TRACELESS PATH

When we flew out of Gatwick in the middle of October 1988 both Rod and I were highly excited at the prospect of our great adventure. Nearly a day later we arrived in Kathmandu. At the changeover of planes from Emirates to Royal Nepal in Delhi, I found out the former airline hadn’t loaded my rucksack onto the plane at Gatwick. This wasn’t good news as it meant I would arrive in a strange vast continent at the beginning of what was supposed to be a trip of a lifetime with next to nothing, sweet fuck all as a matter of fact, apart from what was in my hand luggage. The funny thing was I had a clear intuition that my rucksack had been left behind. At Delhi airport a bunch of Indian porters wheeled out a huge container with everyone’s luggage on it for them to double check before the plane change and as soon as I saw it I knew for certain that my rucksack wasn’t going to be in there. Dunno why but I just knew! It meant that I had to rely on Rod for the best part of a week in Kathmandu until my rucksack finally arrived, and when it did it entailed a long trek out to the airport in order to collect this thing which looked like it had fallen from out of the sky. It had come via Pakistan and considering it was a brand new rucksack when I had bought it back in England it now had the appearance of a casualty from an unknown desert, but I was happy at least to get it with everything more or less intact, apart from a pair of sunglasses that had been nicked from one of the side pockets, which I guess was kind of dumb of me to have put them there in the first place.

Me and Rod spent that first week together just wondering around the streets of Kathmandu. I had never been to any place like it before in my life and I will never forget that first taxi ride into the centre of the city from the airport on the eastern edge of town. We had arrived at about midday when everything was packed with life, the city in full swing so to speak and where it felt like the people and animals were singing Buddhist songs and Hindu songs. Some on the streets, some down by the river where there were monkeys and colourful spreads of washed clothes, with high mountain sunlight reflected on the water and the sweet smell of incense. There was also the not so sweet smell of death from where the ghats were, the smoking burial chambers of Kathmandu! It made me realise that however great I might have imagined things beforehand, the reality of being there just blew it all away. Without actually going, how could I say that I would ever have known the way the land felt beneath my feet? The sight of the herds of water buffaloes in the main street? The way that the people and any manner of vehicles and animals converged on the roads at different angles? The depth and beauty of those ancient city shadows in the late afternoon sun? No, I would never have been able to imagine such things. How could I ever describe the feeling of walking down Kathmandu's Freak Street in the early evening dark? Freak Street, a throwback place from the late 60’s and early 70’s where the hash cafes still played Led Zeppelin and Leonard Cohen, even though the caravan of love was long gone, having evaporated in a huge puff of drippy hippy dope smoke.

On our second day in town Rod and I moved from our first hotel in the tourist area of Thamel down to a place on Freak Street, which was cheaper and full of atmosphere, an atmosphere of shadows. Freak Street was long passed its best, but the old, old buildings and the memories of an earlier generation were overwhelming, the darkness almost blissful. The darkness of high mountain architecture, the darkness of time, a revolving dream from which it felt like I might never want to recover. My biggest memory of this lost and forgotten hotel on Freak Street was that one day I had food poisoning so bad I was shitting and puking at the same time. Retching into the open hole in the floor and falling back on my heels, the same old story, it had probably happened to travellers countless thousands of times before. It was exhausting, it produced a lot of heat and it was definitely the result of a cheap vegetable chow mien from a low brow chop shop across the road where the prices for the food were most definitely too good to be true. At the precise point when I was shitting and puking until nothing more could come outta me, I really wouldn’t have minded if someone had just packed my bags and sent me back home. All thoughts of any shame over being able to last in Asia for only a week would have been wiped away by the sheer relief of just getting out of that hell hole of a place in one piece. The same bug affected Rod as well, and for a day or so we were laid up in our room, in that dingy hotel at the end of time warp Freak Street. Luckily for both of us, it was a violent but short attack, and once the poison had been cleansed from our systems we were both alright again.

On the edges of Kathmandu lay the holy stupas of Swayambunath and Boudnath, Buddhist places of pilgrimage for millions of people from all over the Himalayan region, both near and far. Earth stations of the spirit! Swayambunath was to the west of the city and the harder of the two places to visit, a long climb up a thousand steps to the top with hundreds of monkeys in the trees on the way, monkeys who were not shy, making an incessant noise and continually on the lookout for food as they swayed above us. When we took a trip there we went the long way round, through the countryside to the south. It was a hot day and we walked along dusty trails drinking bottles of cold Sprite at a couple of rupees a pop. The outskirts of the city was seminal Asia; half constructed buildings standing in the sun, thick iron wires jutting out of concrete poles and pointing up to space, pointing up to nowhere. Maybe the builders had run out of money, maybe that was the way they were meant to be, I didn’t know and it really didn’t matter. They were just there when we were there but now they have probably been finished and are long gone, or maybe not, maybe they are still the same; abandoned catastrophes splashed upon the land of a mountain kingdom. Just a temporary picture in the warm haze of a distant early winter that has somehow stuck in my mind from a long time ago.

It was surprising the difference in atmosphere between Swayambunath and Boudnath. The first was wild and a little threatening, where it felt like people had been murdered for power in the hills behind it, black spiritual power. From the top you got a good view looking out across the city. You stood high, the height of the hill was one of the best things about it, but you didn’t feel like staying long. Boudnath was very different. Over to the east of Kathmandu it was on the plain and not too far from the airport. Most people took a rickshaw or a taxi ride to get there from the centre of the city. The first time that me and Rod went we actually walked through the outer edges of Kathmandu and across the open fields. It took us a good couple of hours and we really hit the back streets in order to find the route, but it was worth it. Just to turn a corner and walk down a dusty road with an old temple on it was something special, a temple used by the locals, not there for the tourists, Hindu temples more often than not, or a Hindu-Buddhist hybrid. They were colourful, chaotic, intricate, they housed the sound of ringing bells and you could see incense smoke coming out from inside of them. Often we stood around for a while and just stared at the spectacle, taking in the street life of Asia, far from home, the sensation of having the time of your life, like slowly closing your eyes and kissing an inexpressible infinity, the sensation of bliss, myriad memories, Shangri-La. If I had never been there, I would never have known what I was missing.

Rod and I went to Boudnath a few times in that first week. It was like a magnet, an invitation from the wider universe. We mainly just hung around the huge white stupa which had monasteries and various other human forms of habitation in close vicinity to it. Shops, cafes, the vivid colours of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhism; they all made it seem so fantastically exotic. We circumnambulated the stupa for hours with all the other pilgrims, it seemed such a cool thing for us to do. The best time was at dusk when all the lights came on. Then you could see the red skies over the city to the west, whilst to the east there were the stars above the mountains at the end of the valley, down Everest way. Hidden buildings on dusty back roads, and up on the hill behind the stupa was Kopan monastery, the place where I was going to do my meditation course, something which I had been intensely looking forward to for the last couple of months, having booked my place on it back in London, back in the smoke of the big, bad capital. One day I took Rod up there for us both to check it out. We walked and walked up that hill in the midday heat and I thought at one point we would have been better off getting a taxi, nevertheless when we got there it stoked my fires of anticipation. Lots of Tibetan monks in maroon robes running around, looking happy, and a few Westerners who were there already, booked in for the course. There was a stunning view of the valley below with Boudnath at the foot of the hill, Kathmandu to the west, densely cultivated country to the east, the airport and the road to India to the south. Behind us to the north were the mountains and the way to Tibet. One of the best things about the meditation course was that it was where it was, Kopan monastery had a simply fantastic location. All that was to come later, but not much later.

I can’t now remember how I parted from Rod. Only one day we both packed our rucksacks and checked out of our hotel, in fact by the time we split we had changed hotels on Freak Street. We had got out of the one where we were both sick as dogs and moved to a much better place on the other side of the road. You walked through a dark passageway, came out into a courtyard where the hotel reception lay at the end of this open inner space. There were trees and bikes in the little square, tables with people sitting around smoking and drinking cups of tea. High walls with compact rooms and balconies, familiar languages spoken. The room where we stayed had a smell which I have never been able to forget, it wasn’t exactly unpleasant, just that I had never smelt anything like it before, probably an obscure brand of Nepalese disinfectant that was used to keep the place clean after travellers’ guts exploded.

In the evenings we would eat somewhere and then play chess in our room. Rod smoking his hashish which he had scored on the first or second day just off Durbar Square, an ancient space in the centre of the city just at the end of Freak Street. Despite having been an enthusiastic and regular dope smoker throughout the 80’s, I was now staying clean because I was soon going on a meditation course and I wanted to keep my mind fresh. The most memorable thing about Durbar Square, besides the stunning architecture of its ancient temples, and the exotic blend of people, was each evening at sunset when a tall Hari Krishna devotee chanted the Hari Krishna mantra, banging on a huge drum. It was a magical sight. A Westerner Hari Krishna and a chanting which resonated over the cobblestones, through the city as the crowds surrounded him. For those few minutes each day he was one of the most impressive human beings I had ever seen in my life. Where did he come from? What was his story? Where in the world would he be now? Hari Om Hari Hari.

My first day at Kopan saw me put in the same room as two Germans, Thomas Deilecke and Daniel Rau. It was fate that brought us together. Walking into that monastery room and seeing Thomas lying there in his sleeping bag although it was only early afternoon is still a fresh memory. Lying in his sleeping bag and reading a book by Jiddu Krishnamurti; after all it was the late, late 80’s and that was a sign of the times. It was a dark room and a shaft of sunlight shone through a tiny window, the bright sun illuminating thousands of dust particles that danced in the air as I dumped my stuff down. A blond haired German in his early twenties and already showing signs of going bald, Thomas was fresh from Pokhara, the western Nepalese tourist resort where Westerners went to either trek the Annapurna circuit or sit around and smoke hash by the lakeside. He had made his way from Delhi via Rishikesh to Nepal, and in Kathmandu he had found out about the Kopan course. It was now the first week of November, the course was about to start, and we would be spending a month together in the same room. I immediately liked Thomas, he had eyes that could see, there was something about his way of being that made me feel safe with him. However he also had a mouth that could talk and talk, and there would be times over the coming weeks when a well aimed punch in the teeth wouldn’t have done him any harm whatsoever. Daniel by contrast was a dark skinned Swabian from the south of Germany; reserved, mysterious and a lot quieter than Thomas, although that wasn’t difficult, he had an intensity which made him appear handsome yet vulnerable.

There were over 100 people taking the course, the majority accommodated in the monks’ quarters of the monastery. That was how I ended up sharing a room with Daniel and Thomas. There was no doubt that it was tremendously good value for money. For a little over £150 you got a month long mediation course in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery set on a hill overlooking the Kathmandu valley with all your food and accommodation thrown in as well. The day started early with yoga classes at about 5.30 am and it was always a challenge to get up for them, knowing that only about half the course participants would be bothered to do so. I usually made it as both Thomas and Daniel were into yoga so they would wake me up whether I liked it or not. After all there is only so much space for three people in a small room in a Tibetan monastery. The 45 minutes or so of yoga exercises were pretty effective. I had been following instructions from Iyengar’s Concise Light on Yoga before I travelled and it stood me in good stead with regard to a lot of the postures which I was required to contort myself into. By the end of each session however, I have to say that my thoughts became more and more dominated by the prospect of breakfast; food over spirit any day! The yoga finished at 6.30 and there was then a half hour space to wash and relax before breakfast in the monastery canteen at 7. The water at Kopan was cold and I dreaded the days when I knew it was time for me to have a shower because it was always freezing and my bollox would shrivel up into two hard little nuts that could have probably withstood at that precise moment in time a damn good kicking.

Breakfast consisted of fresh bread made in the monastery with various jams, eggs and peanut butters; all washed down with cups of hot sweet tea. It was a great time of the day, you could eat as much as you want and after being up for nearly two hours I was usually pretty hungry. When breakfast was finished I would take a walk along the hill behind the monastery and look down at the valley below to the east. It was always covered in mist and the golden sun shining above it made the whole scene incredibly beautiful. Singing, along with the sounds of the people and radios could be heard from below, rising up from those densely cultivated fields. I just sat there and stared, let the sun warm me up, feeling good that I had been up for a few hours and had already accomplished in that time some pretty hard core yoga exercises and then filled my belly. It beat the shit out of England, that was for sure. Blissful, it was more than what I could have ever dreamt I had come away for, and I was a dreamer! I would sit there on the hill and think my thoughts, not great ones but looking around with my eyes filled with wonder. The sounds of the birds circling in the sky far above, black dots of resonance against a clear blue sky so very, very high. For that hour, or however long it was, the rest of the world just fell away, down to the valley below, out through the city gates and into the far beyond.

The bulk of the morning was taken up with Tibetan Buddhist teachings and meditation instructions and since Tibetan Buddhism is a rich philosophy there was a lot to learn. The course was the reason why I had come out to the East in the first place, so I was well into it and I was quite an eager student. By contrast, I soon found out that Thomas wasn’t impressed at all with what was taught at Kopan. He liked his Buddhism and he liked his meditation, but in that respect at least, he also liked to keep things simple. The Tibetan Buddhist doctrines of karma, cause and effect and rebirth seemed to him to be more like religion than philosophy, just tired old religious dogma riddled with generalisations. If you do this then that will happen to you, that is just the way it is, end of story. We soon began discussing the various positive and negative aspects of Tibetan Buddhism back in our room and as we walked around the hill at various points during the day. Talking things over, having a good laugh at some of the dickheads who were doing the course as well, whilst taking in some really fucking stunning views of the Kathmandu valley which the hill afforded us in the light of the golden sun. Yeah, me and Thomas! A good friendship was soon forming between us and any jokes we might have cracked about Hitler and his fucked up Reich only seemed to bring us closer together.

In regard to the course I could only agree with him that it was remarkable the number of Westerners who immediately took to Tibetan Buddhism as if it was the answer to everything and who soon began to parrot Tibetan Buddhist concepts of life and death which they had only recently been taught, but which they now took as gospel. It was as if in coming to Kopan Monastery they had made a great journey and had now found their holy grail. No doubt it made them feel special, superior even. I wrote a poem about it, so here it is.

bloody holy

so many people go to the east
searching for religion
where they find their exotic bag
of rituals mantras and prayers,
and with the greed of gold dust men
they tightly grasp it to take back home,
where you can be sure the stupid mothers
will be just as blind as before
to the living blood of the holy present

My thoughts were not as extreme as Thomas’s however, he could launch into serious bouts of criticism with regard to the course and its structure, whilst for now I was happy to defend up to a point the Tibetan Buddhist view of the world against his cynicism, which although eloquent, offered no realistic alternative for me at that precise moment in time.

By noon of each day the morning session would be over and there would then be a brisk walk to the monastery canteen for lunch. The food was pretty good and it was plentiful. In fact for those of us with stronger stomachs it was a dream come true as there was invariably the opportunity to stuff ourselves stupid. This was no doubt due to the fact that not all the course participants at any one time would be fit and healthy and therefore some of them would not be having big appetites, spending more time on the toilet instead. There were always some interesting noises coming from the monastery shit houses whenever I was brave enough to pay a visit, that was for sure! For getting food the system was that you queued up and then helped yourself from great big pots and plates, kind of buffet style. The cooking was vegetarian; vegetable curries, rice and dhal and generally pretty tasty. The trick was to always get a good position in the queue at the beginning, then by the time you had finished the first course the rest of the people would be done and you would have a clear run for a second helping.

Yes, if food was a priority it didn’t take much to work out the best way of ensuring you got the maximum quantity. In this regard I have to say that Thomas was one of most enthusiastic participants on the course. He had no shame whatsoever in sometimes going up to the pots three times, barely giving those who were late a chance to even have a first helping. He was always one of the first in the canteen because he usually didn’t last the whole morning session in the teaching room. Watching him at times was pretty embarrassing, because around those pots he could be a lethal pig. This was especially so later on in the course when some people would stay behind after the morning teaching to do Tibetan Buddhist purification practices in the meditation hall, which meant that by the time the purifiers got to the canteen people like Thomas would be just about ready to go and sit on the grass in the sun, their bellies almost bursting with all the food they had eaten.

There would be a leisurely break before the afternoon session of teachings and meditations began. Since it was the time when the day was at its hottest and everyone had just eaten a big meal, on top of the fact that most of us had been up since 5.30 , it was generally siesta time. People would either go back to their rooms or find a quiet place to sit for an hour or two in the shade on the hill. For me it was a time to walk round the hill and look down at the valley from on high, usually after visiting the well stocked monastery library which was located above the canteen. I could never sleep at that time of day and although I often did feel tired, even just the idea of going to lie down gave me a headache. Thomas by contrast had no problem in crashing out for a couple of hours. I envied him, he was always so relaxed. Later on in our journey together he would often make fun of the tense position I adopted either sitting at the end of my bed in whatever hotel we were in, or on a chair next to a bedside table, where I would invariably be engaged in some complex procedure to do with joint rolling or simply trying to write down some notes. In those places Thomas would just lie there fully stretched out on his bed, whilst I would be too wired, too worried or too damn excited about this or that to ever chill out.

After choosing my reading material I would sit on the side of the hill with the Boudnath stupa at the bottom of it and the city of Kathmandu in the haze below to the west. There would always be an open book in my lap but most of the time I sat there in a daydream, occasionally trying to study something to do with Buddhism but usually lost in my own thoughts. I would look to the south and imagine that beyond the Kathmandu valley lay the whole of the Indian subcontinent and that one day in the not too distant future I would take a bus and head on into it. India! In my imagination it took on great power. Those Indian cities lying on the great plains, rising up from out of the heat, endless urban landscapes of alleys and back streets all waiting to be discovered. Once in a while a plane would come in to land or take off from the airport, slowly descending or climbing up into the sky. Big bird transportation to and from the mountain kingdom. I would think to myself that it was such a good feeling to be sitting outside for hours in the month of November, a sure fire impossibility back in England. In Nepal the nights were fresh and cold, the mornings misty until about 8 o’clock when the skies cleared and then were blue all day, with a hot sun slowly making its way round to the mountains in the west. Every day the same, it was truly blissful and after a couple of weeks I never wanted it to be any different.

The afternoon teaching and meditation would go on until around 6.30 or so when there was then a break for supper. These afternoon sessions were usually the best for me. They took place in the huge marquee on the side of the hill and I usually found that by then everyone was spread out and more relaxed, the air was less thin and it felt like there was more oxygen. The mornings tended to be a tenser affair and a bit frigid, with everyone trying a bit too hard to become enlightened. This was especially the case with the early morning sessions where on top of a sense of extreme effort being made by everyone, there always seemed to be someone who had a bad cough, sending out a harsh, piercing, vicious sound which would echo around the empty spaces of that big tent. It would always be the kind of sound that would make me want to get up and hit the person who was making it. Thwack them hard across the back of the head with my hand. A slap which would be hard enough to make them fall from their cushion in total confusion and total shock. Sometimes I really thought it would be worth enduring the inevitable disgrace which would follow such an action, just for the satisfaction of cutting off their incessant fucking coughing. It never ceased to amaze me how they never had the decency to crawl out of the meditation hall to just go and die somewhere. But as I said, by the afternoon things had invariably chilled out a bit, the coughs were less and thus it was easier to concentrate on the teachings, which were primarily on such mind transformation topics as exchanging oneself for others, rejoicing over difficult circumstances and sending out luminous light rays of loving kindness. And in regard to all that, I guess I might have lost the plot somewhere! By the end of the session it would be dark and therefore necessary to have a torch to guide yourself back to your room, unless of course you fancied twisting your ankle. There might be a thin sliver of turquoise sky far over to the west, but for the most part it was night with a fantastic spread of stars hanging above our heads. The stars of Nepal!

Supper was usually soup, bread and lots of hot sweet tea. It was a time for sitting in the canteen for a couple of hours before heading back for a final meditation session and it was there that I first remember meeting Susan Zakin. She was a 22 year old dark eyed JAP, or Jewish American Princess and by the end of the course I had fallen in love with her. I don’t think it was love at first sight, she came across as being very clever and sure of herself and at first that put me off, due to deep seated feelings of chronic insecurity. I think the reason why we got to know each other was because always without fail she was at the front or near to the front of the queue for food. I don’t know how she did it, even beating Thomas, but she was always there. I would often eat with a Canadian guy called Jim and somehow Susan, Jim and I would end up on the same table together. At mealtimes Thomas was too much to cope with and so I kept my distance from him whilst he stuffed his face with Daniel and a couple of other Germans. Now strictly speaking, Jim really did like Susan a lot, and I guess he showed that in the way he made fun of her, he had a crazy, surreal sense of humour and she was often the butt of his jokes, really funny jokes which left her sitting there with a look of beautiful confusion on her face. I mean come on, how the hell was she supposed to know anything about Jethro Tull? It fell to me to help her out, because Jim would really push it, almost go too far. But that was Jim, later on I knew he only did it because he was falling in love with her. After a number of times seeing her look of puzzlement and listening to her voice go quiet, as two guys sat there laughing at her expense, I realised there was a lump at the back of my throat and I had strong desire to pull her close to me and kiss her. All of that came in time, it slowly built up during that month and the subsequent two week retreat we did at Kopan monastery after the end of the course. But when it finally did arrive it seemed like real love and I was knocked out by a sucker punch which left me flat on the floor with my head spinning.

The final session of the day was voluntary and a number of people didn’t make it. I usually did as I liked the evening atmosphere in the meditation tent and there would also usually be a short and inspiring talk given on Buddhism and the practice of meditation. Thomas would always go to the final session as well, there wouldn’t be so much Buddhist propaganda as he saw it, and more of a chance for him to enjoy sitting in silence with others. His blond balding head would be shining out like a beacon from the shadows of the back row which was where he always sat, and it felt great to know he was there. Whatever meditation he was having I couldn’t wait to hear him talk about it when we got back to our room, something which he did without fail. After the ringing of a gong signalling the end of the final session, we would then walk back to our room and maybe stop off for one final cup of hot tea on the way. The canteen would be shut but there was a small monastery shop selling such important things as hot drinks, savoury snacks and chocolate bars, and which usually had a dozen or so Westerners congregated around it.

Me, Thomas and Daniel would then lie on the floor in our small room tucked up in our sleeping bags, talking about our lives, the whole experience of going out to the East to travel and what effect it was having on us. They were some of the best talks I ever had in my life and Thomas was the undoubted star of the show as Daniel and I lay there listening to him. The nights were cold and once inside my sleeping bag the worst thing to face was having to get up in the middle of the night to go for a piss. This usually had to be done at least once due to the accumulated result of drinking so much hot sweet tea during the course of the day. In some ways it is funny now looking back on those times. I think we must have been at the very end of the period when going to places like India and Nepal was seen as quite a big thing to do. These days people go in their countless thousands every month of the year and places like Nepal are little more than adventure playgrounds for people with more money than sense, queuing as they do to take a hike up Everest. The seeds of what it is like today were there then of course, only not so many had really sprouted. Nevertheless activities like trekking were already popular and all the other stuff which has come in since then is simply an addition to that.

It was in about the middle of the course that Thomas and Daniel decided to see how long they could go without sleeping. I can’t remember now what made them decide to do it, but I guess boredom with the course must have been one of the reasons. Neither of them could swallow the Tibetan Buddhist worldview, especially the way it was presented in Kopan which was rather traditional, dogmatic even, and too reliant on making superficial generalisations in order to answer complex questions. At the time I was more sympathetic to Tibetan Buddhism and in general I guess I still am, although I have to say that when it comes to the big things in life there are no easy answers and that once you go a bit beneath the surface, everything can soon get really complicated. But in this instance things were quite simple, Thomas and Daniel were just going to stay awake for as long as possible, and although I didn’t include myself in this, the daily routine which I had begun to establish for myself was inevitably disrupted. For one thing I had to get used to going to sleep at night with the light on, as there was no way I was going to win any arguments over keeping it off when I was up against two Germans who were locked in a battle against the urge to go to sleep.

After the first 24 hours it was clear that the main difficulty for them in trying to stay awake was the fact that they continued to eat as normal, which in both of their cases meant eating until they were stuffed. It might have been more appropriate for them to have gone on some kind of fast, especially as they were in a monastic setting, but they were having none of that. Just as before Thomas would be one of the first in through the doors of the canteen for the main meal of the day and just as before he would immediately have to go and lie down on the grass after he had finished. His full red face with a blond thatch of hair rolling out of the canteen became a regular sight for people. Invariably he would be wearing a pair of loud striped trousers - black and blue, or red and white - and now he had the considerable complication of having to keep himself awake instead of doing what he usually did, which of course was to go to sleep in the afternoon sun. He would find me at my favourite spot on the hill where I would be day dreaming and then engage me in conversation. Any old shit as long as it kept him awake. Often this would mean him talking about Heike his girlfriend back in Germany whom he was totally in love with, but not to the point where it stopped him eyeing up the women in Kopan and graphically describing what he would like to do with some of them. In fact at that particular time in his life Thomas swung both ways so he was usually happy to indulge in a few cock fantasies as well, which I guess would explain why Heike would stick her finger up his ass when they were fucking in order to tickle his prostate.

Later on each evening during their experiment, the three of us would take a walk down to Boudnath stupa at the bottom of the hill, usually at about midnight when everything was dead silent. The monastery would be asleep as would the villages on the hill. It was great walking in the moonlight past deserted village shrines and hanging trees with prayer flags attached to their branches; a rich array of stars above us and the sounds of the Nepalese night. The only problem was the dogs. Some of them were noisy bastards whose job was obviously to wake everyone up when strangers came along. Especially strangers like me, Thomas and Daniel. After their initial barking however, they usually shut up, displaying little more than canine bluster. After all we weren’t banditos coming down from the hills, far from it, just a small group of fucked up Westerners passing on through. By the time we got down to Boudnath stupa each evening it was always deserted and quiet. After walking around the stupa a couple of times we would head back up the hill. On about the third night Thomas actually fell asleep while he was walking and I guess it was not long after that they both realised enough was enough and their attempt to stay awake for as long as possible came to an end. All in all they had gone about three days and three nights without any sleep, and because of the constant disruption I had gone about two.

At the end of the month there was the option of doing a two week retreat. This was something I decided to do, I loved it in Kopan and although I ran the gauntlet when I was with Thomas who was continually criticising the set up and taking the piss, deep down a part of me felt like I had come home. Susan was going to stay to do the retreat as well and that was no doubt an important factor in my decision to stay also. By now I was constantly thinking about her and it was just as well we were in a monastery because the environment, with hundreds of monks around the place, at least made me cool down a bit, but not much. We were getting along well, most mealtimes we would meet up and we also spent time in the monastery library together, discussing the various books we had read, were reading, or wanted to read. It was just great talking with her. She seemed to know so much more than me, despite being four years younger. A cool American girl, always one step ahead and yet at the same time I knew I was able to tell her things she wanted to hear. Nice things that made her beautiful eyes shine. Besides me and Jim, the people she mainly hung out with on the course were English. They were an intense bunch and for the most part I tried not to have much to do with them. It was amazing how well they had all got to know each other in such a short space of time, how they were so obviously influenced by the Kopan environment and how much more open they were than if they were back in England. Too open possibly. There were various intrigues around some of the relationships within the group and to me it seemed crazy for them to invest so much emotion in situations which would soon quickly disappear. But then again, what the fuck did I know?

At the end of the month Thomas was ready to head down into India. He had had enough. No retreat for him. As we had got on so well together in Kopan and we both planned to be in the East for some months, we made arrangements to meet up together further down the road. On Kovalam beach in Kerala to be precise, right down in the far south west of India. From there we would then go to Sri Lanka where in the middle of the island close to the city of Kandy was a meditation centre called Nilambe. Throughout the course in Kopan Thomas would talk about Nilambe and how it was supposed to be a great place to do meditation, although I guess half the time he did this just to show how crap he thought Kopan was. Nilambe was run by a Sri Lankan meditation teacher called Godwin, and a German woman whom Thomas had met in Rishikesh had told him to go there if he had the chance. She had spent months at Nilambe and planned to go back because Godwin was such a great teacher, along with the fact that Nilambe was such a beautiful place to do meditation. So really that was the plan, Kovalam beach and then Nilambe; apart from those two places, fuck all else had been decided. The whole thing sounded like a good idea to me, just to get down to Kerala would be a challenge, let alone trying to fly across to war torn Sri Lanka, where at that time in Sri Lankan history the Tamil Tigers and the Sinhalese JVP were ringing the bells of terror in a big, big way.

Thomas was first going to go down to Varanasi, across to Bodhgaya in Bihar and then Calcutta in West Bengal before dropping down to Madras where he wanted to stay for a while at the Krishnamurti Foundation. Krishnamurti books were his constant companions in Kopan and he would spend many hours tucked up in his sleeping bag reading the teachings of this great teacher who didn’t really want to be a teacher. After Madras he would slowly make his way down through Tamil Nadu and into Kerala. Now that the month long course was over, my plan was to stay in Kopan to do the retreat, then check out some places in the Kathmandu valley before heading down into India. I also wanted to go to Varanasi and Bodhgaya but I hadn’t as yet structured my itinerary as well as Thomas. It was an emotional parting between us, he left me standing there at the entrance to Kopan as he walked off down the hill with his rucksack slung over his shoulder. There was no guarantee that we would see each other again. It was over two months until our planned meeting up at a place over a thousand miles away deep down at the bottom of the Indian peninsular. We both knew that a lot could happen before then, enough to make the whole Sri Lanka trip a dream which would never materialise.

The majority of the course participants left at the end of the month, but there were still a good number who were staying on for the retreat. There was a couple of days break before the retreat began and I used them to go down into Kathmandu to meet up with Rod and tell him how things had developed. I was kind of worried he would be disappointed that I wanted to stay on in Nepal, as the original plan, if there had ever really been one with Rod, was for us to spend a month in Kathmandu and then go to Goa for Christmas in order to meet up with his brother Gabriel and girlfriend Jenny Anderson. After Kopan though, going down to Goa and indulging in the inevitable hedonism which that would involve, was really the last thing that I wanted to do. It was therefore with some relief that when I met up with Rod I discovered he had found himself a travelling companion, a young Canadian woman and they seemed quite close together. Obviously he had picked up on a love vibe when he had gone off trekking up in the mountains. We had a good talk and he was fine about me staying on, but now that he had done his trekking he had definitely had enough of Kathmandu and would be going south within the next few days. For Rod Christmas in Goa was simply irresistible and who can really blame him for that ? Huge great chillums of hashish on the beach and 24 hour raves was what he was dreaming of, which under most other circumstances I would have stood there to applaud him for having such visions, but not now. We made a lose arrangement to try to contact each other through the Poste Restante later on, but really I think we both knew that it would be unlikely we would meet up. Our plans had developed during our month in Nepal and at the end of it we found ourselves looking in different directions. And it was cool, so fucking cool, for it to be like that.

When I went back up to Kopan after the day or two in Kathmandu the monastery seemed almost deserted although there was still a good third of the original course participants remaining for the retreat, plus all the monks and nuns. I was now in a new room over the other side of the hill and I was glad that I didn’t have to stay in the one I had shared with Daniel and Thomas, it would have felt a bit lonely after all the hours we had spent in there together, talking, arguing and generally having a fucking good laugh. A shaft of afternoon sunlight coming through the room’s little window would now have sent me spinning off into memories of my roommates who had both moved on. My new room was a single one and it was quite close to Susan’s which meant there was more opportunity for interaction with her than before, and I remember one time she was washing some clothes and we talked for ages by the water pump. Cold water, bright mountain kingdom sunlight and a beautiful dark eyed woman I was falling more in love with each day, what more could I have possibly be wanted, although I still didn’t have the confidence to really find out how she felt about me.

The two week retreat was more intense than the meditation course and it was for the purpose of deepening our understanding of the Buddhist teachings already given. There was a lot of visualisation, purification meditation and crunching our way through the numerous topics of Mahayana Buddhism. As far as the meditation went the most memorable thing for me was a massage that I got from a Dutch woman after a particularly long and testing sitting session. My back was racked with pain and her touch was so soothing I immediately closed my eyes and was able to visualise my muscles as thick knots gradually dissolving into light as the massage was being done. Fantastic, ecstatic, orgasmic, all those words would have been fit to describe how I felt afterwards. It might be that on a physical level it signalled that some blockages were now leaving my body and naturally I hoped that on a more refined spiritual level some purification was taking place as well. Somehow I doubted it! I still had my favourite spot on the hill which I would go to in the afternoons. It now felt strange to look out over the valley. I had been in Asia for over six weeks and the only part of it I had seen was Kathmandu and a few places in the Kathmandu valley. I hadn’t gone beyond it and the mountains which surrounded it, and I was now beginning to get restless. A part of me wanted to go straight away there and then, down on into India and the great beyond, shimmering in a heat haze with its endless plains. Another part of me never wanted to leave Kopan and that hill. I had simply grown too used to the view; the incredible Boudnath stupa which lay at the bottom of it, communicator with far flung reaches of the universe, the city of Kathmandu to the west and then the high, dark mountains of the Himalayas in the east of the valley, rising up behind the ancient city of Bhaktapur. Every day I would look down at the planes which either came into land or take off from Kathmandu airport and every day I had a hundred daydreams which I happily occupied my mind with and which now of course I would never be able to remember. All I do recall is how fantastic it was, to sit there on Kopan hill in the warm winter sun in the middle of December in Nepal, far away from cold and miserable Britain.

The day the retreat ended was finally the day that everyone was set to go their different ways. A group of us including me, Jim and Susan got our rucksacks together before walking down the hill and trying to catch some form of transport back into Kathmandu. My plan was to go to a place called Nagarkot which was at the eastern end of the Kathmandu valley and which was reputed to give a stunning view of Everest at sunrise. Susan was going with some of her English friends to a monastery close to a famous holy mountain further east of Kopan. We arranged at that point to meet in Kathmandu on Christmas Eve which was then about five days away. I remember she gave me a long look with her beautiful dark eyes just when I was making a joke about something, and it was then that I realised she wanted to see me again, really wanted to see me again. Jim must have seen her look as well because as we were walking down the hill he came up to me and said in his Canadian drawl, “She really digs you man!” All of a sudden I didn’t want to go to Nagarkot on my own at all. I wanted to be with Susan and do whatever it was that she was doing. It was too late for that though, plans had already been set and I would have looked a complete idiot suddenly changing horses in midstream. I would just have to wait until Christmas Eve but already those five days were stretching out before me and of course they were made to seem all the longer by nagging little worries which now crept into my mind, worries over somehow fucking up the rendezvous. I felt desolate when at Boudnath she got into a taxi and rode off into Kathmandu to begin her trip with the others, gutted as I stood there looking at the dust trails kicked up by the departing cab. Being money conscious I had opted to walk back into the city since I knew the route from when me and Rod had pioneered our way up to Kopan from Kathmandu nearly two months ago. When I got into town it was a simple case of getting a bus to Bhaktapur, the ancient city in the east of the valley where I would stay for a night before hiking up to Nagarkot the next day.

By late afternoon I was in Bhaktapur on my own. Really it was the first time since coming to Asia that I was alone and it made me feel incredibly sad. I quickly found out that I didn’t enjoy my own company in such situations. To me it always felt like I was desperately looking for things to do to fill up my time. Some people can look busy under any circumstances, always writing stuff down or fucking around with bits of this and that, but I was not one of them. There were things like my Walkman and a book to console myself with, but for me they were not the companions I was looking for to fight off my feelings of loneliness. The problem now was simple. All I really wanted to do was to be with Susan! Now that I was on my own I fully realised that fact and it was like a kick in the guts. I was plagued by thoughts of the ultimate missed opportunity. In Bhaktapur I found a room in a hotel full of shadows just off one of the main squares in the centre of town. It left me with a good few hours in which to find something to eat and wander the streets of Bhaktapur. My thoughts were dominated by Susan, worrying over the fact that something horrible might happen and we wouldn’t meet up again in Kathmandu on Christmas Eve. I kept remembering the look she gave me back at Kopan just before we started off down the hill. “Fuck man,” I thought to myself, “don’t blow it, don’t fucking blow it!” And now of course there was the possibility that I had. The meditation course at Kopan had done little to affect one of my worst traits, constant mental repetition, going over the same scenarios in my mind again and again and again.

Now, as I walked the streets right to the edge of town, ending up by a long winding river, all I could really do was think of Susan, think of Susan, think of Susan. By the time I got back to my hotel I had walked around for hours, stopping a couple of times for solitary cups of Nepalese tea and bowls of fresh curd, before heading off again into the medieval landscapes of the old city. Bhaktapur was far quieter than Kathmandu, where space and relative silence lent it a haunting beauty deep within the mystical zone of centuries past. It has obviously been written about a thousand times in travel books by folk from all around the world, so the only comment I can make is that the buildings were very old, the wooden carvings on those buildings absolutely stunning and there are scenes from that long, lonely walk I made which I will remember for the rest of my life. I spent a very restless night in my hotel room before getting up early the next morning to hike up to Nagarkot. According to my Lonely Planet book it was about 16 km away up in the hills, quite a long walk, but they had drawn a map of the route so by mid morning I was in the fields and heading away from the town. The scene looked idyllic, the lush Kathmandu valley surrounded by the towering Himalayas, however the whole place smelt of shit, proper sanitation was obviously not an issue that had been dealt with. I remember having a friendly conversation with an American backpacker who was just coming down from out of the hills. So long ago, so inconsequential, but it happened. It was an event in my life and it happened! For those few minutes I was standing there in the open fields talking intensely with that guy, a complete stranger who I have never seen again and who now I would never be able to recognise in a million years.

It was a relief to get out of the morning sun and into the forest which covered the lower parts of the hills. Just outside Bhaktapur two Nepalese boys had attached themselves to me, fancying themselves as tour guides and although I tried as hard as possible, I was unable to shake them off. The hiking proved to be pretty easy and I was really glad of the exercise after all that time spent either sitting in the Kopan meditation tent or on the side of the hill with my head full of dreams. The higher we climbed the fresher the air became and the appearance of the scenery more fantastic, where people were friendly and some of the women in their bright coloured clothes looked very pretty, beautiful even. The closer I got to Nagarkot the more I could see of the Himalayas and the atmosphere they evoked gave me the same kind of feeling when going down to the sea on a hot sunny day, and you reach that point where you first see the water shimmering in the distance; huge, awesome and full of infinite promise. It was similar to that only different, somehow more connected with space, the vastness of space, and the thinner delirious air of the mountains.

By the time I reached Nagarkot it was mid afternoon but the clear skies made it feel cold and after dumping my rucksack in a room I found in a cheap hotel, I walked around waiting for sunset as there was fuck all else to do. Nagarkot was a place whose only reason for existence was obviously because of the opportunity it gave for people to see Everest. Perched on a ridge it gave an unobstructed view to the north, a view full of mountains which made incredible shapes on the horizon; most high, most mystical, and most definitely the closest places to the sky on Earth. There were a number of hotels around but the whole place seemed pretty deserted whilst I was there and as a consequence I once again soon felt outstandingly lonely. There was no one to talk to, time hung on its heels and the scenery more than reflected the desolation I felt inside. But it was a beautiful loneliness and the only thing I can say is that I felt it was an ecstatic kind of sadness, wandering around lonely as fuck, wanting more than anything else in the world to be with Susan and at the same time being surrounded by some of the most awesome mountain scenery in the world. When a villager came up and offered me a huge lump of hashish for only a few rupees, his eyes glinting in the light of the high atmosphere, it made my day, but still I politely declined. It was too soon after Kopan where the good effects of the meditation course meant I didn’t feel the need for any of that stuff, even though it looked and smelt first rate, making it more than a little tempting.

There was nothing to do in Nagarkot when it got dark except wait until the only restaurant in the village opened up to serve food. I lay around in my cold room with Tracy Chapman playing on my Walkman. It was 1988 after all, and the Tracy Chapman album was hugely popular at the time. I played that tape over and over and the beautiful haunting voice of hers made me think only of Susan. Songs like Fast Car and Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution. Great songs; just a voice, acoustic guitar and the space of infinity sitting upon my shoulder.

You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere...

Tracy never sounded as powerful as she did that night in the high mountain darkness and I will always remember those feelings I had when listening to her, of love and sadness, loneliness and endless longing.

The meal in the restaurant was a bowl of noodles in soup, pretty basic stuff and the perfect kind of food to have with the motley bunch of Westerners who were with me there that evening. All of us waiting for the rising sun the next day to give us a sight of Everest, something we could tick off our list and then piss off to the next place on our route. I slept badly, the room was very cold, but that Tracy Chapman tape was an absolutely tremendous soundtrack to the constantly moving picture I had in my mind of Susan and her beautiful dark eyes looking straight at me. The sunrise was a disappointment and I felt completely ridiculous taking my place in the sad line of Westerners all straining their eyes to see a distant shape on the horizon that in reality did not look too much different to all the other shapes. The best thing about it all was the colour of the sky and the mountains to the west. Everest was already showing signs of being distinctly over- rated, probably even more so now, where every miserable fucker with more than ten thousand dollars to spare is making an attempt to climb it. People queue up to do it, they turn the highest mountain in the world into little more than an amusement park and all for the ultimate empty gesture. Climbed Everest? Wow, incredible, good for you!

It was great when the sun was high enough in the sky for me to start feeling warm again, otherwise the whole thing had been a bit of a tortuous affair, standing around for hours trying to shake off the early morning chill. After breakfast there was no more reason for me to stay in Nagarkot so I packed my rucksack and made off down the hill back to Bhaktapur. It was an easy hike down and I decided not to hang around any longer when I got back down to the ancient town. It was too lonely, too beautiful, too damn sad so instead I went straight back to the bustle of Kathmandu. There were more distractions there to keep me from going crazy whilst I waited for Susan to get back from her little trip to that monastery on the holy mountain. My own solitary adventure had turned out to be a very modest affair indeed, barely two days and two nights out of town. But fuck it, that’s just the way it goes sometimes. By the end of the day I had checked into a hotel over on the west side of town, a cheap one and not too far from the Swayambunath stupa. It felt great to be back in the city of Kathmandu even though I had hardly been gone at all; something told me I wasn’t ever going to cut it as a solitary traveller, let alone an intrepid one.

Those days I spent in Kathmandu waiting for Susan comprised of hanging around the cafes and coffee houses of Freak Street and Thamel, reading my books on Buddhism and wandering the streets of the city taking photographs. Shots of hidden temples on roads to nowhere, streaking mountain sun illuminating cobbled medieval squares through the smoke of incense. I did some shopping in the countless small boutiques full of Buddhas, bells, thangkas, books, shawls and jewellery, and I also made arrangements to get a bus to Varanasi which was to be the first place on my itinerary when I made it down to India. Those dark winter days in Kathmandu! Only it wasn’t really winter because in the daytime when the sun was out the weather was warm and dreamy, so beautiful to walk in, light blue skies with hardly a cloud, mountain territory weather within which I could have wandered forever. Those were my days of shadows and ancient city buildings; of listening to Led Zeppelin and Leonard Cohen in the dark lit restaurants of Freak Street; of thought projections into unknown centuries of the past both near and far; of walking the streets and squares for hours and hours trying to tire myself out so that I might be able to sleep at night. Sad days of the deepest magic! When I finally met Susan again, in a restaurant in Thamel, it was Christmas Eve 1988. It felt like a long time since I had last seen her in Kopan and soon we were talking together, just the two of us, and then soon after that we kissed. I think we both got pretty drunk that night, there was a whole group of us celebrating Christmas, the remains of the meditation course participants from Kopan. Both of us ended up staying the night together in Susan’s hotel room, now I felt like I was a soldier of love in the high mountain city of Kathmandu, fabled place of destination for countless thousands of travellers through the centuries of time, and it felt more than a little awesomely incredible.

We had about a day or two together in town before I was due to go to Varanasi on the bus. I can’t recall how we did it, but Susan and I came up with a plan where she would follow me down and into India as soon as she could arrange to travel. Then we would hang out in Varanasi before making our way to Bodhgaya, the holy centre of the Buddhist world and situated in the tough state of Bihar. In Bodhgaya we would stay to do some meditation and also attend Buddhist teachings by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, one of the founders of the Kopan course, who had been unable to get to Nepal that year due to problems with his visa. After that we would try to reach the east coast, the Bay of Bengal, and spend some time on a beach, maybe Puri in Orissa. Then Susan was due to fly from Calcutta to Delhi, to go on up to Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh in order to attend Buddhist teachings which were to be given by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and finally after that she would fly back to America. As for me after Calcutta I would make my way down south to try and meet up with Thomas on Kovalam beach, just as arranged. All in all it gave us about two months together, so now it was simply a question of seeing if the whole thing would work.

It was now late, late December, and the days in Kathmandu were getting short and dark, although of course there was still a good amount of fabulous sunshine in the middle around noontime. I had been in Nepal for over two months and I was now looking forward to heading south and into India for the first time. Roderick was long gone, probably having a great time in Goa after meeting up with Jenny and Gabriel. Thomas was long gone also and now I knew it was time for me to get moving as well. It felt like I would be leaving in triumph, bringing with me a woman I loved, who I would now have the chance to share some time with whilst travelling across the plains of North India, those ancient holy plains, so maybe again enlightenment would just have to wait! After getting over the early scares of the trip when I had first arrived, such as being without my rucksack, along with the shitting and puking episode after a dodgy meal in Freak Street, I felt I had adapted pretty well. Physical conditions were definitely harder than in the West, it was all a lot rougher around the edges, but for me the main thing with regard to staying fit and healthy seemed to be in the mind. Asia was the kind of place where if you felt shit inside, the environment would then throw your feelings back at you in a very immediate way. As a consequence you could quickly find yourself in a hell of your own making if you were feeling in any way negative about things. However if you were happy within and life was alright then the whole scene was just incredible. Instant karma either way. Just reality, rock and roll!