Magic Bus (32 page)

‘Hope was the casualty,' says Penny.

In August 1969, she was at Woodstock. She helped to set up the music festival's main stage, laid in stocks of muesli, collected bread and milk from Max Yasgur. She watched the Hindu
swami
Satchidananda, seated in white robes on the big stage, give the opening prayer invocation. She listened to John Sebastian sing ‘I Had a Dream' and Jimi Hendrix play ‘Star-Spangled Banner'. She sang along to ‘Marrakech Express' with half a million other kids. She slipped on the mud while taking Janis Joplin to the stage and played out the rest of the supreme sixties feelgood celebration with a broken toe.

Within months, Hendrix, Joplin and Jim Morrison of The Doors were dead. Alcohol abuse finally caught up with Jack Kerouac, killing him in Florida. Ken Kesey ‘left literature behind' to move to a blueberry farm in Oregon. The hippie vibe was knocked off key and many heard its requiem.

That bitter winter, Penny and Orrin – pop painter, performance artist and her ‘final and best husband' – picked up sticks and split the States to join the thousands following the trail across Asia.

‘I remember the sun shining on the water paddies and the mountains reflected in the lake,' Penny says to me, her voice full of emotion. ‘The houses had peacock windows and pumpkin roofs. At night when the oil-lamps were lit, the mountains were clear and sharp against the sky. I'd read my
Hobbit
. I felt I'd arrived in Middle Earth. Nepal was paradise on earth.'

She continues both holding my hand and staring at the ice-white clouds. Only then do I realize that the clouds haven't moved, that they are the Himalayas rising above the road ahead of us.

‘Our days passed in a haze of beauty,' she sighs.

Their first stop in Nepal was Pokhara. An image of cool alpine fastness had sustained them along the dusty 6,000-mile journey from disillusionment and Istanbul (by way of the Auroville ashram in Pondicherry). Penny and Orrin wanted to swim in Pokhara's highland lake.

‘We rowed a
dungaa
out into the middle of Phewa Tal,' she tells me, intoxicated by the memory.
Dungaas
are leaky, flat-bottomed, barge-like rowing boats. ‘Another boat was returning to the village full of wildflowers. I was wearing a pair of ridiculous little white sockettes. I'd saved them in the bottom of my pack for this special occasion. The boatman saw them and called out in English, “Flowers! Flowers for the lady!” In exchange for my socks, he filled our boat with blooms.' Penny is laughing but there are tears in her eyes. ‘Later, when we were alone, we lay down on our floating floral bed and popped our corks.'

The road rises above the Indian plain and into dense, subtropical foothills. Our Magic Bus shudders to a stop at a village on the lip
of a steep ravine backed by grey stone cliffs. The passengers step down to buy paper cones of peanuts and cheeseballs from a huddle of bamboo stalls. A flock of bulbuls wheel above their tin roofs and the setting sun. I smell fried cumin, coriander and woodsmoke, each aroma caught in a separate layer of cool air. I adjust my focus from India's heat and crush, reach for clarity. Angular men lash to our roof rack heavy hands of tiny green bananas and a goat. I buy Penny a cup of fragrant milk tea.

As evening falls, the bus edges around steep hillsides of terraced fields. We turn north at Narayangadh and climb high above the Trisuli, a tributary of the Ganges. Nepal's main north–south road – a twenty-mile dirt ribbon between plain and plateau – is knotted with heavy traffic. The monsoon rains have washed away much of the embankment and, in the half-light, trucks inch around cavernous pot-holes and cottage-sized boulders which have crashed down from the upper slopes. Drivers stretch out beneath their stranded lorries, repairing gearboxes by torchlight. Mechanics drag jacks and tools between the breakdowns. Penny and I lean together against the bus's violent motion like drunken sailors, trying to keep ourselves on an even keel, numbed by the tortuous ride, transfixed by the glacial blue river churning hundreds of feet beneath us. Here and there, the twisted remains of the crash barrier poke above the current. The goat bleats in terror.

Around midnight, we shudder into Mugling, a
daal bhaat
-and-prostitute stop for long-distance drivers. The Nepali passengers file off the bus for another security check. Our six-hour drive has already doubled in duration. Now it stops altogether because of the curfew.

The night is black and moonless. Headlights sweep across sleeping faces in dozens of trucks and buses. A tea shop owner snores behind his refrigerator. A slender teenager in a modest pleated
fariya
draws near to my side, brushing her back against me. When I step away, she moves on, accosting two young drivers for a cigarette. Dogs bark at every new vehicle that squeals into town. Penny groans, ‘I don't remember this place.'

Dawn reveals
himal
peaks above us. Our promised 4 a.m. departure
slips away, the driver sleeping on across the front seats. Two hours later, the conductors manage to wake him. He pushes back his bandanna and waves a stick of incense over the steering wheel. A minute later, we are off, horn blaring, music wailing, the patient passengers stretching themselves awake. The boys run forward to pay tolls, call out to girls, hammer on the metal body to stop and collect more fares. Only at army checkpoints do they snap off the tape player and fall silent.

The bus turns west to follow the deep valleys of the Trisuli and fast-flowing Marsyangdi rivers. Curved terraces of rice step up to hilltops of gum and bottlebrush trees spun in fine morning mist. Ears of corn dry on the balconies of three-storey Baahun and Chhetri farmhouses. Women draw water in humble thatched Tamang and Magar hamlets. Spacious new houses made of Chinese bricks belong to Gurkhas retired from the British or Indian armies. Into this landscape of sixty different ethnic and caste groups tripped the Intrepids, too many of them disregarding the proprieties of class and race in sheer stoned incomprehension.

An hour later, the road lifts into the broad Seti valley. Beyond an upland of tree-lined mustard fields rise the Annapurnas. Nowhere else on earth do mountains climb to such a height in such a short distance. Machhapuchare, the razor-edged ‘Fishtail', seems to erupt from the plateau, only twenty miles to the north and filling the skyline. I don't want to drop my eyes back to earth, especially in the dirty expanse of chaos at Pokhara's public bus park.

We catch a taxi to Lakeside and, as Penny did almost forty years before, walk down to the shore. The morning is sparkling clear. The altitude magnifies the mountains, exaggerating their size and colour: the frost-white of the snow, the vast grey flanks, the luminous light and stainless sky.

‘This way,' she says, leading me around Phewa Tal, between the trees and away from the houses.

In a forest of oaks and evergreens, she lays down her cane, then strips off her purple embroidered shift and sarong. I avert my eyes but, when I glance back, she's smiling at me, striking a carefree
pose, lacing a marigold into her hair. She slips naked into the water, gasps at the shocking cold, paddles away from the shore. I find a stone
chautara
resting platform under a gnarled banyan tree. In the distance I hear the tinkling of temple bells.

As I watch, Penny's loose, white skin seems to tighten and shimmer beneath the surface. The years slip away with each stroke. The ripples ruffle the reflection of the Himalayas as they must have when she and Orrin first swam together in their new-found paradise. At once I understand Hesse's words that the East ‘was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul'.

Penny is about one hundred yards out when she starts to laugh.

‘It still tastes of ice,' she calls back to me. ‘Of new ice and old, old earth. What a gas.'

Nepal was closed to foreigners until 1951. The wheel wasn't seen in Pokhara until the first DC-3 landed in 1952. No road linked Kathmandu to the outside world until 1956. Before then, VIPs had to be carried to the capital by palanquin. The king's cars were portered from India by teams of coolies. In 1962, the US Peace Corps arrived in the medieval kingdom, digging tube wells, dispensing smallpox vaccine and opening Aunt Jane's, the first restaurant in the Himalayas serving milkshakes and apple pie. About the same time, the first tourists dropped into nirvana, and changed it for ever. Every morning, a ten-year-old boy named Ranji met new arrivals at Kathmandu's Royal Hotel – one of only four in the country – and offered to be their guide. As payment, he asked for an English dictionary, which the tourists bought for him at the capital's only foreign book shop. Each evening, Ranji then sold the same dictionary back to the store. Six years later, Ranji – the country's original independent travel guide – fell in with a stoned band of space cadets and became the first Nepali to die from a hallucinogen overdose.

Four decades later, many of Nepal's 400,000 annual visitors are smoking joints at Pokhara's German Bakery. Next door at the Boomerang Kosher Restaurant, Israeli girls order French toast and agree it is impossible to stick to the Atkin's Diet in Asia. A Jamaican in dreadlocks on a mountain bike sails past vanloads of trekkers heading off for the Annapurna Circuit. Tibetan refugees, displaced by the Chinese and resident in Nepal for a generation, sell Native American prayer wheels and Buddhist
thangka
paintings outside the Holistic Barber Salon. A child presses into my hand a flyer for Oktoberfest at the Fulbari Resort (‘an unlimited free flow of San Miguel') and whispers, ‘Hashhhhh, Mister?'

The outside world's intrusions do not end at Zorba's Restaurant
and the edge of town. In the mountains, moraines crumble on trekkers' ‘highways'. Foothills have been denuded of trees, in part to fuel hungry guests' cooking fires. At Khumbu's Saturday markets, only lodge-owners can afford to buy eggs, passing on the hefty price to mountaineers. The few short decades of tourism have turned much of Nepal into a vulnerable Himalayan theme park.

Alone, I hurry out of the laid-back holiday haven, past earthen-walled farmhouses transformed into cafés by new front porches, following the lake's gentle curve into an embrace of hills. I have no illusions about finding the remains of the ‘real' Nepal. I don't kid myself that I'm travelling on the edge. After the long journey from India, I – like most travellers – choose not to trek to the far western Humla district, where four out of every ten children die before their fifth birthday. Instead, I settle on the short climb to Sarangkot, a viewpoint on the ridge north of the lake.

Beyond a chestnut forest, the garden walls are hedged with thorny spurge. Mustard fields are lined with flowering cacti. At a painted marker, I fork away from the cool water and climb a stony path between hillside hamlets. Half a dozen children chewing sugar-cane sticks follow me with their light-golden eyes. Pots of lentils boil in single-room houses with mismatched windows. A farmer clears the weeds from a vegetable patch. At a tea stall, I pause beneath posters of Hindi cinema stars and the god Saraswati to look back at the green terraced shores. Sailboats drift across the glittering lake. Shadows of hang-gliders slide over the rice paddies. Ahead of me, razor-edged Machhapuchare is hidden from view by the hill.

‘May I walk with you?' asks a man.

‘Thank you. I'm not looking for a guide,' I say.

‘I want to practise my English. It's a two-hour walk to the top and the paths can be confusing for you.'

I walk on. Rishi stubs out his Yak cigarette and clings to my side, asking the usual questions. Where am I from? Where am I staying? How do I like his town? His country? My freedom?

‘My freedom?' I repeat. This isn't a usual question.

He spits at the undergrowth before answering me. ‘To walk anywhere. To travel anywhere.'

‘I'm not looking for a guide,' I say again, pushing ahead.

‘This way,' he says, indicating the obvious path. He falls into step behind me as I climb through thickets of rhododendron and laurel, their waxy leaves glistening with the last brush of dew. His slippers flip-flop in the dust. After a hundred steep yards, he calls after me, ‘On television last night I saw a man being arrested in London.' His English is fluent and confident. ‘The police treated him with dignity and I thought, yes, that is correct. But in Nepal, if a policeman catches a thief, the first thing he does is slap, slap, give me a hundred rupees. I have done it myself. I beat the thieves because I thought that's what you do.'

I glance back at Rishi's compact build, his sharp features, his grave, sunken eyes. His manner is assured, but I have no wish to subject myself to his droning patter. We walk a dozen more steps before he adds, ‘But the worst thing is when you have the chance to kill someone after you have taken him.'

I stop in my tracks, alarmed. If this is a sales pitch, then it's very effective.

‘Don't be so surprised,' shrugs Rishi. ‘I'm a soldier.'

Nepal is a yam between two boulders, a rugged land straddling the icy boundary between India and China. The country is an ethnological crossroads, traditionally tolerant yet not cohesive, where Hinduism and Buddhism intertwine with animist rites and shamanistic practices. Four separate New Year's Days are celebrated within its borders. Its vital bonds are of family and caste, not nation. Never colonized because of its inaccessibility, Nepal didn't inherit a functioning bureaucracy and judiciary. Instead, its enduring legacy is one of autocratic dynasties which ignore their subjects' needs in the pursuit of personal gain. The Royal Nepalese Army has long sustained the status quo. Ninety-eight per cent of its officer class are of the Chhetri caste, from which most of the ruling families are also drawn. The rule of royal authority, the army and successive corrupt governments was so absolute as to go unchallenged until 1996.