Makalu

June 15, 2008 at 12:05 pm (Travels)
Tags: , , , , , ,

Its the beginning. I am writing now from a field along the Mangmaya Khola (river) in the town of Mangmaya. My first night here consisted of stumbling in, utterly exhausted with the onset of illness compounded by strenous exhaustion. As I pitched my tent in the faraway fields, my existence was quickly beamed into the public psyche, and like some form of alien landing I drew endless, gazing crowds. It really is a testament to the isolated and close knit nature of Nepali communal villages that a spotting by a couple of kids managed to set off a profound magnetic drawing of every villiage member in a 10 kilometer radius. To be frank, I might aswell of stood there naked screaming and dancing around some form of ceremonious fire. After some solid, consecutive hours of being under constant observation and discussion by a decidedly large group of people I have to say I considered it.

But 2 days later I was still there, recovering slowly from my illness at the compassion of a local man who clearly wished me to hire him as a guide. Every night I’d have dinner with his family, me sitting at a separate table of course, being casteless. This man himself was a self professed christian, which he quickly made known by supplying me with numerous evangelical handouts. On attempting any discussion of philosophy it quickly became evident he hadn’t the slightest, remotest idea what any of his own ideology meant – but nonetheless, Jesus saves.

I have to say, living in a tight knit Nepali village is a profound experience. Your world shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. Everything is in its hierarchical place, women – notably low on this ladder. Then the communists would come, and hand out their propaganda, themselves, victims and propagators of precisely the mindsets their ideology supposedly seeks to overthrow. But then again, the Maoists have never really been revolutionary. They dont even seem to know who Mao Zedong was. On that note, they didn’t seem to understand anything much about the outside world, just their place in this, their world, the only world they ever will or will ever need to know.

Kali loved this place, sprinting around the fields and chasing the hens. I loved this place, though I enjoyed it from my spacecraft, out in the fields. By my tent I played guitar and wrote, visited frequently by children who would chase and be chased by my dog. Under the radar I spent my days smoking joint after joint, watching the wind sweep up leaves, the cows pull the equipment, the women cut the corn. Now and then the monkeys would come down and attempt a raid on a store of food, a welcome addition to the otherwise calm, cyclic rhythm of life. The children all seemed to be wearing drug culture T-shirts, not to the knowledge of their oblivious parents of course. “Sticks and seeds may make me cough but weed will never hurt me” said one such shirt. I wish I hadn’t lost that photo.

But I had to leave that place. Along the way I encountered one man, collapsed on the side of the road. I bent over to check him, felt his pulse, ensured he was breathing. Was he sick? No, it would seem, after a great deal of effort in slapping and shaking a corpse, there was a sudden resurrection. A disoriented face, the blindingly strong exhale of whisky, and a big Nepali smile. I’m ok, his face seemed to say, and we kept walking.

I landed in a middle of nowhere Nepali town made almost entirely irrelevant to trekkers due to its lack of.. well.. anything. In some towns you feel like your in the wild west. Shanty towns with dusty roads, children running wild and the river running strong. Revolutionaries chalking sickles and hammers, each house proclaiming a new Nepal.

You’d hardly gauge from the overtly vague and starkly corrupt manner of politicians that anything was going to change in Nepal. But in a place like this you feel it in your bones. One man whispered to me that he himself had become a “victim of the Maoists”. His land, confiscated. A landlord no more, sitting at the chai stall, smoking a cheap cigarette, staring at the ground. And then the youth came in. Bamboo lathis in hand they loomed over him. It’s just then they took his cigarette to boot.

I guess a lot of westerners would never expect that from Nepalis. The good, spiritual, passive Nepali of folklore takes not from his masters! But Nepalis do, and they are – the leaders are just overlooking the process. What I saw in this place was not a passive changing land, directed by a party. What I saw were people that, from all conversations, were fucking fed up with bending down. They wanted a piece of what had been denied. And they were taking it, leaders approving or not.

My walking led me many places on the road, but never with significant obstacle until Khongma. Its here I was jammed, snow simply so high that you couldnt walk for the fear of falling into a big fucking hole, a hole that sometimes (much to the dismay of one Nepali porter) contained a thorn bush. I had to wait, wait in my tent until the arrival of a virtual army of low paid Nepali workers and their overmonied Australian overlords.

And here I am, in my tent, awash with liberatory value, and simultaneously agitated, some may even go as far to say, fucking shitted off. Theres a bunch of armchair Australian tourists, and now they are pitched all around me. My now imminent neighbours. If I may also place in addition it was almost instantly apparent that these were a bunch of exploitative, capitalistic fuckwits. Their porter staff (which numbered about 20-30, averaging 5 each) on average carried 50 kilograms each (with some exceptional workers carrying 60). They are paid fucking nothing. These Australians do absolutely fucking nothing. I just sat through a massive rant about how they found their beds unmade, and were put through the utterly unacceptable activity of carrying their own stuff outside and unpacking their bags themselves. “Is this fun!? Are you having fun guys!?” one mused in a condescending tone.

I dont know where to start. Fucking pathetic, chauvinistic, superior bunch of self-obsessed cunts. With big fucking cameras may I add. I came out to these mountains to escape this culture. It followed me. Shit.

Anyway, let us move to “higher ground”, a process which henceforth to this writing, I was slowly inhaling my way toward. On the very topic of my tent, I have to admit a passionate and abnormally attached form of love for it. It litterally is the closest thing I have had to a home in a long time, and will have for a fucking long time. It is an unchanging environmental chambre, a thin but effective wall for a dreamers mind. It is however, fucking cold, tent or no tent. I’m unusually hungry as usual. This experience had sewn an appreciation for the base elemental requirements of my existence. Especially when encouraged by a tent full of hash smoke.

And then the Australians turn back. Its too dangerous they mused. Then the germans turned back, its too dangerous they mused. Behind us, a million dollar british military expedition to climb Mt Makalu, with over 200 porters, and more than 30 actual members. Ahead of us, potential profit for the Sherpa teahouse proprietors, and my only shot of solitude in the great himalayan range of Nepal. No brainer, fuck the storms, lets walk on.

Fucking christ I had no idea what I was getting into when I set out with those 5 odd Sherpa people from Khongma to Dobato. These 4000+ metre passes were not only perilous, they are practically fucking vertical. Countless times I fell backwards, snow collapsing under my feet with only my meagre bamboo stick to save me from a violent fall to the bottom of a valley.

As the day drew on the weather grew aggressive and bitter. Visibility was reduced to less than a metre, a blinding white. The wind lashed with unrelenting cruelty, and my front dreadlocks froze solid. The altitude robbed me of oxygen and the cold robbed me of opportunity to stop and take a break. Alone, (far behind the superhuman Sherpas) my time was spent desperately pursuing footprints, psychologically holding myself together and pushing on, drew forward by the terrifying sight of those prints covering up in the new snow from the storm. Alone, countless times I almost fell to tumble hundreds of metres into nowhere – a prospect with no subtlty. It would of meant my death, and each time I lost balance something higher kicked in, a sharp and violent energy – the base survival pulse, the electric feeling of the human body really fighting to survive. It was as if my entire body was enveloped in a surge, and all my effort and concentration were focused and driven like a blade into the moment.

I eventually decided my best chance now was to catch up with the Sherpas. I sprinted and sprinted, tumbling down the hills searching for them. I eventually caught up with one girl, Dike Sherpa. She patiently waited for me as I frequently paused, utterly exhausted. And then, a moment I’d never expect. At the stones she suddenly forgot the way. Panic permeated rapidly as the terrifying chill of the wind started to leek through the cracks in my calm. Non-movement in these storms brings you back to the cold. While Dike kept her calm, my psyche began to collapse. My body was struggling, shivering and exhausted. My hands were numb and on the verge of frostbite. My feet, I have later discovered, were frostbitten by this point. And I must say, a body under stress quickly tears whatever remenants of a reasonable mind can indeed persist under such conditions.

I tried to focus on finding footprints, but too much time had passed, and this was getting bad. The moment came. Tears started to well up in my eyes, as another frantic, frenzied search again yielded nothing. Death was starting to run its current in the marrow of my bones. I was freaking out. My mind started to, for the first time, really come to face the question. Maybe this is it. Mother nature had me by the throat, and the fear, the primordal fear, was so shaking, so strong. I was an ant glaring up at the peaks, lost in the himalaya, on the roof of the world, in the unforgiving land, the abode of Shiva, the destroyer, the unmercifully powerful.

Its true at moments like these you dream of the good times. Its also true you experience an ecstasy beyond your wildest dreams when the gut wrenching reality of the past begins to fade. Fuck me I cant describe the relief that rushed down my spine and through every last inch of my flesh as that porter came up behind us from the distance. I dont know how long we were stuck there, in that place. The psychological “place” jammed a vast expanse into every fleeting, agitated moment of fear.

These are the moments I remember. Bent over, wretching in pain as I held my hands in my armpits. If you’ve ever had to warm up frostbitten hands, I can only describe it as running your skin along heated blades. Its deep, sharp and relentless pain – profoundly difficult to persist with. But the thought of never playing guitar again just kept welling in my mind, it made it all seem meaningless. Dike took my cold gloves, held my things and lifted my bag back onto my back. Its times like these you realise the essential and humble beauty of human compassion.

But I’m here, 1 Yak cheese dal bhat later and ready to continue the journey. Behind me a massive, organised, sponsored expedition, and I intend to see base camp FIRST.

Maybe its the altitude, or the excitement, or both – but last night sleeping was remarkably difficult, even in the face of complete bodily exhaustion. These mountains have set my mind on fire, their image etched with such vividity into the nether regions of my mind.

How idle indeed I have been in a world so magnificant as this!? How long have I sought to avert the world, how long have I squandered the myriad opportunities which relentlessly and elegantly present themselves in each and every moment of my existence. In the night I saw visions, visions of definition unparallel. In my visions I saw bodies and landscapes, luminous and stark. I saw them transfigured and condensced, swirled into a raindrop, in one massive and synchronous dance. I felt that raindrop in the palm of my hand, to be blown like a dandeline in a breeze. What astounding grace with which this vision presented itself! I felt spellbound, cast in mystic rapture. I lied out in a field today, the sun rearing itself for the first time in so long. I felt the blades of grass prickling at my skin and drifted – it was as If I lied upon the peaks themselves, like the grass they appeared to sway, like the grass they grew and massaged the mortality which had so before been strained.

What great act of bravery,

Of loves great and mighty forgery,

To cast karmic winds in elegant mastery,

In the shadow reflection of such tapestry,

My feeble eyes do strain

A poem for Yak cheese

 

First comes the beast,

Then comes the cheese,

Then comes a red face,

And begs of “please”

Of all the creatures,

Spare the yaks,

They belong in the mountains,

And not in my dacks.

 

I arose in the morning not to a mountain but to a looming golden throne, utterly illuminated, alive with the energy of a world not yet known to this all to human mind. The sheer magnitutde, the sheer, raw, mystic experience of something enchanted and other worldly.

I stood in awe, and now I cower in my tent, still utterly wrapt in awe. I scarsely wished to ever leave that majestic hallway, or move my eyes from the seering light which so electrically possessed those clouds, whose meditative drift danced in glory to a myriad of the most splendid rainbow apparitions. This, the alluvial plane, the higher place.

The marihuana smoke turns me like a feather, a drifting being in what now I understand is where god himself would come to meditate. After waiting so patiently for everest to reveal itself from the horizon, behind me another mountain loomed, and in its heart I saw a most spectacular cave. That mountain seemed to glare with humanity, that cave truly the dwelling of some higher being, a bodhisattva, the contemplative devas of lore.

 

Today was truly a day of magnificant accomplishment. My whole day of descent was spent passing member after member of the British military, and watching their eyes widen as my dreadlocked, stoned caricature entered their vision.

Here I was, listening to the debates and jokings of military officers. Heres a good one. “What do you feel when you shoot a terrorist?”. “Just the recoil really”.They took particular ridicule out of my sleeping bag and jeans, and were truly bemused in the morning when I set to sealing my thin leather boots with duct tape. It just didn’t seem right to them, that for them was a planned expedition was for me, a spontaneous stroll out into the unknown. “You carry everything you need on your own back!?!?”

Discussing the Iraq war I discovered much, many of these officers having served actively. They seemed adamant of an extreme rift between the philosophy and practice of their own military and that of the United States. They reeled off story after story of gun toting American marines with a disturbing lack of respect for human life. There were stories of civilians gunned down like dogs amidst great scores of laughter. These stories were, understandably left rather vague.

Furthermore, the use of the weapon, white phosphorous. A post Vietnam-era napalm replacement (remember that photo of the Vietnamese children running down the road with their skin burning off?) – invented after napalm itself got an understandably bad name. Now theres increasingly strong evidence to show that the American’s have been using a variant called white phosphorous, in many cases indiscriminately on built up civilian areas, namely in Fallujah. To give you an idea of what this stuff does, imagine a gas that will burn right through bone whilst leaving all infrastructure intact. If you inhale it, it burns you from the inside, and no, theres no way to stop the burning.

Although I could scarcely coax a word about white phosphorous out of those guys, it turns out the brits use the mildly less disturbing “red” phosphorous, which can apparently be treated (in rather immediate circumstance), and then, only as a smoke screen. Praise the lord for the gentlemanly conduct of the honorable British killing apparatus, lord knows, after a long history of anything but restraint – they seem to have “cleaned” up their act now.

But nonetheless I had neither the time nor the interest to stick around discussing different methodologies of murder – I had to get back. A steadily worsening cough coaxed me on to boot. The descent. The easy part….. right?

No. Fucking no. Hiking like a madman, and recently reunited with my dog, I lost track of the sun and its sapping rays. I also ran out of water. Shit started to get bad. I felt ill, but I was hours from the town behind me, I had to push on. Suddenly my field of vision started to sway, the energy seemed to flee from my body as if leaving mere crumbs for fuel and my stomach tightened, I was sick. I kept pushing uphill, for hours, and hours, and no water, no water, no fucking water. I collapsed by a group of nepalis begging for that prized liquid, in Nepali may I add, but what I got was neither sympathy nor help, just instruction to keep on a walking. Just keep on walking. Just keep on walking.

This was a bad moment for me. The hiking seemed to go on forever before I collapsed by a group of porters. Thankfully, THEY gave me water, seeing that now my eyes were trailing around wildly in my field of vision and I was clearly confused and ill. From above the camp came a 40-50 year old trekker, who instantly recognized my heat stroke and saw to it that my tent be set up, and I would be supplied with some re hydration salts. At this point, not only was I vomiting, but my ability to walk had denigrated to a bare stumble. To be quite frank, that old man saved my fucking ass.

During the night I got struck down by a brain splitting ear infection (to add to the sinus and the lungs). 2 strong codeine and a valium, down like candy. In the morning I stumbled uphill, aided by two porters given to me by the old man. It took hours to hike what should have been an hour, but I arrived.

The days proceeding this were spent holed up inside a room unable to eat, trying to hold down water and going through extreme fevers and chills. I was ill, really fucking ill, unable to walk, and seemingly getting worse. I needed food.

The first food I managed to get into my system was a poorly cooked and handled Dal Bhat courtesy of the Jyotsi lodge (locatable in Num, for all those concerned). I have had bad cases of bacterial diahorrea, but this Dal Bhat wreaked a biological assault on my body that I could scarcely comprehend. All night I ran backwards and forwards between the toilet and the bed, vomiting, shitting and coming in and out of consciousness. Kali usually got up to cause a ruckus when I returned to the room, but this time she just sat there pensively. I, curled in a ball and shivering, and my dog, staring with unusual fixed attention. Maybe it was the delirium, but Kali seemed to be telling me to remember. I was back in Colcutta. Haze blanket, crystal concrete.

That morning, now being completely unable to walk, more or less stand, I decided the time was now to get evacuated, I hadn’t held anything resembling nutrition for 4 or more days, and I was getting rapidly worse. Without clean food, I had no hope of recovery. I asked for a helicopter, now in an utterly devestated state. The people at my lodge meanwhile didn’t seem to give a shit. There was a range of people laughing at me, for reasons I still cant understand. A vast array gathered to stare, and I quickly became the talk of the town.

The alien. I was the alien. That travel dream scape I had in the past thoughtlessly traversed. My mind would rove landscapes in rapture. The traveler, the bird, with eyes as sharp as blades, yet somehow the inability to pierce the fabric, the ubiquitous illuminated dreamers veil. Something rooted in human biology tore into the fabric of not only thought, but the very texture, light and weight of reality. There is a defining, split road in the face of what seems hopeless. There is for me, the instinctive and primal shutdown of thought and the laserpoint focus of survival need. Then, an inkling feeling of being in a dream, creeping in as the minutes and hours tick by. I felt it out there in the mountains. It felt as if some other part of me was surviving, but another did not seem concerned. This consciousness, the transcendental feeling of unconcern and liberation from the world of “signs” or alternatively, of what you define “reality”. In this state of consciousness you are witnessing life in pure, unutterable definition. Its the near death experience, the profound and sudden influx of new perception, the breaking down of the conceptual world of “signs” and the precious opportunity to look upon life without plans, or pasts, or for that matter, anything but the impermeably complex and breathtaking lifeform which you now feel yourself to be departing.

Luckily, as always, Sherpa people came to my rescue. Out of a desire for no money whatsoever they put me on the back of a donkey, and began to evacuate me to the next town. The sheer flood of hope and elation as those donkeys took off, holding up my now limp body – I cannot describe it. After all the challenges of this, my adventure, I had been reduced to little more than a corpse, teetering on the edge of complete physical and mental collapse.

Those people saved my life, and they did it out of the goodness of their heart. They didn’t ask a thing, they saw human need and they responded. They ended up getting me all the way to the airport, letting me stay in their home, giving me tea, caring for me, helping me get my tickets. It was along the way here that I met a man and his mute and mentally challenged 18 year old son. He joined to carry my things all day, for nothing, for absolutely nothing. He had two daughters, one only a little child, adopted when their parents died of sickness. It was with this man I left Kali.

Kali was a lot like those kids, left out on her own in an unforgiving surround. I still have a wrenching feeling in my chest from when I left her. I was sitting out in front of this house, hours from having to fly back to Kathmandu. I started to feel my mind drift toward new frontiers. She seemed happy. I hope shes happy out there, out there on that farm. At the end of my journey I will return to that, my hound. 3 months I’d had that dog, we’d seen so much together on the road. But a Colcutta hound in the mountains, in the fresh air, in the fields? It was truly a sight to behold.

Leave a Comment

Colcutta: Return to Kali

June 15, 2008 at 11:43 am (Travels)

Well I’m heading home. I’ve been picking up debris for close to a month in Sikkim and Darjeeling, but where, I must inquire, is the storm. I write this, ironically, with my feet trying to keep Kali in her cane travel box – much to the amusement of the Indian passengers. The military came before, opened it up with their guns pointed in. “Dog?” they inquired with utter bemusement. They were about to kick me off before I explained she was from Colcutta. She got the local treatment.

My search for the storm found me amongst fellow travellers on a trawl through Asia’s biggest red light district. I felt as if on an airplane, the scattering of idle women, and the feeling that something was happening, and then with full sensory assault, takeoff.

Women of all ages (and one economic class) lined the streets with no semblance of even an inches gap. From 8 to 80, fat, thin, and universally desperate and detached. Nepalis featured prominently here, many of which presumably had been sold or displaced during the civil war and the ensuring desperation. Some were not sold, some were kidnapped. Some sold themselves simply to eat. A depressing and almost claustrophobic sensory assault.

It still strikes me how sudden it was when it all ended too. Like passing too and from a different realm. The feelings, the realities, and the perceptions in that world were grippingly human – but it felt nicer to think of oneself as in outer space. Its often the feeling that comes to mind under challenging conditions. Don’t worry columbus, you can sail right back home if you want to.

The night proceeded naturally to a return to the Paragon coupled with excessive substance abuse. But booze and pot couldn’t calm one fucking iota of depravities fascinating amphetamine. Neither could my guitar release it. I wandered agitated and aimless in the AM.

Then, an irrefutable offer from two drunk 18 y.o call centre workers. “Want a lift”. Needless to say, I accepted, and then brewed uncomfortably over that offbeat decision as the driver snaked the bike at high speed on the highway amongst manic laughter.

My fears were not at all calmed when we arrived at a dodgy junction for Chai. Try opening your shirt to brandish a chest of vicious scars as a casual conversation opener, followed by the (naturally reassuring) question “do you want to see this done”.

But alas, times appeared less grim then presumed, his friends assured me he “just does that to be cool”. I assured them I’d see it another night. This guy of course, seemed convinced he was doing it for Allah. The philosophy being to deprive your body entirely, using pain to cut the ropes of this worldly vessel and connect to god. A philosophy that I’m not at all certain this particular guy really held at all. Those tears and slashes seemed almost like the smog black gunge which clung to my arms. He was trying to write Colcutta. Like a depraved poet’s parchment his skin was torn by this inability.

Him and his friends were self described “hooligans” of Colcutta, immature as fuck and just “looking for a good time”. They “didnt care man” and if anyone fucked with them, well, they’d kill them without thinking, at least according to their own testimony. Apparently he could sing Avril Lavinge aswell, a moment, which, if I daresay, put the icing on the cake.

Despite the apparent morbidity, I really suggest you visit Colcutta, and for that note, India before you pass judgment. It’s a city of profound, destructive energy, and that energy has to affect the kids some way or another. How would you deal? Imagine trying to jam that city in something the size of a coke bottle, and you’d haven apt idea of how it would fit inside your own heart and psyche. The call to prayer kicks in, yet another day begins. “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Prayer is more important than sleep! WAKE UP!”, as elegantly translated by my companions. Sounded like a beautiful song before I heard the words. Before a dance became a concept.

Needless to say after the “hooligans” had dropped me back at breakneck speed to the (relative) safety of Sudder St, I didn’t choose to sleep. Instead, I continued with a band of true trippers to Colcutta’s Kali temple. What a way to tipoff a sleep-deprived plethora of experiences but the sight of countless (male) goats being beheaded guillotine style by an ominous fat man dressed in black. And that absurd battle axe just kept falling. Then the hindus poured in, showering the executioners machine with brilliant red flowers and prayers. Devotions to the unbridled, uncontrolled, raw form of god. The god concerned of sex, blood and electric violent energy. The god that, like time eats everyone and all that slips from the present into her omnipotent domain. Kali, the black goddess.

Like goats themselves they were herded, drawn by brahmin priests, fat and rich, lined up and squeezed in front of a caged and fully sari clad image of god, deprived of their funds, then ushered out. Suddenly I felt a stark depravity. The black goddess in the ridiculous, conforming, covering constriction of elegant clothes. The naked one caged up and controlled, and drawn under the domain of societal expectations. Fuck those rich priests. 100 RUPEES 100 RUPEES they cried! Fuck you pricks. God really needs to hire better representatives on earth.

Leave a Comment

Kali beginnings

June 15, 2008 at 11:36 am (Travels)

I’ve been writing in a haze of smoke, with two characters for company. Its Colcutta, and its the beginning of yet another journey.

 

One, mad dog. Mad dog was a middle aged American man from Seattle, a true believer in alien intervention and a traveller of a wild and electric nature. If you’re ever at the Paragon, look out for the “Mad dog lives 08′” scrawled in one of the single room’s.

 

Mad dog was working in mother Teresa house with my friend Anthony. They had become true souls of Colcutta, immersed in its suffocating vibrance, slaves to its winding streets

 

Mad dog had been a coach all his life, and he reflected it in his every move. He would pounce on things with electricity in his voice, always trying to keep alit some hyper-energetic inspiration.

 

Mad Dog was one of those guys who simply drew enormous excitement from this world. I remember still in the middle of a street stall omelette reading that I was dead set in the middle of the world’s biggest bird flu outbreak. Of course, not even such alarmist news can stop the omelet man selling his omelettes. And I’ll be damned if the onus is on ME to stop buying them. But wow, that news just seemed to light Mad Dog up. “Shit man” he’d say. “We’re in the middle of what could possibly be the downfall of the human race, ain’t you lucky to be here”. What sounds sarcastic on paper ostensibly is not. I agreed with him all the way. Yeah I said. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

 

Anthony was the other of the two. Another American kid, aged 18, spending months in Colcutta volunteering at Mother Teresa house. We spent our time primarily discussing what, if anything, we can do to change this shithouse global political situation. In Darjeeling, a later date, our debates led to Anthony organising a trans-american peace protest which you can read about at: www.peaceodyssey.org

The idea of getting a dog and getting to the mountains seemed to excite both Anthony and Mad dog, and both jumped on board to give me all the help I’d need.

 

And so it begun, we took to the streets, looking for a dog from the bottom of the bottom.

 

This is no beginning. Awash in an enclosing sea of eyes. Laughing, building in crescendo. 100 RUPEES, the poignent and violent request. Shes squeeling in that basket, he jammed her in there like an over sized jacket. Fuck it. 100 rupees. The cash is out, the instant, the moment, the snapping of two hands, the electricity in the eyes, the rush. “I think its time to leave”, I muse to Anthony. Needless to say, that we did.

 

This is the streets of Colcutta, India. A vacuum of need wherein every opportunity and scrap is seized, sapped and torn for every last inch, first by men, then by the dogs. This tale begins with a dog. A street dog, Kali.

 

My chapter with Kali began, in truth, trying to calm her from her ear piercing squeels, whilst coaxing her from under a metal exam table. A mere touch elicited fear and flight, a gut wrenching testament to a hound hounded, fighting for scraps in a scrap economy, living in the jungle which ate the jungle. This all began with cleaning up a seemingly infinite pile of the most vile, wretched, vomit I had ever encountered. Ever seen Colcutta street trash? Imagine that on Martha Stewart style “low boil” for half an hour. Culinary bliss.

 

But through immunisations, powders, pills and pats we calmed and smuggled that newfound hound into Hotel Paragon, a bomb shelter esque low end fortress of drop outs, radicals, poets, and dreamers. And its in this place she entered a fear induced comatose, slowly venturing to eat and drink, slowly retreating. That first night I didn’t really sleep. I sat and smoked, and smoked, and smoked – in a state of perpetual introspection. What indeed sat before me, I had no idea.

 

Kali, my hound, sitting before me. The search had gone on of course, before this moment, to find a dog. The first dog was as black as night, and I found him in a graveyard of old british colonialists. Generals, and delegates of the “honorable east-india trading company”. My love for that first dog began really when I saw its preffered choice of a restroom, I mean, what a dog! Not only good looking, but making overt political statements at a young age! Indian pride. Unfortunately the grave keeper liked the dog too (and every self-respecting grave keeper needs an ominous looking black dog).

 

Kali, the black goddess, the unholy representation of the naked, raw, female. Thirsty for blood, violence, destruction, desire and utterly uninterested and unapplied to the controls and expectations of the human world. The entirely liberated form of god, removed from ideas of human violence, removed from discrimination, love, values and jealousy in her killing. A pure representation of chaos, devoid of the image of man. Shes the one god I really like in the Hindu pantheon. Not because I have some psychotic respect for the horror she represents, but because she stands to uphold nothing of what we would like to see in a god. She teaches no lessons, she demands no obedience. If you may look her in the eyes and feel no fear – than you are free.

 

We named Kali as Kali because hers was that life. To my dog, she was living in the real representation of Kali. No rest, no respite and no escape. A 24 hour cycle of struggle in a world of utterly zero predictability, and almost all encompassing hostility. She fought each day for her meals and was given no quarter by man or fellow dog. Her world was hunger, hunger and nothing but hunger. Her world was a fight in the most solid sense of the word.

 

That being said, shes a lovely little hound. Not really as ominous, and as dark as her name or environment implies. She was also quite non-violent. But it really was a grand feeling to have that dog by my side. Anthony and I split ways after Darjeeling, but the hound stayed some time longer…

 

Leave a Comment

The tale of the purple baba

June 15, 2008 at 9:04 am (Travels)

 

Hampi, India. My head’s still swimming in that psy-rythmic haze that naturally comes with Goa. My bowels are still swimming with an aftershock and a renewed worth. But what the fuck is this shit?

 

Hampi is beautiful for one main reason. The mountains may be tall, the valleys may be deep, but I can explain a mountain. I can explain a valley. Hampi is one of those places where you really have to turn to mother nature and ask, what the fuck is this shit? What the fuck this shit indeed is, I leave it for you to decide:

 

It turns out, now that I write in retrospect, that I spent something close to 20 days meandering about the enchanted landscape of Hampi. I hardly could catch a second of this time to count or examine. It all just seemed to fly from under me like an endless skyline of clouds. My feet were bare and so was my heart. (One led to a relatively brief relationship with a girl, another led to a relatively long and assuredly more intimate relationship with a family of hookworms).

 

But that was the kind of life to be lived in Hampi. I spent most of my time teetering between the world and my 100 rupee hut, subject to a persistent assault of joints, the constant circulation of which was assured by a loyal guard of dedicated stoners. Not one hour of the day or night my hut went without having a watchful eye to cast its glazed gaze for my security. Thankful indeed I am, as my hut didn’t have a lock.

 

I spent my days getting stoned and riding my motorbike around the countryside. Me and many spent hours rambling in the ruins of an ancient society, jamming guitar in rice fields, or just boulder hopping like crazed children in a playground.

 

I spent my nights, more notably, meditating by the river with an italian man who had taken up the dedicated spiritual life. Moonlit chillums and conversations ran ripe, the river of Hampi almost dead silent in the dusk. If it were not for the muffled mumblings of an unauthorized stealth style tourist night boat, then I doubt there would have been a thing to disturb us.

 

These philosophic discussions ran long and deep. I remember one night a disoriented German kid joined us, around the age of 19. He was on the mystifying journey of a man recently trashed on LSD. Still reeling at the boundries between his skin and the air. Still focused, so transfixed on those remenants of energy he encountered in the other world, the inwardly swirled smoke, the river, the grass, the breeze. His mind was still in a world of sublime enjoyments, and uncontrollable excitement at all discussion that touched upon those things that we all, with significant frustration, have failed to pass on in words.

 

 

Theres something special about sitting, as equals, in silence, chillum in rotation, with nothing but a perfectly exchanged understanding for the sheer beauty of this time. All that one felt was the heartbeat, the breath, the breeze, the trickling of water, the ethereal moonlit glow which seemed to animate the inanimate. Finished. A new chillum has already begun. Take this time to breathe in and chat before BANG SMACK you step back into that deliriously potent time machine they’re all passin’ round.

 

The purple baba got his name primarily due to the overt use of purple. Every fucking thing was purple. Chillum case, chillum cloth, bag, clothes, books. He didn’t take himself too seriously. Its this that gave me an instant respect for this baba. No looking down at inadequacies, or wallowing in self-absorbed theological dictates. He was just a dude who knew a lot about medicine, meditation and getting high.

 

The purple baba had an indian friend. A guy called Serat. Serat lost his arms and his legs, but it seemed irrelevant. We smoked, drank and chatted. There were a lot of stories about this guy, and how he lost his arms and legs, he said some kind of accident, but a lot of people said it was because of a run in with the wrong people. Either way, theres no collecting benefits, and a court case ain’t your right. This is India.

 

I liked Serat. One night whilst stoned by the river, eyes shut, completely drifted – we all awoke to discover that someone else didn’t like Serat. Its hard to describe how this moment really kicked in. Imagine looking up, seeing a man sitting at the fire, pensively drawing on a cigarette. Imagine looking down and seeing a prosthetic leg, burning on the holy fire.

 

Then imagine, in what to my mind seemed microseconds, an explosion of conflict. Imagine a purple clad italian man with dreadlocks waving a hot coal in his tongs, sharp with rage. Imagine that mysterious man turning out to be a high up “christian” police officer.

 

The christian part kind of made me laugh. But, oh, to the rescue, two hindu police officers. I couldn’t understand what exactly they said to their partner that night, but I doubt it was out of compassion for Serat. Just imagine the P.R! This was going to get out of hand. You cant just fuck up a baba and a bunch of tourists in a public place I guess. If only they’d chosen a better place then it would have been just like usual. Just another beggar.

 

But thats what the tourists don’t see. You’ll never escape poverty completely in India, its too vast and desperate to be swept aside. But this new tourist industry is big, and like all things it is subservient to the baksheesh (bribe) economy that the police control with an iron fist. They decide who gets to beg in the profitable spots, and they collect a tax off every dollar you donate. And when some beggar fucks them around, well you guess what happens?

Leave a Comment

The Diahorrea Diaries

June 15, 2008 at 8:57 am (Travels)
Tags: , , , , , ,

 

Day 1.

 

I haven’t slept an iota, having been inches to a man whose main preoccuptation for the 18 hours was vomiting into various bags. My head, most of the way, was cruising out the window at a sedated 100km an hour, half in a form of sleep. From my bag came joint after joint. Gazing at India, flying by, a delirious, rich pallete of madness and animation.

 

A stop for Chai had an unexpected turn. One man on the bus was offering my friend 200 euros to participate in a trial for those with travellers diahorrea. The rest of that ride I sat in disbelief. My uncanny resistance to the demons of Indian food had for once forsaken me.

 

Its goa, and we’re fucked. Lights off, fan running slow. Now we’re both sick. Now we’re both fucked. I just felt this foreboding feeling of weakness, and then with unfathomable force, the lights are out.

 

Holy shit thats a lot of light. What is it, day 4 now?

 

Day 4.

 

Fuck man I’ve been living in a tomb, shitting fire and praying that guy comes down to collect it. I’m going for a ride on the motorbike. I’m sure another motorist with a joint hanging out their mouth wont raise too many eyebrows in this town.

 

Anjuna, years and years too late. The barren, tropical town is a collage of dodgy tourist outfits and clubs. What used to be a home to a hippy drop-out culture has become like what modern rock is to Jimi Hendrix. I’m riding the calm breeze before the storm. You can feel Goa’s throbbing chemical heart, but sometimes you cant see it. Church of the immaculate conception? Flowing, empty, fields. Fields and fields. Rickshaws. Pushers. Salesman. Hookers. I never did like stopping my bike.

 

Day 5.

 

Well, theres 2 guys from Sweden down there. One of them’s got a court order for their arrest hanging over their head, unfussed however he seems. Theres a bunch of fucking nutcase Australian’s in this place. Smoking hard, drinking like maniacs and beginning to draw up a comprehensive list of available ingestible chemicals to acquire for this, the opening of our new year. We must of spent the whole day playing the guitar and drums out here, not a care in the world, except perhaps the strangest care I’ve in recent days grown to have.

 

That night I was transfixed by every feedback my stomach gave me. Tonight the doctors arrive. They lay the deal down on our front porch table. 200 euros for your blood, piss, shit and, one, elegantly annotated diahorrea diary. 3 antibiotics and your done. I was midas, and though my midas touch was a less than appealing metaphor, it was nevertheless to yield gold.

 

The midas gold, the midas gold…. a startling mumble that would of appeared to anyone passing my bathroom. There was me, balanced cautious and determined, trying with unprecedented effort to yield. But there was me, defeated, red faced and full of frustration. And there, outside, 3 highly paid swiss doctors waiting patiently.

 

I still find it hard to write about the thought process that occurred when I stood up. I suppose the process began by looking down.

 

“Look too long into the abyss, and the abyss looks back into you” – Voltaire. What looked back was an opportunists curse, of the cruelest kind. That toilet was pre-filled by the most wretched, vile, hateful excrement one could imagine. 200 euros worth of it.

 

Theres 8 different faces, stone silent, standing as if ceremonious guards on the return of a lost citizen. And there stands me, awkwardly triumphant with my sealed container. “Excellent” muses one of the swiss doctors. “Do you want a beer?”.

 

Needless to say I sat and drank, and drank, and drank. Not for need of relief, but rather to drown the irrepressible laughter that was welling in my throat.

 

“Do you have diahorrea” she inquired with a childish grin. It was the Sweedish guy. I guess I understand why he took his time to muse upon that question. “Sometimes”, came his sudden thoughtfully spoken retort.

 

Yes, we indeed all have diahorrea sometimes. But yet so bizzare that I was to now write on it. The diahorrea diaries had begun.

 

Day 6.

 

“It came without volition or force,

  I ran like a madman over the porch,

  I came to sit down, mind set on focus

  Yet I sat overwhelmed, I was given no notice,

 

“ Shocked and bemused I did so enquire,

   What sequence of events did just transpire?,

   And what I am writing now, in poems to you,

   Is what left me fell not, but my friends, it flew”

 

Oh indeed. Oh indeed.

 

Day 7.

 

And the party is almost here. I almost forgot to mention that. The reason we are all set in this absurd scene is that we are waiting for the fabled Goa new years.

 

We are waiting for 2 days straight of relentless, mind bending psychedelic trance – mixed responsibly with a decidedly irresponsible amount of drugs. And we’re all fucking tripping already.

 

Day 8 (And, coincidently, the night of day 7)

 

This Colosseum esque, walled off stadium of lost inhibitions. This enclosed forest of psychedelic painted trees. This artificial, alien world of full spectrum colors wherein shadows cast a glow.

 

Its on like donkey kong. The vibrations are starting to well, the crowd is collecting, the excitement is infectious. My body has been on an ephemeral, cyclic dance trip for hours. The beat always feels like its moving somewhere. Its funny when you mistake the rocking of your ship for the sea.

 

I’m in a wander, drifting like a leaf on an electric breeze.  I’ve been walking for fucking ages. Two girls enter my vision, beautiful, but without the sharpness of beauty. A certain glow, as if enchanted, skipping careless. Time seemed to fall inward, and their image struck me deeply. I felt probably as a man would do if he were ever to step into the mystic woodland of elves.

 

Psychedelic-trance is liberating because its not really music at all in its traditional sense. It doesnt seek to draw you into a conclusion, to emotionally communicate, to intellectually communicate, or really to communicate at all. Its goal is quite the opposite of communication. Its goal, in relation to you, is to relentlessly draw the you from you. Its a community of the hypnotized, who gather to use music like a Zen master might use the bell. Psy-trance breaks down the sensical mind, the concerned, constrained operative mind – and allows for expression in a free form. Why we all love imagery of mushrooms, and elves, and psychedelic painted trees – is that they are all part of the dreaming realms. The other world. This is our way of leaving the old, mechanical world of “sign” behind.

 

At some point or another I managed to stumble back through thousands of people right back into my circle of friends. Most of which were absent, apparently on the unnervingly ironic grounds of diahorrea.

 

“WHERE THE FUCK AM I! WHERE…. THE…. FUCK…. OI GUYS… CAN… YOU…. (fascinated whispers now) fucckkk….. fuck….”

 

You know I always thought that cat tranquilizer was probably meant for cats. Then again, we never thought twice about taking from my ex-girlfriend’s dog’s vast supply of sedatives. I don’t want to apply double standards here.

 

Coming up on a poorly judged dose of that cat smack was our friend, who at this point was lying down to stare vacantly at the colored lights. Ketamine is probably best known amongst backpackers in India for one specific reason: you can buy it fucking anywhere, sealed, medically approved and over the counter. Oh, that and for quite a space of time it plunges you into a world completely disassociated from our own. Often distressing and chaotic, often rich with a tapestry of dreams. Entirely alien to anything else you’ll ever experience. The K-beast. One beast I myself thought was better left undisturbed.

 

I knew exactly where I was, though I couldn’t be entirely certain it was on this plane. That relentless audio thump was like a massaging tirade of waves, completely reducing my body to a blissful, disengaged vessel of hypnosis. I was, like my fellow astronauts of the conscious mind, tripped out and not coming back for hours to come.

 

First light was bearing witness to a landscape you’d grown so familiar too, but now took on an entirely different nature altogether. Lit up, we’d left the flurescent dream coloured night party and entered the more concrete world of the day. Well… maybe some of the security gaurds did, but we sure as hell didn’t. As far as I was concerned the only reality that existed was a magnificent series of colourful hallucinations projected sharply under my eyelids. The only other reality was that my body was moving, although I’m frightened to say I forgot about that quite some time ago.

 

And I think Goa forgot itself quite some time ago before that. Though in those walls, that fairytale land, we were dancing like wild monkeys – outside was a radically different world. Outside was a roadblock by the local police, ready to make their years bonus cheque off wealthy drugged up tourists. It was then I realized my best advice yet on India. Don’t stop your bike.

 

 

 

Leave a Comment