Excerpt
In 1962, Nepal, a country lying just north of India and a trifle west of Bhutan and Sikkim, had only recently accepted foreigners. The King had just deposed his Prime Minister and Parliament, so public tensions were a little high. Even after the coup in Laos we would still be at the edge of the action, one might say. It seemed the typically adventurous setting we were always falling into.
I was excited by the idea of living in Kathmandu, for Id read many novels in those lonely nights as a refugee in Bangkok waiting for Johns release from the Pathet Lao. One of the few stories that stayed in my mind was The Mountain is Young by Han Suyin, read long before I had any idea that wed arrive in Nepal before Christmas, barely a year later. Not only was Han Suyins storytelling superb, but her descriptions of the background made me want to rush to the nearest plane and fly there. Such a potpourri of things Id always loved jungles and high mountains, with an overlay of Eastern cultures suitably peopled with characters from a modern Scheherazade tale.
The long flight from Washington D.C. to Calcutta was uneventful, but once we reached the sub-continent of India, life entered a strange new dimension of unreality.
On arrival in Calcutta, we had to survive a wretched night in a decrepid airport Transit House. The dank warehouse-like room was peopled with dozens of enormous rats scurrying about an open drain in the dark bathroom. Jonathan, our toddler, was intrigued and had to be barricaded in the bedroom. I was totally spooked and remained on the bed!
Next morning was little better and though I did manage to swallow my misgivings on initial sighting of the ancient Indian Airline Dakota DC-3 that was to carry us over the passes to Kathmandu, both my six-year-old son, Christopher, and I were completely undone by the planes unworldly movements once we were airborne.
The plane was not pressurized and so flew at an altitude of only 7000 feet causing the aircraft to surge up and down like a mad yo-yo yanked by the afternoon thermals above the sun-baked plains of Bengal below.
This also, was not a dimension of reality I could enjoy.
After taking off from Calcutta, the plane flew to Patna in Bihar. If we were fortunate, the pass to Kathmandu was clear and we did not need to spend time at the airport. But during the monsoons, heavy clouds frequently made it impossible to navigate the pass and locate Katmandus airport, appropriately named Gaucher (cow pastures). Wed been warned by friends, that in this case, passengers could sit for hours in the blistering, hot confines of this rudimentary Indian airport, watching with increasing uneasiness while Royal Nepal or Indian Airline pilots knocked back a few of their special teas as they checked the dubious skies. (These teas, our reliable friends also informed us, were usually local beer.)
If, after waiting for an hour or so, the weather did not clear, wed be driven into town to try again the next day after enduring the night at a small, dreary hostelry. However, if the weather did clear, we could only pray the pilots were sober enough to make the necessary navigational checks en route. In the year before our arrival, there were three crashes; in one incredible case it was the search plane looking for the first that had crashed!
When flying in DC3s over the pass into Kathmandu most people were resignedly fatalistic. So just imagine how I, a white-knuckled flyer even on Pan American, clutched the children as we plunged across India towards the foothills of the Himalayas.
As we flew higher and northwards, the turbulence subsided. I grimly peered out the window and noticed the plains changing to jungle. This jungle, a wilderness belt in which malaria, tigers, and rhinos flourished, quite as much as the Himalayan peaks in the North, had much to do with Nepal remaining isolated and independent.
The jungle in turn slipped back as the first upheavals of mountains lifted up, ridge upon ridge, higher and higher, each cut more deeply with narrow dark gorges and valleys. Gradually, near the tops of some, a few Nepalese farms and brilliant orange-colored houses could be seen, clinging precariously on the slopes, surrounded by rice terraces that mounted the hillsides like miniature staircases. Finally we were approaching Kathmandu valley.
Then as the DC-3 lurched over the last pass we looked up and suddenly, through the now clear skies, rose the icy and glittering lotuses of the high Himalayas. It was easy to believe these were the abodes of the gods. As with travelers, prophets, and adventurers of earlier centuries after the impact of relieved wonder, we were dazzled by their dramatic size and beauty.
Han Suyins book, The Mountain Is Young, is brilliant autobiographic fiction a tale of love and adventure in the high Himalayas. But beyond the story line, shed written passionate descriptions of the landscape of this remote kingdom. As we swooped down to the grassy airfield, I saw with almost a shock of recognition, the medieval city of Kathmandu lying below in its cluttered saucer of temples, helter-skelter red brick houses and great white palaces; all of this rimmed on the North by the inverted ice cups of the Himalayas.
There in that exotic country where Buddha was born and where, on a clear morning Mt Everest rose majestic and close along the eastern horizon, we were to dwell for the next five years.
In the early Sixties, Nepal seemed a fairy tale kingdom with libretto by Gilbert and Sullivan and script by Vistavision International.
Though time has transformed Kathmandu - with its curious, tiered temples, with its fields of rice beginning behind the single row of buildings fronting the dirt roads and those unlit, muddy streets full of people with lanterns by night and beasts by day memories of that city remain as nostalgic and enchanting as any fairy tale.
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