Jomsom trek (part one): Getting to the trail

Taking the trek to Jomsom and Muktinath was Sean’s idea. When he first contacted me and said he was coming to Nepal, he was already determined to do this trek, inspired in part by the impression made on him years ago by Peter Mathiessen’s The Snow Leopard. (Amanda doesn’t like this book. I have no idea if this is why she didn’t come with us.)

Sean and I were in the process of making preparations when, a couple of days before we were to leave, our friend Becca asked if we wanted any company. We said certainly, and she ended up contributing the lion’s share of the logistical work. Her boyfriend did NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) with a guy named Amrit who works for the trekking agency Borderlands, and he set us up with a guide and arranged our TRC permit. As of October of this year, a new law went into effect requiring foreign trekkers on the major routes in Nepal to be accompanied by at least one guide or porter. It seems to be mainly a make-work law, and certainly benefits the trekking agencies, but it also has the potential to degrade more than enhance the experience for trekkers here. (More on that in part two.)

The route we chose begins outside Pokhara, in the village of Nayapul, and goes via Jomsom and Kagbeni up to Muktinath and back to Jomsom. This route is known as the “apple pie trek” because it runs through Nepal’s apple country, and the popularity of the route is such that the tourist infrastructure is well developed here, so if you want, you can eat apple pie every night along the way. The peak season is in September and October. We got a few warnings that December might be too cold but Vishwa assured us we’d be fine, being Americans and thereby accustomed to colder weather than Nepal generally experiences.

We bought plane tickets for the return flight from Jomsom to Pokhara, US$69 each. Between Kathmandu and Pokhara we took the bus. Sean and I nearly missed our 7am bus from Kathmandu because we assumed we could get a taxi, but none was to be had. We took a local bus and then a minibus, crammed aboard with our backpacks among the wary morning commuters. The bus to Pokhara was a luxurious Mercedes with only half a dozen passengers. It left only a few minutes after we’d thrown our packs into the storage compartment and climbed into our reserved seats. Bottled water was handed out, and the massive bus began to nudge its way among the taxis, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians. In half an hour or so, we got clear of the traffic and began to ascend through the sungolden smog, the sun rising among the shadows of brick factory smokestacks and new buildings in the outskirts of the city, bristling with rebar, and we rose into the hills and the clean air.

The road to Pokhara winds through the lush terrace-farmed valley of the Trisuli River. This is one of Nepal’s main highways, a two-lane blacktop comprised mostly of hairpin curves one after another above hundreds of feet of canyon, for two hundred kilometers. It’s a well-built and well-maintained road, with concrete barriers in many places to prevent or at least discourage vehicles from plunging over the side, and it’s wide enough for two large vehicles to pass. Nonetheless, the sheer curviness of it, and the ever-present chasm, prods at the coddled western driver’s sense of mortality. It’s usually a given that in a plane crash, everyone dies. Here, the same is true of bus crashes. (Note to parents/family/friends/others who love us: Most bus crashes in Nepal happen at night and on less well-maintained local buses. Drivers are drunk or fall asleep, or there’s a mechanical failure, poverty being a harsh taskmaster when it comes to automative maintenance. But out of our concern for you, Amanda and I will try like hell not to be on one of those buses. Besides, this bus ticket came with perks such as an included lunch and a no-livestock policy.)

The bus arrived in the early afternoon in Pokhara and we climbed down into a gaggle of pestering taxi drivers offering to take us to various hotels. We were meeting Laurie, who lives and works in Pokhara as an interpreter for the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights, and we were planning on staying at the hotel where she stays. None of the drivers had heard of this hotel, though they offered up at least three hotels with similar-sounding names. We got ourselves loaded into one man’s taxi, but he was apparently the navigator, not the driver. When he tried to get into the passenger seat Sean shooed him off and got in instead. There was no room for him. But a few hundred yards down the road it became apparent that our driver had no idea where we were going. He hadn’t asked us. We stopped him, got out, found another taxi whose driver, by virtue of not being part of the bus park feeding frenzy, was presumably more trustworthy, and proceeded to the more easily located Pokhara office of Borderlands, where Amrit had arranged to have our TRC permits waiting along with our guide and 250 rupees change.

From there we walked to the hotel, dropped our things, went and found Laurie at the U.N. office and had tea with her. While she finished her workday, we went for a paddle on the lake. The snowy slopes of some massive mountain peeked out for a while from the clouds. Later we met Laurie for Newari food, eaten under a thatch canopy by the lake, and returned to the hotel with her through the peaceful Pokhara streets. Pokhara is Nepal’s second largest city but the lakeside neighborhood is so utterly pleasant that Becca and I were soon rehearsing arguments to convince Amanda and Anna (Becca’s friend, whom she’s here visiting until spring) to relocate their research. Pokhara is warmer than Kathmandu in the winter, and the air is clean, and the nearby mountains and the lake provide the sort of picturesque setting which is essential to good Ph.D. research. I’ll post our new address when the arrangements are finalized.

In the early morning, we took in the view from the balcony of the Hotel Supriya. There was fog on the lake and a near-full moon above. Laurie gave me a cup of hot coffee. Krishna Lama, our guide, waved to us from the narrow hotel walkway between two gardens where a water buffalo could be heard grunting from behind a hayrick. We invited him up, situated our bags, said goodbye to Laurie, and went down to the taxi Krishna had arranged for us. I tied our backpacks to the roof rack. On the way out of town we bought a few baked goods from one of the “German bakeries” that are common here. Money somewhat confusingly changed hands, so in the cab I explained the process known as “Jon’s Delicious Reckoning” to Sean and Becca. The taxi broke free of Pokhara’s traffic and began the climb into the hills, to more and more enticing views of the Annapurna range. Krishna explained to us about the striking mountain Machupuchhre (“Fish Tail”) which is deemed holy and is therefore off limits to climbers. Which is fine. I didn’t want to climb it anyway.

On the way up into the hills, we fetched up behind stopped traffic due to a small protest. It apparently had something to do with students, hence the burning tires.

But this quickly dispersed and we were on our way. We stopped at a checkpost to show our ACAP and TRC permits. Another couple miles up the road, we were dropped at the trailhead in Nayapul. We arranged our packs, paid our driver, and started out.

 

Off to see the sights

Sean and I are off tomorrow to hike from Pokhara to Jomsom with our friend Becca. Amanda is staying home to work, alas.

We’ll be back in Kathmandu, if all goes according to schedule and the planes are flying out of Jomsom in a timely manner, on the 14th or 15th.

 

Visits to Ashmina’s studio

Our friend Ashmina returned to Kathmandu from her artist’s residency in Denmark last month. Shortly after she returned, Amanda and Laurie and I went with her to her studio at Bal Mandir (“Children’s temple”). The building used to be a Rana palace. Now it houses a private primary school and an orphanage. The building is all crumbling and pigeon-haunted grandeur. In front is a lawn, ringed by spindly pines and cypresses, where older children play soccer. There’s a sculpture garden where resident artists have carved, to varying degrees of completion, imposing blocks of marble that lend the place the air of a classical ruin. Morning glories are climbing on a wire fence and nearly submerging the older, weathered statues in a side lawn.

(Marble must be cheap in Nepal. We see it everywhere. For Americans the words “marble floors” imply elegance and expense but I’ve seen marble floors here in stores that sell dusty Chinese electronics and counterfeit cosmetics.)

In a side yard, mustard and radishes are growing in neat plots and laundry is hung out to dry. Children run everywhere. We watched from a third floor gallery outside Ashmina’s studio as a schoolmaster directed a game with thirty children in one of the courtyards. We couldn’t make out the rules. A dog making an exploration of the place watched with about the same degree of understanding from under a tree in the corner.

In her studio, Ashmina took a pile of prints from a cabinet and turned them one at a time and held them up for us to look at. She held some of them up to the sunlight coming through the window and the wrought iron gridwork so that we could see the threads sewn into the fibrous paper, radiating like a network of capillaries.

On our way out, Ashmina’s friend Om gave us a tour of the sculpture garden, and we acquired an entourage of curious children who demanded that I take their picture in various combinations, posed atop various blocks of marble. After each picture I would show the camera’s viewscreen to the children who were in the frame and they would all crowd around trying to grab the camera to turn it for the best viewing until Ashmina warned them not to touch it.

After our first visit to Bal Mandir, Ashmina and Amanda and I went (finally) to buy some plants for the apartment. We followed directions to a nursery, found that it wasn’t where it was said to be, returned too early to pick up some dry cleaning for Laurie, and were led up to the roof by the dry cleaner who pointed out where the nursery was. We walked over there, picked out plants, then Amanda went to retrieve the dry cleaning and returned in a taxi which we packed until it looked like a rolling greenhouse. We drew a number of stares from people we passed in the street.

We’ll need about ten times that many plants before we can transform our terrace into the sort of rooftop garden that our neighbors have, to our great envy. (They also have chickens up there, that we can hear but not see, and a Tibetan mastiff, that we can hear and, when he pokes his big furry head out between the terracotta pots to woof at the street dogs, we can see him as well. Everyone has a dog or five here, if only because the street dogs claim us all equally and are part of the commons, but having a dog for your roof adds that extra touch of domestic refinement.)

 

Nepal, where organic really means organic

I am sure you have read in passing about a food institution of ours, Nhucches, the neighborhood organic restaurant. Thank god for Nhucches, I never dreamed I could get a field greens salad of such quality in Nepal. Plus the owners are really cool. They are cut from the same mold as Jon–socially and politically conscious foodies who are intellectually particular and bordering a bit on hedonistic. I am thankful that Jon has akin people with whom he can pal around.

This restaurant has a market that sells sundries from a cooperative that buys organically produced goods from all over Nepal. They have great rice, lentils, chickpeas, other beans, honey, tea, fresh veggies, herbs and eggs, as well as a wonderful artisanal goat cheese made by some French guy who lives here. For a $1.15 you can get a small wheel of wonderfully creamy, flavorful cheese that is typically unheard of in Nepal, where ripe yak cheese or overpriced old imported cheese is most prevalent.

We often buy both dry and fresh goods from this market, as well as eat at the restaurant about twice a week. During our first shopping excursion we bought a kilo of brown rice from Jumla, the far most northwestern district. It is delicious rice that we constantly have to nag our cleaning lady, Virginia, to cook for us. For some reason brown rice and black lentils are considered poor people’s food. The more healthy alternatives are not coveted like basmati rice and yellow daal, which are typically served in high cast or wealthier homes. So alas we struggle because our tastes are more aligned with traditionally low class cuisine.

One day as I was haranguing Virginia to cook the brown rice, she brought to my attention that all sorts of little bugs that looked like weevils had invaded, and claimed this was why she had not been cooking the rice.

I mentioned it to the shopkeeper. They said I should just bring it back and they will give me some new chamal (the word for rice that is not yet cooked, I think there are about five different Nepali words for rice depending on what stage it is in its life.) It was my intention to return the rice, but then figured we would probably have the same problem with the next batch. Since we had transferred the chamal directly into an airtight canister after buying it, the weevil eggs were definitely in there as it was packaged. It seemed a waste to return it and I was not sure how to deal with a new batch of rice to avoid the same problem. I could have put the rice out in the sun and bake it, which might kill the eggs. Yet that would also involve buying a nanglo, a big flat circular shaped weaved basket that people spread and sort rice on. (The women have a knack were they flip the rice along the slightly raised edge and it tosses the rice, which is heaver, toward them and leaves behind the remaining shaft and grass for them to pull out.) At this point I was tired of buying household items and did not want to bother, so instead I just picked the weevils out of the rice by hand and dropped them in a glass of boiling water.

I figured they could not have eaten too much and the rice would get boiled in the pressure cooker, so that should kill anything remaining.

Virginia was a bit shocked when I told her what I did and requested she cook the rice. I asked her if what I did was strange and if Nepalis would not do it, would they rather throw away the rice? She said no of course they would not waste chamal, they would do exactly what I did. So she made the rice that day but since she does not have the knack of cooking brown rice it came out a little soggy. I was absent from lunch that day, out working, but Jon said Virginia expressed that she did not really like brown rice. (His Nepali is getting good enough that he can have a conversation about food and people’s likes and dislikes.) Since then she has not cooked it. I am not sure if she really is not into the rice, or is freaked out about the weevils (which in Nepali they call maggots, it is the same word they would use to refer to maggots on meat, which we would definitely not eat). So alas our delicious Jumla organic brown rice sits there.

 

Kathmandu congestion and the wonder drugs that treat it

It has been my experience living in Kathmandu that I get a congestion cold every six to eight weeks. I think that the pollution exacerbates this tendency or maybe it is the root cause, I am not sure. Well like clock work Jon caught the cold in our sixth week here. I caught it a week later from him. These days everyone has it, because of the change in weather, so they say. It is highly contagious, quickly moving amongst the population. There are many vulnerabilities, getting sneezed on in the tight confines of a public bus, or grabbing a pole to balance yourself the same way another person had done immediately after he coughed into his hands, or shaking hands with anybody, or having a snotty nosed kid climb all over you, etc. (The NYT exposé on which American politicians use Purell comes to mind.)

It is a nasty cold that fills your head and lungs up with a thick mucus that throws off your balance, makes you feel like you are perpetually drowning, and keeps you from lying down to sleep because it intensifies the drowning sensation. As the mucus moves into your chest you develop a terrible cough that hurts but helps heave up the mucus.

Jon’s cough developed before mine so he asked me to get some cough syrup. I went to our neighborhood pharmacy and was given a cough syrup called Bronchodyne, with a picture of a lung on it (see picture). This Bronchodyne was a new one on me but the lung convinced me that it would probably be effective. I often rely on pictures on medicine labels because I am not very good at recognizing chemical components, a skill that is necessary to decipher what the different medicines are for. Most of the drugs are generic from India and Bangledesh, so things are not referenced by a drug brand name the way they are in the states.

Well it turns out this Bronchodyne has twice as much of the active component in robitussin that makes you loopy. So in other words, instead of having to drink a bottle of Robitussin to induce a high-like tripping effect, you only have to drink a half a bottle of Bronchodyne. Well believe you me, I have come to discover that feeling as if you are tripping is none too pleasant when you simultaneously feel like you are drowning from too much mucus. The stuff was scary.

The next time Jon asked for cough syrup, I got something called Benedryl. In a hurry, I unwittingly took the bottle the pharmacist gave me when I asked for cough syrup without inspecting it. We have not tried it. We were too scared that it actually is Benedryl and we would be subject to another weird high. Or even worse it is a Benedryl knock off that turns out to be something completely different (there are a lot of brand knock-offs here). Luckily our colds are gone so we won’t be motivated to research this bottle of Benedryl’s ingredients for another six weeks. Good thing medicine is super cheap here so all our errors are not causing us too much expense.

 

Royal Stag, Royal Challenge, Royal Warrior

Nepalis love their scotch, and Royal Stag seems to be the most popular scotch in Nepal. We were buying it regularly until DC told us to steer clear of it on the basis that it’s frequently counterfeited. I won’t speculate about what goes into counterfeit scotch. But this might explain the royal hangovers.

Royal Challenge is a brand I’ve seen on bottles of scotch and cans of beer in some of the stores. I have yet to take the Royal Challenge.

There’s a flaking billboard at one intersection in town, and I haven’t had my camera handy, but it advertises a whiskey called Royal Warrior. I haven’t seen this one in the stores. If I do, will I buy it? Would you?

I also wonder if these brands will need to be renamed if the king is stripped of all his governmental powers. “The People’s Stag” does have a nice ring to it.

 

Laxmi puja and a midnight serenade

Laurie flew down from Pokhara for the five-day Tihar holiday. On the night she arrived was Laxmi Puja, when Hindus in Nepal invite Laxmi, the goddess of wealth, into their homes by making an offering on the street in front of their doorway, and a path leading from there into the house. We went out in the evening to get dinner, heading for Thamel, Kathmandu’s tourist district, thick with restaurants and open late.

The narrow street from our house to the chowk was lively, though normally it’s deserted a few hours after dark. Children were going from house to house singing a song that would become familiar over the next few hours. At each door they carol and are given money. Women were tending to the butter candles that lit the pujas in front of their doors. All of the shops were open late. Boys were throwing firecrackers from the rooftops, and an occasional bottle rocket would sparkle into the sky and pop. We followed the narrow street along the back wall of the Russian Embassy and down to the chowk. On the steps of the electronics shop where we bought our cheap Chinese phones there was a band sitting and playing, with drums and an electric guitar run through a little amplifier, and an audience of a dozen people standing in the street. Many buildings were decked out in strings of colored lights but none so brightly as the businesses on the chowk, and along the main streets our taxi driver drove on the way to Thamel. Jaya Nepal Hall, a movie theater near the royal palace, had at least a hundred strands strung from the roof to the compound walls making a pavilion of lights. Laurie said, If there’s a power outage we can blame it on Jaya Nepal.

The driver had to let us off at the end of Tridevi Marg, the street leading into Thamel. There was a cordon closing the street to car traffic, beyond which was a dark stretch and then the backside of a bandstand set up for a dj to play thumping beats for a crowd that filled the street from curb to curb. We squeezed through along the sidewalk and into the press of people dancing under clouds of laser-lit smoke. We emerged from the back of the crowd into the remnants of a street fair where the last few vendors were selling soda and snacks, and dogs, some with red tikka stains still on their heads, were nosing through discarded food wrappers. There were many foreigners in the crowd, some in families, some riding passenger on bicycle rickshaws.

We passed with relative ease through Thamel where on most nights legions of hawkers dog yours steps trying to sell you blessings and trinkets and hash and you have to watch that your feet aren’t run over by the taxis and motorcycles contesting every spare inch of roadway. Tonight, the hawkers seemed to be occupied elsewhere and the taxis were on the other side of the cordons. We went on Laurie’s suggestion to Cafe Mitra, her favorite restaurant in Kathmandu, the doorway to which is near the end of a narrow brick alley. From there you climb narrow uneven wooden stairs, avoid hitting your head on a low lintel, and step into a cozy dining room with windows overlooking the street. The main dining room on the second floor was full, mostly of foreigners, so we were led to the third floor dining room, where we were the only diners for most of the evening. We had cocktails and salad, Amanda ate a grilled fish, Laurie ate pasta, and I dismantled a pair of quails. We talked Nepali politics. On our way out, a group of boys waiting in the alley hit us up with an express version of the deusi song, ten seconds at most, and then claimed to be insulted when it only earned them twenty rupees. A longer version was in our near future.

When we arrived back at our house, a boy with a guitar in his hand followed us through the gate and stood there assessing us as we were greeted by our landlord Vishwa and his wife Kalpana. Amanda said, laughing, He looks like he’s going to hit us with that thing. The boy disappeared back through the gate and returned in a moment with over a dozen companions carrying a drum kit, a tambourine, another guitar, a bass, a microphone and stand, an amplifier, and speaker cabinets. They were singing the same song the children in the alley had been singing, but with a good deal more vigor and volume.

One of the older boys approached Vishwa with a power strip in his hand and asked if they could plug in. Vishwa ran an extension cord for them. A few sound checks produced some feedback and the loud persistent hum of ungrounded electric guitars. Vishwa tried another outlet for them, running the extension cord this time through his living room window. The tinkering continued, the singing and clapping faded, then was picked up again when the sound system still wasn’t ready. We were getting a little impatient but we waited with good humor. The girl who is Vishwa and Kalpana’s live-in helper brought their three-month old baby out for Laurie and Amanda to ooh and ah. He’s a cute and fat and utterly calm baby and the crowd of boys adjusting their sound system didn’t faze him. It took them twenty or thirty minutes to get situated. Finally they played three long rousing songs for us, enticing Amanda and Laurie and I to dance during one of them. The neighbors looked out from the third floor window. They finished with an electrified version of the deusi song during which Kalpana set out their hard-earned tributes, a copper plate with rice and money and an apple with a burning incense stick in it, all of which two of the boys carefully transferred into a knapsack full of other such rewards.

It was a late night. Amanda thinks they waited up for us to return.

 

Kukur Tihar

Yesterday was Kukur Tihar, a holiday on which Nepalis show their appreciation for the dogs, domestic and stray alike, not that the difference is always apparent.

I meant to get out and get some pictures, but Amanda and I had a very busy day. I Googled up a couple of pictures that summarize the mood among Nepal’s dogs on this special day.

 

O pizza where art thou!

I just smelled the smell of pepperoni coming in the window. It was a waking dream, not real, but it smelled like real.

Maybe it was the discussion with Vishwa over his towering basil plant downstairs. He brought it from Japan a few months ago. He was asking me about its uses. He loves Italian food but in Japan he picked up the misconception that spaghetti sauce is made with ketchup. I’ve been scratching my head over what to do with the basil. My impression is that while Thai or holy basil (known as “tulsi” in Hindi and Nepali) is common enough, sweet basil is a bit of a rarity here. The other ingredients for proper Italian food are unlikely to be any more common. I’ve also been discussing with him how to reseed this plant. It’s flowering, and normally I would pinch off the flowers so as not to let the flavor and leafiness diminish, but we also want it to reproduce so it won’t be the last of its line. I was advising him on how to make pizza sauce taste like pizza sauce, and how that didn’t involve ketchup, and it reminded me of the conversation in the gym between Sal and the Nepali guy who wante to know if Sal’s pizza had potatoes for a topping option. Maybe I could make killing selling homefries pizza for Nepalis.

Anyhow, back to the subject of actual pizza. I didn’t post an update on the topic after Amanda and Laurie and I went to Mike’s Breakfast for pizza because their pizza wasn’t all that encouraging. We ordered three single-person pizzas to share. They had overly thick, doughy crust, made soggy by overly thick layers of toppings. The three pizzas were mostly indistinguishable from one another. The one that was supposed to have pesto on it had the same tomato sauce as the others. Maybe the pesto was mixed in with the tomato sauce? In any case it didn’t taste like much. And if there was extra cheese on one of the pizzas, that wasn’t distinguishable either. Maybe the chef was being generous and put extra cheese on all three. It wasn’t enough. Amanda and Laurie pronounced it inferior to Fire & Ice’s pizza on the spot. I ate most of it anyhow, because I was hungry, and the wine was pretty good.

So the other day, Amanda and I went to Sal’s pizza after the gym. They’re close by, down a long narrow alley between brick compound walls overtopped by flowering vines. It’s a quiet, out-of-the-way spot. The store is inassuming and clean. The day we went was mid-desain and all of the shop fronts were closed but Sal’s was open, and a gaggle of teenage boys were sitting on footstools around the lone table on the shop step, drinking tea and playing chess. We ordered a garlic and mushroom pizza, and a mixed meat pizza. The dough was already rolled out, sitting in a plastic bag inside a dormant convection oven, on top of which was stacked another, hot convection oven where the action was taking place. The menu was promising but the convection oven situation wasn’t. We waited a good while. They seemed pretty busy, and the boy who was taking orders and assembling the pizzas was swamped with requests for tea and soda from the other customers. Sal (at least I assume that’s his name) himself wandered in after a while and asked his employees if they needed more dough, and we spoke with him for a few minutes. He was surprised by the amount of business they were getting. He’d thought it might not be worth it to open, but his employees had said there would be a lot of business. My guess is that with most places closed for desain, it’s good to be open. Sal also apologized for the quality of the pizza while it was still in the oven. Most days, he said, they use the tandoor of a nearby restaurant. (There are several tandoori restaurants there on Lazimpat, the main road off which the alley runs.) In fact, after several failed attempts at producing a satisfactory dough, they just decided to have the tandoori restaurant make naan for them. But it makes sense. A good bubbly, slightly burnt naan is closer to what a New Yorker considers proper pizza dough than, say, even a top-notch Chicago deep dish pie. He asked us to come try them again when the tandoori restaurant is open to bake their dough for them.

Judging by the quality of what’s on top of the dough, we’ll be giving them another try. They import their mozzarella and use plenty of it, so they’ve got that part right. The sauce is pretty good, if a little sweet. The other toppings were all fine. They have a couple of oddball toppings that got my curiosity up, as well: “spicy buff[alo]” and “Ramesh’s achar” (but no damn potatoes!)

 

Fun with electricity

Thinking I was well-prepared for our electrical outlet multiplication needs, I brought to Nepal a five-tentacled PowerSquid powerstrip (or, as they’re known here, “multiplug,” which is more appropriate anyhow because the PowerSquid is not in any sense a “strip.” It looks like a squid, with female outlets on the ends of its tentacles to prevent transformer bricks from blocking access to outlets they’re not using. Clever.) It also has built-in surge protection for power outlets, coaxial cable, and phone jacks.

And I brought an adapter, since the Nepali outlets look like the one depicted in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Baseboard outlet

Needless to say, you can’t plug an American-style plug into that without using a hammer. You can plug an American-style plug into such a one as depicted in Fig. 2…

Fig. 2. Wall switch with “universal” outlet

…but only if it’s not a grounded (i.e., three-prong) plug, which doesn’t help us, as all of our 220V-tolerant appliances have grounded plugs.

Now, these are the crucial electronic items I need to plug in to enjoy all of the gadgetry without which I’ll lose my identity as a westerner:

1) laptop computer;
2) external hard drive, chock full of music;
3) little speaker capable of loud volumes, without which aforesaid music is useless;
4) VoIP router, for unlimited calling to the U.S.; and
5) AirPort Express wireless router, so I don’t have to be sitting near all this stuff when it bursts into flame.

The plan was to plug them all into the PowerSquid’s five tentacles. This is why I thought I only needed the one adapter: to plug the American PowerSquid into the Nepali outlet.

Of the above appliances, two—the speaker and the VoIP router—aren’t spec’d for 220V, so they needed to have their voltage converted. No problem. I went to the Bhat Bhateni supermarket, where they sell everything that can be bought, and bought myself a stepdown transformer.

Fig. 3. Stepdown transformer

Here begin the complications. The stepdown transformer, you’ll notice, says “110 VOLTS.” The PowerSquid, particular creature that it is, raised in the unwavering currents of the American electrical system, considered this voltage abnormal and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. (The stepdown transformer seems to have its reservations as well. Now and then it shuts off. The light stays on, but there’s no juice. But if I flip the switch to “OFF” and then back to “ON,” all is forgotten, and the power comes back.) So there went both my surge protection and my outlet multiplication. If I wanted to run those two 220V-intolerant appliances, they had to share the stepdown transformer’s single outlet, which looks, incidentally, like the outlet shown in Fig. 2.

I needed a splitter, preferably one with American female outlets and a Nepali male. If that couldn’t be found, I would need 1) a splitter and 2) an adapter and 3) another adapter. And in either case, there had to be room enough for the two transformer bricks to plug into it at the same time. I had little hope for something as clever as the PowerSquid. What I ended up with was one of these:

Fig. 4. I don’t know what you call this thing

This thing is basically a plastic box with three prongs sticking out of it, and outlets on three sides. Three different outlets. Three outlets that differ in ways that are subtle and, honestly, a little disconcerting. When it comes to culture shock, it’s the little things that get to you. But yes, I find their similarity-yet-difference menacing. Look:

Fig. 5.

No plug in the house, mind you, fits snugly into this thing. Most plugs fit, loosely, into at least one side of it. As to how the screws and wires and metal strips come together inside there, I won’t speculate. When you plug something into it, it snaps and arcs. It has burn marks on the metal. It looks like a skull. But I managed to plug it into the stepdown, jammed on top of one transformer brick and with other balanced on top of it, in such a way that both are getting power and the smell of burning wires isn’t noticeable from more than a few feet away.

Fig. 6. Don’t try this at home

As for the other appliances, they can make do with 220V, so they get to hang out with this Chinese power strip which is less discerning than the PowerSquid. This strip, interestingly, features yet another variation on the “universal” outlet.

Fig. 7. Fang An Safe & Durable

I wonder why each outlet seems to have its own label. Are they for different purposes? They are labeled, from left to right, “NOISE FILTER,” “CIRCUIT BREAKER,” “SAFETY SHUTTER,” “MULTI PURPOSE,” “NEON SWITCH,” and “UNIVERSAL USE.” This power strip is everything the PowerSquid is not. For one, it’s actually a power “strip.” For two, it’s so unpicky about its job that you can actually twist the plugs inside the outlets with about thirty degrees of play. Look at those first two plugs. This is a power strip with a can-do attitude. Ajay, our Indian/Nepali ex-marine-engineer-from-a-landlocked-country technical guru, took one look at it and informed me that such loose connections are the leading cause of electrical appliance death in Nepal. He then warned me off of Chinese electronics generally.

Which brings me to the UPS. Load shedding has been fairly frequent, as have other types of apparently more spontaneous power outages. In order to prevent any more downtime than necessary, I saw fit to buy a UPS (uninterruptible power supply), which is basically a big battery (second plug from the left). Ajay sold it to us, and even hand-delivered it. It’s of Indian manufacture and is a darn solid and reliable looking piece of equipment. It weighs more than it looks like it should, unlike the Fang An Safe & Durable, which weighs almost nothing. And it has four snug, no-nonsense American-style outlets on the back. Of course the cable modem, which was the item most in need of backup power in order to keep our internet connection alive during power outages, has a Nepali-style plug on it. This is why it’s plugged into an adapter and then into the UPS:

Fig. 8. Behind the UPS

That thing on the left with the phone cables running to it is the PowerSquid. Did I mention that the Chinese phones we keep buying keep breaking? Well, we’re on our second anyhow. When we plug them into the VoIP router, the handsets stop working. The speaker phones work, but the handsets die. Vonage tech support blames the phones, and we already know Ajay’s opinion on the matter. Anyhow, to prevent further damage to the current broken phone, I plugged it into the PowerSquid’s phone jack surge suppressor. It may be too little too late, but dammit I brought that thing all the way from the U.S. and I was determined to use it.