Kathmandu

As some of you may know, I recently spent two weeks in Kathmandu with my daughter, Jessica. It was an amazing trip, and as one might expect, an enlightening one. I learned a great deal—both by reading up on Nepal in preparation for the trip and by my own observations once I arrived there.

Kathmandu is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, 50,000 inhabitants per square mile. That is a fact I read.

...if Legos were earth tone

What I learned from observation is that those people live in a city that is constructed much the way a child would build a Lego village. Area wise, Kathmandu is not that big. Rooms are continually being added to current living space by simply building out and up from existing structures.

I also observed some of the most crowded streets imaginable. I’ve walked the streets of New York, Los Angeles, Saigon, and San Jose. They were crowded but for the most part the vehicles stayed in the streets and the people stayed on the sidewalks. This was not the case in Kathmandu. There were only streets—narrow streets at that—and everyone used those— pedestrians, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, trucks, Pedi-cabs, animals. The shops came right out to the streets, oftentimes with their wares stacked alongside the curbs, which were not really curbs but rather ditches for the rain to run off.

The honking of horns and ringing of bells never ceased, not for a moment. Vehicles turned corners blindly with only a horn to alert anyone in their way. They would pull up within inches of those in front of them—whether approaching or coming from behind—and use their horn to announce their presence. Motorcycles literally pulled into shops to make way for larger vehicles.

What I noticed, with all this congestion and continual noise around me, was that no one ever seemed to lose their temper. I never saw anyone flip someone the finger. I never heard anyone curse. I heard no threats. I didn’t even see dirty looks. People just got out of the way or waited for the other to get out of the way.

It was the same with merchants—who like merchants round the globe, did everything in their power to make a sale. They would follow you on the street, initiate conversations that never seemed to end, promised the moon, good luck or everlasting salvation if I bought their product. But when a sale was obviously not going to happen, they simply walked away. No parting remarks, no bad feelings.

The people of Kathmandu are very friendly and helpful—almost to a fault.  

This driver definitely did not know
where he was going.

Jessica and I rode in Pedi-cab once when the streets became so difficult to navigate, the driver got out and pull his vehicle along, with us in it. The first time this happened we were so caught off guard that we stayed in our seats, probably thinking the driver was simply getting the cab out of traffic. The second time it happened, we got out, paid the driver and walked alongside him.

There were times where the drivers seemed to be driving around in circles—it is not farfetched to think even they could get lost in a city so crowded—but they never gave up. A lot of businesses say they aim to please and customer satisfaction is their only goal. These drivers didn’t have to say it. They’d drive through hell to get you where you wanted to go.

School children walking arm-in-arm filled the streets at all hours of the day and were always smiling.

I met some very nice people in Kathmandu. I came away with a strange notion that maybe there is something mystical about growing up in the shadow of the Himalayas. The people I met weren’t full of themselves. They seemed down to earth, satisfied, and at peace living in what I viewed as a hectic and demanding world.

All these observation led me to the conclusion the people of Nepal are very special people indeed.

No one deserves a tragedy such as the one that struck Nepal last week. And yet, sometimes that is the only reaction we can come up with. Of course they need monetary aid, medical assistance, food, and water. Rebuilding will take years, decades perhaps. They will get all that, and I know for a fact they will appreciate it.

Still, I can’t help thinking. These people did not deserve this.

 

 

Many of these thousand year old temples have been destroyed.

The Frogs and My Magical Mandolin

The rainy season came to Vietnam shortly after I arrived and it didn’t seem like it was ever going to end. The reason that Lin said every Vietnamese song was about the rain was that it never truly went away. There was the season when it rained all day and all night and then there was the season where it got hot as hell every day and only rained around four in the afternoon to cool things off. I never minded being caught in that rain because it felt so good and I knew that a half-hour after it stopped I would be completely dry.

The period right after I arrived in Vietnam just seemed to a very damp and monotonous time. The only sounds permeating through the bleak, gray sky was the alternating whirring and whacking of huey rotor blades and the constant slamming of raindrops onto the metal roofs of the barracks.

On one of those rainy days Tony and I rode a bus into Saigon to take some pictures, play around with the tea girls on Tu Do Street, and just do our Hemingway thing, which boiled down to getting away from the structure of Long Binh and into the helter skelter of the city with absolutely no rules—or a lot of rules that everyone seemed intent on breaking. The object was to interact as much as possible with the locals so as to feel that the war, and our year in it, didn’t become just an exercise in keeping our noses clean. When we went to Saigon we were looking for trouble—not big trouble with a capital T but maybe mischief with a small m.

Chain Reactions

There are two things that I like about this picture. The most obvious is the reason for taking the picture in the first place. What’s not to like about a picture of a dog biting a cat?

But there is more to the picture than meets the eye. For instance, why is the dog biting the cat?

To know the answer to that question, you would have had to be walking the streets of Saigon’s Cong Ly slums on a muggy afternoon in 1971, and see what I saw a split second before this picture was taken.<