Update and some normal travel bitching

Well yesterday was much like the day before – curfew, demonstrations. No police/army in Thamel this time – I think they are pretty stretched elsewhere. Also, yesterday the demonstrators didn’t come inside the ringroad. A lot of the security presence the day before was surrounding the palace to keep demonstrators away from the King.

Anyway, it’s all same, same so I’m going to write about something else for a bit.

Bad mood

I’m in a bit of a grumpy mood today. I was like this early last week too. People have been saying it must be exciting/exhilarating. And it kind of is. But it’s also kind of stressful. Well, that seems pretty obvious, huh? But it’s the lack of information that’s stressful I think.

Early last week I was getting really fractious that no-one had replied to my emails since Friday. Then someone pointed out that it had been Easter bank holiday. Ah, right, it’s not that everyone’s ignoring me/everyone in the world has died/all emails are being intercepted by the palace. Phew!

Not that I was really thinking those things, but it’s very easy to enter a state of non-specific stress. Or displacement stress maybe. You don’t really know what you’re worrying about, but you just feel more stressed about little things than you would normally. And I’m maybe not the best person at realising I’m feeling like that.

Exhibit A – My keyring.

Look at this keyring. Do you want to know what’s on it?

1 swiss army knife (variety: Spartan, includes bottle opener, corkscrew and miniature tweezers, among other things.)

1 mini LED torch

1 thermometer

1 compas

Is this not the keyring of someone who likes to think of themselves as able to cope with anything?

Quick-eyed readers will, however, have noticed that there is no, ‘escape safely from civil unrest’ tool. Nor a ‘magically know exactly what’s going on, even in countries thousands of miles from home where you don’t speak the language’ device.

In my rucksack I also have a survival tin (containing, among other things, firelighting tools, a mini wiresaw blade, fishing line and weights…). If I get lost in the jungle (and I can remember my survival training) then I’ll be able to survive for weeks! I even have a survival blanket, iodine and para cord. (Para cord is like super-duper string that is the SAS’s answer to gaffer tape – they’ll all have a story of triumphing over impossible odds that contains the line ‘and all I had was a little bit of para cord…’)

How Tank Girl is that? What good are these things to me at the moment? No fucking good whatsoever!

It’s the uncertainty and lack of information which stresses you out. Everyone is in the same boat I suppose, even the Nepali people. But I don’t even speak the language. Someone suddenly starts shouting in the street, and you’ve no idea if they’re saying, ‘The Army are on their way’ or ‘Has anyone seen my brother?’ or ‘Sports socks, three pairs for a pound!’

You can’t read what’s happening – and it’s not just the language, it’s the nuances of everything.

Yesterday I was sitting having breakfast in a hotel restaurant in Thamel when an police van stopped outside. A police officer (older than all the kids with riot shields, looking important, but with a plaster across his cheek) came in to the hotel, spoke to someone (the manager?), everyone looking serious. A few minutes later someone is carried out from the hotel and put in the back of the police van. I couldn’t see who it was because lots of people had stopped and were watching, blocking the view.

My god, your intrepid blogger thought, I’m witnessing a political arrest! I asked the waiter what was happening, and he explained that it was a traveller who’d just got back from trekking and fallen ill – they were worried about him and no ambulances were running, so they called the police who were taking him to hospital. Stand down Sophia, you are not Kate Adie.

Another thing that’s isolating is, well, the isolation. If something like this was happening in the UK and I was in Edinburgh I would know things well before the news did. People would be phoning each other, passing on info. Jesus, if it was happening in Edinburgh I would know people involved in organising it. I’d be out demonstrating myself!

Here I’m not plugged into a network in the same way. And most of the westerners don’t really know what’s going on anyway. And let’s face it, I’m a bit of a grumpy bugger who doesn’t like lots of people anyway. Meeting people under these circumstances can be tricky.

You have to get yourself into that traveller mindset, where it’s OK to just strike up conversations with anyone. This is difficult, when you’re British. But even when you’ve overcome your natural distaste for initiating social exchanges, there’s the terrible risk that the person you start talking to will be awful, and then you’re stuck!

Let me amuse you with the tales of some of the people I have met so far.

Attempt to initiate conversation A

The second day I was here I decided I should start talking to people (the first day I mainly slept). Sometimes it can take days before the need to talk to people overcomes one’s reserve, but I decided to grit my teeth and get it over with. I said, ‘Hi, have you been here long?’ to the woman on the next table in the Pilgrim’s bookshop café. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Have you been here long?’ I repeated. ‘I no understand you!’ (this was not said in a very friendly manner, but I soldiered on) ‘How long have you been in Kathmandu?’ I tried, with a smile. ‘Why!’ ‘Errr, I was going to ask about places to visit.’ ‘I don’t understand! I don’t understand what you say!’ ‘Err, well, OK then. Thanks.’ She was reading a newspaper in English! I felt suitably rebuffed.

Attempt to initiate conversation B

I tried to strike up a conversation with a guy on the next table in another café. He had dreads and looked alright. I thought this was promising. Unfortunately he was French and spoke about as much English as I do French. We battled on, with goodwill on both sides, but it’s difficult to discuss a complex political situation using only regular verbs in the present tense.

It was a shame because he was nice and called me ‘charming Scottish girl’ when he left. OK, so I confess, he was cute.

ATIC C

I have already told you about the hippy woman at my guest house and her healing and finding herself. She’s alright actually. But someone whose conversation is peppered with vague references to ‘energy’ is not the companion I would choose to sit commentating a revolution with.

This is the thing. I’m not a journalist, but I am a media professional at heart. I want to be analysing everything and swapping information. Not balancing my shakras, as if that will help.

ATIC D

There’s this Canadian guy who hangs out in my guest house. He doesn’t stay there, but he’s mates with the owner. He’s spent a lot of time in Nepal in the last few years and got married to a Nepalese woman last Monday.

‘I run an NGO’ he said to me, portentously, when I asked him what he was doing here. He’s about 27. It’s a small orphanage, apparently. He’s learnt Nepali and now speaks English with a pronounced Nepali accent. I find this very affected. He has a tendency to see his every utterance as profound. He’s been playing backgammon and chess a lot with his Dad (who came for the wedding) and he wins every game and he plays to win every game.

He’s obviously the saviour of the Nepali people. And a far better person than all those superficial westerners who come here and don’t get married and run orphanages. Because clearly what one of the world’s poorest countries needs is inexperienced Western kids with no sense of humour to come here and save them.

I don’t like him, can you tell? Let’s hope they don’t read this.

ATIC E

Three Aussies, a girl and two boys. I knew it was a mistake as soon as one of them opened his mouth and slurred a greeting. They were typical Aussie outdoor types, just been off doing some mega mountain-climbing expedition and had been celebrating their return to civilization since 2pm.

They’d ordered food before I joined them, the slurring guy was attacking his veg and potato but not touching his meat. ‘Are you not eating your chicken?’ I asked, to make conversation. ‘I can’t bloody find it!’ he exclaimed, looking in consternation at his plate. A short while later he fell off his chair.

ATIC F

A girl just tried talking to me in the New Orleans café. I think she was probably American. There’s supposed to be wireless internet here, but I can’t get it to work. I was talking to two journalists on the next table, ‘cos they have got it working.

The American girl interrupted to tell me that she’d had trouble at the internet cafe across the street just now, ‘maybe there’s problems, maybe the King’s doing it’. Eventually I lost patience with trying to re-explain and her keeping saying the same thing. ‘I don’t think the King has specially made my wifi not work when theirs is working!’ I pointed out. ‘Oh, yeah, guess not’ she said.

She didn’t really take the hint because 20 mins later she leaned over and said, ‘Do you know when the curfew’s going to end?’ ‘Today, you mean?’ I said. ‘It’s ending today?’ She asked. ‘Err no, but today’s curfew is ending at 6pm’ ‘So you don’t know when they are going to stop doing the curfew?’ Errrr, where do you start? Try asking the King love! It’s not going to stop ‘til the situation is over, and who knows when that’s going to be?

‘It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’ she said, ‘Why can’t the King just stop the curfew?’ Oh dear. Just how stupid are you?

ATIC G

On Saturday a load of us were in the New Orleans, and everyone had got sick of talking about the situation, 'cos you can only get so far and you've said everything and we don't know what's going to happen. So we ended up doing normal traveller chats - stories of dodgy toilets and nightmare bus journeys, etc.

We ended up talking about the beds here (often very hard) and that horrible moment when you've finally got to a hotel room after days of travel and you sink gratefully onto the bed, and it doesn't sink. And this heavily bearded Canadian traveller, fresh with all the insights leaving North America for the first time has given him, and convinced that no-one else has had them yet, said, 'Oh, it's such a hard life being a traveller! We're complaining about hard beds and there's people here going to bed hungry!'

Yeah, mate, I get it. But they'll be poor whether I'm sleeping on a hard mattress or a soft one. We know, but we can't talk about it all the time, or we'll go mad! And frankly, I don't see what you're doing about it, travelling the world on Daddy's money.

Apart from that I have met some cool people. A lovely older Belgian couple. Strangely there’s millions of Belgians here – not like it’s a problem, ‘damn those pesky Belgians everywhere!’, but normally you go travelling and never meet any – I’ve met about ten since I’ve been here and had other groups pointed out to me. Maybe they like the mountains – it’s like the opposite of Belgium.

There’s also, millions of Canadians – or maybe the yanks all have the sense to pretend to be Canadian. Lots of French, especially at my guest house, which is owned by a Swiss-french guy. Loads of Israelis. And I’ve met a nice Finnish girl, who sounds Irish, ‘cos she went to college there. And a lovely German guy who’s a bartender in Berlin and a lot less po-faced traveller type than most of them.

So in general, while it’s kind of easy to strike up conversations, there is this fear of getting stuck talking to someone awful. And a lot of the people here either don’t speak loads of English or are unreflective outdoor types, wide-eyed gappers, or po-faced mid-twenties Canadians. And I’m a grumpy cow. Or I am today.

And now I need to go and look up information about embroidery machines and write articles about sportswear for Liam. It’s very odd to be still working in all the middle of this. At least it gives me something to do.