Wireless In Kathmandu

News for Kathman-Dudes
Kathmandu, Nepal

I am happy to report that Kathmandu has a bunch of new wireless options. Of course, they are not without their special regional brand of complications.

In descending order of completeness:

1-Hotel Annapurna, a 5-star on Durbar Marg, has the best all-round wireless service in their Coffee Shop. The service is FREE for all customers. Translation: You can buy a 100NRs pot of tea and sit there in the AC being waited on hand and foot for hours, using the wireless. There is never a problem with the connection and there are plenty of places to plug in. Plus, one of the cleanest bathrooms in the Eastern Hemisphere. Open till 11pm ish. They do tack on a service charge to the bill, so no need to tip - but the service is excellent.

2-Cafe Galleria is a new spot on Thamel JP Marg. AC, clean and mod, not much to eat but overpriced teas and coffees - but the wireless is free, and again, never a problem with the connection. Open till 10pm ish.

3-The Roadhouse Cafe, just across the street from Galleria in Thamel (not the one in Patan) now has wireless at 30NRs/hour; however, in their zeal to go mod, they neglected to install any extra plug points. Therefore, the entire place is wireless...but there are only 3 or 4 plug points and most are hidden behind heavy tables. Great planning, guys. Nice ambience, relaxing, open till 10pm. They switch of the wireless unless requested to "on" it. Last week it wasn't working at all.

4-Himalayan Java on Tridevi Marg still has their wireless, now at 40Rs an hour, but the waiters have a crappy attitude and about 15% of the time the service is down. Great coffee drinks, though. They say they close at 10 but actually kick you out at 9 and are not nice about it. They do have a few more plug points available than Roadhouse. Traffic from Tridevi Marg gets very loud and stinky around rush hour.

5-New Orleans Cafe: their "Free" wireless, which their flyers tout as available from opening time till 7pm, is not so "free" when you get your bill. They charge you for plugging in to "current" - regardless of the amount of time spent! As Asian travellers know, it costs about 50NRs a MONTH to plug in a laptop, of course. Some regulars have worked it out where they just don't pay it. Great food, nice ambience, waiters have crappy attitude. Sometimes problem with connection - and often verrrry slow.

The New Orleans branch at Boudha also claims to have wireless now. I haven't checked it out. It is by far the nicest ambience in Boudha but they do close verrry early- 8pm or even earlier.

6-the famous Kathmandu Guest House has overpriced wireless (about 50 NRs per hour) in the terrace. Great surroundings, decent food, indifferent service and the last time I bought the password, I couldn't get it to work. And, they wouldn't give the money back.

7-I am listing DREAMS GARDEN (on Tridevi up the road from Himalayan Java) last only because I have not tried it out first-hand. This beautiful former Raja's private garden, aka "Kaiser Mahal," has been restored and now charges tourists 180NRs entrance, but it is a real class act of restoration inside with Versailles-type folly gardens, fountains and flowers. The wireless in the restaurant is 30NRs an hour. Open till about 8pm unless there is a special event. In order to get your rupees' worth on the entrance you need to go early.

8-Also, the Yak & Yeti, Kathmandu's original five-star on Durbar Marg, has wireless, but I haven't checked it out.

I should add that when I read of the conditions "on the outside" - that is, in Greater Nepal - I feel bad complaining about wireless. District officers kidnapped, beat up and held hostage by Maoists, witch hunts against helpless rural women, all kinds of medieval stuff. Puts things in perspective. We don't have it so bad here in town.

Or, even compared to Delhi... where 3 out of 3 places I went for wireless were "not possible today meddem." And India fancies itself as a tech capital.

You're OFF the Air!
The Mao-Baddies are busy working toward the Constituent Assembly November deadline. Their latest contribution to democracy: helping shut down an independent FM radio station yesterday afternoon.
Read the full story here.

Oh, did I say the Maoists did it? No....it was the "labour union" (which they orchestrated and formed) or maybe, the Young Communist League... but NOT the Maoists themselves. Let's split our hairs correctly.

The MEEZ Generation
Just for fun, check out my 3D ID at Meez.com. And, if you want to get your own (prepare to want one) for free, just enter my "code," sirensongs.

The Big Rot Candy Mountain
Last year at this time, I posted a blog with the identical subtitle. Not much has changed. Every couple weeks there is a garbage strike - usually people locking up the dumping /disposal area until they get paid or bribed to reopen it.

The result: accumulated mounds of filth rotting in the sun and, alternately, monsoon downpour. Dogs dig through it, crows pick at it and amazingly, poor people still rifle through it looking for stuff. Outbreaks of cholera have followed in some areas of the city.

It's yet another use for my handy dupatta scarf (covering my face from the REEK and STENCH of the de facto dump). Don't leave home without it!

Waterfall garbage can

Guest column by Ashe & Macie
Dharamsala, Himachal

I spent most of today on a mountainside above the Bhagsu waterfall Ashe & Macie are writing about. As I came down the mountain, my hands were filled with potato chip bags and mint-wrappers.

What they said about garbage, India and Indian habits is so apt, I just thought I would let them guest star today.

If we could choose just one thing that annoys, frustrates, and saddens us most about India it is that the Indians we encounter just cannot stop lying. We listen and catch people lying numerous times every single day. Most lies are small and meant only to get money from us in some way, but the fact that lying seems to be such a normal activity really worries us.

Read the whole travelogue here.

Trashed

The Big Rot Candy Mountain
Kathmandu, Nepal

Shooooooooooooooo-weeeeeeee!

The KMC (Kathmandu Municipal Corporation) sanitation workers have been on strike here for over a week, and the city is trashed. Living in Asia, I am accustomed to a high level of street debris and smells (everyone knows Singapore does not count as Asia). But even I am not used to climbing over literal mounds of decomposing trash, sodden in the monsoon rains.

The mountains of garbage - paper, burlap sacks, rotting fruit hulls, wrung-out sugarcane used to make juices, plastic bags holding moisture, spent corn cobs, banana peels, newspapers and so on - are now large enough to block traffic on the already congested city streets. Yesterday Floriane and I were walking back from Patan to New Road and traffic was at a complete standstill. We squeezed in between piled-up cycle rickshaws, taxis, motorbikes, scooters and mini-buses on roads that in any other part of the world would be considered alleys. Of course everyone has to honk, as though some obstinate person at the front of the queue is willfully holding up everyone else...and as though honking would do any good whatsoever. Normally cows, goats and street dogs take care of the overflow of organic trash, but there isn't enough livestock in the city to make a dent in all this rot.

Mosquitoes are having a field day breeding in among all the piled-up rot and my entire backside is covered in red welts.

Use and Throw
If you have never lived in Asia, you don't know trash. For one thing, there are few, if any, garbage cans on the road here. The local habit is just to "use and throw" - drink your juice, eat your candy bar, and toss the wrapper down at your feet without a second thought. In fact, if you consume your drink at the shop and ask the shopowner "where can I toss this garbage?" they will often instruct you to throw it right in the street (the phrase is "use and throw"). Most of them don't keep garbage cans. Those that do normally just toss their own garbage can's contents right into the street at night, anyway.

So garbage gets tossed into the tiny gutter, which is just a foot or 2 away from your sandalled feet, or right onto the street itself. Most streets don't have proper sidewalks ("footpaths"), with the result that you are constantly dodging garbage.

Trash: from the ground up
Here in Nepal, the Sanitation Department does not arrive in huge, roaring, dinosaur-like trucks with hydraulic lifts on the back. Since there are no garbage trucks, there are no dumpsters or garbage bins.

In Thamel, garbage removal begins with the street sweepers. This is one of the lowest castes in Hindu society (slightly above the sewer-divers, latrine-cleaners, butchers, and those who dispose of corpses). They are employed by the city at the rate (in India) of about 100 IRs a day - that's about $2.25.

The sweepers come out after dusk and, stooping low over the broken pavement, push the accumulated gutter garbage into neat piles. A Westerner would not recognize their working equipment for what they are - brooms. To us, these brooms look like little bundles of stiff straw, sort of like uncooked spaghetti sticks wrapped in a bunch about 2 feet long and tied with a piece of twine. There is no handle, so the sweepers must bend double over the ground and have their faces in the dirt and dust for hours. They generally don't wear masks or scarves to protect their faces from the filth. Older sweepers' backs are permanently crooked.

If you were to give them a Western broom with a long handle, which would not only enable them to stand upright and save their backs, but would give them leverage and enable them to work more efficiently, they would sell them to someone and return to their familiar whisk broom. This is what they prefer. (In the 60s, one Peace Corps project became legendary among anthropologists. To enable subsistence farmers (can't remember where) to both work more quickly, and save their spines, the Peace Corps workers gave them long-handled hoes for tilling. The villagers promptly chopped the long handles off the farming implements and went back to bending double over the ground.)

Miles of piles - Recycling, Asian style
The next phase in urban sanitation are the rag pickers. This occupation covers all genders, ages and even species. Humans, dogs, cows, crows, cats, and goats all join in nosing and picking through the accumulated rubbish in search of various kinds of morsels. Most rag-pickers, however, seem to be women with young children. It's not often that you see an adult male ragpicking.

Some ragpickers work at night, but mostly I see them first thing in the morning- probably for better visibility. Popular items with humans seem to be plastic water and soda bottles, and re-useable plastic bags. I think they can re-sell them somewhere. In India, there are entire shops devoted to buying and selling old newspaper by the pound. Cows are fond of used corn cobs and banana peels. Dogs naturally concentrate in areas round the butcher shops. They are all working a bit frantically - to try and beat 1) each other - competing groups of scavengers, and 2) - the Garbage truck.

The garbage truck, in Thamel, is a guy on an ordinary push bicycle that has a large wire bin attached on back. Sort of like an ice cream vendor in reverse, he scoops up the piles (using seemingly nothing - maybe a piece of cardboard and his hands) and dumps them into his wire bin till it's full.

In areas with more modern, wide-open streets, the garbage truck is a weird sort of three-wheeler hybrid between a go-kart, a flatbed truck, and a tractor. I wish I could upload a photo for you. This contraption is usually peopled by 3 men, and for some reason, has handlebars rather than a steering wheel. The 2 guys on back scoop up the wet piles of muck onto the flatbed with maximum roaring of engines and blocking of traffic.

In that way, I guess it has a lot in common with Western, more sophisticated garbage trucks.

Smelly Delhi

Smelhi Delhi?

Just arrived in Delhi 3 hours ago on the sleeper bus from Rishikesh, and am typing on a honky-tonk crappy keyboard in Paharganj ("Pahar-Grunge"), the backpacker ghetto. It is really grungy. Kind of place a guy sits on top of his cycle rickshaw, horks his throat, spits right at your feet and says "rickshaw meddem?"

Lots of garbage with lots and lots of cow nosing through it, etc. (How come Delhi has soooo many cows, more than smaller towns like Pune?)

Just passing through Smelhi Delhi to get my contact lenses, new camera lithium battery and then the bus to the Nepali border. Maybe a few photo-ops of striking medical students.