TRAVEL The Long Road to Katmandu

Within twenty-four hours after I arrived in Bangkok, my senses received two jolts that caused the brain not to believe its own dials; it sat up there looking at the instrument panel, saying “Huh?” First, while eating dinner in a downtown outdoor market restaurant, something hellishly fiery in the innocent-looking moo tod kratium priktai (fried pork slices with garlic) resulted in… well, the symptoms of an African disease called Kichyoma-chyoma best describes it: ’’inner pains, ghastly deliria, epileptic spasm, making a barking noise and moving the mouth in a peculiar chopping motion.” Lucky for me a holy man happened by and whispered relief-a half-dozen bottles of Singha, Thailand’s excellent beer that comes in bottles the size of bowling pins.

Having failed to satisfy one basic need, I turned to another. Patpong Road is the main aisle of Bangkok’s sex supermarket, a street lined with garish bars, brothels, massage parlors, discos, and restaurants that sprang up in the Sixties with the escalation of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There in these sex shows I witnessed anatomical feats that would leave an experienced rapist like Attila the Hun awkwardly shuffling his feet.

There is no doubt that sex is vital to Thailand’s economy. Officials estimate 600,000 to one million Thai women engage in some form of prostitution, 15 percent to 30 percent of the non-agricultural workforce. One-fourth of these women work in tourist-related activities, and in 1984, with well over two million visitors (male arrivals outnumber female two to one), tourism was the country’s largest foreign exchange earner. The enterprising visitor may still enjoy, as the London clubman wrote of his own experiences, “all the pleasures that mankind is heir to, excepting only the joys of childbirth.”

There is historical precedence of a sort here. King Mongkut, the semi-comic figure of The King and I, was named king in 1851 after twenty-six years of celibacy while a Buddhist monk. Within three months of ascending the throne, he had taken thirty wives, eventually adding seventy more, and sired eighty-two kids. Obviously, the king spent quite some time in bed.



BUT I HAD not come to Asia to eat fire or see erotic acrobatics. My destination was Katmandu and southern and western Nepal, where I hoped to see something tamer: the Royal Bengal tiger, the great Indian one-horned rhino, wild elephant, and other wildlife. So, with stomach lurching and mind still reeling, I gratefully accepted perfumed washcloths and sank back into Thai Airway’s Royal Executive Class service for the three-hour Bangkok/Katmandu flight. Sometime during the poached supreme of chicken in champagne sauce and apple pie Alexandra, I saw what first seemed to be a towering white cloud. Except it never moved. Real clouds stopped halfway up Mount Everest and the rest of the snowy Himalayas that stretch more than five miles across the whole northern horizon against a blue sky.

“They are out of scale to a degree which evokes something like fear-the sort of feeling, I imagine, that might beset one in the depths of the ocean, however safe the submarine,” wrote the English travel writer Robert Byron about the world’s highest peaks. Exactly.

Nepal looks like a humped rectangle on the map, about 500 miles long and from 56 to 143 miles wide. It’s located on the same latitude as Laredo. Except for Tibet, it is the world’s highest country, with ten of the earth’s eighteen peaks over 26,247 feet. Nepal is the world’s only Hindu kingdom, led by a king who is believed to be the incarnation of Lord Vishnu but who resembles a pudgy Indian accountant. He fancies himself a philosopher king, and each day in the Katmandu newspaper, the Rising Nepal, a profound kingly aphorism is published like “Education is the lifeblood of a nation.”

The lush Katmandu valley sits at 4,360 feet, completely surrounded by foothills with part of the Himalayas visible to the north. The afternoon’s golden light comes slanting between clouds to fall on leafy trees, cleverly terraced wheat fields, flocks of goats, glowing red-brown houses, and burnished pagoda roofs, all suggesting an atmosphere of tranquil “lostness.” Before the plane has taxied to a stop, you seem to have at least stumbled off the modern map and on to another much older atlas. A man bicycles past a dog sleeping on the adjacent runway. Sacred cows wander the Royal Nepal Country Club’s golf course; children play in the muddy-brown holy waters of the Bagmati River, occasionally retrieving charred wooden trays, the cremated remains of funeral rafts that held late Katmandu citizens. An ancient monk, resembling a living skull with his shaved head, enormous eyes, and gaunt cheeks, recites endlessly what seems to be the full Buddhist canon, all 108 volumes of it.

This capital of 400,000 seems marked by piecemeal modernity amidst overwhelming medievalism, with a large dollop of Lewis Carroll country, a real Alice atmosphere everywhere. Monkeys swing in trees above shops selling Sony Walkmans. Fierce-looking Tibetan tribesmen, who believe a headache can be cured by offering twelve lighted wicks to the sun early on a Sunday morning, ask for sequined Michael Jackson gloves, Teenage break-dancers with red-dotted foreheads and nose-rings spin and twirl below semi-ruined pagoda-style temples where thousands of goats are slaughtered on a certain fall festival day. Autos, bullock carts, put-puts, and rickshaws dodge the omnipresent cows, women bent double under a vast bundle of sticks, and old men smoking and contemplating while whirring their prayer wheels round and round.

I had never seen a living goddess, so I headed to the center of town, Durbar Square, with its adjoining Old Royal Palace of pagodas and Indian-style temples, and the Kumari Banal, residence of the living goddess. The current L.G. was only five years old when she was chosen in the early Seventies after astrologers approved and she had fulfilled thirty-two requirements, including no skin blemishes, never having shed blood, “no gaps between teeth, voice like a sparrow, long slender arms.” etc., and a test of courage that meant spending time in a darkened room with bleeding, freshly amputated buffalo heads. She leaves her palace only seven times a year for festivals.

So I spent time peering up at her windows in the open-air market while all around me traders haggled behind heaps of silver bells and scrolls, small ivory scent boxes, copper prayer wheels, jade necklaces, and topis (the small, cotton indented cap everyone wears). The most popular tourist item is the khukuri, the Nepalese knife Gurkha soldiers carried. Some are actually authentic, with the small crescent-shaped notch on the blade meant to keep blood from flowing on the handle. I saw all the Oriental rumpus of a 15th-century bazaar, even the king’s guard parading down the street in comic opera uniforms. But no goddess with “neck like a conch shell, a sensitive tongue.”

My next destination was the fabled “Freak Street,” which ran south of the square and was once known all over the world, like “Chicken Street” in Kabul, as one of the main drags of international hippiedom. Fifteen years ago Katmandu was as high and cool as you wanted, Buddhas and butterflies, where even a deserter could be free. All self-respecting hippies had a Katmandu Eden Hash House calendar, and they are still for sale, but Freak Street long ago lost its theatrical air. The only remaining freaks have gotten malicious on local rotgut, can-nibis. and exile.

Freak Street remains lined with a jumble of cheap hotels, restaurants, street stalls, money changers, and hash dealers always within signaling distance who call out, “Sah, I sell nothing but the best black goods’’-hashish, rolled into a shiny egg. Veteran travelers say Katmandu is cleaner these clays, but it remains a dirty city. In 1877, Dr. David Wright, who spent years there as surgeon to the British residency, wrote, “From a sanitary point of view, Katmandu may be said to be built on a dunghill in the middle of latrines.” Many previous Freak Street businesses have gone yuppie-upscale-trekking equipment, down jackets- and the new market area is centered northwest of Durbar Square on Thamel Street where just-arrived mountaineers swap avalanche tales at K.C.’s restaurant or the Rum Doodle.



MY FIRST OPPORTUNITY to see the Royal Bengal tiger would be in West Nepal at Tiger Mountain’s Karnali Tented Camp in the Royal Bardia Game Reserve. Tiger Mountain also co-founded the Tiger Tops Jungle Lodge in Southern Nepal in 1965 with Dallas oilman Toddie Lee Wynne Jr. The Terai region of far West Nepal had only recently been opened to tourism, and the Tented Camp, set in a forest clearing on the banks of the Karnali River, welcomed its first guests in November 1984.

Three land-rovers awaited our group in Nepalgunj near the Indian border for the bouncing five-hour ride through farmland, brush, and finally jungle-forest to the campsite, only eighty miles away. Joining us to see his facility for the first time was Lute Jerstad, one of the original founders of the company’s Asian operations. Jerstad has had a long affair with Nepal and India. A professional mountain guide since 1958, he was with the first American team to conquer Mount Everest in 1963. Since then he has earned a Ph.D. in Himalayan cultures, trekked more than 6,000 miles, and pioneered adventure tourism in Nepal and India.

Jerstad’s finest accomplishment, however, was scheduling a halt after four teeth-rattling hours in the land-rovers and producing Scotch whiskey, beer, and an instant roaring bonfire. Hours before we had left any semblance of a path, what guide books often euphemistically describe as a “loose-surfaced road of low standard”: Balaram Thapa, chief naturalist, camp manager, and lead driver, seemed to be following an invisible spoor, which, an hour later, brought us to the camp: twelve safari-style tents horseshoed around a thatched hut called the Termite Bar, two bonfires, dinner, and two sets of toilet-showers to wash off the clogged filth.



THE NEXT MORNING, however, the setting proved spectacular. The camp sat at the foot of the Siwalik hills, foothills of the Himalayas, where the Karnali rushes out of ’ Asia’s second-largest gorge and placidly ] flows down to the Ganges in a soggy welter, much as the Mississippi sprawls through the sultry south. Surrounding it all, the 1,000- square-mile game reserve, rich in wildlife: tiger, elephant, leopard, deer (swamp, barking, and hog), sloth bear, wild boar, and other smaller mammals and birds.

The moment of truth came the next evening at 7:30 as I was relaxing at the Termite Bar with a Tiger Tops Special (rum, hot water, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon juice) after spending seven hours rafting down the Karnali. We had seen no beasts. The day’s highlight had been a superb curry-and-vegetable lunch served on the same sandbar where we had earlier encountered a five-foot black hooded cobra writhing its way to high grass.

As I was explaining the ingredients of a Martinez to the bartender (a Texas martini substituting Herradura tequila and a jala-peno for the wimpy gin, vermouth, and olive). John Edwards, a Briton who is managing director of Tiger Tops, appeared and, as quiet and unemotional as a good butler announcing dinner, said “I think we’ve got a tiger.” It seemed that eight minutes away the largest known Royal Bengal tiger among the thirty-five to forty in West Nepal was dining on a young water buffalo staked out earlier for bait.

In absolute quiet we walked single file following guides with flashlights along a clean-swept path paralleling the river and into the jungle. The weather was like Jeeves’ porridge for Bertie Wooster, “cool but not too cool,’-fifty degrees, clear, with an incredible multitude of stars opening up overhead. It was clear why astrology originated in the East, and why Nepal’s king, a fervent believer, delayed his coronation three years until the most auspicious date had been selected by royal astrologers.

After removing our shoes, we took our places behind a thatched blind and stared into complete darkness through rectangular viewing slits. Minutes passed. Then we heard a sound as old as time, a primordial bone crack that echoed in the night. A floodlight lit the area and there, thirty-five yards away, was a 600-pound male tiger, unblinkingly looking at us as he stripped meat away, forearms wrapped around his kill. He was huge, four and a half feet at his muscled shoulders, his lean and taut body-deep orange, black-striped-nine feet long. Through my binoculars his largest teeth looked four inches long. If not disturbed, he would consume sixty pounds of meat before retiring.

The next few days we photographed hog and spotted deer, looked in vain for wild elephant, and took a four-hour hike up a trade route older than Marco Polo that followed the Karnali. The scenery grew craggier as we climbed, with slabs of stone and forested hills enclosing the gorge as the river narrowed. We passed Tibetan and Nepalese villagers-tough, hard-limbed with fine dark features-from Jumla and the north who were making the twenty-five-day march to India’s border, many barefooted, almost all carrying fifty-pound wicker dokos (porter baskets) shaped like overgrown water-bird nests, the weight supported by headbands made of plaited strings. All women wore small nose-rings, always in the left nostril, and many wore curious bullet-like necklaces.

Lute Jerstad recited whole Kipling and Robert Service poems and told of temporarily losing the pads of his fingers and toes from frostbite during his Everest climb. “I was twenty-six years old going up and fifty-six when I finished,” he said after five minutes of “Gunga Din.”

The return trip to Nepalgunj didn’t seem as long in daylight. The day’s heat heightened the fragrance of fruit trees and rhododendron and brilliantly yellow mustard fields that lapped the small spread-eagled villages on all sides like the sea. Villagers stood by the road gazing after us in exactly the same composed attitudes they had assumed during our approach. Five bullocks yoked together, moving round and round a central post, threshed grain as it had been done since before Christ.

It is a thirty-minute flight by Royal Nepal Airlines from Katmandu to the Maghauly airstrip seventy-five miles southwest. The terminal is one of the world’s most modest, with no walls, a restroom out back, security check on the grassy front yard, and a lone professional beggar called a “gaine” who plays a wooden violin, a sarangi, and sings his own incomprehensible tunes.

I deplaned on a mobile wooden stairway that was then rolled over to one of nine waiting elephants. I ascended to the howdah, a box-shaped saddle with railings. My mount was the largest and oldest of Tiger Top’s elephant stable, a thirty-five-year-old, eleven-foot, two-ton tusker named Sham-sherbahadur, Guided by the mahout who sat on the neck with his bare feet behind the huge ears that flapped like swinging saloon doors, we forded a river. Then for several hours we marched through tall grass and jungle, the elephant shouldering and trunk-ing aside branches and saplings as we looked for tiger or the great Indian one-horned rhino.



TWO-THIRDS DOWN in a shallow pond midway in a broad swale of close-cropped grass, the rhino loomed like a ship-battleship gray above, almost black below waterline, his scrawny neck extended, upper lip curved like a beak, reminding me of a large snapping turtle. Until he’s on land, when the turtle becomes a tank. The hide of the one-horned Indian rhino is heavily folded, studded with rivet-like tubercles, looking like armor plate, but actually easily punctured. It is the world’s second largest land mammal and the only beast unafraid to charge the largest, my faithful mount, Shamsherbahadur.

Of all creatures on earth, the rhino seems least likely at first glance to be associated with the art of love. Yet the 360-square-mile Royal Chitwan National Park, where we spotted this creature, was created thirteen years ago to save the remaining rhino from poachers who were after the horn, thought to have aphrodisiac and medicinal qualities. Many Indian Moslems believe, for instance,that a ring made of rhinoceros skin worn on the right hand will cure hemorrhoids. The biggest market for rhino horns is in Singapore, where buyers will pay $30,000 a pound. An average horn weighs more than a pound and a half. Poachers are still a threat, but 375 rhino now live in the park, up from 160 in 1966.

And not only the rhino faces extinction; the Indian-Nepal tiger population dropped from 40,000 in 1900 to barely 2,000 in 1972. But thanks to conservationists’ efforts, they now number more than 3,000.

Toddie Lee Wynne Jr.’s Tiger Tops Jungle Lodge has grown from a small four-room building to three facilities accommodating seventy people-the main camp, the tented camp on its own island seven miles away, and a restored Tharu Village longhouse. At the main lodge, the central building is a circular structure with a tall thatched dome roof that serves as a bar/dining room and meeting hall. Its open fireplace is the site of a high per capita consumption of Jungle Tea (rum, fresh lime, hot tea, lump of sugar) or Rhino Horn (orangeade, rum, ice, water). Guest rooms are tree houses perched on stilts: large, airy, rattan walls, wicker furniture, lanterns, solar baths.



BACK IN BANGKOK on the way home it is time to spend money in one of the great shop-till-you-drop cities of the world. Silks at Jim Thompson’s; deep clear blue Thai sapphires.and other baubles at Christ Jewelers; women’s silk clothes next door at Julie’s; for me, a tailor-made off-white linen suit and some shirts at Bauman’s Tailors near the Royal Orchid Sheraton Hotel. Every- thing’s for sale but Siamese cats. Thailand, the former kingdom of Siam, now imports its Siamese felines. Thirteen of the seventeen breeds are extinct. A word of caution is in order about Buddha images. Airport luggage examiners will confiscate them unless you have written approval from a Buddhist temple priest. There is a room at the Bangkok airport packed to the ceiling with the Guatama’s images.

Ah, sensual Bangkok. Author Paul Theroux got it right when he wrote that while Calcutta smells of death and Bombay of money, Bangkok smells of sex. “What is that fruit?” I innocently ask a vegetable vendor. “We call that melon a phuk,” the man replied, grinning. And on my last night, I fell into a conversation with a young lady at the Royal Orchid bar. “And your name?”

“Twenny dollars.”