Incredible Stories

So I thought about it and I DO have some incredible stories. All have been piecemealed into my almost thirty years of BIM newsletters as they happened but never accumulated in one place. As I idly mulled over my many trips I recalled numerous incredible periods.  

         My first trip to Nepal occurred very randomly, to use a popular word, in 1985. I spent almost 3 months at Gurujii’s ashram after the huge religious mela that takes place on the dry riverbed of the Ganges in the winter, pre-monsoon season. Gurujii promised me we could go travelling together as I had never seen any of India but for the ashram and New Delhi. Gurujii then began a construction project so I packed up some of my belongings and camera and took a lovely narrow-gauge steam train down to Varanasi. After photographing for a few days

I was coming back to my hotel in the back of a cycle rickshaw – from my book.

A day or so later I was in a bicycle rickshaw and as we crossed the intersection of a small muddy street I looked up and saw a signboard for Indian Airlines. I ordered the rickshaw to stop and went into the office. The clerk greeted me and I asked where they flew. He said Delhi, Lucknow, a few other places and also Kathmandu. “Kathmandu? Where is that?” I asked. “That is the capital of Nepal.” he replied. “How much does it cost to fly there?” “$73 one way.” This was beyond exotic. This was like going to another planet. I immediately pulled out a hundred dollar bill and purchased a ticket for the next day’s flight.

… On my third day in Kathmandu I wandered down a street I hadn’t been on before, Pako Road. ‘Mom’s Health Food Restaurant’ the sign said. I couldn’t believe it. It was my meal time so I went in. Corn flat breads, home made ice cream, purified water, and MUNG BEANS. This was heaven. I ordered and ordered and ordered and then went up the narrow stairway to the upstairs loft dining area to await my food. Only one other diner was in the small room, a very attractive woman. Our eyes met. I asked if I could sit at her table. We traveled together throughout Nepal, India and Kashmir over the next three months.

Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), English dramatist, poet.

End book excerpt That was my first trip to Nepal. I trekked alone in the Annapurna region of Central Nepal as Tanya had pre-purchased a trek and a river rafting trip. The incredible part of this trip with Tanya was going to Kashmir and then Ladakh for over a month. This was the last time Kashmir was freely open for travel before essentially being invaded by Indian troops attempting to prevent the Kashmiris from seceding from India. I always called this trip as the one where ‘away went away’. I was ready to return ‘home’ after 4 months but then we added in another almost 2 months with Kashmir and Ladakh then Delhi and I was stretched. I returned to the US a foreigner and have remained one ever since. I was homeless also. When Gurujii and I arrived at JFK airport in the spring of 1985 he asked me who was going to pick me up and where I was going to go. I just turned my palms skyward and Gurujii, realizing my mendicant state, invited me to stay with him and his then chief disciple at a ‘Temple’ they had in a crumbling, half Orthodox Jewish, half Haitian, New York suburb.

         Of my eight other trips to Nepal, at least three have had major upheavals. In 1989 the beginning of the overthrow of the monarchy took place and I was trapped in my hotel for a week before getting out and heading off to the Everest region trekking. By the end of that trek “I had been above twelve thousand feet for three weeks, had walked two hundred fifty miles and had climbed forty-thousand vertical feet.”

Returning in 1990 without major incident, I spend almost three weeks above 13,000’, a week above 16,000’.

         In 1999 I got fired from a property manager job on a thousand acre forest preserve in the San Bernardino Mountains and was given a $3000 severance. I had just returned from a month long trip to Nepal for vacation only two months before but on that trip had gotten a Hindu astrology reading in which the astrologer assured me I would be travelling a lot in the following year. I did not see how that would be possible as I was confined to my property and was at the time on my only vacation. Boy was I wrong! After moving off the property in the 3 days requested, after living there for 3 years, I was back crashing in my friend David’s basement in Laguna Beach wondering what the heck to do. I thought of the astrology reading and said to myself, “I might as well buy another ticket to Kathmandu.” So I did. I called up my little Pakistani travel agent in LA and she asked me if I wanted to leave that day as there was still time. I said no, tomorrow was good and told her I’d pick up my ticket at her office on the way to LAX. I packed in an hour for what turned out to be a six month trip. So off I flew to KTM on Thanksgiving Day 1999.

         A few days later I got an email saying my mother died. She was 86 years old and had been ailing and I had made two trips to Florida from California to visit her in the months before and after my Nepal vacation. I went up to the famous Monkey Temple in Kathmandu at the urging of my Buddhist hotel owner and lit 108 butter lamps for my mother. After hanging out in Kathmandu for a month, I thought I would travel down to India for the winter so I booked a flight to Varanasi. A day later the Indian Airlines flight 814 hijacking to Kandahar took place and Nepal, the origination of the flight, was in turmoil. I attempted to get my flight but was re-booked on another airline to New Delhi then to Varanasi, where I finally alit. There I met a German woman and we traveled together for several months including almost a month in the tropical Andaman Islands. When Karin went back to Germany, finally, after many adventures, I attempted to get back to Nepal as it was warming up and trekking season was starting. Nepal was STILL closed to international air traffic so I booked a Jeep taxi with another couple and took a 13 hour drive to Kathmandu.

         Boy, did it feel good to get back there – like home. MANY more adventures ensued with me leaving my then new Japanese girlfriend Yuki at the Bangkok airport in May after our having taken a superb 2 week trek in the Everest Region together, having a full moon evening at 16,000’ in a small Sherpa village. I arrived back in Laguna Beach after six months away, took an uninvited surprise visit to Japan where I stayed three weeks with Yuki and then went off to the hot springs in Death Valley for many weeks of camping. Boy, was that Hindu astrologer right.

         In 2001 I flew into Nepal and was just planning to get a ticket to fly into the Everest Region and I began to get a queasy feeling I had never had before. In the mornings when I would meditate I would seem to get a message that I should leave the country. Initially treating it as some irrational inner fear, I ignored the message to leave. Finally, in exasperation, I threw myself backwards on my bed after meditating saying, “OK God. If you want me to leave I will. Just guide me and I’m not going to think about it anymore.” I soon found myself down at the airline office where I changed my reservations to leave within a day or so and I returned to the US after less than two weeks away. Days after I left the Crown Prince of Nepal shot most of the Royal Family and himself and the entire country was in lockdown for MONTHS.

         There was also the time in 1989 where I attempted to marry into the Nepali Royal family as I met a widow at Gurujii’s ashram. That cost me numerous 20 and 30 hour bus trips around Nepal before I finally got to Kathmandu having been told to “leave off this business of trying to marry Chandra.” It seemed like a good idea at the time.

         And I was trapped in my hotel and tourist neighborhood of Kathmandu for a week or so with a political struggle going on another year.

         Oh, and another saga. I was back living in David’s basement in Laguna in 2007 otherwise broke and homeless when a friend I knew from Mammoth Lakes encouraged me to apply for a camp maintenance job. So off I went cleaning bathrooms and emptying garbage cans at age 65 and I was the youngest member of the staff. I had an ephinany one morning when I looked at myself in the mirror of a crumby camp bathroom with a rag in one hand and a spray bottle of Windex in the other and said to myself, “You know, I never thought it would turn out this way.” [Ivy League and prep school graduate, former senior computer network designer]

         At the end of the summer my then girlfriend from Los Angeles asked me what I was going to do and I said, “Oh, I guess I’ll go off camping in Death Valley for the winter.” She said, “Why don’t you come down to Los Angeles and camp out with me.” So I managed to fit my ‘stuff’ into her 450 sq. ft. pied-à-terre and I slowly went broke again, to the point Luanne would give me her debit card to ride my bike down to the Whole Foods several blocks away to buy kale and mung beans and some such. Then out of the blue my long term friend Jody emailed me a notice for an open casting call at a commercial acting agency in LA for the next day. I walked in, immediately connected with the agency owner before even delivering my 15 second audition, and they signed me as a commercial actor three weeks later as I wanted to wait for an astrologically auspicious moment. Two days later one of the agency directors sent me to a big audition down in Santa Monica. The day after that he called and told me I’d been ‘booked’ for the ad which turned out to be IBM’s huge showpiece commercial that started running at the Master’s golf tournament every year.

         About a week later I showed up on the set with a gaggle of other actors, all who seemed to know what they were doing, and when my turn came I stood on a line and stared directly into a camera lens the size of a pie plate. I was given a line to say, the cameras rolled, “cut!”, and the director yells at me at the top of his lungs. I had carefully researched this guy, done his horoscope and knew EXACTLY where he was coming from. I used my all-time best line for this type of situation, “Yes”, for the answers to his very rude questions such as, “Are you going to listen to me?”, “Are you going to follow my direction.”

         I finally got through the first line, and went on to the second, “Systems that allow carrots to tell truck drivers how fresh they are”, demonstrating the effect technology was having on simple businesses such as farming and food distribution. I had finally warmed up, the director concluded with a “Great”, the only one of the day from him, I turned out to be one of only a few actors chosen for the final commercial, and six weeks later I went to the mail box and pulled out 5 checks totaling $16,000. I immediately called up Laila, the little Pakistani travel agent and booked a flight to Kathmandu. I offered to pay for Luanne’s flight also but it would have required her to end her job. Here the poor girl had worked EVERY DAY as a nurse for 42 years with nothing but regular vacations and she was stuck on working until she maxed her Social Security. She calculated later she got $9 per month more than she would have. She got screwed anyway because as soon as she turned 65 a few months later her employer cut her hours and dropped her health coverage. It probably actually cost her money to go to work for that last year and a half. So, off I flew to KTM again.

And there are also many other things which Carlos did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.

        

To recap, 30% of my trips to Nepal have been tumultuously unexpected and adventure-filled AND I totally missed the 2015 earthquake and the aftermath from which many never returned at all and seven US citizens died. My main takeaway – STAY FLEXIBLE.