October 21-23: The Goddess of Destruction

Day One

At our rafting company’s 8 a.m. rendezvous at the Busy Bee Café, I found it odd that the Nepali guides kept asking if we were sure we had enough rum. Once enclosed in the bus I realized that at least one had enough last night, judging from the toxic breath.

Our bus (a “video coach”) was made of cardboard-thin tin and the kind of glass that shatters into daggers. The seats were packed so close that our knees didn’t fit even when we turned completely sideways. Worse, the bus was painted Barbie pink.

No, actually: worst of all was what was blasting from the TV screen up front. It was my first real introduction to Bollywood — inane Indian pop music sung by women with shrill voices and beautiful writhing bodies. As the girls did their synchronized pelvic thrusts, their clumsy counterparts jerked their limbs around like John Travolta on Ectasy.

We passed a head-on collision whose gruesomeness didn’t put a damper on the driving technique of our captain.

I was sitting next to 18-year-old Simon from England and trying to tell him from which UK town my grandfather had hailed, but all I could remember was that it began with a W-A, and the only name I could think of was “wanker,” which is not correct.

Speaking of “wanker,” this is the first group trip I’ve been on that didn’t have any. Except for the guides, I mean. The only weird thing was that my young companions, none over thirty, didn’t quite know what to make of me. They’d swear at something, and then wheel around and look at me, gasping and apologizing as though I were the Queen Mum, unaware that I’m probably the one who made up the word in the first place, before the dawn of time.

Lila, nineteen years old and from Canada, had just returned from the trek that Cheryl and I are planning to do next month. As she described ascending thousands of feet of stone steps, I expressed concern about my own ability. “Oh, don’t worry,” she reassured me. “There are people even older than you up there — I mean, really old, with grey hair and everything.”

One of the Israeli guys tried to teach me the two sounds of Hebrew that give the most trouble to native English-speakers. I could “ch” up a storm (that guttural, phlemmy one like in Channukah) but the “r” threw me. You’re supposed to stick the middle of your tongue against the middle of the roof of your mouth and roll off the “r” like so many marbles. My version sounded like I was drowning.

I also learned a Yiddish curse: “You should be a calendar so they hang you on the wall and each day they tear a little piece off of you.” Influenced by the Brits, I started saying “knackered” and “WICK-ed” and “innit” (as in “There’s a lot of rum in there, innit?“)

En route to the river we drove through village after village, adobe houses painted with ochre skirts and thatch-roofed huts on stilts. In one town a woman sat with a burlap sack by her side, which gave me a start when it started to oink and wiggle. In another place, a sari-clad mother lay asleep  in the middle of a street with two sobbing toddlers by her side.

It took us two-and-a-half hours to get to our put-in spot where half a dozen starving dogs joined us on the beach as our guides laid out sandwich fixins. One sweet old rottweiler-lab found pleasure in our scrap bucket until one of our guides starting throwing rocks. Apparently that’s typical here. Many Nepalis are not sentimental about animals, unless they happen to be one of the sacred variety. The poor hound yelped in pain and ran off, but hunger kept bringing him back.

Our first rapid, Little Brother, was a Class Four+ and we aced it.

Next was Big Brother, where six days ago an accident claimed two lives and badly injured fifteen. I was grateful our guides decided to portage that one.

Local boys perched on a giant rock overlooking the rapid, observing us. One spoke sweetly to me: “Hello, tourist.” I’d thought they were cute until the horrifying moment that a kayaker crashed upside-down and out-of-control through the rapids for too many seconds without breathing, and then was catapulted head-first into a boulder before slipping out of sight into the waves.

The kids burst into wild laughter. The guy lived but sustained significant injuries.

The Nepalis aren’t shy about staring, even when you’ve crawled way off behind some potty bushes. One English girl with me observed, “This is a rather exposed wee, innit?”

My Facebook friend Laura had warned me that the Kali Gandaki is icy. What I didn’t factor in was the wind-chill once you’re soaked and tearing down the deep and sunless canyon. By the time we reached our campsite a few hours later, I was tinged a shade of blue that went well with my eyes.

As I focused on getting warm, the guides pounded down bottle after bottle of rum and started hitting on all the girls — well, except for me, at twice their age. Actually, one was so drunk he must have been blind because he made a few feeble attempts on my attentions. Before they totally lost control they finished preparing excellent dal bhat.

Day Two

Particularly on the misty mornings you can see why places like this gave birth to Shangri-La legends.

When we broke camp, we found we’d been camped on the nest of a certain creature which Simon immediately befriended. He kept trying to throw it at me, but I can run faster than you think.

Unaware that the first few hours of the day would be the wildest whitewater, I innocently took my place at the front of the raft, jamming my toes as tightly under the tubing as they’d go. If you know from rafting, you know this is where you sit if you like to spend most of your time eye-to-eye with roiling water into which the raft is either diving or which is plummeting on you in a powerful wave. It’s also where you get tossed around the most. Have you watched what happens when current hits the spiny creatures that are rooted on a rock in a tidepool? You know how they twist and stretch and tangle and generally look very uncomfortable until the turbulence stops? That’s what my backbone did: whooshing in every direction with each plummet into or climb up a wave. I didn’t realize how bendable and posable I still am at my age.

From morning to night we heard a steady shrill way up the canyon walls. It was like crickets but without the modulation, so it sounded more mechanical. One of my Israeli companions maintained with absolute conviction that it was the sound of water whistling through pipes. Never mind that there are no pipes up there. Only at the end of the trip did he allow as to the possible flaws in his theory. It was crickets — just not very musical, creative ones.

Around lunchtime we pulled up to a beach where an enterprising woman was selling goods to the tourists. My team picked up another half-dozen bottles of rum. I bought two chocolate bars.

By sunset I felt like I’d spent the day on the heavy-duty cycle of an industrial washing machine. I hobbled off alone with my chocolate to explore the surroundings beyond the camp and, in near darkness, could just make out the silhouettes of three rhesus macaque monkeys frolicking along the opposite bank. I saw a single lightning bug and many drunken Nepalis hitting on 20-year-old women. Bored again, I went to bed. But some idiot had thrown my so-called mattress into the river so it was drenched. I took an Ambien and hit the hard, cold ground.

Day Three

Practicing patience, local boys eventually got the benefit of our breakfast leftovers.

It was a quiet day on the river with only three mediocre rapids and a few miles of paddling along flat, still water above the dam. Some schoolkids watched us from a high bridge and I was grateful they didn’t decide to spit — or if they did they had bad aim.

I swam the last few hundred feet to the confluence of a smaller river whose turquoise water interlaced with the Kali Gandaki’s glacial turbidity.

Then came the inevitable five-hour bus ride, as hair-raising as all the others. Today’s delay was caused by a likely-fatal accident involving a truck over a cliff. By the time we got there the truck was inching its way back up the embankment, pulled by primitive, hand-rigged contraptions.

Back in Pokhara the guides suggested we meet for a farewell dinner at The Love Shack, I suspect as a final, subliminal encouragement to any of the girls who had not yet been won over by their libidinous charms. As my rivermates engaged with glee in drinking contests, I got to talking to the only guy who wasn’t leering: a sweet young man named Ram whose life couldn’t be more different than mine. He grew up with nothing in a tiny village on the Kali Gandaki. I grew up with plenty in an affluent city with potable water and filet mignon. So we spoke politely about nothing. But suddenly and accidentally we stumbled on a mutual experience — a very funny one. We went into hysterical laughter, made more delightful and uncontrollable for its unexpectedness. Eventually everyone at the table wanted to know what we were on about, but we couldn’t even try to explain it.

Leaving my youthfully spirited companions I went home to my hotel, managing for the first time not to get lost on the dark walk. Up in my room I tossed back the covers and found a cockroach waiting patiently for me on my pillow, upper legs crossed behind its head, cigarette dangling from the corner of its mouth. I relocated it. As I drifted off (after examining every square inch of sheet and pillow) I heard the screams of low-status dogs being attacked by gangs of superiors.