The next day I went for a walk down the pedestrian (even though cars are legal there) central area and decided that I if I wanted to find the Katmandu center of Healing where my brother left his bike for me, I should ask someone and maybe they would know. So I asked a guy, and sure enough he was living there and ended up being my Thai Massage instructor. He told me where to go so I jumped on a Tuk Tuk.

The Tuk Tuks in Nepal are the most primitive in the world. Even India has outlawed them because they pollute too much, because the engines come from building air conditioners. The Nepalese version of a Tuk Tuk is a three wheel metal can with wheels of a diameter not much larger than a basketball. There is a front area where the driver sits, and a rear part lined with two short benches for seating. If these things would have been in operation in the states for golf games or something, they would have a maximum occupancy of about four people, but here at times I had to share space with like ten other people literally sitting on top of each other and standing up in an area about three and half feet high. Not too far north from the center was a peaceful road that veered off and brought me to the Healing center. And sure enough there was my brothers Marin aluminum mountain bike.

Originally I planned on getting the bike and immediately going touring around Nepal and India, but I ended up staying in Nepal for six months and never even going to India. I just found it too comfortable staying at the healing center. It had a good energy about it, and there were a lot of other good travelers staying there. I took a five day Reiki class, and then a month long Thai Massage class with five other people.

My classmates for the Thai Massage class were: 1) A Russian woman who was living there because her husband worked in the Embassy. 2) An older Danish man who bought furniture in Bali and imported it to Denmark. 3) A New Zealander tree planter kid named Mark Armrien. 4) A psychic Italian girl named Madalena. 5) A French-Swiss girl whose boyfriend taught the class. 6) A wacky Swiss-Italian electrician named Enzo. 7) A friendly and eccentric English girl from a noble family whose name I can't remember. Our instructor was an ex cop French-Swissman who imported Nepalese goods to Switzerland. Our official instructor was an Indian guy who grew up in Thailand named Raul Barti, who started the place with his Nepalese friend Nabine, but Raul was rarely there to instruct us.

For the couple of weeks I was there before the Thai massage course started I was mainly just reading books and keeping to myself. It was during the end period of the Thai massage course that was before mine. There was another Danish guy there and a Danish girl, and a young half Tibetan girl from Vancouver. For the time I was taking the class there lived a young English couple called Patti and I can't remember the girls name, and the English girl who was in my class boyfriend called Christian. There was another American girl who lived there who married a Nepalese guy she worked with in a restaurant so she wouldn't have to leave after five months. There was also a girl from South Africa named Wendy who lived there for a while. There were some others who came and went, but I can't remember them all, for a couple of days there was a farmer from Longmont who was cool.

Overall I lived in the the center for about two months but It seemed longer because it was the first place that I ever actually lived that was out America. It was a cool time because my situation was very peaceful. There was no sound of traffic, and we had our own courtyard to hang out in. We all walked a couple hundred meters away to eat at the same restaurant that served good Nepali food such as mo mos and their style of Chow Mien, and of course the traditional dish of assorted vegetables and rice called baat that you eat with your hands. Nabine, a cool Nepalese guy who was one of the Thai massage instructors there gave me a huge bag of weed that I rolled 270 joints out of. The others got up at seven every morning and did yoga for an hour, but I could never get up that early. I would get up a little before the class started and smoke a doobie while listening to Joni Mitchell's hits album on the roof. A cool thing about a lot of third world architecture, and especially Nepalese architecture, is that all the buildings have terraces on the tops of them; which was very nice because you can go up there and enjoy the view of the city and catch a nice fresh breeze. We would a couple hours of class where we would practice the steps we had learned, and learn another step.

During the breaks the rest of the group would hang out in the patio, but I stayed in the room and stretched. During the time I was there I became the most limber than I have ever been and could touch the ground with flat hands without bending my legs for the first time. I also spent every spare moment of the day practicing my massage on others. I practiced on everybody, from the little boys who worked there to tourists who came for free massages from the students who were practicing.

The culture of Nepal is very different from where I am from. They have a very weak economy, which is basically to say that there are a lot of people who don't ever have anything to do so they waste time in ways that are unimaginable to people from first world countries. For example, it isn't uncommon for people there to bring their friends along with them on their daily chores and errands. Many times I met Nepali friends of Nabine's who would come over to hang out with us for hours even though they didn't speak any English. For the first couple of weeks I was staying at the center I was going to a local gym, and a few times I saw the other people who worked out there had friends who came along just to watch their friends work out. This wasting of time basically means that for them time and therefore boredom doesn't even exist, so they didn't deal with stress the way we do in the states. A perfect visual example of how relaxed they are is the Nepali head bob. It looks just like as if when you shake a doll whose head is attached with a spring, and the head bobs back and forth. It basically means "Whatever". So that basically means that most peoples attitude about life is ''whatever'', and that will be their reaction to most things. For example, if you invite them to join in on the conversation they just smile, shrug and do the Napali bob. Most westerners unwittingly pick this gesture up after a couple weeks here, which means comes to be so vague it can mean everything from "bullshit" to "OK".

One by product of having a population with too much time on their hands and not enough money is that people will do menial jobs for almost nothing, so they create as many useless jobs as possible that actually clutters the process and makes for a comical if not infuriating experience for the foreigner. A perfect example for this is the supermarket shopping experience. Keep in mind that not all supermarkets are like this, but one in particular was so ridiculous I had to write about it. If I wanted to buy just a couple things, even if I was the only customer of the whole place, which I usually was, I couldn't get out of their in less than ten minutes. Here is the process I had to go through to buy a pencil and all of the people who help me make the transaction occur, for example:
1) Enter the building and have to explain to the security guard where I wanted to go.
2) Give my backpack to one of the many backpack checkers and wait around for him to give me a number which he usually didn't have on hand because one of the others usually had it.
3) After I find my pencil now I have to give it to the teller at the check out counter to write the serial number of the pencil down on a piece of paper.
4) The I had to allow a bagger to put my pencil in a bag which they always insist on doing, maybe in the hopes of a tip or maybe just because they are just hypnotized.
5) After my pencil is in the bag, the bagger passes it off to another kid who takes it downstairs to where my backpack is located and passes it off to another person who checks the receipt that I have with the pencil.
6) Locate another bag checker to trade my number with my bag. And finally say goodbye to everybody as yet another person apart from the security guard, the ''door opener,'' opens the door for me. Thank god I don't have to give a tip to all the people involved.

It is nice to be in the presence of people who are so stress free about life, but the inefficiency can get on foreigners nerves and make them just lose it and freak out every once in a while. Getting money at the bank is a perfect breeding ground for this kind of behavior. When I was there, there didn't exist money machines, so to get money the tourists had to go to a room behind a bank and wait in line for about half an hour even though there may only be a few people in front of you. Then you have to go through a series or three or four ladies who somehow divide up the jobs to finally get your money. I remember one time when I was waiting in line one American guy just totally lost it and started yelling and screaming at the top of his lungs at the teller and being really sarcastic like asking her very simple questions and answering them for her. If that had of happened in the states, the other people waiting in line would have told the guy to shut up, but here we all knew where he was coming from so nobody said anything, and the teller didn't react at all either. You would think that the stressed out tourists might breed contempt among the locals, and especially because there are so many tourists here. But the Nepalese had nothing but respect for foreigners. To them we were the light of the highest society, however a little stupid in terms of knowing how much money things were actually worth.

The Nepalese, or rather third world timelessness can be a bit creepy at times though. For a couple months I stayed at a hotel and for most of the time I was the only guest at the place. I noticed that the guy who owned and lived at the hotel, Jose, had a worker girl who took cared for him as his life literally only consisted of sitting in a small room and watching Indian musicals all day. When the girl didn't have any chores to do, she would just sit down in the room next to where Jose was and look at the wall with a blank stare as if she was a droid in Hibernation mode.

A lot of confusion and unexplainable trickery goes on here that you wouldn’t guess from initial friendly contact. For example: A nice nine year old kid named Raju who worked at the Healing center I was staying at got a job at a restaurant, but left and came back to the center. So the people from the restaurant called the cops and had the poor kid thrown in jail for desertion and didn’t feed him, so he went a day without any food when the people at the center found out about it and had to pay about $50 to get him out. Then the cops took one of the owners of the center, Nabin, into the police station for questioning for kidnapping. When I asked Raul, the other owner of the center how all of this could happen, he just shrugged and said all his country men are nuts.

They also aren't very confrontational. The center had a secretary who worked there for a few months who was fired because she was stealing money. But they didn't tell her why she was fired because you, ''don't do that in Nepal''.

Some American friends of mine said that they read that the kids here have %50 less brain power there because of all the chemicals in the air; which wouldn’t surprise me because the air is so filthy from the Tuk Tuks spewing out black smoke that I literally couldn't ride across town without a face mask and not get a bad asthma attack. Every time I rode across town my clothes became filthy also.

A very special aspect of this culture were the children because they were so out going and always trying to strike up conversations, even the three year olds. I remember one time I was sitting in a restaurant and this beautiful little seven year old girl came in with her father and looked at me with a totally blank face. I was thinking "Here's another poor little shy third world kid looking at this American alien boggling over him". And after blankly staring into each others eyes for about ten seconds she suddenly broke in to a confidant smile and said "Hi", and started laughing. She then sat down at the next table and kept on assaulting me with an omniscient smile on the verge of laughter. All I could do was sit there and control my embarrassed smile, and every time I looked up she was looking right at me. Nepalese love to make eye contact, and the longer you hold it with them the more friendly and open they become, which is about as an opposite cultural trait with the rest of the world that I had found. I thought that was cool.

Children are put to work at a young age there. There were a couple of orphans at the center who were kept working all day long who were nine years old. One time I went into a small restaurant and my waiter was three years old! I tried to order with him, but he just stood there with is notepad, so he had to get his mommy.

Another interesting example of how relaxed Nepalese people are is when I have close calls and collisions with Nepalese on the road, instead of shaking their fists at me and yelling, they either look at me in a state of introverted horror, or laugh at me. I remember the first week I was there I noticed I almost missed my turn and made a last second swerve in front of a motor cycle who had to swerve to miss me. When I looked over the passenger was pointing at me and laughing. And I thought "That’s cool". I hate getting yelled at or the "evil eye". Nepalese don’t know the evil eye.

Nepalese like foreigners and are very interested in them. One time Nabins parents invited me, Fran, and Christian over to their house for a dinner. They didn't speak English, so we just communicated with them with gestures and talked to Nabine. They were very accommodating with the way they set out our multiple course meal on the living room table like a buffet. Then we got to drinking on the roof and Nabins parents joined us up there. One thing led to another and we ended up getting totally hammered and I threw up on their roof and blacked out. I have one picture in my head of that night though that will stay with me forever. I remember us talking and being really rowdy, and them throwing up and falling off of my chair, and when I got up I noticed that his parents were sitting in chairs right there just watching us. That must have been rather amusing for them as the Nepalese don't seem to ever get drunk like westerners do. I hope they were amused anyway, but judging from the mild Nepalese temperament, I seriously doubt they were upset with me, apart from having to clean the puke off their roof.

After I finished the Thai Massage class I took a psychic healing class from Raul for $160 bucks which was a rip off because it was nothing more than him coming in the room with us for five minutes a day for four days and telling us to get each other to relax and look for an old woman next to a tree in our imaginations. We weren't supposed to talk to anybody for the five day long course because we were supposed to be trying to get in touch with our subconscious. I took the course with two other people, Magdalena the psychic Italian girl, and the Singaporean guy. There were some interesting things about the course though. The philosophy was a Shamanic one that consisted of the idea that there is our world, and above our world is the above world where we can travel to other areas of imagination. And below our world is the underworld where we can go to the deepest recesses of our own selves. We took turns putting our hands over each others heads to hypnotize each other in order to help bring about the ''trip''. I remember one occasion when I went on the trip to the upper world I was flying through space and then got to a ticket check out place and the lady there said I couldn't go any farther, but the guide who was with me said I could and bypassed her and helped me continue. But I don't remember where I continued to. When I did the trip to the underworld I just found myself digging into a hold like a hamster or something and didn't find anything. This upper world underworld journey could have been from another workshop there though as that class was insignificant and just a waste of money.

Magdalena was an interesting girl. She had very real and powerful psychic powers; and she didn't discover them until she was at the center. She found them out while she was doing a reading of an American guy who was staying there for a couple days with his friend. The American guy, coincidently, was an expert kayaker from Idaho and knew a guy I river guided with in Moab named Grant. She put her hands over his head and literally read his mind. She saw his childhood home and described it to him, and even got into his innermost thoughts and emotions. He told me that she described it perfectly. Everything from the backyard street to the layout of the house. Then she did a reading on me and described me pretty well also. She said not much radiated from my heart, but my mind was exploding with thoughts, which is how I would describe my mind. She said when I was a kid I was a loner, which I was. She said that was because I lived in my own crazy eccentric thoughts that made people uncomfortable, especially my family who were always trying to try to contain me into a box out of fear that I would go nuts. Which is pretty accurate.

About the time I finished my month long Thai massage class my mother visited me for about a week. She spent the first night in a room in the center, and the next day went to stay at the house of her friend Sister Max. Sister Max was a very eccentric southern black woman who had been living in India for the past thirty some odd years making a living buying antique furniture and selling it in the states. I think I remember her telling me she hadn't even been to the states even to visit in the last 30 years. She had been living in Katmandu for about a year or so and was apparently doing pretty well because she had a nice big closed in house with a big yard that was full of old furniture, and a servant she brought from India.

While my mom was there she gave an Aromatherapy workshop to various Nepali women. I don't know who got her the students. She was on her way to Bangkok Thailand were she to give another workshop and speak at an Aromatherapy conference. I did the workshop along with a Singaporean kid who stayed at the center.

My moms friend Sister Max had an American friend who had been living in Katmandu for the last 20 years. This woman was eccentric also. She rode around in a motorcycle, and even brought my mom on it to do some errands. With her I did a tour with my mom to the town of Bhaktapur which is a suburb to the east. This is a historical ancient town where a kingdom was centered, and is now a tourist spot because of all the ancient buildings. On the way back to Katmandu we did a tour of the local essential oil factory on the eastern edge of town, and I think my mom bought some oils. The woman there was very friendly and accommodating. Then we went to the historical center of Katmandu around Durbar square on the southern part of the city, and even though I had been there for some time I had never been to the historical part, so it was just as exciting for me as it was for my mom. All of the historical buildings were intact and I felt like I was back in time.

One interesting feature of that area was a girl of about ten who was supposed to have been a reincarnated goddess. She was a bit of a tourist attraction. She lived on the second level of a house where she lived her life being pampered by servants. She isn't allowed to ever go outside because she isn't supposed to have any marks whatsoever on her body before she reaches a certain age. We waited outside of the house for about ten minutes along with about ten other tourists so we could get a glimpse of the goddess. When she poked her her head out to say hi so us, it was only long enough to count how many people were there and then she retreated without even nodding her head to us.

After the Aromatherapy workshop my mom, Sister Max and I took a taxi a couple hours to the east of Katmandu to a retreat place way up in the mountains. It was nice to be in a cooler dryer environment for a day. They got up in the morning to catch the sunrise over the snow capped Himalayas, but I didn't want to get out of bed and bear the cold. The drive was beautiful, but Sister Max was starting to get on my nerves because she wouldn't stop talking, and her diatribes were centered around how much she didn't like India. She said Indians were basically dirt bags, and told us of a story of a school bus that fell off a bridge killing all of the children aboard because the driver of the school bus played chicken with a truck driver coming from the other side, and because it was a one lane bridge they collided and everybody died. I didn't realize it as the time but I think the reason Sister Max was so annoying was because she never had the change to talk to other Americans, and one of the favorite things for ex-pats in third world countries to do when they get together with countrymen or other ex-pats is to talk trash about the locals in order to vent the frustration of their backward ways.

Not long after my mom left I rode my bike to Pokhara, the second largest city in Nepal a couple hundred miles west of Katmandu. It took me two days to get there. As soon as I left the city I descended down a rather large hill and into a river valley and rode that into a town called Gorkha where I got a hotel room right on main street. It was absolute hell all night because there was no window to close out the noise of the trucks which were honking their horns continuously, and for some reason the horns on Nepalese trucks are like five times louder and shriller than trucks back home.

I started riding early the next morning, and right after the city a long climb started which continued for most of the day. After a couple hours of climbing the road turned to dirt and I grabbed the back of a truck that pulled me to the top of the pass. I got a flat around the top before the road descended a bit and became paved again. I smoked a bowl near some rocks next to the road a little before I arrived to the outskirts of Pokhara which lasted a while, and got a room in Pokhara not far from the lake.

Pokhara is a beautiful city because of the backdrop of the Himalayas and the huge pointy mountain which is sacred to the Nepalese and thus became illegal to climb right after the last group of Western Mountaineers failed to climb it in the sixties; so it has never been climbed. Pokhara didn't really have a city center because it wasn't really a city, just a very large sprawling town. In fact the main street was dirt. The lake had some nice restaurants near its shores, and a large field where there was a rock concert the day I was there. The concert was an interesting experience because of the behavior of the crowds. I remember I was standing there watching the show behind some American guys who I overheard talking about their kayak trips on the river. And at a few people started throwing plastic water bottles and trash in the air, so pretty soon everybody started throwing bottles in the air. So all of the cops, which there was a ridiculously large amount of, rushed in to quell the bottle throwing and everybody ran from them in mass hysteria. I ran back to because everybody else was, and I remember seeing the American kayakers just stood there laughing as the cops ran past them at the crowds who had stopped throwing the bottles. Needless to say nobody threw bottles after that.

The Annapurna Circuit

I had to buy an extra tire in Pokhara because the crappy Indian ones don't last very long. The ride towards the Annapurna circuit was beautiful was beautiful. As soon as I left Pokhara to the north the city died away rather quickly, and a climb into a sparsely populated area began. After I got to the end of a valley the road turned to the left and went straight up the side of a mountain at a steep grade, went over the mountain and down the other side. The descent was fast and fun with a lot of switchbacks. At the bottom of the descent I rode past a small town a couple of miles to where the circuit started. The circuit started on the other side of the river at a small village. The village really intrigued me because it was so primitive yet peaceful. That actually is one of the endearing things about Nepal; it is primitive yet peaceful. Not like places like Morocco, or even Central and South America where the primitiveness is a synonym for poverty and squaler. Nepal is different; there is a real feeling of peace in the streets of the little villages. There it was a beautiful thing to be in a village with just a couple small stores, and no cars or even roads; where all of the huts are connected with dirt walking paths.

I had to buy a permit to do the trek, and then continued riding on a very rocky path. I remember at one point coming across an old western man trekking from the opposite direction, and when he saw me he stopped and burst out laughing at loud and long as could. So I stopped and faced him and he just pointed at me and kept laughing and laughing. In all reality the trail was indeed not suited for mountain biking up, maybe someone could mountain bike down most of it, but I was basically pushing the bike. The first place I stopped at was a little rest area made specifically for the trekkers on the side of the mountain. The ambience was very nice there because it was in the middle of nature way up in the mountains on the side of a steep mountain on the rock paved trail. The place consisted of very simple boarded rooms for individuals and a common shower on the mountain side of the trail, and a restaurant perched out on the downward side of the trail. The view of the valley from the restaurant was very nice.

The next day was pure stair climbing and I passed a couple of hamlets until I got to an actual town called Ghorapani. Don't let my description of it being a town fool you, it was more like a couple of houses lining the trail. I wanted to do the trip to the base camp near the Annapurna mountains and Machupuchare, which is the beautiful mountain you can see from Pokhara. So I left my bike with the official who checks permits and went hiking over the side of the mountain and down the other side until I arrived at a house that was beautifully situated in a little stream valley on the other side. I stayed there one night and was the only guest that night. I hung out with the friendly family of man, wife and young daughter in their kitchen as they were cooking my dinner. They did all their cooking over the open fire and had a dirt floor.

The next day I got up early and walked down the trail into a very thick and mystical fog. Pretty soon I started to climb again up the side of a mountain and found myself on the side of a sheer cliff about a hundred meters above the river. At about noon after hiking through a beautiful forest I got to the edge of the top of a mountain where another town was called Chomro; which was larger than Machupuchare, and was actually a town with schools and mountainside farms and the like. I had a mystical feeling in this town also because it was foggy and peaceful. After Chhomro I descended down and down and down to the bottom of a valley and across a big bridge and up again and past a school with no town. It must have been the school for the local farmers in the area. The terraced farms there were very interesting because they were on the side of a steep and very large mountain. I remember looking down to the bottom of the valley and it seemed at least four thousand feet. I descended some more and came across the largest town yet on my trip called Hinko. It is places like Hinko that make doing the Annapurna circuit make you feel like you are going back in time because it is a town with houses, schools farms and everything, but no roads. After the town I climbed up a narrow steep valley until dusk where I got to a place to stay. I was the only guest that night and hung out with the owner who said he made enough money with that place to support his wife and kids in Pokhara. He said they live during the school months in Pokhara and the off school months with him in the mountains.

I got up early the next day and passed a couple more hut places, the last of which before the tundra started I had lunch at. It was very cold outside so they had a propane heater inside, but not in the normal position, this propane heater was under a very large table so as to heat everybodies legs who were sitting there. The table had blankets draped over the sides to keep the heat in. After lunch timberline started and then the valley opened up into a large snow covered basin amongst the bases of the large Annapurna mountains and the beautiful and sacred never climbed Machupuchare. I hiked a couple hours up in the snow until I got to the Annapurna base camp which was in a narrow valley in between three huge mountains barely out of the reach of a huge avalanche. I talked to some American travelers there for a little bit and then turned around and hiked back to the place I stayed at the night before.

The next day I hiked back to the same place I stayed at two nights before, and hiked back to get my bike the next day. While I was hiking up the side of the mountain that I had to get over to get back in the valley where my bike was I found myself in a blizzard and was very cold even though I had long pants and a jacket and hat and gloves on. I saw some sherpa's walk down past me, and I was astonished to see one Sherpa walking down the trail in shorts, t-shirt, and sockless sandals like it was summer. After I got my bike the trail went down a bunch of switchbacks and passed another town that was built up on the hillside. I descended into the big valley of the Kali Kandaki river and went up the western left side of the river. This was the section of the trek that I could ride my bike because it was flat and the trail was nice and wide and good. I stayed at a large tourist pit stop that had a nice outdoor restaurant.

There were a lot of tourists eating there together and drinking the local alcoholic drink which I don't remember the name of. There was this weird american restaurant manager there who wanted to get up super early but didn't hear his alarm clock go off for like twenty minutes and all the other people could hear it through the paper thin wooden walls. It was funny hearing people wake up and say say ask to each other who the hell had the loud alarm clock.

The next day I rode up the river a little more until I crossed the river and was confronted by another steep wall of steps that I had to carry the bike up, so I ended up staying at a hotel with the weird guy and an American actor. It was a nice little town up on the side up the mountain with the river down below. The main street of this town, as with all of the larger sized towns on the trek, was paved with stone and gave a feeling of ancientness. I was a bit of a star with the locals in this town because of my bike, and let some kids ride it up and down the road a few times. Some of the kids couldn't ride it, and I think it was the first time many of them have even seen a bike. That night the manager of the hotel sold we some weed and we got stoned and had some drinks.

The next day I got stoned before I rode down the road until it connected to the river again. I remember riding behind a guy with a bunch of sheep or something and couldn't get around them and the guy was really adamant that I don't pass so I had to hang out there a little bit. When I passed him the road got really smooth and beautiful winding through trees. I had read somewhere that including the mountain tops on either side this was the deepest river valley in the world. The river bed was rocky and very wide, so I started riding down the rocks until my tire exploded from the holes that had appeared. I was too stupid to have an extra tire so I had to walk my bike on a very smooth part of the trail that would have been perfect to ride until I got to the next town which was up to now the largest on the trek. This town called Marpha was amazing to ride through because as I was walking down the trail stoned which was also main street, I noticed how it was paved with stone and had a developed water system allowing a virtual river to flow under and around the trail under rocks. I knew that this town was too small to have any political system so I really got a feeling of going back in time; being ''far from the empire'' as on trekker put it. I had to walk all the way to Jomsom which was a metropolis in terms of the trek. There were no cars there but it had an airport for the people who wanted to just to half the trek. The main street was a dirt road, but this was an actual town because the buildings were a few deep. Luckily for me there was a bike shop there were I bought a new tire, but my wheels were starting to fall apart and they didn't have any wheels or spokes for sale. I brought a bunch of extra spokes with me, but I was running out. I stayed at a small hotel that had a couple other people in it. The owner of the hotel had a bike too and invited me to ride to the next town down, Marpha, to visit some of his friends. We hung out with some people in a very primitive house with a dirt floor but had a nice patio in the inside. I had run out of the weed the guy sold me so I asked him if he could hook me up and he told me that I shouldn't smoke and it was bad stuff.

I left Jomsom the next day and rode up the valley a little bit before the trail turned to the right and went up the side of the mountain towards the pass. The trail up the mountain was nice and smooth and not too steep so I could ride my bike. I passed through a farming town with an ancient temple called Jarkhot. and arrived in a little town and stayed in a hotel called Bob Marley that had paintings of Bob Marley all over the place. I had one of the boys who worked there get me up at four in the morning to go up the Thorung La pass but as I was having breakfast I started to feel ill so I didn't go. That day I got really sick and was just hung out. That day a group of about fifteen trekkers arrived at our hotel, and they were all talking about a human leg with a shoes that they saw in the middle of the trail as they were walking down from the pass. I had heard that four Sherpa's were killed in an avalanche a couple weeks before, so it could have been one of them. The hotel I was in was full of people and the hotel next door which was the same size was empty. There was an old guy in the group who felt sorry for the other hotel so he tried to get some people to stay over there, but they didn't want to break up the group; but he transferred over there anyway. The group hung out there the next day to rest, and also because the view of the mountains and the river valley were beautiful from the roof of the hotel. I remember hanging out with a few guys from the group and looking over to the roof of the hotel which was right next door and seeing the old guy sitting there on the roof alone, and hearing the guys wonder why he was so insistent on going over there. I was out of weed but some other guys had some and we smoked some. There were some mountains around that looked dry enough to climb without walking on snow that were a little higher than 6,000 meters, but I didn't have the motivation. Besides I heard you need a special permit that costs like 300 bucks to climb higher than 6,000 meters.

The next day I couldn't get up in time, but the day after that I managed to get up and hike up. At the base of the snowy gulch there was an ancient buddhist retreat hamlet called Muktinath, but it was too early to sea any of the monks. I pushed the bike up a snowy slope for a couple hours and figured I was pretty close to the top of the pass but I was in a blizzard and I had thin wool gloves. I also started thinking about how my wheels were about to fall apart. I wasn't cold but I kept thinking about if the blizzard got any worse, anyway, I decided to turn around. I searched the web of pictures of the pass to but here, but none of them mean anything to me because all I remember was being in the middle of a blizzard hiking straight up a steep snow field. It was still pretty early when I arrived back at the hotel. In retrospect that was the stupidest thing that I ever did while traveling. As a rule I don't like going back the way I come when I do trips. I like doing loops, but oh well. I rode back down to Jomsom, but the bike wheels were so wobbly I couldn't use the breaks and I didn't have any spokes left, so I decided to take the plane back. When I got back to Jomsom I came across a group of trekkers who told me they heard about me and how my trip had been, and when I continued down the road they all clapped. I had a pipe on me and was going to jump on the plane but I noticed the person in front of me have to take everything out of their pockets so I went outside and hid it in my sleeping bag. The plane ride back to Pokhara was about 50 bucks and it was nice to view all of the hills and valleys that I hiked over from a small plane. The flight was only about a half hour, which made the trip seem a lot smaller than what I did on my bike. After I got my bike fixed I rode my bike back towards Katmandu. I made it a point not to get a hotel in the same loud place that I did on the way over, but I couldn't camp out because the road was lined on one side by a cliff full of jungle, and the other side with cliff that leaded down to the river. Luckily I arrived at a roadside restaurant where I paid the people a little money to camp in their yard. I didn't want to ride through the night because I had seen about a half dozen dump trucks laying on their side from crashes. I even saw a photo in the Katmandu newspaper of one on its side with these legs sticking out of it; some poor guy got totally crushed!

The next day I arrived in Katmandu and stayed at the center for a couple days until I took the bus to do the Everest trek. I spent a night in the town at the beginning of the Everest trek. I hung out with a boy who worked at the hotel I stayed at. He sold me a big lump of hash that was nice and strong, and we went to a local bar where we had a weird alcoholic drink that was made with hops and had a bunch of hops in it. I didn't get a buzz of it. I got up super early and did a big loop, hiking up the trail to the top of a pass, but suddenly got the desire to not hike anymore and just read, so I went back to Katmandu. I would say that I regretted that because I never got to see Everest up close, but when I don't want to do something I just don't want to do it.

I got a room in a hotel that Joe and Rana were staying at because I just wanted to be by myself and read. The hotel was a big house with a lot of rooms, and was owned by a strange fat and lazy Nepalese guy named Jose. All Jose did was watch Indian musical movies day and night in his small office. He didn't have to do anything because he had a young helper woman who took care of him. I think she may have even lived there, but they never talked, when she wasn't working she just sat in the other room looking at the wall.

I got a room on the first floor on the back with a room overlooking a field. And a couple days after I got there I noticed a four foot tall Marijuana plant growing right outside of my window. Someone who stayed in my room before must have thrown some seeds out of the window before. I brought it in my room and smoked off of it for the two months that I was there. While I was there I got into a predictable routine, which I like to do from time to time. I would read all night long until sunrise and get a beer and them come back to my room and drink it. Then I would go down to a local restaurant that made good American style breakfasts that I went to a couple times with my Thai Massage friends. It was interesting eating there because literally all of the people who ate there were the same exact westerners who ate at the same exact place and the same exact thing, but never talked to each other. The other foreigners must have been Embassy workers and the like. My routine at the restaurant was to get hash browns and fried eggs and tomatoes and read the English language newspaper. Then I would go home and sleep until three in the afternoon, and then ride my bike down to the gym and lift weights for a couple hours. I made some Tibetan friends at the gym who were regulars there at the same time as me. The Tibetan actually wasn't Tibetan, his parents were. He had a strange idea about Tibetans that weren't consistent with the Tibetans I saw when I went there. He said they were tall and violent. At the time I was really interested in books about Spirituality. The books I read during the two months that I was there were: A book about dreams, a book about Krishna Murti, and a few other insignificant books. After about a month or reading books that I can't even remember, I found the Urantia book in a bookstore. It was supposed to have been written by spirits, and is about the history of the world, so I read that in a month. After I read that I got started on A course in Miracles.

Tourists can only live in Nepal five months out of the year because in the 60's a lot of drugies went there so they could live cheaply, and a lot of them went crazy on acid and jumped off of the roofs into the crowds in streets below. It got so bad that the government officially renamed the street were all the hotels were "Freak alley". So my time was up in Nepal and I had to decide on what to do. I don't recall ever really thinking about going traveling in India; I was ready to work in Korea as Joe and Rana who had been there a year told me they were making 4,000 dollars a month teaching English there. I got a tour bus to Lhasa and planned on riding my bike across China to Korea from there.

After Tibet

When I arrived in Katmandu I stayed in the Katmandu center of healing for about a week until I got some money and took off to Korea. While I was there I met an American girl who had just taken the weeklong massage course, and I went with her and a couple of people so see a Tibetan medicine woman.

The experience there was a memorable one. We had to wait for like 45 minutes to see her because there were like thirty people in the place waiting. I remember an American woman who was being treated was looking at her like she was God. When it was my turn to go the lady asked me through an interpreter what my problem was and I told her I had asthma and so she smacked me in the face and spit in a cup and made we drink her saliva, which I did; and then she told me to get out of there. After my friends went there I expressed to them how I though that old bag was full of shit, but they said they still thought she was cool. So whatever, I guess the placebo affect doesn't just have to work with pills.

When I left Katmandu I went to Bangkok for a couple days before I took off to Korea.

Trek journal

I left Katmandu on the first of March. The first day I went to Tikendunga. That is where I noticed my rear tire was about to explode from the rum because it is an Indian tire and although it says 26x it is too small for my rim and I have to stretch the metal wire that is the lip which sometimes breaks so there is a place that has ripped free of the wire and was coming through. So I switched the tire with the bald Tiga tire. The next day was the hardest day so far because I had to carry the bike up 2500 meters to Ghoropani where I let it for the rest of the day to Banthanti, which is at 2500 meters. The next day at the tourist info place I strapped a pannier to my back and trotted down up and way down a couple of canyons and made a traverse off the steep hill and down and up another canyon to Dutan which is at 2500 meters. Then on day I hiked to Annapurna Base camp and back to the same lodge. The next day I kicked back to the same lodge I stayed at in Banthanti. On day six I made it back to my bike and rode 3,000 meters down to "Tatopani", which means "Hot water" in Nepali.

There are lovely hot springs there next to the river that are nice and hot, like 105 degrees F. That night I hung out with a few people at the lodge and drank 10 rupee Rakie: Three was a weird 32 year old English man named Jamie who liked to talk about sex. there was a 30 year old English actor with a lot of whit who has lived in New York for the last three years and is moving to Australia. Then there is an active couple from Arizona, a good Irish couple and a young German man. I am finding that I am not knowing people who are my age 24 to be that young. I am guessing 30 year olds to be 24 and 24 year olds to be 30; and people are thinking I am in the late twenties sometimes.

I got stoned for the first time on the trip with Jamie. I had my own dorm room with 4 beds for 20 rupees, set my alarm for 5:30 A.M. From like six. I rode and hiked to Kalopani, gaining meters, Kalopani is a beautiful place 1,200 meters surrounded by mountains. One day I rode down the nice rock pathway to the Kali Gandaki and rode up the river bed but the rear tire finally gave out and I had to run it all the way to Jomsom, but that wasn't too bad because it was only a couple of hours. I bought a couple tires and a tube and kept pinching the tube while I was trying to put the tire on; then I gave up and took it to the shop today (day 9). The man traded tires with me and got a better tire that he didn't want to sell to me before because it was someone else's. But when he was putting it on with one inch wide tire irons he bent my rim way out accidentally and bent it back, causing a big crack in it, but managed to get it on without getting damaged. I think it will make it back.

I had a rest day today, I got the new tire on and tube and went to Marpha and bought a nice pipe for 120 rupees and got my shoes stitched. I ate a lot here. I bought an apple cider last night but it had no kick to it. I bought a Big piper whisky today. There is a Swiss couple staying here with me for two nights in a row. I have to remember to give their blanket back. They gave me one of their two because I said I didn't have any. But I had one I just didn't see it. I want to have an early night tonight and get up early tomorrow, be off by six thirty after I eat. I should be at Muktinath early and can see out the situation with the pass, probably hike over it day after tomorrow. That will be a trip carrying my bike over an 18,000 foot pass. I think it will be on a full moon. I want to be off by 4:00 A.M. in the full moon. I sure hope their is no Avalanche danger. Since I will get to Muktinath early tomorrow maybe I will sleep the rest of the day so I could hike the pass the next morning. Maybe I could hike it with another tourist, our paces would probably be similar.

3-10-98

I had an interesting dream last night. I was in Hawaii except at first it wasn't Hawaii, it was a place like Hawaii that was owned by America but

wasn't a state yet, but then it was Hawaii. Someone had provided my friends and I land and a semi rickety house on the top of a hill in the woods with no other houses around. We were going to use it as a spiritual healing center and one day me and about three guys were up there fixing the house up on the back porch listening to music and smoking dope and we got lazy and started sleeping outside. And those female friends of ours hiked up and wanted to do the spiritual healing stuff with us whatever it was but we weren't too lazy and so the four or so of them left after like ten minutes. I talked to one of the women, and there might have been a man with them, she was really short and had long curly red hair and was about my age and she was really nice and said the reason they left was because they thought this was a healing center and we were smoking dope and lazy I agreed with her and said how it was at an ideal location and Hawaii was the biggest mountain in the world and the last remaining tip of the Lemurian civilization and she said "Yea that's great", and we had a vision again and that's all.

3-13-98

I had some dreams here but I cannot remember them. I tried for three nights I get over Thorung La but to no avail. The first night I got up and it

was cloudy so I denied not to go which was stupid. I called it off because I was tried and thought i should acclimatize and rest and a woman said "If is clear you should definitely go". and I thought haziness was a good reason, but in reality I chickened out, I was so close too, the boy had gotten up for me at 2:30 and I was dressed. Then after I told him I called it off it cleared up. The next night I was exited and I was clear but I was puking. Then this morning I tried and there was a blizzard. That reached down to Muktinath, I feel like I am in the

North Pole, I just want to go where it is warm and ride so I am heading back to Pokhara by way of Beni and then for the Everest Trek, but just running this time. I hiked about 4:30 hours from 3:00 -7:30 up and got back here at 10:30. Oh well, I hope It stops snowing but on second thought I don't because precipitation is good to prevent drought. I will cruise down to Jomsom supper early tomorrow like 2:00 or something to savor the full moon and get a long day because I have been getting too much sleep lately. The day I got here 14 people came over the pass from the other side and they saw a human foot in a shoe being eaten by a dog on the trail. The second say I was here I just hang out and smoked grass all day long. I got back from the pass and came back here and didn't feel like hiking any more because it was snowing and figured I would leave tomorrow when it is not snowing but it has been snowing all day.

3-20-98

you must write when you have something to write. I had some interesting dreams last night but I didn't write them down when I got up and I forgot them. I was trekking and I had Cinderella and the X1. It had good energy. There were Nepalis there. Today was the first day of my Everest Trek. I didn't feel very good today. I woke up kind of undernourished and over alcoholed. I had amazing dreams last night that I was trekking and then I had Wyndham's and my Mountain bikes. I had a hard time waking up rather get up. Every body else got up at 6 and that's when my alarm clock went off. I had a big breakfast and hiked just out of town where I shat, got high, and changed. Then kicked but I had a hard time with my walkman because it wouldn't play a tape and stopped playing at small bumps. The I took a couple wrong turns and then ran for a bit and started up the big hill and I was tired and not enjoying my music. I felt like something was wrong, like I hurt my moms feelings in my e-mails asking her about her errands for me. I first thought i was dehydrated by drinking didn't help and I thought it was low blood sugar from smoking but the rest of my candy didn't do anything. Then it was obvious it was mostly mental; I don't want to do this I think. I got to Duerali and got food and put on super suit and started freeing my fingers were numb and it wasn't even cold out. So I decided to not do this trek and go back tomorrow. I got stoned and had a nice sleep from 2-6. I feel like I need to read for these two more months I have here, so when I go to Tibet and China I will be excited about riding and not burned out on being on the move the whole day. Plus, reading in Katmandu is a good idea because it is cheap to live there. I could lift weights, watch a movie, buy a tape, and read 100 plus pages every day and write as well. The main discordance i feel now is that my mind is feeling neglected. I saw the X1 last night and it was so beautiful.