peace Memorial Park, a park on the peninsula between the Honkawa and Motoyasu-gawa Rivers right near Ground Zero. The area in and around the park not only holds the Peace Memorial Museum that is responsible for most of the research and photos used in this entry, but many memorials erected for the events of that unfortunate summer day in 1945 -- including the Mother and Child memorial, the Monument for A-Bomb Victims, the Peace Bell and the Flame of Peace, which appears to be an eternal flame monument for the victims, but is actually extinguishable; the flame will be extinguished when the world has completely disarmed all of its nuclear weapons, most of which are in the USA.

The most significant of the memorials is the site of the remnants of the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall -- now dubbed the A-Bomb Dome, reconstructed to remain in a dilapidated state as a reminder to the world of the destruction that had emanated 580m above its roof. Nearby was the T-shaped Aioi Bridge, which actually served as the target in the crosshairs of the US Enola Gay that dropped the bomb over Hiroshima. Choosing Hiroshima as the site of the first atomic bomb was a result of weeks of discussions of the perfect target in Japan. The Americans narrowed it down to Hiroshima from a possible 17 targets -- Hiroshima was picked because it was a Japanese military strategic position that hadn't been bombed yet, and it was believed there were no US POWs.

THE EFFECTS OF THE ATOMIC BOMB did a lot more damage than any conventional weapon of mass destruction could. With the radiation came many side effects, apparently not much of a concern to the scientists of the atomic bomb researching Manhattan Project (which was advised by none other than Albert Einstein, who urged Roosevelt for the creation of nuclear weapons for fear that the Germans already had them). Aside from the burns, cataracts, keloids and the odd black deformed fingernails that started to grow out of some people, one major after effect was leukemia. One girl named Sadako Sasaki contracted the disease and while bedridden in a hospital, believed that she could overcome her illness if she did the "impossible" task of folding 1,000 paper cranes. She died before reaching her 700th one, but her classmates were inspired by her strength and finished the rest.

Sadako Sasaki's story became such a moving and inspirational one that the Children's Peace Monument was erected in her honor. To this day kids still come by the busload to present 1,000 paper cranes -- and, as I saw in the group that arrived when I did, to sing a song of peace. The kids were allowed to wander the park afterwards -- some of them placed flowers in front of the Cenotaph for A-Bomb Victims, the centerpiece of the park, in front of the "eternal flame" burning as long as the threat of nuclear war did.

NOTHING REALLY HIT THE EMOTIONAL IMPACT right on the head more than the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, a free indoor exhibition in the park that really humanized the disaster with an electronic list rotating through the names and faces (picture above) of those Japanese that died that day, and the ones that died as a result of the nuclear fall out. By the end of 1945, the death toll rose to about 140,000 and over time up to near 200,000 -- not all of them exclusively Japanese; ten percent of the victims that perished were Korean (many working in Hiroshima as WWII laborers, and remembered in the Monument to Korean Victims and Survivors) and a smaller percentage were students from China and southeast Asia. Also, in an apparent foul-up of US military intelligence, US POWs were killed -- although I didn't see anything erected for them.

I walked through the memorial's Hall of Remembrance, built with 140,000 tiles to commemorate the 140,000 lives lost by the end of 1945. In the center of the hall was a perpetually-flowing water fountain sculpted in commemoration of the time 8:15 and the tens of thousands that died thirsty -- at the time, many people begged for water, not knowing that water after such an explosion actually accelerated the death process.

Everyone visiting the memorial hall received a pamphlet, which I thought was just an ordinary explanatory thing, but each one was individually encoded with a symbol that triggered specific information in the library archive computers. Oh, it's like trading cards I thought, but that didn't seem so funny when I inserted mine into the machine and saw the victim whose code I had. My pamphlet also pulled up the moving and tear-inducing first person accounts of the people in rescue teams (like Toshio Ishizu 1 2 3 4 5; and Mariko Arata 1 2 3 4) and people who had miraculously survived (like Fumiko Ikeda 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10). (I was so moved by their anecdotes I wanted to share them here [without having to retype them]. Please read them at your convenience.)

WALKING AROUND PEACE MEMORIAL PARK and the Peace Memorial Museum, without a doubt, was the most depressing place I'd been to in The Global Trip 2004 thus far, largely in part because as an American I felt some sort of guilt. I got all choked up inside seeing the before and after models, and the press photos taken that day by photojournalist Yoshito Matsushige (who couldn't stomach being there after five shots). Depressed and saddened, yes -- but it was nothing a couple of pancakes couldn't handle.

OKONOMIYAKI, THE SAVORY PANCAKE DISH stuffed with noodles, meat, eggs and other toppings that I had tried with Liz, John and Melissa, was one of Hiroshima's specialties. Once place Liz highly-recommended was Okonomiyaki-mura Village, a collection of small, humble hot griddle food stands that specialized in the Japanese pancake. It was there I was almost immediately cheered up by the smiles of friendly people, including my cook Emiko, and the couple from Yamaguchi that I befriended, Yasuhiko and Yumi. There were no grudges when I told them I was American and they were impressed that I broke the stereotype that all Americans don't know how to use chopsticks.

PROBABLY THE MOST OBVIOUS EVIDENCE that there really is no bad blood anymore between Japan and the U.S. is the common pastime of baseball. The Japanese have come to enjoy watching and playing the American-made sport -- that morning I was tipped by a guy in the hostel that a big home game was going on that night: the Hiroshima Carp vs. the Yokohama Baystars. The Japanese really have embraced the American pastime, particularly on the spectator side of things, with paraphernalia stands and a mascot that dances in the outfield or "can't hear you." I sat in the home team bleachers out of right field and watched the game, but was more entertained with the crowds. Going to the ball game in Japan is very similar to going in the USA, with vendors going around selling popcorn, french fries and hotdogs, and a big guy with a keg strapped to his back to pour beer. The Japanese have also perfect the good ol' American pastime of looking really surprised and waving when they realize they're on the big JumboTron screen.

I had a great time at the baseball game, less for the game, but more for the cheers led by the pep squad "Carp Club" with drums and trumpets almost every minute of the game. In the seventh inning stretch, people inflated big phallic balloons and then launched them into the field for a colorful display of deflation that sounded like a symphony of flatulence.

In the end I was finally cheered up after such a depressing morning -- the Hiroshima Carp defeated the Yokohama Baystars 2-1.

HIROSHIMA MIGHT HAVE BEEN VICTORIOUS that day, but in the struggle to promote world peace and nuclear disarmament was far from over. For that night, in the darkness of Peace Memorial Park, the Flame of Peace still burned as long as the threat of nuclear war did. The question still remained: Which country was willing to blow it out first?

The Critters of Miyajima

DAY 353: One of the iconic and most photographic structures in Japan is the Ohtorii Gate, a bright orange gateway marking the entrance to the Itsukushima Shine on Miyajima Island. This island was a daytrip away from Hiroshima and I decided to check it out at Liz's suggestion. Besides, with all the post-A-bomb peace memorials in town, I was getting a little "peaced out."

A twenty-five minute train ride and 7-11 break later, I was on the JR ferry to Miyajima, only about ten minutes from the mainland. The bay was peppered with stationary rafts that served as artificial reefs to attract oysters -- one of the creatures the region was known for. Aside from oysters, the other obvious critter indigenous to the region was deer. As soon as I got off the boat, deer were all over Miyajima as if they were citizens of the island like people: hanging out to the market, going to the payphone, and general loitering by a food stand. Everywhere I went a deer was around, just sort of hanging out without getting out of the way since none of them were really threatened by man. One curious one even approached me and tried to lick my balls through my pants.

"Whoa, hey there!"

The other critter that would possibly make its appearance was the Japanese monkey, but there was no sign of them.

SEVERAL GROUPS LINED UP to take their photos with the famed Ohtorii Gate (picture above) in the background, which had been under reconstruction in scaffolding the time Liz visited the island some time back. Perhaps it was always something on the island; this time the Torii was fine, but the famous 12th century Itsukushima Shrine that it led to was under repairs after it had been damaged a couple of weeks back by "Songda," Typhoon 18 -- much to the dismay of the two French girls I met that came to Miyajima specifically to see it. They left soon after briefly visiting the 15th century Five-Storied Pagoda, which flanked the 16th century Senjokaku Temple, created by Hideoyoshi who had died before giving it a matching paint job.

After a quick bit of grilled fresh Miyajima oysters, cooked up and shucked by a friendly old woman, I went to go the other "must see" on the island: the top of Mt. Misen, the island's highest peak at 529 meters high. There was a cable car available to go up the incline, but at about $20 (USD), I thought the price was steeper than the actual mound. I proceed on foot on one of four hiking trails up the hill, the one that started from the picturesque stream by Momijidani Park. Going on foot up the stairs, as exhausting and sweaty as it was (don't ask me why I decided to lug my laptop to Miyajima), was good training for me if and when I tried to go up Mt. Everest. Perhaps I was the only one to go on foot (aside from more deer) because the only people I saw on the trails were only going down after taking the cable car up one-way.

"You are very courageous," a woman in a French accent said to me, unsure if I knew English. "Do you understand?"

"Yes."

When I got to the top I was greeted by a collection of shrines and sacred statues and an observation deck with a spectacular view and a concession stand on its bottom floor. There was only about three people up at the top with me, more if you include the deer that poked his head into the store and started eyeing the beer in the fridge.

On the way to the Shishiiwa Observatory by the cable car station for another view of the bay, I met the other guy who had gone up on foot, just on another trail: Gus, an Aussie traveling solo for the day while his ex-pat English teaching friend was at work in Hiroshima. He too had run-ins with deer; one of the ones with antlers nearly bucked him where it really hurts -- but the antlers luckily went to just outside his outer and inner thigh regions. Why deer have an obsession with the human male genital region I don't know, but maybe it was due to all those oysters around.

"Have you seen any of the monkeys?" he asked me. Gus was less concerned about deer and was more obsessed with seeing Japanese monkeys. All around the peak region there were signs that implied that they we'd see them and that they'd be harmless as long as we didn't stare. No monkeys were to be seen though, and after a while we gave up, hoping we'd see them on the way down. Gus decided to take the way I went while I took to a shady, untamed trail underneath the path of the cable car.

Walking down the heavily eroded and slippery Bakuchio Trail led me to areas of heavy tropical foliage, and at one turn that was so wild I thought I had strayed off the path. I heard a rustling in the distance, followed by a high-pitched howl. Is that a monkey? The closer I got, the louder the calls were and it turned out to be a monkey, warning the others of my accidental invasion. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by about twenty monkeys of all ages, running down the hill to escape from me in a sort of miniature stampede. It was a great thrill to finally see them in my last day in the wilderness of Japan since I never saw them since trying to find them back in Nikko -- and because none of them tried to lick my balls.

"I SAW LIKE TWENTY MONKEYS!" I told Gus when I bumped into him at the shops near the pier.

"Shit, I was thinking of going with you too."

Gus and I took the ferry back to the mainland and the train back to Hiroshima and split up at different train stations. From there I hopped back on the Superexpress Shinkansen (bullet train), which got me to Tokyo in less than four hours.

TOKYO WAS THE SAME as when I left the week before, with its crowded trains and electronic platform chimes that always made me feel like I was getting a power-up in a video game. I took a train back to Liz and Hiroshi's apartment just in time for a surprise earthquake that shook the Tokyo region with a tremor that measured 5.8 on the Richter Scale. The entire apartment shook -- the bookshelf, the mugs on the table (shaking simulated by hand) -- but everything remained intact.

I casually drank my tea after it was all said and done, knowing that I hadn't been that shaken up since that deer licked my balls earlier that morning.

Farewell Surprise

DAY 354: Whispers were going back and forth between Hiroshi and Liz. They wanted to take me out for dinner for my last night in Japan, but they wanted the location to be a surprise.

Maybe it's sushi. Maybe it's yakitori. Or maybe it's something cool that I don't even know about.

I saw them come to a consensus. "We're going to give you a taste of home," was Liz's only clue.

McDonald's? Starbucks? Oh wait, are we going to that Denny's down the road? Surely it can't be Denny's. Right?

LUNCHTIME WAS A FAMILIAR TASTE when Hiroshi took me out to the nearby Osaki New Centre, a complex of shops and restaurants catering to the business lunchtime crowd. "What time do people go to lunch in the States?" Hiroshi asked me.

"Around one," I answered." Or twelve, or two; it really depends on the person and the company."

"At twelve they all march in big groups here."

We followed the dark-suited platoon to the restaurants and sat at a tonkatsu place, serving breaded and fried cuts of chicken, beef and shrimp with a side of miso soup and rice.

Although I've had tonkatsu back in the States, I cut it off the list of possible dinner places figuring we wouldn't have it twice in the same day.

THAT FINAL AFTERNOON IN TOKYO I simply ran errands. I finalized my flight with Tandin at Hit Travel, who had suggested I fly to Bangkok and then arrange my onward flights from there since it would be cheaper. He too was envious of my travels and gave me the spare 200 Indian rupees in his wallet (for beer). I went back to the Indian embassy and picked up my passport with a brand spanking new Indian visa inside.

Hiroshi, Liz and I regrouped back at the Gotunda JR station for my farewell dinner at the secret location they had decided on that morning. I was exciting to see where that was, but it turned out that the "taste from home" plan had been scrapped because the place was booked solid -- it was an oyster bar in the fashion of New York's famous Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station.

Instead we went out to a recommended fancy restaurant serving nabe, the "hot pot" dish where a brothy stew is prepared for you in the center of your table -- we opted for the fish one. Nabe was nothing new, but there was still a surprise that night, and it came in the form of the sashimi appetizer (picture above).

"It's horse," Liz informed me.

That's right, horse meat -- but raw nonetheless. It resembled fine cuts of lean beef at the butcher chop.

"And that's whale," she continued. "You can't get that anywhere else, except for maybe Norway."

Raw horse and raw whale. Yup, it was a long way from Denny's. Both kinds of sashimi were excellent -- horse, like beef served really really rare (right from your grocer's freezer); whale like a cross between tuna and yellowtail sashimi. Both went well with soy sauce and crushed ginger.

"The first time I had it, [I gagged,]" Liz told me, eating a piece of Mr. Ed's cousin. She had come a long way in her culinary courage since her arrival in Japan five years ago; she didn't even really mind the fish heads staring back at her from the ingredients plate of the nabe or in the bowls in front of us. (Usually she has the heads cut off at the fish market.) Either that or she was just tipsy off the sake -- I don't remember how many shots there were after that first farewell toast.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Liz and Hiroshi saw me off at the train platform when I made way to get to the express train to Narita International Airport.

"Thanks for everything," I said, shaking Hiroshi's hand.

"Thanks Liz," I said after giving her a big goodbye hug -- but she knew as much as I did that it was only a goodbye in the physical world and most likely before the end of the day we'd be back in contact in the virtual world of The Blog.

"I'll just speak to you on The Blog," she said with a smirk.

The doors shut and the train slowly moved away from the station. My last memory of Liz and Hiroshi was them waving goodbye from behind the glass.

And so ended my stay in Japan, a country I hadn't planned on visiting when I started the trip the year before. I really have to thank Hiroshi and especially Liz for the invitation, hospitality, advice and of course, the horse meat.

One Writes in Bangkok

DAY 355: "Won't you be relieved when you get home and you don't have to move on anymore?" Liz asked me the morning I left Tokyo as we walked to the train platform.

"I can't wait 'til I don't have to write anymore."

MANY PEOPLE THINK THAT GOING ON THIS TRIP is a big vacation, but allow me to clear the air right now; I never in my mind considered this trip to be a "vacation," even from Day One. For me, it was a way to gain a personal spin on as many destinations as I could that interested me, so that I could have an angle for future articles to pitch to travel publications, in a continual attempt to "climb the ladder" in the travel publishing biz. The efforts of all my note-taking and practice is seen in this here Blog, an entity that has personified itself in my mind as a nagging wife every time I fall behind.

Going around the world is one thing, but going around the world and maintaining a daily Blog that can hold an audience is another.

Pepe, the Dutch guy I met in Ecuador, had also kept a Blog of his travels through South America to impress newspaper editors, but at a certain point he told me he couldn't keep up and said 'Fuck it, I'm on holiday.' He told me in an e-mail that he's in awe that I've managed to keep the pace for so long. I knew he could appreciate what I've been going through.

Imagine going to work 24/7 and having to write a 1,200-word report about every day, everyday. But you're in exotic locations while I'm stuck at this desk you may think, and yeah, sure that's right, but after a while the routine of daily Blogging becomes work. Imagine the stress you get when you fall behind -- and you can't take a day off to take a break because then you inherently fall behind another day and give yourself more work. With all the time I spend doing everything that I do on the road, and an average of three hours of work per entry, there really is no time to sleep. (Since Mongolia my eyes have been red from lack of sleep, hence the wearing of my glasses in recent photos.) I swear at times I'm more burned out than when I had a 9 to 5 job; I jokingly tell myself, "Man, I can't wait to work a 9 to 5 again so I can get some rest." (Mind you that's still a joke. Nine to five again? Puh-lease.)

I've received e-mails saying that I could just take it easy and just post pictures, but I say I'm in this too deep now -- it's over 300 entries so far and I haven't skipped a beat yet. When I've fallen behind, I've always sacrificed "play time" for The Blog and gotten things back on track. Skipping a day is simply not an option; it's not fair for one day to get treated more special than another. (My God, am I personifying days now too?) Besides I'd hate to give a bad impression to any of the new readers who still seem to be discovering The Blog to this day. (If you are one of them reading this as your first entry, please forgive this rant and go read this one.)

I WAS STILL OVER A WEEK BEHIND ON ENTRIES when I left Japan's Narita International Airport on an airplane with my 60 lbs. of baggage, more if you count the figurative weight on my shoulders. The only thing I wanted to do was catch up; being behind kept me from looking ahead. The bad thing was the fact that I was headed for legendary Bangkok, Thailand, renowned for his party scene and sex tourism. As the 80s pop song goes, "One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster... The bars are temples, but the pearls ain't free..."

My reason for going to Bangkok was for none of that (at least for the meantime); it was to arrange a cheap flight to Kathmandu, Nepal at the suggestion of Tandin, my travel agent in Tokyo. The world would have be my oyster at a later date.

SIX HOURS LATER AND TWO TIME ZONES BACK, I touched down at Bangkok International Airport, landing point of an international array of backpackers, all in summer clothes to keep cool in Thailand's hot, tropical weather. I was also welcomed by Bangkok's Friday afternoon rush hour -- a one-hour bus journey took over two hours with the traffic.

I was dropped off in Bangkok's party district near legendary Koh San Road (picture above), an area of cheap beer, cheap travel tickets and cheap accommodations -- it's no wonder it was a haven for backpackers. I walked down the street with no hassles, presumably because touts thought I was Thai. Every Caucasian person I saw walk down the same road was always called over to take a bicycle rickshaw or tuk-tuk (motorized tricycle) ride.

I HAD NEVER BEEN TO THAILAND BEFORE, but Thailand to me was what Harry Potter was to a lot of disgruntled people during the overhype around the time the first movie came out -- people wouldn't shut up about it. Harry Potter this and Harry Potter that. "Did you see Harry Potter yet?" "Did you read the book?" "The book's a lot better than the movie." It got to be so much that the disgruntled people were so turned off, they boycotted seeing it altogether. (On a side note, one friend I have was one of these disgruntled people and went to see it anyway under influence from his girlfriend. He now tells people, "Harry Potter got me laid.")

Anyway, back to Thailand. Thailand to me is like Harry Potter. I don't know if it's because I'm in contact with a lot of backpackers and divers, but everything I've heard is Thailand this and Thailand that. "Have you gone to Thailand?" "I love Thailand!" "I have to go back to Thailand." The recent mass interest of the southeast Asian country has given Thailand the biggest boom in tourism than any country in history it seems. But with all the overhype I was turned off from going there -- but alas, it was inevitable.

However, being in Bangkok I finally got a taste of what all the fuss was about with its energetic vibe and ability to seemingly do whatever you want. Wow, this isn't so bad at all, I thought. Sure it's no longer an authentic exotic location with the entire area overrun by Westerners, but hey, most of the female Westerners are wearing hot-looking halter-tops. I resisted though, The Blog nagging me to stay in and catch up. Work before play, The Blog nagged me in my head. Just catch up and then go back to your normal life. You're not in Bangkok to play just yet, this is simply a layover en route to Kathmandu.

FINDING A CHEAP ROOM in a decent guesthouse was easy -- there's no shortage of them in the Koh San Road district -- but finding one with a room with an electrical outlet for my laptop was another thing. It took me a while, moving from guesthouse to guesthouse, but I eventually found one for a little bit more (five bucks USD instead of the usual $3-$4).

And so, I locked myself in and wrote on my laptop that "one night in Bangkok [where] the world's your oyster..." That is, your oyster, not mine -- not yet anyway.

One Night in Dhaka

DAY 356: "I need to get to Kathmandu as soon as possible," I asked at multiple travel agencies in Bangkok. The answer I got: "Not 'til Monday." (It was Saturday.)

"Is there anyway you get me there sooner?" I pleaded. I sounded like a desperate contestant on The Amazing Race who was in last place -- but one travel agent, Ms. Kook at Nancy Travel, had an option for me. "There is a flight. Bangkok, Dhaka, Kathmandu," she told me. "But it's stand-by."

"Let's go." I even paid the extra twenty bucks to get me off the waiting list and guarantee me a seat in a higher class. Ms. Kook simultaneously worked multiple telephones and a fax machine like an overworked secretary, but made it happen. By three in the afternoon, I had tickets for a flight that evening at eight for Dhaka, Bangladesh, where the airline would put me up in a hotel for the night (included in the price of the ticket), before taking me to Kathmandu the next day. I'd get to Kathmandu a whole day earlier than if I waited for the Monday flight.

THE REASON FOR MY HASTE was not because I was afraid of being the last one to reach the pit stop with the yellow and red marker, it was because I knew that with all of Bangkok's lures, if I stayed another day I wouldn't want to leave. Thailand was on my planned itinerary, but not yet; I was to get to Nepal as soon as possible. Besides, I figured if I was just going to sit around on my laptop and catch up on Blog entries, I might as well be acclimatizing at a higher altitude in preparation for a trek through the Himalayas.

BEING AT THE CHECK-IN LINES for Biman/Bangladeshi Airlines (picture above) was a preview for the madness that I'd see later on at 35,000 feet. The crowd was restless, many passengers Indian businessmen who had just finished a conference in Bangkok. Traveling with them was like traveling with a bunch of hyper high school students, all of them restless and snap happy like it was their first big trip away from home (which might have been the case). Biman/Bangladeshi Airlines was the perfect airline for them, with their yummy curry dishes and lax flight attendants; no one seemed to care about guys not wearing seat belts -- or even standing to take a photo -- during take off or landing. Before take off, everyone talked through the pre-flight prayer to Allah, and after landing in Dhaka, everyone got up and retrieved their bags from the overhead compartments, even before the plane slowed down to taxiing speed.

The airline's handling of the transit passengers was just as crazy, but bearable with the help of a Bangladeshi immigration officer. I was led through immigration and customs and a bag search and eventually to the nighttime Bangladeshi cityscape. I didn't have any opportunity to explore because I was at the whim of the airline and immigration officials because being a transit passenger with no real official entry stamp into Bangladesh, they had to hold my passport overnight.

The hotel room they put me in was nice with A/C and TV where I saw commercials for the upcoming Indian Idol (from the makers of American Idol). Mr. Deeds was on HBO and it kept me company while I continued to write on my laptop to catch up on entries. Jet lagged, I came to a stopping point and went to bed around eleven, but was awoken passed midnight on the telephone.

"Please come down for the dinner."

Dinner? We ate on the plane. But I went down and had dinner with the Thai businessman who was in transit to Calcutta.

THE NEXT MORNING, the questionable behavior of the staff continued. When I tried to figure out my transport to the airport around 11 a.m. for a 1 p.m. flight, they were really adamant at keeping me on lock down. "Kathmandu?" asked the Bangladeshi man.

"Yes, Kathmandu," I answered.

"It is delayed."

Delayed? It's totally clear outside. "How long?"

"I have to call the airline."

How do you know if it's delayed if you haven't been in contact with the airline yet? "The flight is supposed to be at one, shouldn't I be leaving soon?" I asked.

"Please, just go back to you room."

"I just want to know how long, because it's getting close, and I don't want to miss the flight."

"No problem, no problem," the Bangladeshi man said. "Just go to your room. We will call you. You go to sleep."

Sleep? Is the flight cancelled? Or will I be stuck in Dhaka another day? Man, I should have just saved the twenty bucks and taken the Monday flight straight to Kathmandu from Bangkok.

"The flight is delayed. Please go to your room. I will call you when it is time."

In the end, everything worked out; they called me about half an hour later and got me to the airport in time. I picked up my passport from an immigration officer who shook his head as he spoke to me and then boarded the plane. There was in fact a delay, but only by half an hour and soon I was up in the air, bound for my final destination after two layovers, Kathmandu.

The Writer Card

DAY 357: If you've followed The Blog for the past dozen or so entries, you know that it was up in the air as to whether or not I'd go to Nepal -- I even put it in the readers' hands with a vote. With the Maoist rebels a bit more active these days trying to force Communism onto the Nepali people through acts of terrorism -- Kathmandu was under siege about a month prior -- there was debate over not just the safety of Nepal, but the ease of getting around with all the Maoist roadblocks. On top of that, the Nepalese were angry with Americans because of the killing of Nepali hostages by terrorist groups in American-occupied Iraq. And we mustn't forget the regular threats in Nepal like avalanches and abominable snowmen.

The voters spoke, and in a very close match, it came to a tie. However, the results were eye-opening to me; contrary to what I thought, a lot of people chose "GO NEPAL" and wanted to read about an experience I'd have there. I tried to work on a compromise -- go to Chinese-occupied Tibet, which also has a base camp to Everest -- but that would have required more days and more money waiting around for another visa. Meanwhile, I received an e-mail from an ex-pat living in Kathmandu who told me that tourists go there and say they don't know what the fuss is all about; it's fine.

And so, I decided to give the voters for "GO NEPAL" their entries about my experience in Nepal. I soon found out it would be a unique one because of my appearance.

"ARE YOU NEPALI?" the baggage claim attendant asked me. I smiled. I guess I blended in here too.

"No, from the States."

"Oh, I thought you were Nepali. You look Nepali!"

I had landed in Kathmandu, capital city of Nepal, the country in the Himalayas sandwiched in between India and China. Its people's make-up was a hodge-podge of both countries -- some Hindu, some Buddhist -- and it was no wonder I blended in; my father has been mistaken for Indian and my mother for Chinese, although both came from the Philippines.

I made way to the pre-paid taxi desk in the arrivals hall. "Pre-paid taxi!"

"Yes, I know," I said. "Okay." Pre-paid taxis were recommended by my Let's Go book to avoid the shadiness of other taxi drivers. "Kathmandu Guest House."

"Oh, that place is expensive!" one guy said. The inevitable pitch came for a cheaper one and he showed me the brochure.

"Okay fine, it doesn't matter to me."

"Let's go," a guy said who escorted me to the taxi outside.

The guy at behind the desk called to me. "Be careful out there. Don't talk to anyone who approaches you."

"It's okay, they think I'm Nepali."

"Yes, ha ha! You look like a Nepali! No problem then."

No problem was right. As I rode through Kathmandu, I didn't see any Maoists or angry anti-American protesters. Instead I saw crowded streets of people going about their normal lives, weaving their way through the polluting cars and motorcycles going by on bumpy roads. I was "back in the game," back in the exciting vibe of a developing nation after being in the modern comforts of Hong Kong and Tokyo for the past three and a half weeks. So far, the only dangers I saw were the troupe of monkeys that ran across the street through incoming traffic.

I arrived at the Hotel Encounter Nepal, which wasn't listed in the book, but was a very nice guesthouse of two buildings with a lovely landscaped garden cafe in between. It was comparable to the widely-popular original backpacker guesthouse four blocks away, the "Kathmandu Guest House," and cheaper too if you stayed in the old building at $6 (USD)/night. After checking in I was introduced to the in-house travel agent so that I could figure out my trek up Mt. Everest Base Camp.

"You look Nepali," the guy told me. He was Davi, a Nepali man who wore a turquoise two-piece suit that made it look like he was going out for a night at the Roxbury. He was a good guy, friendly and all, but I'm sure that came with the business. He walked through the hotel lobby like a Nepalese Fonzie, greeting and greeted by every passerby. "Hey man, what's up!" "Hey!"

"How is this guy?" I asked one American guy there that had just done a trek up to Everest Base Camp with his father.

"He's great. You want to go to Everest? He'll set you up!"

I sat at Davi's desk in the corner office and he wrote me up a rough itinerary. I just had enough days for trekking and acclimatizing to arrive at Everest Base Camp right on my thirtieth birthday. (Coincidentally, because of 2004 being a leap year, that day would be the significant "Day 365.")

"Sounds good," I told him.

"Let's go to my office and check the flights [to the starting point of Lukla, up north] on the computer." We walked down the block through the Thamel district, the tourist district of tour agencies, bars, restaurants and shops selling everything one would need to go mountaineering if s/he came to Nepal with nothing. Davi's company turned out not to be a fly-by-night operation; he was manager of Himalayan Glacier, which was recommended by Lonely Planet and some German guidebooks and was used to guide a journalist from the south China press. The company was also involved in clean-up programs in the Himalayas. I knew all of these pluses because Davi adamantly kept on showing me pictures and news clippings to provide evidence that his company was legit.

"Okay, okay. I get it. You've convinced me."

He worked out a program for me, checking flight availability too, and gave me a price -- it was about what Let's Go said it might be for an organized trek with a reputable company.

"Everything sounds good," I told Davi, "but for my peace of mind, I just want to go to other companies to compare."

"That's fine. I understand," he said, but he continued to give me the pluses that his company may have over others -- better guides that have been to 6,000 meters ASL, ten years experience, etc. -- and was still trying to think of other ways to prove his legitimacy, other than the fact that their logo and website looked professionally done (which I appreciated).

"Have you heard of BootsnAll?" I asked him. I was curious to see if he'd recognized the name while he was going through his mental Rolodex of places that might have given Himalayan Glacier press.

"Bootsnall?"

"Bootsnall. It's a travel website. I write for them." I usually hate telling my identity as "a writer," but it slipped.

"Oh, you're a writer? You must get a discount! Would you like some tea?"

"Sure, okay."

"A sandwich?"

"No thanks, I'm on a diet."

I spelled out "Bootsnall" on a piece of paper and he pulled it up on the web. It took us a while and we couldn't find anything about Nepal trekking agencies. Gradually I saw his enthusiasm declined. (I blame Bootsnall's dated homepage logo, which I [no offense] always thought was embarrassing. I couldn't wait until they integrated the new logo I designed for them so that they might look more legit, especially since they've been getting press in Conde Nast and National Geographic lately.)

To regain Davi's enthusiasm for that possible discount, I continued to play The Writer Card (even though I hated doing so). "Go to this website." I wrote it down and he typed it in: www.theglobaltrip.com. Up came my picture and my brief bio with the list of publications I've written for: New York Post, Travelers' Tales, Lycos, Globe Trekker, etc.

His eyes lit up. "Oh, you don't have to have to pay anything! I'll give you a guide whose been to the summit!" he said. "I'm sorry, I didn't know who you were!"

"Uh, do you have any more tea?"

Davi got on the phone and called the other room for someone to bring me more tea. "Would you like some soup?"

"Sure."

I got down to it. "I don't want any special treatment," I told him. "It's counterproductive to journalism. I know a lot of guys out there are going around with fake Lonely Planet ID cards because they're in it for the discount, but people don't realize it goes against journalism."

Ugh, me and my goddam integrity. It was true though; my travel writing mentor along with a panel of editors I saw speak from blue, National Geographic Adventure and Conde Nast Traveler always stressed not taking free press trips because they gave the writer a positively-skewed, biased look at a destination -- although I was certain when Davi said I'd go for free he was just being colorful with language.

He reduced the price about a hundred bucks, three hundred less than the published price on their website, including flights to and from the starting point at Lukla, about 40 km. south of Everest Base Camp (EBC). I still felt skeptical, but then he threw in an upgrade to the nicer wing of the hotel (picture below), a farewell dinner and a ride to the airport when I left Nepal. Plus no surcharge for using a credit card, which he was going to charge me before I pulled The Writer Card.

"Money is money," he told me, "but relations are more important."

"Okay, let's do this," I said. We worked it out and I paid half for the time being. I probably could have done it cheaper if I did it alone, but I figured, I might as well get the guide to ensure my arrival at EBC on my birthday. As Blogreaders have commented, "You only turn 30 once."

"You must have dinner with me tonight," Davi said. "I'll pick you up at 7:30."

"Okay."

THERE WAS A BLACKOUT IN TOWN around dusk, but the power came on by the time Davi arrived and handed me a helmet. "Have you had Nepalese food before?"

"Yeah, in Hong Kong. But I like it."

I hopped on the back of his ride and we rode across town to one of the local favorites -- that is, until it appeared in a guidebook and became overridden by tourists. The food quality hadn't declined, and so for my first meal in Nepal I had the Nepali dish, thali -- chicken, rice with sauces, lentils and roti. Over dinner and Nepalese beer I found out Davi's ulterior motive for schmoozing me: he was planning to break off of Himalayan Glacier one day and go independent with his own company and wanted to establish as many contacts of his own, especially those in the media. He had worked up the ranks from porter to guide to manager and it was the next logical step.

Davi also filled me in on the situation of Nepal, i.e. its possible dangers to American tourists. "You'll be fine," he said. "There are no Maoists on the Everest trek. Only in the west." Kathmandu on the other hand, was another story; he told me just around the corner from the restaurant we were in, a woman got shot point blank just the other day, and that at ten o'clock, most of the stores were closed for fear of armed robbery or terrorism.

"The problem with Maoists is that they look like anyone. It could be you, it could be me."

Wow, not only do I look Nepali, but I look like a Maoist too! Kick ass!

AFTER DINNER, I was just dropped back to my upgraded bigger room with private bathroom and wrote on my laptop at the desk to catch up. I figured if I was going to get the writer's discount, I might as well earn it -- although if I looked like a Maoist I could probably just boss my way if I didn't.

Americans in Kathmandu

DAY 358: "You look Nepali," said the hotel manager. So did the waiter in the garden restaurant and another guy. I think I was a novelty act for them: a guy that looked like they did but spoke in am American accent.

MY FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS that fine Monday morning was to visit the American embassy, and this time I mean the real one, not McDonald's. Hearing that New Jersey, the state I was registered to vote in (even overseas) had become a swing state in the all-important 2004 US presidential election, I wanted to apply for an absentee ballot. Three Nepali soldiers who were stationed outside the American compound greeted me.

"Is it open?" I asked.

"What do you want?"

"I'm just trying to find out about overseas ballots."

"What? You are American?"

"Yeah." Seemed hard to believe.

One soldier gave me a slip of paper with a printout on it saying the embassy was closed. A sign posted said public office hours on Monday started at 1 p.m. "Thanks, I'll come back."

On my way back into the touristy Thamel district (picture above), an American voice called to me. "Hey man! I thought it might be you, but I thought nah... but then I saw the shirt. Your hair's grown out a bit."

It was Paul, the American from Kansas who was my roommate way in the Beijing Gonti Hostel back in August. It was with him I had a conversation about fate and coincidence; funny us crossing paths again totally unplanned, at random in a different country. We caught up for a bit, standing there on the sidewalk under the Nepalese sun. Paul had followed me to Xi'an and then made way through Tibet and over into Nepal. He had just gotten back to Kathmandu after doing some trekking on the Annapurna circuit in the west, where he had a run in with armed Maoists patrolling the trails -- he shut his American mouth up and pretended to be some French guy's brother to avoid the American fees they collect by force (before giving a receipt).

Paul had been to the American embassy before and told me about the American government's position on matters in Nepal. With the Nepali/American tensions, they told him, "You're not even supposed to be here!" The US had already sent home the Peace Corps and all non-essential government employees. They had issued a travel advisory not to even think about going to Nepal. "Just down there," Paul pointed out to me, "was where [that American compound] was bombed three weeks ago."

Perhaps an American wasn't completely safe in Nepal after all, at least the ones that were "overly American" and stuck out, like government employees -- but for guys like us, we were Americans exercising the American right to travel. Kathmandu was legendary amongst travelers, especially American hippie types and the descendants thereof.

Paul and I split ways -- he was on his way to the Pakistani embassy this time for a visa -- but we made plans to meet up for dinner and drinks that night. Later on in the afternoon, I went back to the American embassy, but it was still closed. The "overly American" employees were celebrating the American holiday of Columbus Day.

WALKING AROUND KATHMANDU, I definitely didn't stick out as an obvious American, with my apparent Nepali-looking façade. I went for a walk around town, starting at the Rani Pokhari tank and temple, built by King Pratap Malla in memory of his dead son, and then down the crowded market road lined with market stalls and temples en route to Durbar Square, the heart of the old city. Weaving in and out of motorbikes and people scuttling around, I saw the Annapurna Temple in the busy Asan Tol plaza, which paid homage to Annapurna, the goddess of plentiful food; and the Akash Bhairab in the equally busy Indra Chowk plaza, with its distinctive metal gargoyles. Up north was Kathesimbhu, a stupa in the fashion of the bigger Swayambhunath one west of the city -- which had been victim to American-influenced graffiti.

Durbar Square, the former residential area of the royal family, is a big tourist draw as many of the buildings of political, social and religious significance remain there, all together in a big open plaza -- so much that it has been described as a "templescape." Near the northern area there was a 200-rupee fee for foreigners to walk in, but with my mouth shut, my cover remained intact and I just walked in without anyone saying anything.

I wandered passed the Taleju Temple, built by King Mahendra Mall to honor the deity Taleju; Kasthamandap, the 14th century temple for Hindu saint Gorakhnath of which the name "Kathmandu" is derived from; and the Hanuman Dhoka Durbar, the former royal palace. I made way to the bazaar at Basantapur Square, where vendors sold all sorts of Nepalese trinkets. Nearby was Freak Street, the former hippie haven that had lost all its popularity over time to the Thamel district up north where my hotel was.

Probably the most visited temple in Durbar Square was the Maju Dewal, not because it was a temple dedicated to the god Shiva, but because with its ten-level easy-to-climb pyramid design, it was easy to get a view of the happenings in Durbar Square below. With that said, it was known as the prime target for touts to approach guys sitting around. One young guy who called himself "Mr. K" (and had a "K" ring on his left middle finger to prove it) saw that I might not be Nepali after all -- anyone sitting on the so-called "Hippie Hill" was either a tout he knew of already or a tourist -- and he tried desperately to get business from me, either as my city tour guide, trail guide or hash dealer. I declined and then got out of there before word got around that I was American after all.

I MET FELLOW AMERICAN PAUL in front of the Kathmandu Guest House in the heart of the Thamel district and from there we met up with two guys he had been trekking with (whose names I forgot) from France and Switzerland. The first order of the night was to make final call for drinks at one lounge's Happy Hour, and we started things off with a shot.

"Just like the American girl in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark," I said to Paul, stamping down the glass onto the table.

Whether in the movies or real life, the fact remained: Americans were in Nepal whether or not the American embassy liked it or not. When we went out to an Italian restaurant for dinner (one of many kinds of international cuisines available in Kathmandu), I didn't know what the embassy's big hang up was over; I mean, as far as I could see there was no violence, and besides, the pizza in Nepal was pretty good.

Special Report

OCTOBER 20, 2004, The One Year Anniversary since The Trip began... and I almost didn't make it. Last night, high in the Himalayas of Nepal, I was almost pronounced dead.

Cause Of Death (would have been): high altitude pulmonary edema, high altitude cerebral edema
Time Of Death (would have been): around 8 p.m. (Nepal time)

I AM ONLY ALIVE writing this because of the efforts of five Sherpas, three English (especially two named Eddie and Kenny), two Australians (especially one named Stewart), a yak and a horse, who carried me on a long 7-hour, 5-mile trek down from 5200m. ASL to Dr. Mike and Dr. Linda of the Himalayan Rescue Association at 4200m. ASL. (The last 90 minutes of that trek was in the dark!)

My guide Tilak could not help out because his condition was worse than mine and had been carried down earlier. Strange how we both got so sick; we had only ascended as fast as other people we'd met on the way. Altitude sickness is a funny thing; it varies so much from person to person.

I AM WRITING THIS back in the lower altitude of Kathmandu (1200m. ASL) after a night on an oxygen regulator at the Himalayan Rescue Clinic. I was flown down this afternoon in an emergency helicopter, which hopefully my travel insurance will cover. (At over $3000 USD, it still must be debated when I get back home.)

The important thing is I'm fine now, after narrowly escaping death. I will continue the slow and steady recuperation process in my hotel room in Kathmandu with a night caretaker sent by the Himalayan Glacier travel agency. Details to come in the next coming entries...

Due to my weakened condition, I apologize in advance if I can't get to all the postcards I promised to send out of Nepal. I'll try my best, but the messages may be short and/or repetitive.

Anyway, when you're out celebrating the One Year Anniversary of The Global Trip 2004, please make sure you raise a glass (or whatever it is you have in front of you) and toast the men, women and animals who saved my life!

THIS CONCLUDES THIS THEGLOBALTRIP.COM SPECIAL REPORT...

(Get Well comments welcomed and appreciated.)

In The Footsteps of Tenzing Norgay

DAY 359: Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander mountaineer became Sir Edmund Hillary when in 1953, he became the first man to climb to the summit of Mount Everest, the highest point on the planet at 8848m ASL. But he wasn't alone. It wasn't until recent years that a lot of credit went to the Sherpa guide at his side, Tenzing Norgay. Hillary might not have made it without Tenzing Norgay, as the conditions at the top of Mt. Everest are severe and life-threatening -- in the Coen Brothers' 2003 film Intolerable Cruelty, George Clooney's character says something to the effect, "No man can make it without his Tenzing Norgay." (I saw the flick on a plane.) Perhaps if the Sherpa people of the Himalayas got more press back in the day, Hillary might not have taken all the initial glory. (To be fair, Hillary did fully respect the Sherpas and put a lot of money into their community when he got it; on the flipside, it's not like Tenzing Norgay didn't have the support of other Sherpas either.)

"YOU COULD COME HERE with nothing and book everything here," I heard a man say in an American accent.

"I'd rather pay the money [for a package tour booked in the States,]" a woman answered.

This was one conversation I overheard as I stood on line at Kathmandu airport with my Tenzing Norgay at my side, a Nepali named Tilak who had been assigned to me by the Himalayan Glacier trekking agency. He wasn't a descendant of the more-East-Asian-looking Sherpa mountain people of the higher altitudes, but a more-Indian-looking Newari people of the lowlands, although he had been born in the western mountains and had six years of guiding experience under his belt.

We had tickets for the 8:05 a.m. flight to Lukla, the airport town servicing the Everest region (about 40 km. south of Mt. Everest summit), where we'd land and proceed on foot. We'd go "The Sherpa Way," lugging all our own gear, in contrast to those two Americans I heard (in a group of eleven) who would go with a full support team of porters, guides and yaks.

It was 7:40 and Yeti Airlines' 8:05 flight to Lukla hadn't called for boarding yet. Same at 7:50 and 8:06.

"Did we miss it?" I asked Tilak.

"They said eight, but it's Nepal!" he said, chuckling. "Don't worry, we will go today." Today was a good thing; the previous weeks, people spent 4-5 days waiting at the airport for the sky to clear up.

Eight thirty rolled around and they called for boarding -- the eleven Americans all got on and I got my gear to go through to the security gate. At 8:38, everything was in motion but, "We didn't get it," Tilak told me. The next scheduled flight was 9:40.

The airport in Kathmandu was a madhouse of hundreds of people trying to get somewhere and the only way to get on a plane was to muscle your way through. Tilak did most of that for me and before 9:40, we got to the boarding room. Then we just waited some more. The monitor displaying the departure schedule might as well have played a screensaver.

A CALL FOR THE "E" FLIGHT eventually came and we boarded a small twin-propeller plane with a French package tour group. The flight attendant passed out cotton to soften the noise of the engines in flight and soon we were 20,000 ft. in the air.

"Look at the mountains," Tilak told me. Sitting in the front row right behind the pilot and co-pilot I saw what they saw: the snow-capped Himalayas were right in front of us (picture above) and it reminded me of a scene from Indiana Jones at the Temple of Doom. I couldn't exactly hear what the two pilots were saying to each other, but I hoped it wasn't:

Co-Pilot: You know how to fly, don't you?
Pilot: No, do you? Uh, how hard can it be?

"Look," Tilak pointed out to show me what was coming up ahead.

That's the runway? What is that, like a little rest area strip off the interstate? It was a strip of asphalt in a tiny narrow valley in between some high mountains. I'd seen more asphalt in a supermarket parking lot.

The pilot did know how to fly and land after all, and brought the plane softly to the ground. He was thanked with applause at touchdown. The only problem with the landing though was that cotton got lodged in my ear and Tilak had to pick it out for me.

LUKLA, A SCENIC SHERPA TOWN at 2860m. ASL is a small community of houses, farms and shops, mostly catering to the trekkers coming from the airport -- an airport that Sir Edmund Hillary had built to ship building materials for Sherpa houses and schools. The hiking trail started as soon as you exited the baggage claim room, but we stopped at one place for lunch that proudly served "Everest Starbucks" coffee. We had tea and dahl bhat, a staple Nepali rice and vegetable dish, instead.

The goal of the rest of the day was to hike to the village of Phakding, about 6 km. away on an undulating path through the Himalayas. The trail went passed fields, from village to forest and back to village again along the way, without much strain on the body -- a good preparation for the harder days ahead to Everest Base Camp. I saw other trekkers on the way with yaks to carry their things -- their Tenzing Norgay's if you will -- and I sort of felt proud to be doing it the Sherpa way, carrying my own gear like a mountain man. (The load wasn't at full capacity; I'd left most of my stuff in storage in Kathmandu.) Perhaps carrying my bag instead of using a yak made me blend in with the other Sherpas porters carrying gear for clients; Western trekkers always greeted me with "Namaste" ("Hello") on the presumption that I was Nepali. In fact, every Nepali Tilak and I encountered thought we were brothers.

The trail followed the Dudh Kosi River and took us over bridges and through several small villages -- passed little Sherpa kids, stupas, sacred mani rocks and Buddhist prayer wheels -- each with many humble "teahouses" where people could crash, thus eliminating the need for bringing a tent. We made it to our final destination of the day, Phakding, by mid-afternoon and checked into a guesthouse -- coincidentally the one where all the Sherpas of that big eleven-person American group were staying. The Sherpas weren't without their own personalities; in one case, two of them got into a fight and one had to be restrained from stoning the other to death with big rocks. (I think the other might have said something about his mother.)

In contrast to me doing things "the Sherpa way," the eleven Americans arrived soon and they shared the dining hall with me. I met a couple of them and I learned they were all from Portland, Oregon and had been trekking buddies for years, although it seemed to me they did everything the easy way. Two yaks a person? C'mon. They kept to themselves all night, leaving me to chill out with the Nepalis hanging around, including my guide Tilak. And what do you talk about with such people? Pro-wrestling and DHTML coding, of course.

At the end of a long day, it was finally good to be out there on the trail, in the footsteps of Tenzing Norgay -- and that other guy.

A Call For Tourists

DAY 360: "My friend tells me you are a journalist," said a Nepali man at the table in the dining hall. He was all excited to meet me.

"Well, freelance," I told him. "I'm not a staff reporter. I still have to sell stories."

He was excited anyway that anyone even remotely connected to foreign press was in Nepal at the current time. He wasn't just some random guy, he was Mr. Rammani Bhattarai, the Section Officer of the Ministry of Culture Tourism and Civil Aviation. His office worked to fix the distribution problem of tourism money coming in -- most money went right to the rich companies, leaving little to the Sherpas and villages that did all the hard labor for about $2 (USD)/day. The office was also concerned with the promotion of tourism in Nepal to the rest of the worlds, despite the overactive news media blowing all violence out of proportion.

"It's good that you came here because they say it's a problem," Mr. Rammani said. "But do you see any problem here?"

"No, it's just cold."

The temperature warmed up as the sun came up over the eastern peaks to slowly illuminate the ones out west. Tilak and I packed up our bags and head off for our second day on the trail. Behind were Mr. Rammani and his guide, followed by Team Portland with their 29 yaks and Sherpa support team.

We weren't the only ones on the trail. Dozens of others were on their way down or up like we were. Tilak and I ended up pairing up with another solo trekker, Nariko, a Japanese-American from New York City on her first "big trek," who was with her guide Chabi. We continued along the undulating trail with its mani rocks, stupas and cabins along the way, over bridges and passed waterfalls. That seemed to be the theme of the day: bridges and cascading water. We walked through forests in the shadows of snowy peaks as some village kids walked miles to get to the regional school while other ones stayed home.

"Tired?" Tilak asked me.

"No, you?"

"No."

I was just a bit strained in the back because in an attempt to catch up on Blog entries, I was lugging me laptop computer of all things, in hopes that I could get some work down in my acclimatization days. We all went at a leisurely pace, and I was fine. "Once we hit the park, it's all uphill," I told Nariko.

"I hope I can make it."

"SAGARMATHA" IS THE ORIGINAL NAME OF MOUNT EVEREST -- which was renamed to the Western World after George Everest, Surveyor General of India at the time of its discovery -- and it's original name lives on in the national park it is a part of, Sagarmatha National Park. There was a small international traffic jam of trekkers at the entry gate -- I heard German, French, Spanish, English and Nepali -- as people stopped in to register and pay park fees and use the outhouse. A sign posted on the board alerted everyone of a missing person, a guy who had gone into the park presumably alone and had never returned.

From the entrance we walked the short way to the village of Jorsale, where we stopped in for lunch at a teahouse before ascending for most of the rest of the day. Nariko and I sat at a table over waters and food.

"So do your friends think you're crazy for coming here?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "But I love to travel. Most Americans just go to Europe or the Caribbean, but you have to go to these places now, while you're young." (Point taken, but that wasn't necessarily true; a lot of the people on the trail were gray-haired, and not in a young Steve Martin kind of way.) Both of us had ignored the US travel advisory to go to Nepal and had no regrets; around us was the big beautiful natural world, a sight more magnificent than I'd seen before.

I heard an American accent coming from a woman on the other side of the room and I invited her into the conversation with the ice breaker, "Going up or coming down?"

"Coming down."

"How is it?"

"Oh, it's beautiful! You'll have a good time."

She too was cued into the issue of Americans in Nepal and I told her, "The American embassy here is surprised how many [Americans] are here."

"That's great. That's good to hear."

"No, I mean, they're surprised because they say we're not supposed to be here." I told her about all the info I got from Paul the other day. Suddenly she got all angry and vocal.

"That is so stupid," she said. She said that she knew of the Maoist threat but knew that encounters with them were civil; one American she met had encountered one and was given a receipt. "You better frame that receipt!" she told him. She continued by saying that the administration before was in tune with the reality of the situation, whereas, "This administration is so stupid!" (Coincidentally, she was from Texas.) "Well, I'm glad there are a lot of Americans here," she said.

"There are about twenty coming this way."

"That's what I want to hear!"

PERHAPS WE ALL SPOKE TOO SOON because when we left Jorsale and headed up through the Khumbu Valley we were soon approached by a group of guys coming down the trail in plain clothes, armed with automatic weapons. One guy was holding a shiny new rifle with a shiny new sniper scope.

Uh oh.

"Are they Maoists?" I whispered to Tilak.

"Either Maoist or army," he answered in a low tone as to not attract attention. "But I think army."

"Shouldn't they be in uniform if they are in the army?"

"I don't know."

"[Something something!!!]" One of the armed men turned around and scolded me angrily in Nepali.

"He says no pictures."

Okay, I'll put this away now.

"So is it Maoist or army?" I asked again.

"Well, we can't ask them, 'Are you army?'" True, they had guns. I'm sure that sniper could get me with a headshot at 50 meters back.

The armed guys kept on marching through. We saw more of them as we proceeded uphill, each with some sort of automatic weapon -- more and more of them had a uniform on, which answered my question. With the threat of Maoists on the trail, the army patrolled the park to protect the trekking tourists.

WE CONTINUED ON, over the river on more suspension bridges (some not as sturdy as others), passed more porters (carrying things like yak meat) and yaks (and their yak herders that slapped and yelled at them to move on so they didn't become yak meat), all in the spectacular Himalayas. At one point, we even got a glimpse of Everest summit itself. We continued on a path that hugged the curves of the mountain (picture above) and eventually reached one of the army checkpoints where they routinely conducted bag searches for Nepalis, not tourists. I almost had to be searched until Tilak explained to them that I was not in fact, his brother like they thought.

The checkpoint was a breeze and soon we were in Namche Bazar, a fairly big mountain town at 3450m. ASL, bigger than any of the villages we had passed through, the one last main outpost before Everest Base Camp or any of the other spectacular peaks in the area that trekkers preferred to go to instead. Namche Bazar's main street was lined with teahouses, small bookstores, and a few satellite internet cafes (for about $12 USD/hr). In Namche, one could get everything a trekker would need if for some reason s/he made it there with absolutely no mountain gear. You could also get dental work done at "the world's highest dental clinic." Down below the main strip, flanked by the tremendous snowy Thamserku peak, was the local market, where I picked up a fake (but comparable) The North Face shell jacket for the trek ahead.

The Khumbu Lodge was where we'd base ourselves for a couple of nights, so that I might chill out, eat yak steak and acclimatize to the altitude -- it was the same place that the crew of the IMAX Everest film crew did. On the wall in the dining hall I saw that it was a pretty popular place for prominent Americans who had listened to their hearts and gone to Nepal: Robert Redford, Bonnie Raitt and former president Jimmy Carter.

I lost track of Mr. Rammani from the Ministry of Culture Tourism along the way to Namche, but wherever he was, I'm sure he didn't have to worry; through the years, people haven't been afraid to go to Nepal at all, no matter what people may have said. They must have come for the yak steak; it's really tasty.

The Mysterious Yeti

DAY 361: Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. In the Himalayas, the legendary creature is the Abominable Snowman, known by many as the yeti. You probably won't believe this, but I swear I saw a yeti in Namche Bazar.

My room at the Khumbu Lodge in Namche Bazar was a corner room, giving me a window view of two sides of the valley, although at night it was hard to see clearly with the light reflection inside the room. The night before, alone in my room, I opened a window and saw something so unexpected I actually said "No way!" out loud (as opposed to thinking it in italics). What I had seen when opening the window was a yeti.

The window I was holding open with my fingers closed shut whenever I let go and when I opened it again, it was gone.

Am I seeing things? Did I really see a yeti? Or is it the Lariam (anti-malaria) pills kicking in (that I had to start taking 2-3 weeks before going to India)? Lariam has been known to play mind games.

THE YETI, OR ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN ranks up there with the other great mythical creatures. The sasquatch. The leprechaun. Each of these legends have gone through much speculation as to whether or not they are real or a myth. I tell you right now it was no myth what I had seen. I had seen a yeti that night. I even tried to latch onto it, but it was too far away from me.

In the morning, I checked for the yeti through that same corner window and it was nowhere to be found. No one would have believed me if I told them, so I left it alone until I could get some evidence.

THE GOAL OF THE DAY was to acclimatize to the higher altitude by doing an acclimatization trek up to and from the fancy Everest View Hotel, about a mile away on the map from Namche Bazar, but about 500 meters higher in elevation. One with a lot of money could stay there for a view of Everest without ever having to go trekking, using the nearby heliport in Namche.

It took about two hours to get to the hotel, through the town and up a steep zig-zagging trail overlooking Thamserku (other picture above) on the other side of the valley, followed by a straightforward undulating one. The weather wasn't clear at all; in fact a small snow flurry soon turned into a small blizzard. The sky started to clear up by the time we reached the hotel's restaurant with a view, giving us hope that we'd see the tallest mountain summit in the world, but the clouds came in again and with it, more snowfalls. The temperature rose by mid-day, turning the peaceful blizzard into a nasty rainstorm. Tilak and I head back down to Namche Bazar after a round of hot chocolate and tea.

On the way up to the Everest View Hotel, we stopped at the stupa and Sherpa Culture Museum, inaugurated in 1994 by Sir Edmund Hillary himself. It was a four-part exhibition, one displaying Sherpa tools, one a Tibetan Buddhist prayer room, one a photo gallery of Sherpa life, and one informational hall immortalizing with pictures on the wall, the dozens of Sherpas who had reached the summits of various Himalayan mountains, including Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, the first Nepalese woman to reach the summit of Everest in 1993.

The room also had news clippings on display -- one particular one caught my attention, one about the theories of yeti. There has been speculation over whether or not the yeti is just an old Sherpa's tale or if its existence lies in a blur of real life and folklore. Some speculate that the previous yeti sightings were merely the sightings of the yellow snow bear or the Tibetan blue bear. Some say it was some strange breed of monkey.

But what I had seen the night before was different. I had seen something else...

FOR MOST OF THE STORM I stayed in, alone in my room in the Khumbu Lodge, acclimatizing by typing up entries on my computer. I was still curious of the yeti I'd seen the night before and opened up the small window in the corner.

Oh shit, there it is! A yeti was staring me in the face, somewhere in the distance. Excited, my fingers slipped and the window shut. When I opened it again, it was gone. Shit! I looked and looked for it over and over and nothing. This yeti was elusive. Was I seeing things again? Or was it my coming altitude sickness headache playing mind tricks with me?

A couple of hours passed. I got a total of four entries typed with pictures sorted out for one big upload before I continued the trek to Everest Base Camp in the morning. I checked the window in the corner one more time.

It was there. The yeti, and closer than it was before.

I tried to grab it but apparently it was still too far away from me. C'mon man, think of all the bragging rights you'd have if only you got a hold of it. Think of all the digital photos you could send to the world!

But the yeti got farther away again until I could see it no more.


EVENING FELL AND WITH IT so did the temperature. I spent a good $11 USD to upload the four more entries in the satellite internet cafe (where the owner too thought Tilak and I were brothers) and then went browsing through the shops. One bookstore had a book about the theories of yeti, tracing its roots in folklore and its sightings -- but I'm positive the author had not seen what I had.

At dinner in the lodge I met an Australian on his third trip trekking through Nepal, an older guy who looked like he might have seen everything, but had no mention of a yeti. Was this just beginner's luck?

My altitude headache had grown after my Sherpa soup dinner, so I just went to bed right after. Exhausted, I was too tired and too much in pain to check one more time if the wireless server named "yeti" was available in the wireless network pop-up window in the corner of my laptop screen again. Man, if it was, I really would have sent a bunch of digital photos home.

Like Warm Apple Pie

DAY 362: Like pole pole in Swahili and tranquilo in Spanish, the word for "relax" or "slow down" in Nepali is bistarai.

"Oh! Bistarai!" I exclaimed. "I recognize it from the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark." I explained to Tilak the scene in Nepal where Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) is in a drinking contest and shouts "Bistarai!" to everyone when surrounding Nepali gamblers thought the other guy might be the winner. Tilak had no idea what I was talking about.

"It's an American movie from 1981."

"Like American Pie? I saw American Pie."

I chuckled. "Uh, no, it's not American Pie."

Tilak and I had made way from Namche Bazar northbound and upwards on the trail towards Everest Base Camp. The rains had passed, leaving nothing but clear skies. I was all energized from my breakfast of Sherpa soup, a thick porridge-like meal of rice, vegetables, a mild curry and broth.

I was all excited about the landscape around me; nothing I'd seen prior matched the grandeur, the bigness of the Himalayas. Every turn we made along the mountain path I couldn't help but think, Wow, it's just so big! In the distance were three great visible peaks: Nuptse to the left, Lhotse to the right, and in the center, Mt. Everest, which always looked shorter at this classic angle because it's farther back.

We continued on our way at a leisurely pace, passed stupa after stupa after stupa as a lone helicopter flew around above. The path undulated up and down, following the nature of the landscape. Everyone kept to his/her own pace and I kept on bumping into Nariko and her guide and members of Team Portland.

We met a new face along the way when we stopped for a rest, another long-term traveler from Manchester, UK named Paul. "Energy food?" he offered to me, Tilak and his own guide.

"What are these, gummi strap-ons?" I asked.

"I thought they were a bit curious."

We walked with Manchester Paul and his guide for a bit along the trail, which went over more bridges and down a muddy and slippery path to the village of Kyangjuma, and then through the village of Sanasa. It continued through a mountain forest environment to a rickety wooden suspension bridge across the Dudh Kosi River, whose source creeks provided drinking water for me and my purification bottle. In the village of Phunki Thanga, we stopped for lunch and I had another Sherpa staple, rara noodle soup, known more commonly in the West (particularly in college apartments) as ramen noodles.

An Australian was on his way down when we proceeded uphill after lunch. "You've got a steady two hour slog [ahead]," he told us.

The slog was uphill; hard, but not impossible. Tilak and I trekked at a casual pace as it snowed in the distance, staying clear of the yaks coming down, keeping to the inner part of the trail so as not to be accidentally knocked down over the cliff. The yaks, even with their pointy horns were pretty benign and the only thing really to lookout for was the many piles of yak dung along the trail -- some still steaming fresh like warm apple pie.

Six hours after leaving Namche Bazar that morning, we finally arrived at our goal of the day, the village of Tengboche at 3860m. ASL. We checked into the Trekker's Lodge -- with its view of Thamserku behind, a great sight around sundown -- using the reservation that Nariko's guide had made for us since they were about half an hour ahead of us. The reservation turned out to be necessary because that night most of the lodges in the village were full and any latecomer had to trek farther to find a place to crash elsewhere.

TENGBOCHE WASN'T JUST A STOPPING-POINT for trekkers, with its lodges, teahouses, satellite telephone booth and obligatory stupa. It was more known for the Tengboche Monastery, one of the highest Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in Nepal, home for monks to pray and live. Most of the temple was closed off for photography, but inside the ornately painted temple, four monks were meticulously painting another frame. Around sundown, two monks blew a conch shell, signaling prayer time.

That's not to say monks did nothing but pray all day. Earlier that afternoon I had seen them play volleyball against the non-monks. Also, of their burgundy and gold attire, some of that was The North Face gear and a lot of them wore sneakers.

"You sometimes forget that monks are people too," Manchester Paul said when he bumped into me as I sat by the monastery entry gate, writing and acclimatizing. He had seen a young monk wearing a Manchester United shirt.

Paul and I went to check out the building labeled "BAKERY," to see what a remote mountain town like Tengboche could bake up. I thought maybe they'd just have loaves of bread to cater to the Westerners sick of rice and potatoes, but it turned out to be a fairly decent European-style bakery with cupcakes, chocolate eclairs, donuts and angel-wing cookies (picture above).

"Oh wow, they have apple pie!" I rejoiced. "If I get apple pie, can you put it in the microwave?" Behind the counter was a microwave that some poor yak probably carried up for days from Lukla.

I had my warm apple pie and a hot chocolate and sat with Manchester Paul and his new friend Maria, a solo trekker from Portugal. We sat around and chat about the life of a trekker until the bakery, which obviously had much more of a reputation that we had thought, packed up to capacity.

"It's like McDonald's in here," Maria said.

BACK AT THE TREKKER'S LODGE, I met more trekkers: George, a Brazilian from Sao Paolo (who was excited that I knew about his home country's Skol beer); Greg, an older guy from New Brunswick, Canada, and three other Canadians originally from Ontario but lived and worked in Saudi Arabia (even though they got all their camera gear from New York.) Those last three Canadians were on their way down and were happy they found a place to crash for the night -- even if it was out in the big open room and not in a private one -- since everything else in town was full. They filled us in on the trek ahead and told us what to expect.

"There's a Canadian doctor at a clinic in Pheriche," one of the girls said. "They recommend that you take a rest day there, but we didn't and we're fine."

Sundown came and most of us went back to the center of town to the sundown effect on the western peaks. In the distance were the peaks of Nuptse, Everest and Lhotse, and Everest was the longest to be lit by the sun, proving that despite its shorter appearance, was still king of the peaks.

That night, warmth came not from a freshly-nuked piece of apple pie, but from the stove in the center of the big room -- it kept us all warm through the cold night, just like The North Face did for the monks.

Garlic Me

DAY 363: Altitude sickness, or mountain sickness, occurs when you are at a high altitude where the oxygen in the air is thinner. The human body can adjust to the change in oxygen percentage by creating more red blood vessels to bring oxygen to the brain -- it simply takes time. Most people who get altitude sickness get it when they ascend too fast.

The only proven method to cure altitude sickness is to simply descend to a lower altitude; however, there does exist medical and natural remedies to promote more oxygen to the brain. In the Trekker's Lodge in Tengboche I heard people talking about the drug Diamox, but I try to stay away from those kinds of drugs unless I really need it. Tilak said the way I'd been behaving I'd be fine without Diamox and so, I just stuck to the natural remedies that the Nepalis use, one main one being garlic.

"Whoa, that's a lot of garlic in the morning," I said when my garlic toast arrived at breakfast. I was expecting a light sprinkle of garlic powder or something, but I should have known better with the other Sherpa dishes I'd had; they just love using garlic in the mountains, and plenty of it. Crushed garlic was spread on my toast, giving my mouth a pungent odor that could make a yak keel over.

THE SUN ROSE IN THE EAST, slowly reflecting the snow on the peaks to the west of Tengboche. While Nariko would go back down (Tengboche was the farthest she'd go on her first trek) and Manchester Paul and Maria would go east, I continued the trek northbound and upwards with my trusty guide Tilak. The start of the ascent actually started downhill, through a forested tree area.

"Are you okay?" Tilak asked.

"Slight headache, same as yesterday, but it'll go away if I drink water." The water and garlic must have kicked in shortly after because for most of the day I kept an energetic pace on the undulating path, over more wooden bridges (some replaced by sturdier steel ones). The trail hugged the Dudh Kosi River through a valley with an awesome view of the Ama Dablam peak (HiRes 1632x1224), which I swear is the inspiration for the Paramount Pictures logo. Ama Dablam is actually (arguably) the most stunning of the peaks in the Everest region -- Everest is just tall, not particularly pretty -- and word around the trails was that about a dozen teams were at Ama Dablam Base Camp at that very moment, waiting their turn to scale it.

Tilak and I trekked on following the trail that hugged the river (picture above), under the crows flying above and the yaks beside us. By late morning we arrived at Shomare, a little village at 4070m. ASL, at the end of the tree line. From that point on the environment changed to semi-desert, with sand, short grass and tiny shrubs. Without trees to slow the winds down, I prepared myself with a nice bowl of spicy garlic rara (ramen) soup. My breath went from "pungent" to "explosive," and I'm sure it could have made a whole village keel over.

Tilak and I continued on towards the village of Pheriche, along with the dozens of other trekkers going at different paces. I concentrated on my breathing, the way I did up Mount Kilimanjaro and kept a steady pace. Mind you, the trail wasn't entirely uphill all the way.

"You should be able to make it to Gorak Shep with no problem," Tilak told me.

BY 1:30 IN THE AFTERNOON, we reached our goal of the day ahead of schedule, the village of Pheriche at 4200m. ASL.

"[What, are you guiding a Nepali?]" the hotel clerk asked Tilak.

"We look like brothers, don't we?" I interjected.

My Nepali brother brought me down the corridor to my single room, Room #18, which was more like Closet #18 with a bed in it. The claustrophobic space was surrounded by thin sound-traveling walls that let you hear the person breathing behind. No much privacy in that respect, but at least the lodge had an indoor toilet -- an important selling point around those parts.

PHERICHE (PRONOUNCED "PERICHAY") WAS THE LOCATION of the Himalayan Rescue Association Clinic, a totally volunteer medical facility run by British and Canadian doctors to provide aid to trekkers in medical peril. Everyday at three they held a free lecture on altitude sickness and seeing as there was nothing else to do in a town like Pheriche, I dropped in. Dr. Mike, an English doctor who had spent a lot of time in North America (thus obscuring his accent), was already in the middle of the talk -- although there were only two other people there when I arrived, an English couple, Kenny and Julia. Dr. Mike explained in an informal way, the different kinds of altitude sickness, its symptoms -- the first sign usually a severe headache, caused by the brain swelling up against the skull -- and its solutions. The bottom line of the lecture: if you feel you are getting altitude sickness, descend and let your body acclimatize at a lower altitude naturally.

I asked Dr. Mike about Diamox and he said it's perfectly safe; it triggers something in the body that makes it breath more than normal, taking in more oxygen for the brain. I was intrigued. "The only side effects," he said, "is a tingly feeling in the toes and fingertips. Oh, and soda and beer will taste flat."

"Oh forget it then!" I joked. Well, Tilak said I wouldn't need it anyway.

The Himalayan Rescue Association was conducting a study along with other scientists in the world on the effects of altitude sickness in different people -- it is a very variable thing and isn't exactly an exact science. Dr. Mike asked the three of us if we'd be willing to enroll in the study, with a questionnaire and a donation of a DNA sample. Kenny, Julia and I all accepted.

Dr. Mike passed around some forms to fill out. The second page was a disclaimer about donating our DNA to the international research community.

"So basically this says that you can clone us," I said.

"Yeah, but it's anonymous," the doctor answered. "Don't worry, it's only for research."

"Actually, I'm quite excited about the prospect of you cloning me."

"So you could run into yourself? You might not like yourself," he joked.

The DNA collection procedure was simple. I simply had to rub a flat cotton swab thing on both my inner checks and under my tongue. "I have to warn you," I said. "I've had lots of garlic for breakfast and lunch."

"I'm not going to sniff it."

I rubbed the swab in my mouth for about a minute and then gave it back to Dr. Mike. "That's it?"

"That's it."

"That's my DNA?"

"Yeah."

What would happen from there I didn't know.

THE MAIN ROOM IN THE PUMORI LODGE was full of people reading, writing, chatting, eating or sipping on hot tea or hot lemon. I saw that Greg from Canada and George from Brazil had made it there too. I loaded up on natural acclimatization preventatives: garlic soup (with chunks of real garlic!), ginger curry ("Could there be any more ginger in this curry?") and mint tea, which was no match for the overpowering odor now in my mouth. My breath went from "explosive" to "atomic" and would have probably melted the polar ice caps.

A familiar face sat next to me: Wendy, one of the women from Team Portland who reminded me of Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon. Due to her tight vacation schedule, she had branched off from the rest, who had all trekked to Ama Dablam Base Camp, to line up as one of the teams to climb to the summit. Turns out they weren't totally dependent on Sherpas after all; beyond Ama Dablam Base Camp they were on their own.

We had a long day ahead of us the next day -- the trail would ascend 700m., the highest change in any day -- and we prepared ourselves with over-hydration. "The problem with all this hydration is you have to go to the bathroom all the time," Wendy said.

She hit it right on the head because that night I must have run to the bathroom four times in the middle of the night to pee. If my clone had been around, I would have gladly had him go for me, no matter how bad his breath was.

Sand Trap

DAY 364: I woke up in Pheriche feeling good. I suppose when you are awake walking around, it is better than actually sleeping alone in a cold, claustrophobic room.

Before eight o'clock, all the trekking groups and individual hikers were all set to trek on -- except for Brazilian George who had developed a painful altitude headache. He bailed and decided to take the extra recommended rest day.

George, like me, wasn't part of one of the many package trekking groups, but was a solo trekker with a personal guide -- often considered advantageous because you don't have to worry about going too fast for others, or too slow for that matter. There were people on the trail completely solo though (sans guide) -- one particular one that stood out was the European(?) who went up in just his boots and underwear, despite the frigid morning air. Needless to say, he caught the attention he probably wanted from passersby.

That guy better not take my idea! I thought. For an even more memorable birthday on Everest, I was planning to go streaking around Everest Base Camp in my "birthday suit" and maybe sell the tape to Real TV.

Tilak and I kept a steady pace; no matter that others were passing us in the tundra-like environment -- hence the advantage of not being in a big group. The trail ascended a steady hill for about an hour up to the top of a ridge with these piles of stones everywhere, down to a valley bridge over the river and then back up on a path that ebbed and flowed with the landscape. We walked through the desert conditions and eventually to the halfway point at the village of Thukla at 4620m. ASL.

"Do you want to have lunch now?" my guide asked me.

Lunch now? It's only ten o'clock; we just had breakfast two hours ago. "No, I'm good, let just keep on going." Everyday on the trek so far, we'd stop at the mid-point for lunch. The mid-point always came around ten, ten thirty, just after breakfast. Himalayan Glacier only provided the three meals, which meant I wouldn't get to eat anything until nightfall if I took lunch right then.

The second half of the day's trek was harder this day though, and for a second I thought maybe I should have stopped for something. The late morning trek involved going up and down an undulating ridge of many hills (picture above). Each time we cleared a hill I expected to see our destination, the village of Lobouche, but it was always another hill. "No, the next one," Tilak would say. No matter, I took my time, and at least I wasn't suffering from a headache or totally exhausted like one Sherpa porter we saw.

We made it to Lobouche (4940m. ASL) near the Khumbu Glacier by around 1:30, which was a little on the late side; all private rooms in the town lodges had been booked already by faster trekkers or by package groups, and I had to settle for the dorm room in one lodge -- which was a big double bunk bed where 4-6 people had to share each level. The rest of the private rooms were already taken up by a big British tour group, whose Nepali leader thought I too was a Nepali. He had just served them slices of fried SPAM, something they didn't know what what it was, but raved about.

"WHAT ARE THE HORSES FOR?" I asked Tilak as we did a short acclimatization trek that afternoon to and from the top of a nearby ridge that overlooked the famed Khumbu Glacier. It would be our first major sight of accumulated snow.

"They are for the tourists to ride," he told me. Unlike horses I'd seen in every other country, the Nepalese horses didn't seem to be used for everyday transportation or hard labor -- that task went to the yaks.

"You know I ate one of those."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. In Japan. Raw."

The Khumbu Glacier wasn't much of a glacier in a traditional sense. I expected it to be a big snowy expanse with glimmering white everywhere blinding us with the reflection of the sun, but it was more like a big giant golf course sand trap. "Where's the snow?" I asked.

"Not in this season. Maybe [in January]," Tilak answered with a slight developing cough.

Without much of a show, we just hiked back down the ridge and back to the lodge.

"FRESH FROM YOUR GROCER'S FREEZER," I said.

"I should bring some home to my wife," Greg the fiftysomething Canadian said. We were watching the guy at the lodge fill the heating stove in the center of the room with frozen yak dung chips -- the environmentally-conscious fuel source in the area since we were above the tree line. It didn't smell like I thought it might, but that was mostly due because the smokestack rerouted most of it away.

Greg had made it to Lobouche after me, and therefore had to share the big bunk bed in the dorm with me. With us on the top bunk was another young solo trekker (with a guide), Andres from Denmark, who had just finished some volunteer work in southeast Nepal. When we got into another dinner computer conversation with Tilak -- who had spent the past seven months not trek guiding, but attending a computer training course -- Andres explained that yes, there does exist a downloadable pack from Microsoft so that one can write in Nepali Sanskrit.

Greg, Andres and I climbed up the lone ladder to the big top bunk that night and it was sort of awkward having to climb over each other to go to the bathroom in the middle of then night. With that and the farting, suddenly that cold, claustrophobic single room at the previous lodge looked a lot better.

All For A Pun

DAY 365(!): If you haven't figured it out by now, the reason I was so eager to make it to Mount Everest on my thirtieth birthday was all for the sake of the right to truthfully say for the rest of my life, the following pun (or slight variations thereof):

"When I turned thirty, I was on Mount Everest... and it was all downhill from there."

(Get it?)

I could see myself using the pun at fancy dinner parties back home, talking amongst my peers over glasses of fine wine:

"Oh Erik, ha ha ha! 'Downhill from there!' That's a real knee-slapper! Are you always this witty?"

"Ha ha, yeah! Now watch as I set one of my farts on fire!"

"Oh Erik, you're such a hoot!"

Of course, my pun could always backfire at dinner parties ten years from now, when talking to my peers about "being over the hill" at forty, and people saying things like, "...but not you Erik! It was all downhill after thirty! Ha ha!"

"Bite me."

Either way, I was less than a day away from Nepal's Everest Base Camp (as opposed to the one on the Chinese/Tibetan side that you simply just drive to), and it being October 18, 2004, my thirtieth birthday, I was a man on a mission to acquire my pun rights. Sure, many people had warned me that Everest Base Camp was nothing special -- there were no buildings or tents there and you wouldn't even see Everest Summit, plus there were so many other Himalayan peaks that were so much prettier -- but for me (and many others), nothing emitted that "Top Of The World" feeling like physically being on Mount Everest, regardless of its mediocre views.

And so, Tilak and I set off from Lobouche that morning in attempts to reach my goal. Of course, saying you're going to do something is always easier than actually doing it.

"ERIK!" CALLED A FAMILIAR VOICE from behind as Tilak and I were making headway northbound and upward towards Everest. It was the voice of Wendy from Team Portland, who was coming from behind much faster than me with her hiking poles. "How are you feeling?"

"Lethargic."

I was slow-going, but steady like the tortoise in the proverbial race. My pack was really weighing me down that morning, even with only the bare minimum inside (I had left the laptop and many other things in storage in Namche Bazar). Wendy the Hare must have had a shot of something that morning because she was zipping up at an energetic pace to reach her goal by mid-day: Kalapatthar, the nearby peak higher than Everest Base Camp that most locals recommended going to instead if you only had one choice because it did have a view of Everest Summit.

Anyway, she zipped ahead, ascending in altitude at a faster rate than me with no problem, leaving Tilak and me on our slow, but steady way -- it was no race after all. The ridge we were hiking kept on going, undulating over hill after hill, and just like the day before, it got to be a little ridiculous. Every time we'd clear one I expected to see the next village of Gorak Shep, but it was always another hill. The constant hills really started to piss me off.

Eventually, about three hours later, we made it to Gorak Shep (5150m. ASL), the very last outpost on the Everest trail. From there the trail split two ways: one towards the Kalapatthar peak (5545m. ASL) and the one towards Everest Base Camp (5350m. ASL). It was common to check into a lodge in Gorak Shep and go to either endpoint and return back to town since both were a day round-trip trek away.

"Okay, let's go to Base Camp!" I said to Tilak in the Snowland Inn lodge, a popular lodge with many signs, flags and t-shirts hung up from the many international groups that had made it to Everest Base Camp and beyond.

"Yeah?" He was surprised that I was still willing to go after struggling the way from Lobouche.

"Well, I won't have my bag."

"The bag makes a world of difference," said Canadian Greg who had come in after us. He too looked beat and was going to sit out the rest of the day to recuperate; he wasn't on any pressing pun mission I assumed.

Tilak was game -- for days he was always bragging about his "six years experience" and having "been to Base Camp ten times" and was strong enough to trek on -- and after lunch, we got ready. I got my cameras, my water bottle, a Snickers and a Clif Bar, and bundled up.

"Bring your headtorch," Tilak told me. "It will be dark on the way back." It was already passed noon, late for a departure to Everest Base Camp since the round trip would be "seven hours" (according to Tilak) -- although I heard others say it might be three there and two back.

THE TRAIL TO EVEREST went up and down another annoying undulating ridge, perhaps at the average altitude of 5400m. ASL. Once passed a brief flat land area -- with memorial plaques for those who died there in 1997 -- and the initial uphill, it was fairly level and not too bad. I could definitely feel the thinning air and really had to concentrate on my breathing with deep nasal inhales to fill my lungs -- every time I forgot to do so, almost immediately I'd feel a headache or dizzy spell coming on. I stopped every so often to really catch a few more breaths -- and to admire the isolated avalanches on Nuptse across the valley.

Tilak trailed behind me, which wasn't unusual, but it seemed this time the more I went ahead the farther back he became. He was going at a much slower pace than me, and he blamed it on his worsening cough. "My lungs... my heart..." he said, gasping for breath. "My cough... it is hard to breathe when I cough." He was coughing and spitting out yellow phlegm wads. "Are you sure you want to go? It will be ten o'clock when we get back."

Ten o'clock? Seems a bit of an exaggeration.

He was trying to tell me that we'd be all alone in the dark since we got a late start, but I pointed out the big Hong Konger group just in front of us that was also determined to make Everest and be back by nightfall. I could tell he was just trying to make excuses not to go farther, which was weird because he was always bragging about his "six years experience" and having "been to Base Camp ten times."

"I'm sorry, in my six years experience, I never get sick. You go ahead, I'll meet you back here."

"Okay."

So much for a guide, I thought. What the hell? How am I more fit than the guide? I continued on the undulating ridge for about another hour alone, in the trail of the two stragglers from the big ten odd-person group from Hong Kong, who were always one mountain turn ahead of me. I concentrated on my breathing and tried to keep a steady pace, but it was getting harder and harder as the day wore on. Every time I ran into a trekker on the way back to Gorak Shep, he/she would always give me a different answer as to how much farther it was to Base Camp -- no matter how much I progressed, it was always "one hour, maybe a bit more" away. Soon, the thin air was starting to get the best of me and I started getting a dizzy spell.

In front of me I couldn't focus. Or rather, I could only focus on the particular stone in front of me, but everything around it sort of swirled around in a blur. I tried my deep breathing, but it wasn't working this time. I felt like I was on the verge of unconsciousness, sort of like when you're drunk and everything around you gets all blurry -- except this time it felt a little different. It didn't feel like my consciousness was slipping away, it almost felt like my life-force was slipping away. It's kind of hard to describe, like an out-of-body experience or something.

Oh shit, oh no! BREATHE. Luckily my brain was still functioning and kept me sane. I searched through my mind for a memory to cling onto and focus on, but it was hard. Oh no, is this what they mean by "life flashing before your eyes?" C'mon, you can do it; you've gone up Mount Kilimanjaro without these problems, and at a faster ascension rate too.

The ridge finally descended down to the valley (picture above), down to where the oxygen was slightly thicker and the path was no longer as strenuous. I had finally caught up with the two straggling Hong Kongers, which I thought was a good thing because if I passed out, at least two people would know about it.

Hong Konger #1 (in Cantonese): Did you hear something?
Hong Konger #2: I think it was the thud of that guy who passed out and fell down back there.
Hong Konger #1: Oh, what a pity. (long, awkward pause) So, want to see me set one of my farts on fire?
Hong Konger #2: Oh Hong Konger #1, you're such a hoot!

It wasn't far from the end of the ridge to the area where the rest of the Hong Konger group was. "Welcome to the Base Valley!" their Nepali lead guide said.

"There is the Ice Palace," an assistant guide said, pointing to the glacier nearby. Also above was the beautiful snowy Nuptse peak.

"Is this the Base Camp?" I asked.

"It's over there," the lead guide said, pointing down the valley to an area that didn't look like anything official, about twenty minutes farther on foot at the same level. Some of the Hong Kongers continued to proceed there. "I don't know why they want to go there," he said. "You see the same thing there that you see over here."

"So here, this is technically Mount Everest?"

"Yes."

I was too lethargic to go any farther. A check appeared on a checklist in my mind. Everest, check. Mission accomplished. Pun acquired. The pun didn't require to have the phrase "base camp" in it for it to work anyway; the name "Everest" was punchy enough.

"Here's your guide coming," the guy said.

Just behind was Tilak. He made it. He had kept with it to meet me on Everest after all, still coughing, perhaps harder than before. I was happy to see him and greeted him to Everest, even though he'd been there ten times already. It was a sort of triumphant moment for the two of us, and we celebrated not by drinks of champagne or by going streaking, but by simply sitting down and catching our breaths by a rock held up by ice. I tell you, nothing was more refreshing than that.

THE WAY BACK TO GORAK SHEP was the same way we came. After the initial ascent to the ridge, it was fairly easy -- more so than before because it was a gradual decline this time. The sun started to set down below the western mountains, leaving a bright sunset effect reflect off the side of Nuptse, and eventually off just the peaks. Tilak was still slow-going with his cough, and I waited up for him at every other curve. "I'm sorry," he apologized. "I never got sick in my six years experience. [Every time I cough I have to stop.]"

"It's okay."

I tended to Tilak from that point on and the two of us eventually made it down from the ridge by nightfall, around seven o'clock. We hiked the flat muddy land back to Gorak Shep under the shine of our flashlights and made it back to the warmth of the stove in the center of the crowded lodge. I was starving and a little dizzy, but still had to wait for my pizza to arrive; it took awhile because all the Western-looking foreigners got served food first -- and I blended in with that second group at a glance. No matter, the pizza eventually came after Tilak made a fuss, and I ate it at a table next to Andres the Dane, who spared me some Diamox to help me take in more oxygen that night. I slept in the big bunk bed of the lodge aside Greg the Canadian and some French dude to rest up for the trek to Kalapatthar the next day.

AND SO, NOW I CAN SAY, "When I turned thirty, I was on Mount Everest... and it was all downhill from there." And if you don't like it after all that I went through to be able to say that truthfully, you can bite me -- or at least wait until I attempt to light a fart on fire.

The Long Way Down

DAY 366: (The following entry was written to the best of my memory since I didn't have much time to take notes or photos in the delirium I was in that day.)

"Your guide is very sick," Andres' guide informed me as I woke up in the big bunk bed that morning. Tilak's cough had gotten the best of him during the cold Himalayan night and it incapacitated him from being my guide for arguably the better of the two endings of the Everest trail, the peak of Kalapatthar (5545m. ASL), with its view of Everest summit.

(The real end of the Everest trail was actually the summit itself, but that required about $30,000 USD to go there for all the permits, insurance, etc., not to mention a certain level of insanity. I heard that earlier in the year a guy tried to get to at least Everest Base Camp 1 ["Everest Base Camp" is Base 0] but had fallen in a crevasse and died.)

It was in Tilak's best interests to descend in altitude down to at least the next town down (Lobouche), and so off he went with the help of two porters. Before leaving, he left me in the hands of his friend, Andres' guide, who would take Andres and me to the peak of Kalapatthar that morning.

I was a little out of it -- lightheaded, dizzy -- and I thought that maybe this would be the day I'd finally take that rest day everyone recommended since my pun goal had already been accomplished by my birthday deadline, but Andres and his guide were already on their way out waiting for me.

Okay, up and down, no problem. I'll just get this over with and descend to a safer elevation to meet Tilak later, I thought.

By 7:30 we were out the door and headed up towards "Black Rock," or Kalapatthar.

THE TRAIL TO KALAPATTHAR wasn't another annoying undulating ridge this time; it was an annoying constant incline all the way. When I reached the top of one hill, I'd come around the curve and see another discouraging hill right after. I might have given it the finger, but I had no energy. In fact, Andres and his guide were always way ahead of me, waiting up too many times -- so much in fact that they eventually just went on up without me, thinking I'd just catch up. I never did though, and thus, I was left to conquer Kalapatthar alone.

Well, I shouldn't say completely alone. Oh no. There was person after group after person passing me by at a much faster pace. In fact, some groups made it all the way up and back down to where I was before I had made it up to the next hill. They weren't snobby about it though and always gave me words of encouragement.

"Keep it slow and steady and you'll make it."

"Hang in there."

Still, it was hard, especially without a guide to keep me company and to assess my condition. Often I stopped to catch my breath, and soon, "often" meant every four steps. "I can't wait 'til we get back to Kathmandu," Canadian Greg said to me on his way down. It was a struggle for him, but he too had reached the top and was on his way down even before I got midway.

Lethargically, I trekked on. Just small baby steps, it's not a race, I thought as I went up at a snail's pace. I concentrated on my breathing; like the day before, any breath that wasn't a deep one would result in a headache or dizzy spell. Andres and his guide finally turned up -- on their way down of course -- and I was given the option to follow them back down to Gorak Shep and then down to Lobouche, or continue on up. "I'll try and make it," I told them. They left me again.

ABOUT THREE HOURS WENT BY -- more than enough time to go up and down -- and I finally made it to a level where I could finally see the end of the trail, the "black rock" peak of Kalapatthar in the distance, dominated by the Pumori peak.

One guide of a big group saw my weakened condition and showed some concern. "How are you?"

"A little dizzy."

"You should go down. You can see the same thing here that you can see over there." True, there was Everest Summit in the distance behind Nuptse.

"Okay, let me just make it to just the top of this ridge." I was close to the top of the last ridge before you went up again to the peak.

"Okay." The guide and his group continued their way down, leaving me alone to go up. I can... almost... reach it... But I couldn't go any farther. I was perhaps somewhere around 5500m. ASL, and every baby step I tried to do wouldn't advance me. My foot would go up, but then land right back where it started, with no forward momentum. I had physically gone as far as I could because my body wouldn't let me go any farther. Plus the winds had picked up, which blew the scarce amount of oxygen all over, which made it harder to breathe.

Okay, whatever, I thought. No biggie, you acquired the pun yesterday. Kalapatthar has no name recognition to the layperson; it doesn't matter if you get to the top or not. You don't write for mountaineers, you write for real people. My inner italicized self was making sense. Besides, I was starting to get drowsy, which was a bad thing -- that kind of drowsiness was the kind that put you to sleep permanently.

As they say in business, I cut my losses and turned back. My body immediately thanked my brain for doing so with the power of gravity finally working for me, not against me. It wasn't a cakewalk though; going down (picture above) still required a lot of energy to keep from slipping down the dry landscape of loose rocks, and I still had to take my breath breaks every four steps or so.

LIKE A GUARDIAN ANGEL (one of many to come over the course of that day), down came a thirty- or forty-something Englishman from Leeds named Eddie, a twice divorcee with a carefree attitude, who saw me struggling. He had separated from his bigger group, but was walking with one of the guides, who also showed some concern.

"You go ahead," Eddie told his guide. "I can walk him down."

Eddie was a godsend because he lent me the hiking pole he wasn't using, and gave me some of his energy drink out of his Camelback drinking tube at every break -- we had one about every 50 ft. so that I could catch my breath. "You're not much of a hiker, are you?" he asked.

"I am, just not at these altitudes," I told him.

The false peak effect was the same going down; when I thought we came to the end of one hill, there was another hill waiting just after. I took my time though, using Eddie's hiking pole, and eventually we made it back to the buildings of Gorak Shep after what seemed like another whole hour. I returned the pole to Eddie and went to my lodge while he went to his. I was too out of it to remember to thank him, and I never saw him again.

CAN'T I JUST STAY HERE AND TAKE A NAP? I thought to myself as I was slouched over the dining table in the Snow Land Inn after having a bowl of rara noodle soup and a mint tea. I was in a pickle; I didn't have that much money on me because everything was paid for by Tilak thus far -- in fact I had to pay for the lunch I had just eaten -- and I was instructed to meet Tilak in Lobouche. Lobouche is down more, it would be better to at least get to a lower elevation. Besides, you're at a loss without your guide.

It was decided. I would go down to meet Tilak and to save myself. However, things are always easier said than done.

With my pack on, I left the lodge. The sun was out and the winds had died down, and it would have been an easy trek down to Lobouche, except that going down required going up to another annoying undulating ridge. The ridge wasn't the hard part though. No, I couldn't even make it that far. I was still within Gorak Shep village limits, trying to go up a small three-step flight of stone stairs, and I could barely even do that without leaning down and gasping for air. My inactions soon attracted the attention of a Sherpa woman who ran one of the lodges.

"You need a porter," she told me. A small crowd developed around me about what to do with me. I didn't have that much cash on me to pay for a porter, but the manager of Snow Land Inn sent one and told me he'd bill my agency if I gave them their card, which I did.

The Sherpa guide took my pack and wore it and then pulled my arm up the hill. "Wait! Wait! Too fast!" I yelled, gasping for air. "Bistarai! Bistarai!"

He stopped so that I could catch my breath and then started up again, but it was the same thing. "You're going too fast! I can't... keep up... My legs..." I soon learned one of the other effects of altitude sickness wasn't about the lungs, but about the loss of energy in the legs. I barely had enough energy in the muscles to keep myself standing, let alone enough energy to keep breathing. My heart rate was going a mile a minute.

The Sherpa and I made it only to the top of the first pass of the ridge when another small group gathered around me, concerned about my rapidly weakening condition. In the crowd was Kenny and Julie, the English couple I met in the Himalayan Rescue Association lecture a couple of days before.

"You need another porter," Kenny told me. "For a couple of bucks, it'll be worth it."

"I don't have that much money on me."

Nearby there were a few porters ready to arise to the occasion of freelance lifesaver, for a fee of course. Kenny and Julie saw how incapacitated I was and bought me another porter for 500 rupees. Another porter tagged along to carry my pack, in hopes he'd be paid afterwards considering the circumstances.

There were now two Sherpa boys carrying me on both sides, but they were both shorter than me and I still had to sustain my own weight with my legs -- which I could barely do. I only made it about six steps before my knees buckled and I had to sit down for another breath. "Wait! Wait! Slow down! I have no energy in my legs!" All the help was just getting me more tired. An official rescue was in order.

I pulled out the list of things that was included on my tour, one item being "Rescue Service." We assumed this meant a rescue helicopter, so Julie took my passport and information to run back to Gorak Shep to try and arrange one. Meanwhile, Kenny tried to keep me conscious with constant talking and conversation. "Okay, do you know where you are?"

"Yeah. Going to Lobouche."

The commotion on the trail attracted the attention of more people, including two Aussies from Melbourne, Beth and Stewart, who were just casually walking by. Everyone saw that me being carried on the shoulders by the two Sherpa boys wasn't doing anything since they were shorter, so Kenny and Stewart (who were both taller than me) gave it a shot.

"Wait! Wait! My arms!" It was the exact opposite. Now my legs didn't touch the ground, even with my tippy-toes. The strain on my shoulders was painful. "Wait! Hold up! My arms feel like they're going to pop out!"

"You can pop them back in," said Kenny.

"This is going to save your life," Stewart said.

Save my life? Is my life in danger here?

I couldn't take it after a while. My arms felt like they'd pop out like out of Mr. Potato Head. We took yet another break on the trail just before one of the bigger hills of the ridge. One of the Sherpa boys had an idea; he put me on his little back, piggyback style, and carried me up. Amazing. When he tired, the other Sherpa boy had a go at it and carried me piggyback style. It would have been fun if I wasn't so damn tired. They alternated until we cleared the next hump.

We had made a lot of progress on the ridge but there was still a lot more to go. Stewart and Beth went ahead to the next town to see if they could arrange a horse or something, leaving my marionette of a body for Kenny and one of the Sherpa boys to carry me. This time with one taller and one shorter, it sort of balanced out and I could walk a little at a time -- although I still had to stop every twenty seconds to rest.

"Wait! Wait! I need a breather!"

"C'mon! Just fifty more meters, c'mon, you can do it!" Kenny yelled with frantic enthusiasm. "Your legs will get stronger when you go down." He knew not to shut up to keep me conscious, and at one point even threatened to pluck out one of my nosehairs to wake me up. "Okay, no time, you're almost there! We have to get you to a lower spot. C'mon, just a hundred more meters, c'mon!" he'd say. The two would lift me and I'd walk. Slowly but surely, the lower we got in elevation the more I could support my own weight with my legs.

"Wait! Wait! Stop! I need to breathe!" I exclaimed. They put me on yet another rock to sit. Kenny gave me a test with hand gestures to see if I was still with it.

"Okay, look at me, what am I doing?" he asked.

"You're at a headbanger concert."

"Alright! And this?"

"AOK."

"And this?"

"You're jerking off."

"Alright! C'mon, let's go! Just a hundred more meters, you can do it! Just concentrate on your feet and your legs will carry you! Come on!"

They lifted me again and I started the walking process for another round. We got to one of the valleys in the ridge, a clearing where I hoped we could stop and wait for a helicopter -- but up ahead in the lower lands there was a lot of cloud coverage and Kenny said that most likely they probably couldn't get one sent up. "C'mon, we've got to get you to a lower area! Just another hundred meters! There you go, nice and easy!"

Eventually we got to a point on the ridge where we met up with Stewart who couldn't get a horse, but a yak, which was good enough. The yak had a saddle and everyone lifted me onto it. Kenny and Julie wished me well and told me they'd meet me in Pheriche the next day. The yak would take over from there, although I'm sure the yak didn't know the hand gesture for "jerking off."

I HUNG ONTO THE SADDLE for dear life as the yak proceeded at its own pace down towards Lobouche. Like the yaks I'd seen before carrying gear, this yak wasn't all about getting the job done; it'd stop and wander for grazing, only to have its herder yell and slap it back into line. We had a little caravan going, with two yak herders, Stewart, Beth and the Sherpa boys and it was fairly smooth sailing for about an hour. Soon, there was a horse in front of us.

"Change," said the herder.

They lifted me off the yak and onto the horse. "Looks like you have a ride all the way to Pheriche," Stewart told me after talking to the guys. The horse was led by two Sherpas who also had to yell and slap the animal into line. I had to hang onto the front and back of the saddle to keep myself from falling off with all the ups and downs of the trail.

By dusk we arrived at Lobouche, where Tilak was rumored to be at the same lodge we stayed on the way up. I was too lethargic to get off the horse to find out, so Beth ran over to see. Word around town was that Tilak was so sick that Lobouche's elevation was still too high for him and had been carried by two porters down to the Himalayan Rescue Clinic in Pheriche. It was fitting that we should try and meet him there, because my condition was worsening and I had better get there myself.

Stewart grabbed his sleeping bag in Lobouche and left Beth there to escort me the rest of the way to Pheriche. It was just the four of us -- five if you count the horse -- and we continued downhill for the additional four hours to Pheriche. Going downhill wasn't such an easy thing on a horse. The horse was more and more reluctant the colder and more strenuous it got, and kept on neighing in disgust. I really had to keep my hand on the back of the saddle to keep myself from pulling a Christopher Reeve. "Oh, falling off, falling off, falling off!" I said at one point when the horse leaned at and angle and I couldn't keep on. The guys rushed over to keep me balanced.

The path went down and then up another ridge to an area where there were dozens of mini towers made of stacked-up stones. "Do you know what those are?" Stewart asked me.

"What?" I put my head up and looked around more. There might have been hundreds of the little stone shrine-like piles.

"Those are for all the people who died of [Acute Mountain Sickness]. You might consider yourself lucky."

The path went down another hill and over a river bridge and then back up again. It was a real roller coaster of a ride on the horse, and not in a fun way. I hung onto the saddle -- hung onto my life -- to keep myself from going over the edge. The sky was getting darker around that time, which didn't help the fact that I was getting drowsy. I tried as best I could to keep myself from falling asleep; I knew there would be no waking up if I did.

The horse and the Sherpas marched on, even when the sun went down and everything was only faintly lit by moonlight. We offered to use a flashlight, but they didn't want it. The farther we went in the darkness, the more often we had to take a break for the horse's sake.

"How are you doing?" Stewart asked me.

"I'm so cold."

He pulled out a spare down jacket from his bag and put it on me. We continued on until the rocky downhill became the flatlands of the valley. Up ahead I could see the distant lights of Pheriche.

"Almost there."

It was still another hour before we reached the town, an hour of breathing and hanging on. The lack of exertion while riding the horse did me good because when we finally arrived at the clinic around 7:30, I was able to dismount the horse myself and walk to the window on my own strength. Behind the glass was Tilak awake in a bed, breathing through an oxygen mask.

DR. MIKE AND DR. LINDA OF THE HIMALAYAN RESCUE CLINIC got me on the oxygen tank right away. They rolled in another bed into the room where Tilak was (the only patient room in the small building) and set me down after giving me some drugs. Dr. Mike was confused as to who Stewart was, and I explained that he had escorted me pretty much all the way from near Gorak Shep.

"You did a good thing," Dr. Mike told him.

"Well, he was going to die."

Die was right. I had come into the clinic with a blood oxygen level of 52 -- a new record low for the clinic by two points. (At sea level it should be 100, and at the elevation Pheriche, it should be no lower than 85.) If I hadn't gotten to that oxygen tank sooner, I might have fallen asleep in the cold Himalayan night and been pronounced dead by 8 o'clock from the high altitude pulmonary and cerebral edema I had.

Under the mask I was returning back to normal, normal enough to answer Dr. Linda's medical questions in my usual smart-alecky way and even eat some food. Meanwhile, Stewart had paid off the horsemen for me and went off to sleep in one of the nearby lodges.

"Thanks," I told him, still wearing the blue down jacket he put on me.

"No worries. You would have done the same for me."

"I'll see you in the morning."

The energy used for eating was enough exertion for the night and so the doctors left Tilak and me in our room on two beds on both sides of the pure oxygen regulator that we shared. We slept there that night with the oxygen masks on, under the care and supervision of Dr. Mike, Dr. Linda and their medical assistant Khagendra who gave me more drugs throughout the night.

THE NEXT MORNING, something happened more celebratory than the fact that it was the one year anniversary since my trip began: I simply woke up.

Die Another Day

DAY 367: "You seem really calm about all this," Dr. Mike told me the morning after my near-fatal incident on the Everest trail.

"I'm pretty calm about a lot of things," I said. I was casually eating a bowl of rara noodle soup.

"You know you could have died yesterday from the pulmonary edema."

Hmmm, there's that "D" word again. I guess when you're dying slowly, the situation doesn't seem so grim until someone puts it bluntly to you like that.

I had escaped the "D" word (and all its derivatives), all thanks to the efforts of the Sherpas, Eddie, Kenny and Julie, Beth and Stewart, the yak, the horse, volunteer Doctors Mike and Linda, and that tank of oxygen. And some drugs. I was already showing great progress; my blood oxygen level was back up to a healthy 87. Tilak on the other hand wasn't as improving as much as I was. With his cough, his average blood oxygen level was in the low to mid 70s -- with every cough he lost about 15% of his oxygen -- and he wasn't really stabilizing.

STEWART THE AUSSIE CAME BY that morning for a visit in the clinic to see how I was doing. "Thanks for saving my life," I told him. While he was all humble about doing so, he also came for another reason: to square off the money that he spot me to get me down with the hired help -- I owed him a few thousand rupees. Dr. Linda paid him off and transferred the cost to the hospital bill so that I could claim it on my insurance.

Figuring out the "cost of living" was a big mess that morning, trying to figure who paid off who, etc. The night before Tilak shelled out some extra cash to pay off one of the horse porters, who might have been paid twice -- I think a couple of the Sherpas took advantage of the confusion and cashed in. No matter, the important thing was that I was alive. In the end, everything worked out, and ultimately it was just money.

"Here's the bad news," Canadian Dr. Linda said to me as I was still under the mask. It was the bill, with the itemization of the consultation, the oxygen, the drugs and the miscellaneous horse/yak/porter fees. So far getting my life back only cost me $785.00 USD, about the price of a big TV. My life is worth as much as a nice TV, I thought as I charged it (my life that is) on my MasterCard. (How's that for "mastering the moment?" However, if they took Visa exclusively like in some places I'd been, I would have been dead for sure.)

TILAK WAS JUST ACROSS THE WAY on the other bed, still looking a bit pathetic with his mask on. "I'm so sad," he said. "I never got sick in my six years experience." It seemed to me that he was less concerned about his health and more about his job security. He was concerned that no one would want to hire him as a guide with this new history on him. With a wife and two kids, it wasn't a good situation since guiding was his only source of income.

The day was getting warm, and if not for the circumstances, a nice day to go out and be in the sun. I had enough energy to walk around a bit and take a photo of the staff, but doing so didn't really help my condition. In fact, when Dr. Linda conducted a test, my blood oxygen level sunk down to the low 70s after a simple walk to the wall and back. I was ordered to stay under the mask until we could figure a way for Tilak and me to descend.

Descending altitude was the only proven method to really help our conditions, but going down to the next town required hiking up onto another annoying undulating ridge -- something neither of us had the blood oxygen level for. We contemplated getting two horses, but why bother when you could send in a chopper? It eventually boiled down to pushing the proverbial panic button and calling out the emergency rescue helicopter.

"This will be one of the most beautiful flights in the world," Dr. Linda told me. She told me that it despite it being a rescue mission, it'd probably be a great opportunity to take some photos. Kick ass. She gave me my patient report to give to the doctor at the clinic in Kathmandu once I landed.

The words "rescue service" on my included costs list from the agency didn't exactly cover steep helicopter fees, but I hoped my travel insurance would. My insurance card said that the company must be notified before any emergency evacuation and so I had to wait for hours to clear the red tape via satellite phone to the agency in Kathmandu, who called overseas to the phones in the USA. I spent most of this waiting time taking a nap under the oxygen mask.

"The heli is one thousand dollars per hour," Tilak informed me. "It will be over three thousand dollars."

"Hopefully my insurance will cover it. They're trying to find out."

"Can I come with you [on the helicopter]?" he shyly asked. In his mind he was probably wondering if I was just going to leave him there.

"Yeah, of course! You're my guide," I said. I figured that was the loophole, him being "my guide" to escort me back to Kathmandu. The insurance company didn't have to know he was sicker than I was. I suppose that really didn't matter though because the cost for the helicopter was per hour, regardless of the amount of passengers.

"I have to ask you anyway."

"Yes."

"Three thousand dollars is too much for a Nepali," he said. "I would just die here."

Okay, enough of the "D" word, I thought. No one here is going to die today; enough of the morbidity. Soon, Tilak soon got a visitor of his own; a Polish woman who was his guardian angel on his descent to Pheriche. Without enough money to afford a horse or a yak to carry him down, he was simply taken down by two porters and whatever energy he had left in him for the entire five mile undulating hike. Luckily the Polish woman showed up, who was a doctor that just so happened to have some medication on her during her trek and had given him a shot so that he might survive the rest of the trek to Pheriche.

"SOMEONE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU ON THE PHONE," nurse Khagendra said to me. I went outside and put the satellite phone to my ear. It was a manager at Himalayan Glacier named Naba, explaining to me the red tape with the insurance company.

"They won't pay for the helicopter now," he told me. "They say you have to wait until you go back to the States and then complain."

"But the insurance company will pay for it, right?"

We went back and forth like this, and there was no direct answer, but I figured it was just a matter of a claim and paperwork later on. The important thing at hand was to simply get the chopper over for the well-being of Tilak and me.

"Okay, send it over."

It wasn't that instantaneous though; the helicopter was delayed a couple of hours while waiting I took another nap and stared at the wall. Around 2:30 the doctors finally heard the whirring sounds of our salvation and it was time to go. Tilak and I got our bags together and took off the life-saving oxygen masks and head out the door.

"Hey!" said a familiar face.

"Excuse me, [we're busy at the moment]," Dr. Mike said to the trekkers coming in.

"This is Kenny," I told him. "The English guy that helped me before."

"Looks like we made it just in time," Kenny said. He and Julie had come to see how I was doing, but it turned out they came for a final goodbye. I had him write his e-mail address for me as we walked towards the chopper, the winds of the blades blowing our hair back.

"Bet you never thought you'd hear that nagging voice again, asking you all those questions!" he said, smiling.

"It's okay."

Tilak and I got on the helicopter and strapped in. The pilot pushed a few buttons and grabbed onto the joystick and soon we were floating in mid-air. I waved back to Dr. Mike, Dr. Linda, Khagendra, Kenny, Julie and the small crowd of villagers excited to see the helicopter land in their town. Soon, we were up in the air traveling southbound to safety -- and at Dr. Linda's suggestion, I even got in a couple of snapshots of the breathtaking views (other picture above).

I REQUESTED A BRIEF STOP back in Namche Bazar to get the bag (and laptop) I had left in storage. The helicopter landed on the local helipad and Tilak went running down the hill into town to get it for me, as if he was still trying to prove he was still strong enough to be a guide. I wished he didn't do so because I knew he was worse off than I was, but I think he was still worried about job security. However, when I caught up with him on the main street he was totally winded, gasping for a breath. A porter from the lodge had to carry the bag back up for him.

Soon we were back in the air and stopped in Lukla airport to refuel. Then it was back up in the air for the hour or so flight back to Kathmandu. None of us really said anything on the way; there was a lot of just staring out the window, looking at the mountains, valleys, river and villages that we had encountered on the way up. Man, it seemed like such a long time ago.

NABA AND A DRIVER FROM HIMALAYAN GLACIER were at the Kathmandu airport to meet us and everything was handled with care and professionalism from there. Naba, a guy with a suit and a cell phone that seemed to ring as soon as he hung up the last call, coordinated the continuation of the rescue from the helicopter to the Nepal International Clinic (HQ of the Himalayan Rescue Association) in town. I was checked into the clinic just before closing (thanks to Naba's advance phone call) and was led into one of the rooms by a nurse.

"So, are you Nepali by origin?" she asked.

Even in extreme circumstances, some things never change.

DR. DAVID, FROM MICHIGAN, U.S.A. came in the little room. I explained the whole ordeal to him, including the part about my guide casually just waiting with Naba in the waiting room outside and how he was in a condition worse than me. The doctor checked me out and everything seemed to be getting better -- no fever, no wheezing and blood oxygen level at a healthy 96. The only issue was perhaps my elevated blood pressure, but he blamed that on the change in altitude and told me to come in the following day to make sure. In the meantime, he'd write a second letter (Dr. Linda wrote the first) to my insurance company explaining that the helicopter ride (as beautiful as the views were) was all part of a necessary, life-saving medical emergency rescue operation.

Naba and Tilak took me to the Hotel Florid, a nice hotel in the lively Thamel district where he got they in a big room with a desk and two comfortable beds -- a very welcome change from the big shared bunk beds I had in the mountain lodges.

"Excuse me, [I need some air,]" Tilak said. He walked out the door while I was whisked away upstairs. Going up the three flights was hard, but that would change with time.

Naba and I sat at the table in my hotel room under the dim lights and chat over hot lemon teas. He assured me that a guy from the agency would stay in the hotel nearby in case I needed anything, and that he himself was just a mobile phone call away. I could even order room service if I wanted. The bottom line of the conversation though could be summed up in three words: "You need rest."

"Yes, I know." In the back of my mind, I knew how big the arduous task of writing about all this was going to be.

He left me to go attend to his phone calls and business, leaving me alone in the room to finally recuperate after the crazy week I'd had. I sat there in the silence of the dim room and finally took that big breather I wanted so badly the previous day.

THEN, THERE WAS A KNOCK ON THE DOOR. It was Tilak. Apparently when he "stepped out for some air," he stepped into a clinic to finally get himself checked out by a local (and much less expensive) doctor. He showed me the results of some test they ran on him.

"I don't know what this means," I told him. "But you got medicine right?"

"Yes," he answered. There was an awkward pause. "So, how was my behavior?" he asked. I think he was worried that I'd slam him in a guide evaluation form that would sure keep him unemployed.

"It was fine, don't worry."

The two of us just stood there in the spacious room with not much else to say; we had already been through enough. There was another long, awkward pause.

"With your permission," he finally said, "May I go home?"

"Of course! Go home! Feel better! Take your medicine."

"Okay."

He closed the door behind him and I was alone again, safe and sound away from the beautiful, but potentially fatal Himalayan mountains. I slept like a baby that night in a comfortable bed under a comfortable blanket.

BOTH TILAK AND I HAD SURVIVED The Incident on The Everest Trail and would be back to normal in the next coming days after that whole brush with death thing. While death is the only inevitability in life (after taxes), for us it wouldn't come until another day -- hopefully not for a long, long time.

What Exit?

DAY 368: "Ohaiyo gozaimas!" greeted the Nepali hotel clerk in Japanese when I finally showed my face downstairs that morning.

"Uh, no, I'm not Japanese."

I went out to a table in the backyard garden cafe. The waiter gave me a note left by some Korean guy to pass on. "This is from your Korean friend."

"Uh, no, that's not me. I'm not Korean."

What the hell? Altitude sickness must have been my Kryptonite because in my weakened condition, I no longer had the super power of blending in as a Nepali.

IT WAS THE FIRST DAY OF SEVERAL DAYS I'd need to recuperate after The Incident on The Everest Trail, and I was to take it easy. Most of the legwork I had to do was taken care of by Naba from Himalayan Glacier, who met me that morning, still with his business suit and cell phone. As I ate breakfast outside in the garden cafe, he explained that Nepal was in the middle of Dashami, the big national ten-day festival to honor Durga, the demon-slaying goddess. Most of the celebrations took place in the mountain villages, away from the city.

"It will be quiet around here," Naba told me.

"Good."

Naba and I hopped in a cab to go back to the Nepal International Clinic in town to have my blood pressure checked out since it was high the day before after the rescue. The receptionist in front recognized me and greeted me with a letter that Dr. David wrote for me to justify the helicopter rescue to my insurance company. Dr. David wasn't actually there though -- he was out in the mountains to celebrate Dashami with a friend -- but I was assigned to the doctor-on-call, a Dr. Johnny.

Dr. Johnny took my file and escorted me to the little patient room in the back. Right away he saw the address I put down, the only address I could label "permanent" having lived like a nomad out of a bag for a year: my parents' address in New Jersey.

"I'm obliged to ask you, what exit?" he said.

I smiled. Is it possible that I went through the entire rescue ordeal so that I might cross-promote my side venture WhatEXIT.net on The Blog? What Dr. Johnny was referring to was an inside joke that the people of New Jersey have when they leave the state and meet other New Jerseyans.

New Jersey is such a diverse state of different cultures -- yes, there is more to New Jersey than gangsters and toxic waste dumps -- and you can usually tell what kind of person someone is by what exit they live off of from one of two major highways that cut through the state: the Garden State Parkway and the famous New Jersey Turnpike. People around Exit 12 (Rahway) usually have the stereotypical accent that pronounces it "New Joisey," while people around Exit 8 are usually upper-class residents who attended Princeton and just settled in. There's almost more than likely a Bon Jovi tribute band playing off of Exit 63 (Belmar) every night, while Exit 4 (Wildwood) seems to be the designated vacation spot for the Quebecois who drive down from Canada every summer. (In case you were wondering, Tony Soprano enters the Turnpike at Exit 16W in the introduction to HBO's The Sopranos.)

"Eighteen W," I answered the doctor. (It is the last exit on Turnpike before the George Washington Bridge that goes to New York City.) "Are you from Jersey?"

"I'm from Connecticut, but I'm familiar with the exits," he said. "There's Newark..."

"Fifteen W."

"...and that IKEA..."

13A, I answered in my head -- but we cut to the chase and wrapped the blood pressure band around my arm.

"Looks like everything's normal," he told me. He said the high blood pressure from the day before was probably from the steroid they gave me in Pheriche to get my blood going. I told him that I remembered that I was on the anti-malarial drug Lariam at the time I got sick on the mountain, and although there were no exact answers, we theorized that it might have had something to do with the fact that I never really got a warning altitude headache.

NABA BROUGHT ME BACK TO THE HOTEL, where he had me switched to the lower level so that I didn't have to strain myself climbing up and down stairs all the time. My new room had a view of the garden in the back (picture above) and a big comfy bed where I pretty much slept and vegged out the rest of the day.

Before that happened though, I had one more meeting to attend to: the meeting with the helicopter service that rescued me from the higher altitude. The pilot came to the hotel and gave me the bill. It came to a whopping $3881.25 (USD), which hopefully my insurance would cover.

"How was our service?" he asked.

"Good," I said. "Well, I'm alive."

One thing about riding in a rescue helicopter (as expensive as they are) is you get to go places fast -- much faster than those people stuck in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike anyway.

If this is your first taste of this Blog, please forgive me for how lame this entry is; I didn't have much going on as I was recuperating from an almost-fatal incident on the trail to Mount Everest, which you can read about here.

Slowly But Surely

DAY 369: It was the second day of my recuperation since The Incident on The Everest Trail, but that didn't mean I couldn't get up and walk around. Perhaps it was advantageous for me to be recuperating during the big Dashami festival (which took place mostly outside the city) because traffic was low in the usually lively Thamel district (picture below), and I didn't have to keep dodging the busy traffic of bicycles, motorcycles and cars all competing for king of the road in the narrow bazaar streets.

NABA CAME TO MY HOTEL that morning to square off the money I still owed Himalayan Glacier since I only paid half up front. Times were different back then when I had book the tour with his schmoozing associate Davi; it was a time when "breathtaking scenery" was just a figure of speech. Anyway, Naba and I worked out everything together on a calculator and I paid the difference, which excluded that return airfare I would have taken on a plane if I hadn't gone back to Kathmandu in a rescue helicopter. Although I didn't expect the multi-thousand dollar rescue helicopter ride to be included in the "Rescue Service" included in the tour price, I questioned what it did cover. Naba said that it merely covered the costs of the phone calls used to call the helicopter service, but not the actual service. Seemed a bit of a cop out, but at least Naba snapped his fingers and made it so the entire rest of my stay at the Hotel Florid would be comp until I left Kathmandu.

I made the effort to get up and try and walk around the neighborhood. I was still dizzy and it was hard to focus on things, but I could feel that I'd get better after some more rest. I knew my "super powers" of blending as a Nepali was coming back because I noticed all the beggars ignoring me and going straight for the more fair-looking tourists. No matter how much the foreigners got all "spiritual" by donning Nepali clothes -- it seemed to me like it was more like a fad for them -- they didn't fool anyone.

I leisurely spent my time browsing through Thamel's many bootleg DVD and CD stores and its used bookstores. As low-impact as that was, after a while it got exhausting for me, and I decided to treat myself to a nice big American-style hamburger and fries as a nice nostalgic pick-me-up. It was served with hot sauce and garlic chili, which gave it a bit of Nepali flair.

I spent most of the rest of the day recuperating in my room, listening to CDs, writing and catching up on sleep. I wasn't 100% back yet, but I'd get there slowly but surely.

If this is your first taste of this Blog, please forgive me for how lame this entry is; I didn't have much going on as I was recuperating from an almost-fatal incident on the trail to Mount Everest, which you can read about here.

In A Dark Back Alley

DAY 370: One of my worst fears in life is to be stranded at sea, the lone survivor of a boat sinking or something. The fear isn't the actual being alone or being miles away from being rescued or even the threat of sharks, it is the fact that at any given moment, a big giant whale's tail could pop out like in those nature documentaries and slap me down silly. Every time I see one of those whale documentaries on TV and see that happen, I cringe.

One of the worst fears I have pertaining to this Blog is that I don't do something interesting on the road to write about. Even at home I get antsy when I just sit around and do nothing and I feel like time is just wasted when I should be out doing something. But doing something was harder in this circumstance, as it was the third day recuperating from The Incident on The Everest Trail in the Himalayas -- that and the fact that I had an awful pain in the neck from sleeping on a hard pillow, and a pain in my leg from some strange insect bite I got in the overnight. But while I was still a bit exhausted and a bit dizzy when walking around, I figured the least I could do to be productive was get a haircut.

Thamel was still pretty much closed for the Dashami holiday, but a few businesses remained open to cater to the tourists in the area. One such business was an old-fashioned barber shop/massage parlor, down a dark and sketchy narrow alley where everything else was closed (picture above). The barber was waiting out by the street for clients and he seemed nice so I gave it a whirl.

The barber was thorough and cut my hair finally back down to the short, fuzzy style I have on my passport photo. In the other barber chair was a British guy from Guernsey, the British Channel Island where Lara (Peru, Bolivia, Brazil) came from, although he said he didn't exactly know her. The guy wasn't there for a haircut but for a back massage, and he raved about it when he was finished before my hair was finished being cut.

It was just me and the short Nepali barber in the shop in the back alley, and immediately after my cut he started with the touching and rubbing. "You want massage?" he enticed me.

I'm sorry, we just met, I thought. This is really out of the jurisdiction of the barber/client relationship, you know. "Sure," I said anyway. Never mind that we were two lone men in a secluded back alley in Kathmandu; my neck was still sore and I wanted him to knead it out for me -- plus the gay connotations involved were nothing compared to a big whale's tail coming out of nowhere in the middle of the ocean (not that there's anything wrong with both). The barber was gentle with me in the back massage as I remained in the barber chair and simple leaned forward for it to happen. He cracked my back and my neck in all the good ways and rejuvenated my joints.

I wandered around Thamel again that sunny day afterwards, passed the snake charmers and the tourists who had never seen one before. I still wasn't 100% just yet, but I could feel myself able to focus on objects stronger than the previous day -- that is, until after the time I thought I could handle a beer at the curry restaurant I went to, which just got me more tired and sleepy. I bought a bunch of bootleg CDs -- I collected all twelve of the Buddha Bar CDs since they were so cheap -- and even bought a CD wallet to keep them in to minimize the bulk of jewel cases.

When I was too tired to walk around, I went back to my room and finally watched the bootleg I, Robot DVD I got in Beijing but never got around to watching. With my new haircut, I entertained myself for a while by trying to simulate the suspicious facial expression Wil Smith has on the cover of the movie.

I slept early again that night and all was fine; in the safety of a bed in a landlocked country, I had nothing to fear from big whale tails in the middle of the ocean.

If this is your first taste of this Blog, please forgive me for how lame this entry is; I didn't have much going on as I was recuperating from an almost-fatal incident on the trail to Mount Everest, which you can read about here.

Nepali Again

DAY 371: I thought perhaps since Nepal wasn't a Christian nation, a Sunday would be an ordinary day, with things open. However, things in the Thamel district were even more dead than before. When I finally lugged out my laundry to "the cheapest laundry service in town" (a whole big load for about three bucks, washed/dried/folded), I had to wait for it to be done the following day because the laundry guy had the day off.

That's not to say the entire city was shut down. Being the touristy Thamel district, more than enough stores were still open -- despite the weird extra added army cops stationed around (picture above) as if they knew something we didn't -- to cater to the few tourists wandering around wearing either hippie attire or mountain gear. After energizing with a lovely steak and eggs breakfast, I went wondering, yet again, in the continual effort to gradually come back to normal, day by day, after The Incident on The Everest Trail that almost took my life. Each day I was getting better, and each day I was blending in more and more like a Nepali again.

One familiar place I found was one of the several branches of Baskin Robbins in town, the only Western franchise that I'd seen make it out to Kathmandu (although I could be wrong). No McDonald's, no Subway, not even a KFC -- which surprised me because KFC from what I've seen is the most worldwide American fast food restaurant, miles ahead of the Golden Arches. Anyway, I stopped in for one of the 31 flavors -- they only had 13 -- and then continued to mill about town.

I sort of went on a shopping spree with bootleg CDs, buying ones I always meant to buy (i.e. Stevie Wonder's greatest hits) and even some that I already owned but missed listening to (Oh, how I've missed my Prodigy!). It didn't matter, each was between one and two bucks, as cheap as the big load of laundry I sent out that morning.

The Nepali woman at the counter of the CD store saw me come in and immediately greeted me in Nepali.

"Sorry, I don't understand," I said in confusion.

"Oh, you're not Nepali? I thought you were Nepali!"

With that said, I was finally 100% again with my "super power" of blending in as a local. I was finally back in business. Now if I just had some clean clothes...

If this is your first taste of this Blog, please forgive me for how lame this entry is; I didn't have much going on as I was recuperating from an almost-fatal incident on the trail to Mount Everest, which you can read about here.

Reunions

DAY 372: I was awake in my room that morning, ready for another boring day of recuperation -- until there was a knock on the door.

"Yeah?" I said, the way Seinfeld speaks into the intercom when his apartment gets buzzed.

"It's Tilak."

My former Everest trail guide was all freshened up with a new button-down shirt and fresh smile. I hadn't seen him in days, although it seemed like a lot longer. I invited him in and we caught up on our recuperation days since our rescue from the Pheriche clinic in the mountains. Tilak caught me with my laptop out and so, as promised, I burned him a CD of all the photos of our trip together, from the pictures at Kathmandu airport trying to get a flight to Lukla, to the shots back in Kathmandu after the helicopter rescue.

"What are you doing today?" Tilak asked me.

"I have to go to the American embassy."

"And after?"

"Nothing."

He offered to be my guide yet again, this time to see sights around the Kathmandu valley and I gladly accepted. We made plans to meet at 12:30.

MY ENCOUNTER WITH TILAK wasn't the only surprise reunion I had that day. At the Northfield Cafe in town, I was sitting at a table by myself when I noticed two faces staring at me from across the way.

"Erik?" said the guy. "It's hard to recognized you without The North Face jacket on."

"It's the hair. I got a haircut."

"Right."

Kenny and Julia, the English couple that helped save me on the Everest trail, had literally just landed back in Kathmandu from Lukla, checked into a nice hotel (to splurge after roughing it for weeks) and went to the Northfield Cafe (one of the more notable eateries in Thamel with its lovely garden setting) for a bite to eat. I had forgotten that in the days I spend recuperating that there was time for people to proceed with the standard Everest tour as planned -- hike back to Lukla via Namche Bazar and fly back to Kathmandu from Lukla.

"So what did I miss?" I asked the pair.

"A lot of groups are up there now," Kenny informed me. "Big Chinese and Japanese ones. There's this one guy at Lobouche walking around in circles telling everyone he's okay. Lots more helicopter traffic too."

I was late to meet Tilak, so I grouped a quick photo with the life-saving couple. Before departing, Julie reminded me that the whole experience would be "good material for [my] book."

TILAK AND I WALKED OUT OF THAMEL on the nice sunny day for the half-hour walked to the American embassy -- that's the real one, not McDonald's. It was our first "trek" since the Everest one and it was still hard to breathe -- this time not from the altitude but from the smog and air pollution of Kathmandu. The embassy was finally open after having been closed for both American and Nepali holidays (Columbus Day, Dashami) and I walked into the tiny waiting room by the gate of the compound, toting my US passport like an FBI agent so there was no mistaking me from a Nepali.

My passport got me passed the next security checkpoint where I was led into a dim, semi-circle-shaped room that was a dreary as an empty DMV office. I eventually made it passed there after they probably secretly ran a check on me, and was escorted by the female Nepali officer to the consulate services area. On the way I saw that the embassy was actually nice-looking despite the bleek exterior, with a big central square with Old Glory proudly waving above. It felt good to be reunited with U.S. soil again, even if there was no lingering scent of McDonald's french fries around.

The purpose of my visit was to find out about overseas ballots and the woman there gave me a form and instructions, and told me I had until 8 p.m. of Election Day to get my voite in. I was registered in New Jersey (What exit?), which I'd heard became a swing state and I wanted to do my part. How awesome would it be if my vote actually did count and determined the next U.S. president? The yak and horse that saved me would be hailed as heros by the Democrats -- or perhaps hailed as left-wing liberal scum by the Republicans.

WITH THE ONLY ERRAND I had for the day done, Tilak and I went to finally go sightseeing. We hopped in a cab that took us on the outskirts of the eastern part of town, to the Pashupatinath, the holy area dedicated to Pashupati, one of the Hindu god Shiva's many incarnations on earth -- the "holiest Hindu site in Nepal" according to Let's Go. Leave it to our timing to be hit with another does of morbidity; we arrived just as a somber cremation funeral was underway, with a crowd of concerned, melancholy onlookers. From what we saw, Tilak deduced it was the funeral for a parent (the body was covered in cloths and wood so we couldn't tell the gender) who had passed away, leaving three sons behind. The three sons, dressed down in loincloths, blessed themselves with the holy water of the nearby Bagmati River. The three men circled the body and blessed it, weeping and sobbing until each of them reached his threshold and really started bawling and wailing their eyes and lungs out in a sad, depressing and almost haunting way. They were oblivious to the people all around watching, including the French tour group that, like me, respectfully only snuck in a couple of photos. The more the men cried for their loss, the more sad the overall mood got; it was one of the more tender moments on The Trip thus far. The three lit the body on fire, wept to the heavens and were escorted out. The decoration of the body were thrown into the Bagmati while the scent of burning flesh and wood filled the air.

"You want to stay or go?" Tilak asked.

"Uh, let's go."

We walked passed the shrines of Shiva (picture above), up a hill and down to the Hindu-only Gujeshwari Temple, believed to be where the deity Sati was hacked into pieces by Lord Vishnu. The somber mood of the funeral was lightened with the presence of the whimsical monkeys of all ages all over -- except for when I tried to take a photo of one. The monkeys, with fairly comprehensible brains and personalities, didn't exactly like their idea of me pointing the camera at them, like this one that tried to jump me with its sharp monkey fangs. Tilak pulled out his keychain and held it like it was a switchblade and the aggressive little bastard backed off.

"The Hindus respect the Buddhists and the Buddhists respect the Hindus," Tilalk the Buddhist-respecting Hindu said. It was the harmoney of the two religions that gave Nepal its appeal to the spiritaul traveler. According to Tilak, a Hindu could pray at a Buddhist temple and vice-versa.

FROM THE HINDU PUSHPATINATH we took a cab across town to the west, weaving in and out of the sacred cows in the middle of the road, to the Buddhist Swayambhunath, the "holiest place on earth for Newari Buddhists" (Let's Go), home of the big Swayambhunath stupa atop a hill with its Buddha's omnipresent eyes overlooking the entire Kathmandu Valley. Nearby was an area with many Buddhist prayer flags hung up, so much that (no offense here) it looked like the grand opening of a used car dealer.

Tilak and I took in the views and then walked down to see the Thousand Buddha Stupa and the Amideba Buddha, which Tilak called "the biggest buddha in the world." (Mind you, he didn't get out of Nepal much.) The sky got more and more overcast as the afternoon wore on and I even heard a thunder in the distance. Soon it started to rain, so we just head back to Thamel. On the way to the hotel, I saw another familiar face from the Everest trek, Canadian Greg, as we zipped by the narrow streets. It looked like most of the people I had met in the Everest region were safe and sound now, back in the capital city.

It pretty much rained that evening, leaving me to my hotel recuperation room once again. It was good to finally get out there that day to get some fresh air, even if it was polluted with the smog of combustion and the smoke of burning flesh.

On The Way To Delhi

DAY 373: All my bags were packed, I was ready to go... 'Cuz I was leaving on a jet plane, didn't know when I'd be back in Kathmandu again...

My flight wasn't until five in the afternoon though, which gave me most of the day to run last minute errands in Kathmandu, get some food and try and call one of the lodges in Delhi, India recommended in my Let's Go book with a thumb's up icon. I figured I'd better secure one of the recommended places before arrival in India so I wouldn't be persuaded by all the touts to other places where I might not meet like-minded people; the advantage to going to a place recommended by a guidebook was getting to meet other solo travelers so that I might have a new character for the beginning of the Blog's chapter on India.

However, every call center I went to got nothing but a busy signal or non-answer for every number I tried to call in India.

Tilak came to the hotel to escort me to the airport around two and we got a cab to take us there. Only ticketed passengers were allowed in the building, which meant my goodbyes with Tilak could only be brief.

"I have something for you," he said out on the curb near Departures. He pulled out this silk scarf thing called a kata, which he told me was what Nepalis gave to each other in a farewell. He put it around my neck.

"I have something for you," I retorted. Despite The Incident on The Everest Trail, I gave him an envelope with my tip inside. "I put the story on the internet," I told him. "When my mom read the story, she told me to give you this." I gave him another envelope with the secret amount of 7500 rupees inside (about $100 USD, over twice the amount a Sherpa porter made in a month), which my mother wanted to give him for his trouble. (She would reimburse me later.)

I went off to the first of many body frisks while Tilak went to the curb to hitch a cab. I don't know if he opened the envelope just yet, but I'm sure he would have been pleasantly surprised.

THE AIRPORT WAS THE SAME OLD SITUATION, and by that I mean being approached by every Nepali security officer in the Nepali language who wanted to start casual conversation with me under their presumption that I too was Nepali.

"Uh, I, I don't understand," I'd always say.

"You are not Nepali?" they'd always reply, completely shocked.

"I'm from the States, but Filipino," I'd say to make things simple.

"Filipino, Nepali, same thing."

However, my Nepali-looking ways didn't stop security from confiscating my keychain link chain from me at the big security check near the boarding gates.

"EXCUSE ME, WHAT COUNTRY ARE YOU FROM?" asked one of the passengers checking into my flight.

"The States."

"Oh, we were wondering if you were from Brazil because you look Brazilian," said one of the two Brazilian guys.

Here we go again, I thought.

THE FLIGHT TO DELHI on Royal Nepal Airlines was fairly routine. The hour and twenty minute flight departed at sunset (picture above) and was long enough to require an in-flight meal but too short for a movie. When the flight attendants went around with the arrivals forms for foreigners, I saw one stare right at me and deduce that I was probably Indian and so, she skipped me. I had to go ask for the form in person with my American accent.

Kick ass. Perhaps I'll blend in India too. This was a good thing because there were so many travelers' tales I had heard about India, how it's probably the "hardest level" if you had to rate the level of difficulty in the standard backpacker countries with its culture-shocking poverty and arguably the toughest touts and con-artists in the world.

Landing proceedings were a breeze, and so far India wasn't looking too bad, so much in fact that the posters by the Ministry of Tourism spelled India with an exclamation point in their slogan, "Incredible !ndia." Still, I was all set to leave the coziness of the the baggage claim area (Is there such a thing?) and be barraged by a mad scene of taxi drivers outside trying to get me as their fare to take me to one of their affiliated hostels so they could whop a hefty commission on my bill. Instead, I found the easy way out; I simply took a pre-paid taxi from the desk outside the customs area.

With minimal words, I tried to keep the illusion that I might not be a Westerner as the cabbie drove me down the highway into the city center -- aside from the fact that I saw a guy riding an elephant on the shoulder of the road, the highway was fairly modern, complete with rush hour traffic. "You come from Nepal?" asked the cabbie.

"Yes. Kathmandu."

"No you, what country?"

"Philippines."

There wasn't much of a conversation as he weaved in and out of traffic until, "What's your budget for hotel?"

Here we go. "I already called ahead, it's okay." This was true, I did call ahead, only I left out the part about them never picking up.

Eventually there were more questions and my cover was blown and he tried to convince me that "it's the tourist season, it's so busy. We should stop at the "tourist center" so you can call." I stuck to my story, even adding that I was "to meet someone at the Camran Lodge" (still the truthful plan), and he backed down. I was dropped off as far as a car could go on the Main Bazaar in the tourist district of Paharganj and proceed on foot.

This isn't so bad, I thought, walking down the crowded nighttime market street with my big bag on, the obvious sign that I was a foreign backpacker. But for the most part it was pretty tame -- Egypt was much, much worse by comparison. Unless you were a blonde European-looking woman attracting unwanted attention, Delhi so far was really civil, despite all that I had heard.

When I finally got to the Camran Lodge on the main strip, that lodge recommended with a thumbs up in the Let's Go guide, I really questioned why that was. Sure the place was built into an old mosque, but the appeal ended there. My room was put together with plywood and the place was pretty deserted -- it wasn't swarming with happy-go-lucky travelers like I thought -- but at least there was a view (a mediocre one at that). I checked in anyway since I was so determined to go there since Kathmandu and then went out to an internet cafe to close the night with some Blog entries. The connection in the cafe clipped my latest entry, making me lose about an hour of work. I'm sure the resulting anger and frustration in my face was a universal one, no matter what nationality the cafe owner may have thought I was.

Good Old Delhi

DAY 374: Centuries ago when the British came and butchered the people of India, there was an immediate resentment and a rebellion built up within the British-governed Indian society. This was to be expected of course; I mean, what do you expect when a Western superpower forces a governmental system upon a country in order to regulate the taking of its natural resources? (Sounds familiar, huh?)

The British gradually spread their Western influence in India over the 18th and 19th centuries by instating things like railways and industrial factories, and by getting rid of other things, two mentioned in the history section of my Let's Go guide: "sati, in which widows burned themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres, and thugi, in which devotees of the goddess Kali committed ritual robbery and murder." The British forced English into the school systems in order homogenize the new society, and even put Indian soldiers in their military forces. This proved to be a mistake in 1857 when, with secretly built-up antipathy for the British authority, the Indian soldiers used their guns against their superiors to recapture Delhi in the name of the former glory of India.

Needless to say, the incident was an eye-opener for the British and they tightened the way things were run in the country; eventually they took Delhi back. While arguably the most noteworthy revolt, The Mutiny of 1857 wasn't the only insurgence with bloodshed against the British; for centuries there were continual violent uprisings throughout the country, all of which made the British realize the Indians could be a force to be reckoned with. To make a long story short, the force was formidable and headstrong, and with it and the non-violent examples set by Mahatma Gandhi, India eventually became independent in 1947.

THE PHYSICAL REPRESENTATION of the military force in India is the Lal Quila or Red Fort, one of two "must sees" in the Old Delhi district of town. The fort was built in 1648 by order of emperor Shah Jahan of the Mughal empire during the golden era of India -- the era when the Mughals also built the great Taj Mahal in Agra -- and has held the Indian military until the end of 2003 when the fort was completely handed over to the Ministry of Tourism for a tourist attraction and national historical monument. There was of course a long period of time when the British used the Red Fort as their own base of military operations, but that time is long gone, and for future generations the Red Fort will be an architectural symbol of Indian soldiers and the former Mughal empire as long as the Indian Ministry of Tourism has anything to do about it. They are not ignorant of history though, as within the Red Fort are two museums, one impressive one being the Sanghralaya Museum, which chronicles in great detail, the centuries-long revolution since the arrival of the first British tea ships in the 17th century.

The compound of the Red Fort was a huge expanse of fields and buildings surrounded by an impressive display of red ramparts, whose main Lahore Gate allowed visitors in to see the sights inside. Passed the Chatta Chowk bazaar of touristy souvenir shops, I saw the palaces and halls within including: the Diwan-I-Am (Hall of Public Audience), where the Mughal emperors in the imperial throne held their big stately ceremonies (they took the throne from here); the Khas Mahal, the living quarters of the Mughal emperor (picture above); and the Moti-Masjid, the small "Pearl Mosque" where the emperors prayed. The surrounding fields were once used for military training, but nowadays were used as a peaceful oasis for Delhi citizens to escape the crowded chaos outside the red fortification walls.

LIKE THE RED FORT, I too had made a transition from old to new times, better from worse; that morning I had checked out of the Camran Lodge, the cheap hotel built into an old dilapidated mosque, that despite its views on the roof, might as well have been condemned. I shopped around all morning in the Main Bazar area for another recommended place to stay and eventually chose the popular Anoop Hotel down the road. The only class of room available was the higher end one for the outrageously expensive price of about six American dollars (say that respectfully sarcastically), but I paid it anyway. Never mind that the money got me a room with a private bathroom, A/C and a television with cable TV, it got me something that all the cheaper places were lacking: clean sheets (a plus since I had lost my sleep sack somewhere between Japan and Nepal).

THE OTHER MUST-SEE IN OLD DELHI was the Jama Masjid, also built by order of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, and is now the largest active mosque in India. At the entrance I was instructed to pay the camera fee and leave my sandals at the gate. I did as told but suspected a scam coming when I returned.

The interior courtyard of the mosque was tremendous, where I gathered many worshippers could pray at the same time. The time I was there prayer wasn't in session and I walked around with other Indians and a handful of tourists, passed the pigeons and the central cleansing fountain, all as the sun was beginning its descent to the horizon. Tourists had to clear before the next prayer call, so I left after a couple of snapshots and went to get my sandals. As predicted, my sandals were not in the pile I had left them.

"Where are your sandals?" the tout asked.

The other "beggar/shoe watchman" pulled up a blanket to show me that he had kept them "hidden" for safekeeping. They asked for 20 rupees (about 40 cents) for their service, which I didn't argue paying; in a poor country like India, I knew the people could use 40 cents more than I me. I'd wasted more than that on skill cranes trying to get stupid stuffed toys, it might as well go to someone who would use it for food, even if they did try and pull a scam to get the money. This was the second scam of marginal money of the day; the first was at the Red Fort when a "teacher" hounded me for a "donation" for the "school" she "represented." I gave her a buck and hoped she wouldn't spend it all in one place.

ON THE WAY BACK the hour-long walk from Old Delhi to my hotel in Pahar Ganj, I walked through a crowded market and down the main thoroughfares jammed with motor rickshaws, taxi, bicycles, people and cows (they're everywhere). The legends I had heard about Delhi's pollution were true, from the thick smog in the air to the burning garbage in the street. All of it collectively made the walk seem a lot longer than an hour -- that and the weird lingering pain I had in my left leg from an insect bite I got in Kathmandu that didn't seem to go away. The only thing on my mind as I tried to get back to my room was closing the night off with some Indian food.

"Have you eaten here before?" I asked a couple at the Anoop Hotel's humble rooftop restaurant.

"Yeah," answered the guy.

"Is it true that there's no Indian food on the menu here?" The menu was divided into two sections: continental and Thai of all things.

"Yeah."

I stood up and left to find an Indian place on the Main Bazar. "I'll get my Thai food in Thailand."

So no Indian food at the Anoop Hotel after my big tiring day touring around Old Delhi -- but at least they had clean sheets.

American Leftovers and Indian Flair

DAY 375: Since my arrival in India I had two leftover errands from Nepal that I wanted to take care of right away: finalize my insurance paperwork for reimbursement from the rescue from the Everest trail (total expenses came close to $5,000 USD!) and more importantly, try and get my absentee ballot for the 2004 US presidential election. I had tried numerous times in the Anoop Hotel's fax desk to electronically send the eleven sheets of documents to my insurance company, only to have them tell me that I also had to mail in the originals. I had spent even more money and time to fax in my absentee vote ballot application to either of two numbers in America that I had gotten from the US embassy in Kathmandu. I don't know which party was playing games on the other end, but the fax machine wouldn't pick up my call.

Both DHL and the American embassy were in different parts of town and with those and the sights I wanted to see that day, I felt it was in my best interest to hire a car and driver for the day at the hotel company's travel agency at a flat rate instead of having to argue and haggle and most likely still overpay for taking numerous motor rickshaw taxis all around. A car and driver was only $12 USD for the day and I got it around ten in the morning, just before the short hour and half window of the US embassy's American citizen services morning hours.

My chauffeur for the day was Vinot, a fine young Indian man -- married, no children -- who wore a button down shirt with flaps on the shoulders that made him look like a wannabe airline pilot. "You pay for air-conditioned car?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"How much did you pay?"

"600 [rupees]."

"Oh, I don't think so then, but I will put it on if you want."

"It's okay, the window is fine."

He turned it on anyway, I think more because he preferred it. "I know how Americans like it cold," he said. "Please don't tell my company or they will charge you two hundred or three hundred rupees."

He was confused on my status of "American;" with my master-of-disguise ways, he too thought I looked Indian, perhaps because of the tweaks I had made in my ambiguous look: contacts instead of glasses, which accentuated the sun-baked dark tone of my skin (I think the glasses also lean my ambiguous look towards Far Eastern); more hair in the moustache region; and, unlike the European tourists decked out in snazzy silk, linen or pashmina Indian threads, plain clothes just like every other Indian guy I'd seen on the street.

All the embassies in Delhi were all together in one section of town called Chanakyapuri, a section with super-tight security and nicely manicured lawns. Vinot dropped me off at the corner of the US embassy since no parking was allowed to pick me up in an hour. I walked in, tweaking my ambiguous look to make me more look more "American" (by toting around my shiny blue passport) and made it inside with no problem. Unlike the embassy in Kathmandu which had a stale DMV feel to it, this one was more like a university registrar's office in early September with crowds of people lined up for a visa. I was directed beyond the lines to the corner room for American citizen services and eventually got to speak to an officer behind a bulletproof glass.

"I got [form] this in the embassy in Kathmandu and I've been trying to fax it in but they won't pick up the call," I told him, sliding my filled out form under the window.

"Ah, New Jersey. [What] exit?" he asked in his southern accent. I smiled and answered "18W". (He actually asked "Which exit?" but I figured, what the hell, I'll plug my on-line store again while I can.)

"You were probably faxing it to that general 703 number," he told me. "I think that goes somewhere in the Pentagon."

"You mean I was trying to fax the Pentagon all this time?!"

"Yeah, maybe they'll track you down and arrest you," he joked. He warned me that it might be too late for me to vote already, but I showed him the instructions I had that said New Jersey gave me until 8 p.m. of Election Day to get my vote in. "You're one of the lucky ones." It was a rarity that a state allowed an overseas ballot come in that late, even by fax.

In assurance that my vote would not be missed, I got to vote on a write-in ballot which he would both fax and mail to the Bergen County Clerk's office. The process took about half an hour, much more time than pushing those new fancy electronic voting machines in Florida I'd seen on CNN International, but it was my duty and right as an American to do the deed. There were others there doing the same, from Yonkers, NY, Washington state and L.A., which was a good thing to see. In most of the countries I'd been to so far, a lot of people felt powerless that they can't vote for the American president, even though the victor inevitably affected them and their country. Many I'd met were annoyed that the leader of the only superpower in the world could only be decided by people in a country where less than 10% of the population had a passport and actually traveled outside the country.

Anyway, I felt pretty patriotic having voted as I left the building. I walked to the corner to meet Vinot and the car as Ray Charles' rendition of "American the Beautiful" was pumped out the speaker to the rest of the people outside on line waiting to get inside. Vinot drove me to the Connaught Place district, a more modern Western-business district of New Delhi, and I finished off my leftover American errands by going to Citibank headquarters to get some cash and then to DHL to mail my insurance documents to the USA to get my claim process up and running. I celebrated the end of my American errands and my American vote at the American embassy in a good ol' fashioned American way (with Indian flair of course).

INDIAN FLAIR TOOK OVER the rest of the day as I went to go see some more sights of Delhi. I had seen Old Delhi the day before and would see New Delhi this time. Vinot drove me to see the Secretariats of government ministries near the Rashtrapati Bhavan (the presidential estate), all of which made me feel like I was in Europe again -- and no wonder, they were designed by architect Edwin Lutyens and built by the British when they moved their capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911.

Parking was also not allowed in the area so we high-tailed it out of there to the one big "must-see" in South Delhi, the Qutb Minar complex (picture above), the ruins of the site of the first Muslim kingdom in India of 1206, built by Qutb-ud-din Aibak. A World Heritage site designated by UNESCO, the Qutb Minar complex (picture above) attracts not only foreign tourists but local ones as well. "Qutb Minar" itself is a minar, or tower, erected for prayer in the Muslim faith. The tower was the main center point surrounded by the ruins of the complex, the remnants of holy shrines, mosques and tombs. The Quwwat-ul-Islam Masjid mosque just below the Qutb Minar remains as a big courtyard with an iron pillar known as the Gupta Pillar, erected for Lord Vishnu and in memory of the Gupta empire Chandragupta II. To the north was the Tomb of Qutb-ud-din Aibak's grandson Iltutmish, and nearby was the unfinished Ala'i Minar, slated to be twice as big as the other minar, which was left after only the base was completed; it now looks like a sort of volcano where birds fly out of, although at some vantage points it seems as if they're not birds but giant vampire bats.

"HOW FAR IS THE BAHA'I TEMPLE?" I asked Vinot back in the parking lot.

"It's far," he said. "Twenty kilometers."

"Do we have time to go there?"

"If you want we can go."

"Yeah, let's go."

"I want to show you a market," he said.

"Okay."

He told me he knew of a market on the way where we could go in and out for five minutes just to see what was there. When we got there, I immediately felt the scam coming. Oh c'mon Vinot; you're a good guy, not this, I thought. He drove me not to a big bustling market like he implied, but a secluded store. Inside there were carpets and wooden carving things in a big showroom, with persuasive salesmen and guys serving tea. I saw that two Asian guys had fallen into the trap and were getting a very very pushy sales pitch for carpets.

The scam to be driven to such a place was common according to my guidebook -- drivers get on your good side and then drive you to their "friend's" place in order to force a sale on you, often giving the driver a commission. I had fallen for a similar scam in Egypt and was on guard not to buy anything this time. The salesman invited me for tea and to "just look" at the shawls "for your mother or girlfriend" and I was resilient in resisting both, never making eye contact once -- which is key. I was in and out of there in four minutes and went back to the car outside. Vinot didn't look happy or sad either way.

THE BAHA'I TEMPLE, known by some as the Lotus Flower Temple, is one of seven unique buildings of the Baha'i faith throughout the world, erected for the Baha'i faith, one that encompasses all world religions and concentrates not on their differences but on their universal common bonds of the relationship of God and man and search for Truth.

The building in Delhi -- the others are in Western Samoa, Sydney (Australia), Uganda, Panama, Frankfurt and Wilmette (USA) -- which at some angles is reminiscent of the Sydney Opera House, is surrounded by nine pools, designed not for just aesthetic purposes but as a cooling system for inside the main hall. Inside I went to see what was going on and walked in on a short inspiring prayer service of words and song -- I wasn't allowed back outside until it was over. (It was only five minutes.)

THE LAST PIECE OF "INDIAN FLAIR" for the day reminded me more of France: the India Gate, a triumphant arch erected in memory of all the soldiers of India that died in the many wars the country had been involved in over the decades. An eternal flame burned under its arch, guarded by soldiers of course. I walked around the gate, surrounded by a park with ice cream and cotton candy vendors, and it was a nice place to end the day as the sun set.

ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF MY RECUPERATION period in Kathmandu, I got some sort of an insect bite on my left shin as I was sleeping in the middle of the night. I assumed it was a mosquito and ignored it -- but days later the swelling of the bite did not go down; it actually spread in area on my leg. I put some hydrocortisone on it.

The sting of the bite worsened, almost in a paralyzing sort of way. Still I could walk, but it stung everytime I stretched the skin of my left leg. When I walked around Delhi the pain only got worse, in fact I felt it was spreading down to the rest of my left leg. So I went to the local clinic recommended by Let's Go off the Main Bazar in Delhi. It was a shabby little places that blended in with the other humble stores, but it was evident every attempt was made to keep it as sterile as possible

Dr. Gupta there looked at the lump on my leg and immediately diagnosed I got some sort of staphylococcal bacterial infection in the bite. It may have not been a mosquito bite after all, and at this point no one can know for sure what it was. (I'm hoping it was one of those genetically-altered radioactive super-spiders.)Before I told the doctor the history of the pain, he deduced that the pain was benign at first and then spread; which was right on the money. He told me the infection would only spread more unless we cut open my leg and drained the pus, cleaned it out and put me on antibiotics.

I elected surgery.

And so, in the little shabby clinic in the middle of the bazar (with safe and sterile instruments opened right from their sealed packages thankfully), Dr. Gupta and his assistant operated. I was injected with adrenaline as an anesthetic and then he cut a deep slit in my left shin with a scalpel. Using a retractor, he inserted a swab thing and cleaned out the inside.

"Tell me if it hurts," he said.

I believe the entire ten minutes I went something like this:

"Oh... Ugh... Yeah, that hurts. Oh, yeah, that hurts too. THAT hurts. Rrrrrr... And that hurts.... Oh yeah..." etc.

He assured me I did the right thing by catching it early and put me on some anti-biotics to get rid of the infection. While this was good news, it also put me on the bedridden list once again.

AND SO, I WAS GROUNDED AGAIN, this time at least with a TV to keep my feet up as the doctor ordered. One particular show continued the theme of the day: Indian Idol, an American show with Indian flair, produced in the same manner as its American counterpart with a similar logo, theme song, similar judges and crowds of eager people off the street trying to make it to Bollywood.

Needless to say, it's not just America that can produce "the worst singer in the world."

Worldwide Pants

DAY 376: Bedridden again, this time in Delhi to rest my leg from the bacterial infection I contracted from a weird insect bite (and the mild "operation" I had to get it cleaned out), I sat in my room as the penicillin did its thing. For me it was a time to catch up on world news with CNN International and BBC World, with its always catchy breakfiller background music (RealMedia file) so jazzy that I think I even heard it in a club once.

After seeing the same reports over and over again -- Arafat has a tummy ache and is going to Paris; Cambodia swears in a ballet dancer as its new king; violence on the Thai/Malay border; and those missing weapons showing up in Iraq right before the election -- I flipped around the other stations the way guys normally do; faster than two channels per second, unless there's a hot chick, which warrants at least a once second glance. Eventually I tired from nothing good being on (even in India) and watched Will Ferrell in Anchorman again from the bootleg I got in Beijing. The movie gets funnier every time I watch it -- finally a movie that understands the intrinsic comic value in the phrase "pants store"!

I THINK IT WAS AGAINST DOCTOR'S ORDERS, but by afternoon I couldn't stand being in bed all day and went for a low-impact walk to the Connaught Place district (picture above) of town (fifteen minutes by foot from where I was in Pahar Ganj) to see what was there and to find a replacement sleepsheet since I had lost mine. Connaught Places was the central area of more Western stores in Delhi (unlike the more "authentic" vending stalls of Pahar Ganj), all situated around a rotunda surrounded by another rotunda surrounded by another -- sort of like Main Street Suburbia, USA meets the layout of a big international airport. There were plenty of restaurants, bookstores, music stores and of course, a pants store. A sports equipment store led me to a bed sheet store, where I settled on a plan single bed sheet instead of a real "sleepsheet" which she said I'd most likely not find.

After a taste of the Indian ice cream flavor Zafrani Badaam Pista at the Friendly's-like Nirula's, I head back to the hotel to rest up again in front of the TV. The news headlines were the same. Later, I checked back at the doctor's clinic to get an assessment of my leg. Dr. Gupta said everything was going well. He redressed my wound (showing me the big puncture in my leg he made to clean it out, which was much deeper than I thought) and got me more antibiotics and told me to take two of them and call him in the morning.

FOR FOOD I WENT TO THE ROOFTOP CAFE of the nearby Vivek Hotel, for a change of pace and simply because unlike my hotel, they actually served Indian food. It was there I encountered a new type of traveler I had heard was rampant in these parts: the aggressive hippie-type.

A mixed couple -- male Indian, female French blonde -- who had married when she was thirteen and he was twentysomething, sat a table nearby. As eager as I was to meet new people I soon discovered I was happy that they struck up a conversation with someone else: an innocent enough Spanish couple on vacation in India. The conversation started normal, but the strongly-opinionated Indian man (with his young wife backing him up) just kept on getting more and more vocal about the flaws of modern European society and the poverty of India, and eventually started attacking the Spanish couple for simply being who they were. The Spanish guy (who was better with English than his girlfriend) kept a level head, agreed with some points, disagreed with some, but the aggressive hippie-types wouldn't stop preaching their opinions. The Indian guy didn't even know the Spanish couple really, and suddenly he was saying that there's no way they could be in love 100% because they live in European society, yahta yahta yahta, and that he himself had been to every corner of Spain and knew better than the Spaniard. I could tell the Spanish guy was just getting aggravated -- he and his girlfriend just wanted to eat and possibly meet a new person -- but the whole thing escalated out of his control. The hippie guy tried to convince them that they weren't in fact "happy" like they said they were because they weren't complete or something like that. He went on and on about society's problems, much like this paragraph getting too long.

"Okay," said the Spaniard to the aggressive hippie Indian guy. "Then what is the solution?"

"People have to share more."

"If you think it's that simple, you're crazy," he said in his Spanish accent. "You're a crazy man." Eventually they hurried with their food, got up and left.

BACK IN MY ROOM with my new bed sheet I got from the place next to the pants store, I wrote on my computer, I watched more TV, all with my leg up as the doctor ordered. The news headlines were the same so I flipped around to the Indian music videos and the back-to-back episodes of HBO's Sex and the City.

I went to sleep but then woke up in the middle of the night for some reason. I turned on the news and the new surprise Osama Bin Laden video had just been aired, featuring the Nine Eleven terrorist addressing the American people right before the election. Wow, real life is turning into a suspense movie again, I thought. This is like when Cobra Commander used to address the world in the G.I.Joe cartoon.

The video, which showed Osama's upper body at a podium, left Americans to contemplate a new question before Election Day 2004: Has Osama Bin Laden been to the pants store in the past two years?

The world may never know.