Nepali Belching Women's Choir

In terms of the amenities one typically expects in an "International" airport, you won't find them at Kathmandu's.  Duty free shopping?  I didn't see any.  Do you need to get a visa on arrival as I did?  You'd better have your ready cash in USD, Euro, Aussie dollar, Indian rupee, whatever foreign currency is accepted, because they don't take Nepali rupees (which are not allowed out of the country) and they don't have an ATM at the airport.
Good thing I had arranged a pickup with my guesthouse.  I only had enough USD to get a monthlong visa, rather than a three monther, but you can easily extend your visa once in the country.  I got all squared away with my forms, photos and fees, retrieved my bags, exited the airport, and was promptly catcalled.  I definitely made a face.  I was just so shocked; it's been months and months since I've had the experience.  Southeast Asia has its hassles, absolutely, but men making "appreciative" noises as you pass wasn't one I noticed.

But Kathmandu is different.  How many capital cities have 6 hour power blackouts ranging across the city daily, as a fact of life?  Many guesthouses and businesses have generators to keep the juice going during these outages.  How many bustling tourist quarters go nearly pitch black at around 11pm nightly?  It's one thing not to be a late night town, but keep some lights on, would ya?  Street lights are uncommon, so once the businesses close, it's lights out.  When you are a solo female, that is plenty motivation to get back to your room before the dusty, pitted roads are bereft of lights and people.

After a few days seeing sights such as Durbar Square, the old historic royal/temple district and a variety of Buddhist and Hindu temples, fending off street touts offering everything from pashmina scarves and trekking expeditions to tiger balm and hashish (Nepal, incidentally, is the only country where I personally have been offered drugs on the street), I escaped up to the hills surrounding Kathmandu for another 10 day Vipassana meditation course.  Because I am crazy.  At least that's what I thought the first three days.  The first Vipassana course felt like a life-changing experience, the second more like masochism.  Oh, it was hard to concentrate.  I wanted to leave, I wanted to run away, I wanted to be doing anything else but what I had come there to do.  And it was a less comfortable experience than the one I had done in Malaysia.  For example, both facilities had cold water only.  That's not really a problem in Malaysia.  Cold water showers in the tropics are refreshing.  But what about cold water showers at 2000m elevation in very late winter?  If "refreshing" properly describes the experience of watching steam rise off your shivering, wet body, then, yes, I guess cold water showers on Shivapuri Mountain are refreshing.  In Malaysia, the 4:30am to 6:30am meditation session had been surprisingly enjoyable; it was by far the coolest part of the day there.  That and the early morning quiet combined to make it a lovely time to meditate.  Here in Nepal, it was also the coolest part of the day.  I wore a combination of 4 shirts, a sweater, a hoodie, long johns, pants, and a skirt, and still I spent the entire two hours shivering, just dreaming of the hot milk tea I'd get my numb hands on at 6:32am.

Along with the hot tea came food.  Two meals a day for me, no food after noon, which meant I was going 19 hours between lunch and breakfast daily.  In the evenings, I had hot lemon water with sugar and salt - just like fresh Gatorade, only better.  But breakfast and lunch always involved one food item - beans.  Nepalis like beans.  The national dish is dhal bhat - lentils with rice.  It's a running joke that Nepalis don't want to eat anything else even when they have the option.  Luckily, we had more than just lentils and more than just rice.  But whether they were lentils, black-eyed, kidney, garbanzo, or pinto, we had beans twice a day.  I like beans, always have, but that is a lot of beans.  And you would expect a certain physiological effect to accompany such prodigious ingestion of legumes, especially when you park a hundred or so people in a room and tell them to sit without talking for hours on end.  The men farted.  A lot.  But that's dudes!  I wasn't surprised.  A few women farted.  But many, many women burped.  And when I use the verb "burp" or "belch" here, it's because the English language doesn't have a word to express the elevated or more forceful degree of burping that I encountered in the hills of the Kathmandu Valley.  I was not afflicted myself, nor was everyone, but there were times when you'd have five women all burping repeatedly.  Ten burps in ninety seconds from one person: not unusual.  Call and response belches between two or more women:  not unusual.  One massive burp broken up into three or more truncated burps: not unusual.  Maybe my mind was just looking for something to fixate on, but I began to classify these burps.  Each burp began to have a personality trait (let's not use the word flavor here).  There are blunt burps, questioning burps, bleeting burps, long-winded burps, inconspicuous burps.  There's a Ph.D. dissertation in this somewhere, I'm convinced.

The burping never stopped, but my ability to concentrate on other, more important, things, like meditation, improved over the course.  In the end I was glad I had done it again and was renewed in my determination to meditate regularly.  By the time I got back to Kathmandu, I had some plans to hang out with some of my fellow attendees.  Good times, right?  Two nights ago, I got the dreaded travelers' sickness.  In over a year of travel and countless nibbles of shady food, I have had amazing luck.  It ended March 13, 2011.  After just one night of projectile vomiting and diarrhea, I felt spent, totally depleted and utterly without energy or concentration.  It was all I could do to get up and down five flights of stairs to a pharmacy to get rehydration salts and more water.  I spent all day yesterday in bed, too tired to read or do anything, just laying there when I couldn't sleep.  I am very glad that I'm staying in a nice place; they have room service here, so I was able to eat some plain rice and soy sauce for dinner (yay! more rice).  Whatever got me appears to have done its worst.  I don't have my full energy levels back but I'm not bent over a toilet either, so no complaints will be documented in this space.

I've now extended my visa here, so I'm feeling much less pressure to do this, that and everything else in the next two weeks.  Tomorrow, I take a bus down to Chitwan, which is in the southern plains of Nepal.  Chitwan is considered one of Asia's premier wildlife parks, as it's home to one-horned rhinos, sloth bears, and royal Bengal tigers.  I may see no more than a deer and a bird or two, but there's only one to see what one will see.  I'll update you accordingly.