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Oct. 28, 2010 Greetings from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia! I arrived, October 26, 2010, from Kathmandu, Nepal on a four-hour flight on Royal Nepal Airlines. I have a tiny, nothing-nothing room in a kind of hotel called a homestay around here. This is where there are tiny rooms and dormitories around a shared day room. I had to pick one at random online, without a reservation, as cyber cafes in Nepal don’t have printers for printing confirmations. My neighborhood is very fine though. I hope I can find a better place soon. I was in Nepal, not so much for sightseeing as for existing and living. I had to be somewhere. Nepal was good enough. I did do some sightseeing though, with a one-week excursion over the Himalayas to Lhasa, Tibet. I also visited a national park in Nepal that is the habitat of elephants, rhinos, crododiles, gharials and tigers. Then there were a few short jaunts about Kathmandu itself. I lived right downtown in a district called Thamel. You’d have to see Thamel to believe it. Thamel is an impossible labyrinth of tiny streets, some so narrow that vehicular traffic is limited to motorcycles, which come in a never-ending stream. Half-paved, with potholes in the paved part, and jutting rocks, bricks and sawed-off pipes sticking out of the dirt part, they simply wear you out, as you stagger and stumble along, dodging motorcycles and bicycle-powered rickshaws. The more important streets in Thamel have stores—thousands of them—devoted to yak-wool scarves and sweaters, silk garments, Gurkha daggers and swords, brass pots and knick-knacks, stone Buddhas, paintings, wooden flutes, embroidery and other collectibles. I can’t even imagine how they all continue existing with so much competition. But if you want something useful, it’s not there. I spent three hours walking and gawking around looking for some notebook paper. It took me an hour to locate toothpaste. The smaller streets in Thamel have shops—many only four feet wide—that sell beads, earrings, cosmetics, spices, plastic toys, dishes, knives, forks and spoons, and who-knows-what. You cannot even guess what they have. If you pause for even a second, someone will come flying out, “What are you looking for?” Or even if you just pass by, they will greet you insincerely, “Namaste.” They just want your business. They’re not being friendly. Another big business in Thamel is trekking. They will provide lodging, food and guide-service if you want to hike around Nepal. The tab is usually about $100 a day. Some of the treks last as long as 17 days, so trekking is a rich man’s hobby. There must be 100 trek shops in Thamel, along with 100 money-changers. Hiking and camping gear is plentiful too. But grocery stores are few and far between. A drugstore in Thamel is a ten-by-ten cubicle where the druggist fetches everything, if he has it. You have no access to inspect and compare. There are bars and restaurants too. The cheap restaurants may cause disturbances of your digestive system, as I learned the hard way. So I ate at my hotel, overpaying and obliged to tip as well. In Nepal, you can get pork, buffalo, sheep, goat, chicken and fish, just no beef. I hardly ate meat in Nepal. I don’t think there is a McDonald’s in Kathmandu. There’s supposed to be one newly-opened KFC, but I didn’t see it. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Visit my website here. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com
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