Everyone also remembers her first time out of the country. For me, it was when I was four and my sister was six, packed off with my parents to explore Bangkok City.[break]
Well, the next two weeks, we explored as much as we could, most of which were spent in shopping malls where mom was awed by the goodies in the shops and we were in awe of the rides in the theme parks while a hapless tour operator tried to explain in badly broken English how much it would cost.
While the days spent in the awfully humid and smelly Bangkok City wasn’t probably my idea of a first holiday, it did show me enough to make me want to keep returning.
It made me return to the smelly roadside food stalls that offered the tastiest culinary delights, to Central Department Stores where my wife shopped for clothes while I bought ties like there was no tomorrow.
I also remember the hotel – First Hotel – where we were put up. Long before bed and breakfast with soundproof air conditioned rooms became popular for their snobbery among a small set of travelers with Rolexes on their wrists, there were hotels like these.
With a single timing for breakfast, which basically meant that if you woke up late, there would only be leftovers to eat, and run by a manager with an awful command of the English language. But it’s still a place I remember fondly.
In fact, the last couple of times we’ve been to Bangkok, me and my wife have actually put up in the same hotel on Soi Somprasong of New Petchburi.
Of course, the rooms are much nicer now and the air condition actually works. Even breakfast is served in the room. One needs only to dial room service and order. But it’s still run by a manager with a bad command in English.
When I was a child, vacations were taken locally to places where my father had to go for his training. Of course, we couldn’t afford to go to Europe for President Travels didn’t have Dashain schemes whereby they would fly us to Europe for 80 grand then.
And while summers were spent at the boarding school where we walked around in our very short “half pants” and “half gangees” to beat the heat, there were the memorable “social work” trips in and around the villages on Tuesdays and Saturday mornings after breakfast where the grateful villagers would offer us the local “chhyang” while we marveled at the cows and the goats the villagers owned.
Not so long ago, a good friend of mine, Amit Shrestha, lamented the fact that his children were probably more familiar with Australia than Nepal, for that’s where their aunt lives now. Not because they spend no time in Kathmandu, but because they spend less time walking its streets.
Somewhere down the galli, that gets translated into an assumption that a holiday is worth taking only when we pay enough money to take us far from the city where we spend most of our time. Nowadays, holidays have to be exotic. No one wants to go on a boring trip anymore.
I brought this up during a recent visit to Bhaktapur with a dear friend of mine whilst in search of a nice whiskey drink when we stumbled into some fine well preserved ruins.
Wandering through, we saw all kinds of signs that told us that these buildings, although seemingly in a state of disrepair, were protected by the Bhaktapur Bikas Samiti and had people living in it.
There were kids playing in the area, young lads sneaking a cigarette behind the stone pillars. But for us, this part of their city, a part they consider home, was part of the discovery of Nepal that comes so unexpectedly.
That’s when we noticed the Didi who makes awesome chhoilako aachar, the shop that sells local artists’ paintings for really good bargains, the lane leading to the square which gives off a pleasant aroma of burning marijuana, and the small house by the square where you can hear the loud drums from a local “rock band.”
But more than these forgotten trivial pursuits, there’s the Nepal that’s unrecorded. Far too many visitors seem to think that Nepal is little more than fine dining in Jhamsikhel, gawking at the mountains from Lukla, and getting drunk in the bars of Thamel.
Far too many visitors with guidebooks think that Kathmandu is little more than the sordid sewer it’s made out to be.
But there’s a half an hour bike ride from Kathmandu that you can take down the streets of Bhaktapur that will tell you a different tale.
For it’s by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.
Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you’ve driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
So that’s my travel schedule for the next few months. With my lovely wife recuperating at home, instead of cashing in on my Dashain bonus to travel to an “exotic” destination, I’m going to get my trusted old Trek 4300 and pedal on the road.
Alright, not quite all the way to Nagarkot, for the climb would kill me, but down some dusty old trails. It’s hardly a road less traveled; after all, at least half a million go down to Bhaktapur everyday.
But every man needs a Lance Armstrong moment in his life: Even if it’s on a not-so-cheap Trek 4300.
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