Whatever you do or think of doing in life, try to avoid changing airlines and transferring bags at Delhi airport, never go there if possible. You will leave the well ordered universe of, say KLM Dutch airlines and be dropped into India's version of Kafka, arriving just after midnight, after flying for 8 hours, not knowing what time it really is for your body. I have been here before, to the purgatory of being attached for some reason to two bags of climbing equipment being held hostage by a large committee of young Indian airline officials. First someone explains that you will need to wait for maybe 15 minutes while they find the bags and he disappears. An hour later someone new goes through the entire process again, checking the passport, the baggage claim numbers, the ticket...just wait over there for a few minutes, then disappears. I rant at the counter, gesticulate, demand, implore, lay down on the floor, until someone else, looking very concerned, takes down all the information and says, just wait for 15 minutes....but I can't wait, I am tired, it is 2 AM, you have my bags with my gloves and boots and tent.
A new person makes another promise, we have found the bags...then disappears. At 4 AM they ask how much the bags weigh...15 kilos...each exchange creates a long conversation in Hindi among everyone, there are 11 to 16 people there at any given time for "transfers". I get the impression I am the first person who ever attempted such a thing and they really have no idea what to do. At 5 AM someone says, a new person, that I have to pay for extra weight...$55.00, I knew this was going to happen, just find my bags....He takes my $60.00 and disappears, it is 5 AM. Later someone else appears and says, $47.00, but has no idea where the $60.00 went....This is the short version, I know that just beyond the doors there is a lovely airline terminal. When they finally come up with a boarding pass 6 hours after landing, I feel permanently bonded to these people, like a prisoner to their captors. Who knows if the bags will ever end up in Kathmandu.
Don't ever go here
Debating the fate of a bag
Avoid the transfer desk
Inside the terminal!
Inside the cab in Kathmandu! With bags.
At Nima's at last Tuesday morning a 36 hour trip.
Standing on a rooftop in Kathmandu, it is early in a very misty humid Nepal morning, listening to a chorus of dogs, birds, roosters, distant motercycles, honking, and the lonely drone of an airplane heading for Lukla and the Khumbu. Reminding me of that place in the mountain, climbing alone, melting ice, waking up buried in snow and the endless dreams of the great mountain etched into my body.
From my rooftop I can watch the small dramas of people moving about, children going to school, goats and chickens, a cow, little trucks, older people on the terraces. 
Nima took me to the Pasang Lhamu climbing center, named after the first womanp to climb Mt. Everest. The climbing wall gave climbing on plastic a whole new meaning, these were old creaky walls, the plastic was smooth and hard and worn and shiny.
I have gone native, riding a motorcycle. A Nepalese taxi, driving down the wrong side of mostly unpaved roads with no stoplights on bald tires is scary. A motorcycle in Kathmandu is vehicular danger on an entirely different level. Since signaling never happens, it is a matter of honking and assuming someone else is going to slow down. I mostly concentrated on strategies for leaping from a crashing motorcycle as we drive on unpaved roads past the woman cooking corn on the side of the road, children in school uniforms, dodge a cow, chased by dogs, race to pass before being crushed by an oncoming truck, past the smoking pyres of Pashupati, past the tiny shrine to Genesh, through streets of crumbling houses and houses rising out of rubble into the dense thicket of Thamel. Thamel is the dream of many heavens. It is in Thamel where you buy the map fork the pilgrimage to the mountain, the armour to scale the mountain, emblazoned with mythical brands, like the flags of crusaders. In Thamel you buy the image of any Hindu god, the compassionate Buddha, or an organic curry. Tea, cloth, jewelry, rugs, Thanka paintings, phones, cameras, clothes, singing bowls, the Asia of the imagination, and everywhere the reminder of the great Himal in the distance. 
Nima and I strolling in Thamel. 
