I'm baaaaack

My trek to Everest Base Camp is over and I'm back in a warm, sunny Kathmandu. When I first arrived here a few weeks ago, it was a polluted, chaotic, overwhelming place. It's still a polluted, chaotic, overwhelming place, but I'm now loving it. As I think I mentioned in a previous post, there is a period when you're an easy mark for those praying on tourists new to town. It just left me paranoid and pissed off. Now that I have a better idea of who's who and and what's what, I'm enjoying all of this madness. I think a big part of it is learning where you're safe and feeling comfortable ignoring certain people. At home, if anyone approaches me, more than likely that person's intentions are innocent enough and I'd feel strange brushing them off or ignoring them. When I was approached here and asked where I'm from, how long I've been in Nepal, etc., I felt rude not engaging them. This was surprisingly hard to do, even when I knew they were out to sell me something. But now it's easy--very easy. I think they can even sense who's new and who isn't. When I first got here, I was approached by someone on virtually every block. Now I rarely have someone accosting me. "Where you from? Going trekking? Give me the name of a country, I'll tell you the capital (what the hell is this one about?--I stumped him with Uzbekistan)?" Apparently this is good practice for India, as everyone I've talked to says it's an order of magnitude worse. Yippie!

Yesterday, Holger, the German guy who ended up being my trekking partner for most of the trek, and I just wandered the streets of Kathmandu. He's a professional photographer (and is carrying a huge medium format camera!) so it was especially fun. Sometimes I love to look at the world through a lens. It helps me to really see a place, to notice textures and colors, light and faces and on and on. It's been my experience that a camera can be both a doorway into a place or a wall in front of it. You can use it as I just described or it can just be the device that's recording all of your experiences for later recall. In my experience, when used that way, focus tends to be on the camera itself instead of what I'm photographing. Anyway, it was just a delightful day of the many wonders of Kathmandu: women making garlands of flowers for the festival, hidden temples in back alleys, live chickens attached to bicycles (not riding them, thankfully), kids playing and markets with everything from dried fish to lentils and spices.

I'm actually back from my trek a couple days early. There's currently a big festival going on here in Kathmandu. My guide on my trek, Santosh, has missed it for the last five years and we agreed that in lieu of a tip, we'd come back early. This really wasn't a problem, since this Colorado boy can move a little faster than the average trekker (especially when he has a porter) and I didn't have to cut out anything.

As far at the festival goes, this is what I've been able to piece together from the Lonely Planet and chats with a few of the locals. The festival goes on for a number of days with each day celebrating something different. One is the Newari (one of the Nepal's ethnic groups) New Year, another is a celebration for brothers and sisters. I think there might be something else thrown in there, too. The experience has been like Christmas, Forth of July and Halloween rolled into one. There are lights hung everywhere, firecrackers going off constantly (I'm surprised the gutters aren't filled with the fingers of little children) and groups of kids go door to door singing songs and dancing until you give them a little money. Most of them are annoying but sometimes they're incredibly cute. The first night back from our trek, Holger and I were having dinner at the Everest Steak House (thanks for the suggestion Dave and Christen) when a group of girls burst into the restaurant and starting dancing--it was very "Bollywood" according to the woman next to us. The staff tried to shoo them out but had to stop amid protests from the patrons.

But, who cares about all this, you're probably saying. How was the trek? In a word: incredifabulitastic.