21st May 1992 Day 306

The Diary
10 months to the day that we flew to the USA and I wish our next country was USA and not India. My bottom certainly does. There's probably more chance of getting to see some of the European Nations Championship in India though. Frank from Chitwan reckoned it was going to be England v Germany in the final.

I got up late, skipped breakfast and made it to 'the strip', as the Yanks would say, in time for dinner. A plateful of chips which is about as daring as I'm going to be at the moment. I booked a bus to Kathmandu and found that the lad in charge of the ATS will be on it too.


Progress. Went to the toilet about 3pm, first time today and the brown liquid has been replaced by lots of mini-stools. Oz should be somewhere near Ghorepani at the moment, enjoying the views.


Visited the owners of the Lake View to pay up and chatted to them and the 'babu'. Failed to get the babu to show any interest in rugby played with 3 coins.


2012
Dinner = lunch


There's some irony in my comments about USA and India. A few years later I was on a business trip to Michigan and had such bad food poisoning from United Airlines food that I spent two weeks in my apartment room and never made it in to the office. A friend who was on the same flight spent about 2 weeks in hospital after eating the same food as me.


I'd decided I'd had enough of hanging out in Pokhara and was going to leave Oz a note telling him where to meet me in Kathmandu. 

20th May 1992 Day 305

The Diary
The least exciting day of 1992. Toast and jam for breakfast and 2 packets of biscuits for the rest of the day. The daily showers came early so I stayed in and finished "An Area of Darkness", which managed to fill me with dread about going to India, and started "The Big Red Train Ride". 

If anything else happened it was even less remarkable than the events so far described. The pills haven't started to do their stuff yet.


2012
Oz would have been on his way up to Poon Hill - I'm sure it was much more interesting.

19th May 1992 Day 304

The Diary
I posted letters to Christy and Neil Stewart and cards to Howie and Sylvia Hobbs and Ling Khoo. I popped in to see the Annapurna Travel Service to see if Oz had left yet and they said I should see a doctor. They phoned up the clinic and said if I came back at 3:30pm they would take me there. I bade Oz farewell and retreated back to my room.


At 3:30 I went back to the ATS and talked to them about Oz's inflatable globe that was now hanging in the shop. They made several more phone calls to the clinic and at about 4:15 I was put in a taxi with Krishna, the owner's younger brother and taken to the clinic. Krishna paid for the taxi, which surprised me as I'd assumed he was along for a free lift into town as well as to help me.


Krishna did the talking at the clinic and I bypassed the queue to see the doctor. He did a thorough examination, pulse, blood pressure, listened to my chest etc. without doing a stool examination. He explained the stool exam wasn't too precise and even if it came up negative there was still a 30% chance of something being there. He wrote out a prescription for 5 days supply of tablets and some re-hydration powders and I gave him 200rp. I declined the receipt as 2 pound 50p was not worth the hassle of an insurance claim.


Krishna had a pair of walking boots polished, I bought us both a drink and then we wandered down to the King's statue with him trying to teach me Nepali and me trying to understand his English. He even paid for teh bus back to the lake side.

I retreated back to my room, only surfacing for a salami pizza. Big mistake. Tomorrow it's back to the plain diet. I might as well help the drugs do their stuff. I bought a couple of Rising Nepals and discovered a State of Emergency had been declared in Bangkok as the demonstrations had forced the military into action. Nigel Mansell had won his 5th straight GP of the season - surely he'll get to be world champion this time - and Gary Lineker had missed a penalty and the chance to tie Bobby Charlton's England goalscoring record in a 1-1 draw  with Brazil.


2012
Neil Stewart, Sylvia Hobbs and Ling Khoo were all from PW Sydney I think. I really only remember Neil as he was the partner there.


Oz's inflatable globe - I'd forgotten about this. In the days before ipads and google maps we carried an inflatable globe around to track our progress around the world.

Nigel Mansell did win, Gary Lineker never equalled the record. Mansell's 5 straight wins at the start of the season were a record until Schumacher equalled it in 2004.

18th May 1992 Day 303

The Diary
Most of the shops in town were shut and we discovered this was because the communist party had called a strike. To work was at your own risk as dissenters shops were usually stoned. It was quite peaceful down by the lake side but apparently there was quite a bit of trouble in the town. And all of this is just because of upcoming local elections. 


We decided today that Oz should go and do a 5-day trek in Ghorepani and I should continue with my recovery. If we wait until I'm completely better it may be a long wait. Trips to the toilet were still becoming less frequent so I risked a lasagne in the evening. Oh to be well again.


2012
Communisn in Nepal seems to be quite complex. This chart shows links between the various communist parties. Shades of the People's front of Judea.

17th May 1992 Day 302

The Diary
My slow recovery seemed to be continuing so we hired a couple of mountain bikes for the day. The place we hired them from was the same place that Oz had taken some negatives for reprints. Not only had they taken a day longer than promised to turn up but when they did they had an early 70s white border. It's lucky Oz didn't give them my finished film to develop. More of the photo shop later.
  

We set off into town and it was a lot further than it appeared on the map. The town had no historical interest at all as far as we could discern. and like many other towns in Nepal, and Asia, was built of concrete and brick shoe boxes liberally covered in badly painted adverts. Coca-cola is a difficult logo to escape from. Cows roamed the streets, taxis and bikes and pedestrians wildly weaved in and out of each other and the shit and the dirt that cover most of Nepal's roads.

We went to the end of town, turned round and then it was downhill all the way. By the time we'd got down to the airport, fatigue, hunger and illness had got to me. I left Oz and headed back. I stopped to watch a demonstration by the Nepali Congress Party (tree) as it wound it's way to a big tree and stopped for a few speeches. I'm sure most of the people carrying banners continued walking past the tree and went home.


In the evening I decided to have a proper meal as I thought I was going to die of hunger before the diarrhoea got me. I had a chicken enchilada and seemed to survive the night relatively well. 


Back to the story of the photo shop. When we returned our bikes a big crowd had gathered in the shop listening to a Canadian or an American (they're the same anyway) protesting about some photos he'd had developed by them. He was very unhappy and was insisting he shouldn't have to pay. We didn't discover what was wrong with them or whether he got satisfaction. Shades of Oz a few days earlier although Oz's protests were a little less vehement and didn't pull in the crowds.


2012
Instagram seems to have popularised the look that we were all trying to avoid.

16th May 1992 Day 301

The Diary
my dashes to the toilet are less frequent but the end result is always the same dark brown liquid and a pain in the ring. The force with which the eruption occurs could probably power one of the battered Nepalese Tata buses over the Himalayas.

Eruption

As I didn't need to immediately retreat to the wc after breakfast, Oz and I walked to the dam at the end of Phewa Tal (Lake Phewa) and he had a couple of passport photos taken for his trekking permit. We sat around for a while and then slowly walked back and in the process, I burnt my nose and Oz his forehead. 

The rest of the day was spent lazing by the toilet.

15th May 1992 Day 300

The Diary

I'm sticking to my diet and hopefully if the diarrhoea clears up in time we'll still be able to do a 7-day trek to Ghorepani and Poon Hill. This was another day of doing very little due to the need to stay in close proximity to the toilet. The little old man in his hut-cum-shop just along from Lake View Guest House is profiting from my illness as I'm buying litres of water, biscuits and a daily toilet roll from him. At the moment I'm probably his only source of income and he invariably tries to sell me more. If I buy water, he offers biscuits and chocolate as well, if I buy toilet roll he tries to sell me water and biscuits. You've got to admire him for his effort but as my purchases are pure necessities I get a bit few up of it.

14th May 1992 Day 299

The Diary
Now I know what Oz felt like, up during the night on the toilet, and minutes after food or liquid goes in at one end it comes out at the other. My diet now consists of toast and jam with black tea, naan bread with black tea, plain chips with black tea and an orange flavoured solution designed to restore minerals and salts to the dehydrated body. Glucose biscuits are an additional source of energy. I'm feeling listless and drained and having a cold doesn't help.

Wasting away with food walking past

The evening "meal" was followed by a quick dash to the toilet. Well, as fast as I can manage without the contents of my stomach escaping.

Home from home

13th May 1992 Day 298

The Diary
By today it was obvious that my mild stomach complaints of the last few days had turned into the full-blown disease - the trots. The 1 hour bird walk at 6:30am was crap anyway but it was even worse as I was holding my stomach in.


We were taken back to Tadi Bazaar in a jeep with 15 people in and on it and we were given a ticket for the bus to Pokhara. Thus began 7 hours of hell and the worst bus journey of my life. I sat there holding my stomach in for the whole time, aching all over, unable to move because the bus was so full, not wanting to move because my bottom would erupt. As this was not a tourist bus it stopped for long periods at every town on the route so a few people could weedle their way off and a few more could squeeze themselves on. My seat was broken and when anyone standing in the aisle put their hand on it, it moved into the reclined position and as this must have happened about 100 times I felt like crying. "Infinite patience" I kept saying to myself and dreamt of being home or in Sydney. I think they managed to make a journey that should have been about 2 1/2 hours take 7 hours.


Just before we reached Pokhara more people squeezed on to the bus but they were trying to get us to stay at their guest houses. I didn't have the energy to talk or say no, so I said to Oz that we'd have a look at the first one. The Lake View turned out to be pretty good and I was immediately testing the ablutions.


This area of Pokhara is like a country version of Thamel with lots of restaurants, travel agents, bookshops etc. For dinner I had tomato soup and a roti but had to leave immediately to relieve my botty.

2012
The worst journey of my life. Ever.


Google maps can't seem to work out the distance but it's probably about 110km !





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The Lake View seems to have been upgraded !!!