Here's some excerpts from the diary I kept, recently unearthed from the dust, when I was in Nepal in the winter of 1980.



"Hiked down to Jomosom today from Muktinath. Very windy in the gorge-almost knocked me over a couple of times, well, several times. I was constantly leaning into the wind, scurrying over the smooth stones.

I stopped a lot today coming down the upper valley, watching the clouds and light change in that fantastic basin. I thought about how I should have spent the day climbing to the pass or a peak for some cathartic experience (writers note: it was mid January, probably a good thing I didn't try that) For a while I was rather bummed out thinking how lazy I was not undertaking that, especially hearing all the other trekkers talking about going over to Manang.

Then I thought of Mathiassen and his writing about being in Inner Dolpo and not seeing a snow leopard or having massive visionary experiences. But then, he realized that it just wasn't that way all that much. The experiences of your life add up and at the time you may not think it's much but it's going, life is progressing.

I came up here and I saw these beautiful mountains and people and these temples and the Miracle of the Fire and Water. And though you may not have seen the snow leopard, you felt a presence there and saw what it sees and walked in a high land where the sun burns bright and hard. If you saw this and felt something in you wonder, that's what such trips are about and it really doesn't need to be that you climbed to the top of such & such, it is good that you wondered, at yourself and the strange sights and manners of a world unlike the one you came from."



"...Ah, eating. Going to the New Style and Chi and Pie and the Kathmandu Pie Shop. This place really is a food trip. Get all kinds of odd balls in the Pie Shops. A junky sits at a table looking pretty ragged and pasty and doesn't eat anything, just talks out loud to himself or if someone asks him what he wants, he rants on in some mysterious monologue about something only he can follow.

He sits in a corner mashing up some hash for an hour, puts it on the table and forgets about it while he searches for the chillum in his bag, muttering away like some demented Santa Claus. He finally collapses against the seat back from the exhaustion of his search and stares hollow-eyed at the ceiling.

Meanwhile the people sitting nearby are having a discussion about over-the-hill junkies; how some of them get violent or die of repetitive epileptic fits (is that part of the amphetimine series???). Occasionally they shake his tree which he answers with a strange esoteric diatribe and they look on like clinicians, apparently feeling so wise and better somehow than this poor soul. I have an urge to go over and slap them all across their smug and shiny bright faces, down here playing at slumming. I only hope someday it becomes real for them, and then we'll see how snappy they really are."



" I get up in the morning and pull on my clothes and wash my face and go downstairs and ask for porridge and black tea and settle back looking outside at the passing scene in Pig Alley. The freaks and the Nepalese passing by. Produce being taken to market. Big sacks of potatoes or beans or onions on either end of a pole being toted uphill by a Nepalese who's rhythm of walk bounces with the sacks. The newly slaughtered meat is carted up in the morning from the river, carts and rickshaws full of hacked up quarters and sides, pots full of entrails, occasionally falling off into the open sewer of Pig Alley only to be tossed back on again.

A French woman lives across the alley and she always comes across in the morning and looks in the hotel for someone, muttering away in French, never finding whoever she is looking for, her face knotted in masses of worry wrinkles around the center between her eyes so that her face always looks like a mass of radiating lines with big black circles under her eyes.

I asked the young man who works at the hotel who she is and he tells me she had lived there for years, having been married to a Newari man, but then divorced, Hindu-style, so they don't live together. Every day she wanders the streets looking for him. She is wasting away because her family in France sends her too little money. The hotel across the street lets her stay, though she doesn't pay. They have taken pity.

He goes to the window and watches her as she goes up the hill to Durbar square. Someday, maybe soon, she will die. There are blessings in all things, don't you know?"



"An interesting side note. Saw a very western-looking sadhu doing a chaulk drawing of Shiva, Vishnu and Christ on the cross yesterday, the latter picture pretty unusual for Asia. Today the Christ had been totally obliterated but the Shiva and Vishnu were in perfect condition."



"There's a Nepali here who walks about with a bamboo cane and lots of reading material of assorted sizes with no bindings so that it looks like he is carrying a huge cauliflower of paper under his arm. He's always dressed in green with a green Newari cap with some silver metals on it. He has a meticulously kept mustache and strange attractive eyes and always Namastes touching his forehead to me when he meets me.

Once he handed me a note scribbled on a Yak Cigarette package addressed to the World Traveller. The body of the text was illegible but appears to contain a religious motif and he signed it with his name (illegible) and after it, the title 'King of the World.'

I've met the King of the World and he lives in Kathmandu."