WITMOT?

During one of Kathmandu’s many power cuts, a frequent traveler to these parts–a tall, tattooed Rasta guy sporting a Dave Matthew’s T-Shirt, lectured us Nepal Newbies of the Kathmandu curse. I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel, huddled around a candle with my fellow travelers. Rasta guy leaned into the candle’s light and after a brief dramatic pause, he declared that everyone who visits Kathmandu gets sick within a week.

Ha, I thought. I had been vaccinated to my eyebrows and I had enough over-the-counter medicine to cripple a pack mule. That is until I was felled by a cheese sandwich. Previously I had eaten in little hole in the wall (literally) places where Nepalis actually ate. One place where I had some stunning lentil curry had no electricity but did have throngs of toothless women in saris. No problem. In another place, I had spicy milk tea in hang-out for Kathmandu’s thin blue line, which consisted of a guy with a camp stove boiling milk and selling chewing tobacco behind a run-down stupa. No sweat. But when I eat a bleedin’ cheese sandwich at a restaurant which featured a menu in three languages and proudly stated that they soaked all of their vegetables in iodined water, that’s when I find myself two hours later hurlin’ in the street.

That night I was plagued by images from the Indian movies I have seen (I’ve see one more film since my last missive, that one equally as bizarre). That weird sniveling villain, those oscillating busoms of the back-up singers danced before my fevered mind. But worst of all, one of the songs from said movies remained fixed in my head playing over and over and over and over.

The next morning, after swilling some Oral Rehydration Salts (the label cheerfully read: “For Diarreha or Cholera!”) I hobbled over to the Nepal International Clinic. The doctor, a Nepali who studied in Canada, listened to my tale of woe, poked at my stomach and then handed me a film canister and told me to provide a stool sample. Talk about performance anxiety. I sheepishly handed the receptionist my “sample,” and ten minutes later I was handed a pocketful of antibiotics.

Overall I’m slowly returning to 100% though that damned Indian tune is still in my head. I’ve spent most of my two days convelesence reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover (the only thing interesting at the local used book store). Tomorrow though, I’m planning on trekking around the Kathmandu valley.

Over and out.

Man, this country is nuts. Yesterday I was privileged to see a cobra charmer; a corpse ready for the funeral pyre; errant cows; weird holy men with painted faces, unkempt hair and loin clothes; Tibetan monks; women in saris and more stupas than you can shake a stick at, but I have yet to lay eyes on a single traffic light nor I’m glad to discover a McDonald’s. There are at least six or seven sites where the average tourist can log into the net within a block of here, but most streets here aren’t paved and I’ve seen more half naked crying children standing in rubbish heaps than I care to see.

I’ve been guided by a “college student” conveniently, or suspiciously named, Mr. Nepal. He has boundless energy and knowledge about Nepal and has a contagious smile. Yesterday, we went from one end of Kathmandu to the other seeing dozens of temple complexes, each more stunning than the next. By the end of the day, I simply wanted to sit in a quiet room and detox from sensory overload.

Today, it rained most of the day, so at my behest we went to see an Indian film. It started off as a standard Dirty Harry style rip-off, but quickly became a deeply weird film-going experience. The movie began with a montage of the chiseled-featured good guys where aviator glasses and the Indian flag. Yes, these lads were honest, virtuous, and had David Hasslehoff haircuts–all the things that India, apparently, looks to for a hero. The villain, conversely, was a Sherrif Lobo look-a-like hell-bent on doing everything that made India weak–corrupting officials, buying elections, killing, raping and of course wearing really tacky jewelry. The guy who played the villain, by the way, apparently was a devotee of the Eisenstein school of acting–I haven’t seen a more campy performance since Ivan the Terrible Part 2. Anyway, the leading good guy gets predictably suspended when he shoots a criminal in the groin (who bored a striking resemblance to G. Gordon Liddy). The crook/victim was running for office and his platform apparently entailed beating up orphans and circus performers. From there the plot splits into a dozen different directions. Will the other chiseled face good guy get the girl? Will the leading good guy get his job back and get another girl? Will the villain ever stop sniveling? To make matters more confusing, the “plot” will suddenly cease and an elaborate music and dance number will kick in. Out of nowhere a dozen backup dancers pop out of nowhere and begin shaking their busoms in a manner frighteningly reminiscent of Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” (That video scared me as a child.) In one sequence, the girlfriend starts singing on an isolated beach and out from a drainage pipe, I guess, comes the Benatar dozen. What really struck me about these sequences is that there is absolutely no coherence between one shot and the next. One moment girlfriend is rolling in the sand with her back-up, the next she’s in a completely different outfit embracing her beau. Is this an avant garde deconstruction of cinematic space? Is this some convention I’m unfamiliar with? Or is this simply really bad filmmaking? The film ends with the evil villain literally nailing the good guy to a cross and then setting it alight. For one spine-tingling moment I thought that the hero would actually snuff. According to the film, Jesus simply didn’t want it enough, because our hero managed to push over the cross, rips his impaled hands from the wood and proceeds to kick the shit out of seven or eight armed baddies. I was hoping they’d break into song at that point, but sadly they didn’t.

What was interesting about this film was the audience, who applauded when the hero suddenly saves an orphan from getting its head kicked in. I’m not sure if it’s a certain innocence from cliche at work or simply applauding is more a part of Nepali culture.

Over and out.