'ROUND THE WORLD BOOK CLUB

One of the interesting things about traveling light is that you can't afford to have too much weight or space in your pack taken up by books. But books are absoluately indispensable to the traveler, including travel books and reading material for planes, trains, busses, and taxis. The upshot is that everyone reads everyone else's books, which usually means that everyone reads MY books since I'm the one who thought to pack them. This leads to interesting statements such as, " I'll trade you the "Foreign Affairs" magazine and the "Clash of Civilizations" for your "Rising Sun." We have multiple forms of bookmark in everything we have, from ticket stubs, napkins, and turned corners to empty rice cracker bags and the occasional passport or customs form. I had to resign myself to the inevitable destruction of the books, which is quite hard for an Obsessive Compulsive person, and they are slowly deteriorating.

So far we have all shared the above mentioned books, as well as Til We Have Faces, Pilgrim of Hate, The Motorcycle Diaries (which Mark read whining and complaining about reading "communist" propaganda), a set of Ray Bradbury short stories (I Sing the Body Electric), and all of our well-worn tour books.

Coming soon: The Round the World Book Club's Quiet-Nearly-Exhaustive review of Til We Have Faces.

.........AND POKER CLUB

The Poker Club got started in Kathmandu, when the plane we were supposed to be boarding developed a problem, and they shooed us all into an enclosed waiting room. Mark was already kind of annoyed because he'd got frisked by the same guy three times in the course of getting through security, and another delay inevitably meant another search, so we distracted him by getting out all of our money and the deck of cards to play poker on the floor. Nothing like a 4 hour delay while playing poker with random currency. The paper was easy, since everything just got face value, no matter the actual worth, but the coins were too varied to figure out (and it really does not matter since we were not playing for money) . We ended up doing them by size. Small coin for little blind, big coin for big blind, and we were off, throwing around 100,000 Lira coins like they were nothing. (Well, they actually are nothing, but that doesn't sound very impressive. It sounds terribly better to say, "I'll see your 200 Rupees, and raise you 100,000 Lira.")

Had a good game, with a lot of people coming over to watch and laugh, although I think Mark got distracted whenever the frisky security guard walked by, especially since we were playing with about 1,000 in Indian Rupees right beneath the sign saying, "It Is Offence Some Serious To Have Indian Rupees More Than 100." They'd probably have fined us Seventy Billion Lira and six Mark friskings if they'd noticed.

At the beginning of the trip, I had this idea that we would keep a running clock of the amount of time we spent lost on the trip and report it with each blog. Didn't work out, though, because it turns out that we are better navigators than I thought. We got lost of the first time in Kathmandu, about 3 weeks into the trip. Not really lost, it was just that we couldn't find our hotel in the twisting, narrow little streets. Kathmandu is great. It's basically a quiet little town of 20-some million, except with soldiers with AKs. They have that whole civil war with the Maoist rebels going on, so they are kinda uptight. We spent a lot of time threading through the winding streets, eating at random places with Seth and I hoping they were serving us Monkey.

Got interrupted at one point by a tour of the city by King Gyanedra and his wife. Quite a show! Like any dictatorship, they had bused in kids and peasants to the city squares, and the place was packed. We jostled with the crowd and caught sight of Something Going By, which I think was the King, but we didn't even know what was happening at the time, so we just jostled extra hard and squinted like everyone else. Found out later that the next day there were quite a few protests in the square and that the residents were particularly mad about a Kathmandu man who had been putting up a triumphal arch and had been killed when a passing car snagged a dangling rope and pulled the whole thing down into the street.

We got a chance to take a flight up to the Himalayas for a veiwing, which turned out to be pretty interesting. Spurning such clearly inferior choices as "YetiAir" and "Spice Airlines" (Is that where the Spice Girls went? I mean, seriously, did the whole part of the group that didn't marry David Beckham decide to invest the funds from their 20 minutes of fame, and someone suggested, "Hey, let's start an airline!," and then only later did they discover it only operated in parts of the world where they don't have people who can vaguely remember what their music sounds like? Anybody have any inside info on this?) we jumped on a Buhdda Air Beech 1990C and took off for the mountains. Descriptions in travelogues are always boring, so suffice it to say that the Himalayas and Mt. Everest knifing through a thick cover of pure white clouds ranks up there with the sights that will always remain in my mind.

We also went to one of the oldest Hindu temples in Kathmandu. I wanted to see one from the inside, but disappointingly, they won't let any non-Hindus into the actual temple-proper. I'm guessing their altar-calls are pretty awkward. The rest of the temple was pretty interesting. Imagine something out of Indiana Jones, but totally overrun with monkeys and other primates. The smell was something else.

Coming soon: Tiger doodoo, the Bridge, Floating Chaos, and Sushi With a View and an Asian Go-Go Band

JS®