Slowly everyone is leaving. Patrick takes the bus tomorrow, Charlie left before the weekend. Pero is planning his return to Macedonia, maybe with Peter, but now it looks like Pete may head to Austria instead. Brad is just waiting for his visa to Pakistan to come through, and Tom’s going back to India in 2 weeks. The only foreign tandem pilot left will be “Kite” but he’s a self-medicated weirdo with some unfathomable mental health issues and an involuntary shoulder spasm which means he shouldn’t be put in charge of a shopping trolley let alone flying tandems.
I’ve only been here 2 weeks but I’m so at home that when I sit on the balcony to use the wifi, not more than five minutes goes by without someone I know passing by and stopping for a chat. Evan the tiny Swiss solo pilot, Wally the Romanian, Bhupal the owner of Frontiers Paragliding...
My day begins when the sun wakes me around 7h30. I check the sky from bed. If it’s clear then I’m up and ready for the 9am jeep up the mountain, a bowl of low-rent cornflakes and buffalo milk sitting uneasily in my stomach. All the pilots sit in the back and we talk over the day’s flights and conditions. I love it. Really feel part of the team, even though as a beginner solo pilot I am in primary school compared to these university professors.
Depending on the lift I fly til midday. The conditions can be anything from totally still air to 15km/h winds, and the thermal lift fluctuates from none, to smooth, to leaf-in-a-tornado. My flights have ranged from 10minutes to over 2 hours including several visits to the cloud base, and I flew briefly inside the cloud. Total whiteout. The cloud base is quite low, which means doing any cross country flights is quite hard, so I am focusing on practicing finding and coring the thermals (circling in the strongest part of the rising warm column of air) and flying in formation with other thermaling gliders.
As I’m turning in a thermal I’m trying to feel if there is more lift to the left or right and making minor adjustments to the brakes to help me find it. After a few minutes of spiralling up, listening to the vario beeping contentedly, and eagerly watching the other gliders in the thermal I realise that while being totally focused I’m also zoned out. Suddenly wisps of cloud I’m heading into snap me out of the climb hypnosis. Coring the thermal is a chance for my brain to relax from the concentration of searching for lift, and as soon as it has an easier repetitive task it’s no wonder it spaces out.
On the contours of the hill, the shadow of the other wings rising round the same column of air form a swirl of ovals which gives you the satisfaction of knowing you’re probably in the best place for lift, as well as a glow of knowing your mates are there with you.
John, a retired ex-paratrooper from the UK and owner of the Safari Garden hotel leant me his vario/gps. Flicking through the logs stored in its memory, the longest flight is 2hours 17minutes. I’m trying to beat the best score on the instrument before I give it back. It’s become like an arcade game obsession for me. 2hours and 14 minutes so far. Three minutes short!
After I’ve flown and walked back into town with my wing on my back, I’ve got such a sweat on, I cycle round the lake to a place where I can swim and wash. Because of the rains, the level has climbed and the water feels smooth and soft. There’s still the occasional buffalo turd floating out there, but where I go now is much better than the dam outlet pool downstream of the lake. I’ve tried collecting rain water running off the bus so I can shower inside, and it worked really well at first, but I tried it again today and the bus is so grubby that the water I collected is brown.
On the last no-fly day Tom, Pero and I cycled 10km up the valley to swim in some rock pools which we never found, so we made do with the river and pretended it was where we meant to go.
For lunch I’m off to the “Cathouse”, the nickname Tom and I have for the restaurant where Catwoman holds court (see previous post Dharam-wit) although I think she might have left now, and I miss her. The place is like X-Idol without Piers Cowell. Over apple pie, Tom and I share our post-match analysis about the morning flights. Today we discussed coring theory. It’s like a cult meeting where we feel uninhibited to geek out about our thoughts on tandem spreaders, practical rights of way, pros and cons of using speed bar and how long it takes to clean puke out of a tandem harness.
After a nap, I check my emails, try to make some skype calls on the atrocious broadband connection, and finally it’s time for the nightlife, which mainly consists of sitting in one of two bars with Pete and Pero wondering if the girls they flew during the day are going to turn up. Statistically the (100%) safe money is on them not showing up, and my faith in these guys’ ability to pull more than a glider into the air, means and I’m currently down 100Rs.
I can’t imagine this being of any interest to anyone else, but I’m loving every minute of it.
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
Saturday, 29 May 2010
The Reality of Dreams and Packaging Accomplishment
I was browsing the net looking at a long distance rowers’ website recently. They are currently embarked on the final stage of a 3 part journey across the pacific. Over the 3 stages the stated public aim of the journey seems to have shifted, from raising awareness of environmental issues to encouraging others to achieve their personal potential.
I’m always hugely cynical of projects which excuse themselves by “raising awareness of climate change”. Especially ones that require massive CO2 emissions to carry out this awareness raising. It’s a pretty rare corner of the world where people aren’t “aware”. However the media love this simplistic purpose and if you want the sponsors you have to play to the media’s tune.
My journeys have changed their stated purpose too over time. The chocolate powered lorry expedition was “the first ever carbon neutral expedition”. I’ve since come to hate the term carbon neutral with a passion. Short of sitting in a cold dark room holding your breath it’s pretty hard to do anything that’s carbon neutral. Every activity has some energy and CO2 or other Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission associated with it in some way. Don't get me started on the smoke and mirrors, and ethical subterfuge which goes by the name of offsetting. The planets systems can cope with some GHG’s so the aim is not to be carbon neutral, it’s to emit only as much as the planet can cope with. As it turns out that isn’t much but it is more than zero or neutrality.
Carping on about carbon neutrality is really unhelpful, because it’s an unachievable and unnecessary goal, like a five year old wanting to count to infinity. Count to a million, that’s enough.
A journalist friend of mine shared his theory on why the British respect these endurance athletes that perform these essentially unnecessary challenges in the name of saving the planet/inspiring others/any other equally pious reason. According to him, it’s down to the private school system which developed during the empire to create administrators that could go to the far reaches of Britannia, and endure the hardship. Getting a ruddy good hiding, wearing shorts through winter, single sex segregation, makes one into a jolly good chap. And these values have remained important to the British, and are at the heart of why rowers, polar explorers, mountaineers, jungle craft experts, the WWF Ambassador that just swam through lake Everest this week (to raise awareness for Climate change – Really, is it changing?) e.t.c. are so revered.
Playing up to this persona also lands you the cushy corporate speaking gigs, of which I’ve done a few myself, and let me tell you it’s the easiest money I’ve ever made. You talk for 20-40 minutes about what you’ve done and package it in a way that makes it relevant to your audience. I enjoy researching the crowd, and finding a way to make it relevant, but apart from that, the hardest part of the job is finding the venues with the appalling directions they invariably give you. (“Well you are an explorer, I’m sure you can find it”, Yes but I’m not a mind reader.) I really enjoy it, and I’m pretty good at it. I’ve had standing ovations, and I’ve had sober, intelligent adults ask me for my autograph!
High profile explorers charge “Ellen McArthur Money” as I once heard it described. £10-15,000 for an inspirational talk, but even those on “Andy Pag money” can get £1000 for 30minutes work. So there is an interest in managing your media profile to fit in with Britannia cliché of the explorer because it gets you on to the books with the agents. Maybe the Andy Pag money will go up now that I’ve been in prison. People love to hear about that. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to package that experience into a few pithy anecdotes just yet. It’s still way too raw. There’s a process of sanitation, and post rationalisation that needs to happen between the adventure and the inspiring tale.
With this in mind I tuned into the rower’s YouTube promo video for their corporate speaking, ready to cynically pick them apart, but instead I was really inspired, and got a better understanding of why I want to be here on this journey, based on their retrospective musings and what they’d learnt.
A few things they said really hit home; firstly forgiving themselves for mistakes early in the challenge, because the person that made those mistakes didn’t know any better, and that person didn’t exist anymore, having grown into the new better person as a result of those mistakes. Also when things went wrong they came to think of it as a success, because they’d set out to leave their comfort zone and things going wrong meant they’d achieved that.
I can really relate to that. Part of my survivalist Britannia mentality is to see exactly how deep of a shitpile I can climb out of and still smell of roses, because being able to do that gives me the confidence to deal with any life choice I make, and therefore the freedom to choose any life I want.
Meanwhile I’m hanging out with the tandem pilots at Frontiers Paragliding, and the more I speak with them the more I realise these guys are literally among the best pilots in the world. They include the altitude record holder, an ace aerial photographer and the team that attempted the trans-Himalayan Odyssey. It’s the most exciting and adventurous end of the sport. These guys are the Top Gun of paragliding. They live the sort of free life, travelling to fly and work, that would inspire so many that don’t have the courage to break from the familiar.
But the most inspiring part of their life for me, is seeing that their day to day reality is just as full of shit as anyone else’s. They get all pissy about the working conditions, and the people they have to work with. They are continuously skint, spending as fast as they earn, they bitch that they haven’t had a break in months and are sick of eating this foreign food. But deep down they know they are living a charmed life. Importantly it’s a charmed life which no one has handed them on a plate, it’s a life they’ve chosen to take for themselves, putting up with all the discomforts along the way. Those discomforts may by now have been transformed into pithy anecdotes, but at the time they were thankless moments of hardship.
Their inspirational life stories are available for the price of a beer, and a plane ticket to Pokhara.
I’m always hugely cynical of projects which excuse themselves by “raising awareness of climate change”. Especially ones that require massive CO2 emissions to carry out this awareness raising. It’s a pretty rare corner of the world where people aren’t “aware”. However the media love this simplistic purpose and if you want the sponsors you have to play to the media’s tune.
My journeys have changed their stated purpose too over time. The chocolate powered lorry expedition was “the first ever carbon neutral expedition”. I’ve since come to hate the term carbon neutral with a passion. Short of sitting in a cold dark room holding your breath it’s pretty hard to do anything that’s carbon neutral. Every activity has some energy and CO2 or other Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission associated with it in some way. Don't get me started on the smoke and mirrors, and ethical subterfuge which goes by the name of offsetting. The planets systems can cope with some GHG’s so the aim is not to be carbon neutral, it’s to emit only as much as the planet can cope with. As it turns out that isn’t much but it is more than zero or neutrality.
Carping on about carbon neutrality is really unhelpful, because it’s an unachievable and unnecessary goal, like a five year old wanting to count to infinity. Count to a million, that’s enough.
A journalist friend of mine shared his theory on why the British respect these endurance athletes that perform these essentially unnecessary challenges in the name of saving the planet/inspiring others/any other equally pious reason. According to him, it’s down to the private school system which developed during the empire to create administrators that could go to the far reaches of Britannia, and endure the hardship. Getting a ruddy good hiding, wearing shorts through winter, single sex segregation, makes one into a jolly good chap. And these values have remained important to the British, and are at the heart of why rowers, polar explorers, mountaineers, jungle craft experts, the WWF Ambassador that just swam through lake Everest this week (to raise awareness for Climate change – Really, is it changing?) e.t.c. are so revered.
Playing up to this persona also lands you the cushy corporate speaking gigs, of which I’ve done a few myself, and let me tell you it’s the easiest money I’ve ever made. You talk for 20-40 minutes about what you’ve done and package it in a way that makes it relevant to your audience. I enjoy researching the crowd, and finding a way to make it relevant, but apart from that, the hardest part of the job is finding the venues with the appalling directions they invariably give you. (“Well you are an explorer, I’m sure you can find it”, Yes but I’m not a mind reader.) I really enjoy it, and I’m pretty good at it. I’ve had standing ovations, and I’ve had sober, intelligent adults ask me for my autograph!
High profile explorers charge “Ellen McArthur Money” as I once heard it described. £10-15,000 for an inspirational talk, but even those on “Andy Pag money” can get £1000 for 30minutes work. So there is an interest in managing your media profile to fit in with Britannia cliché of the explorer because it gets you on to the books with the agents. Maybe the Andy Pag money will go up now that I’ve been in prison. People love to hear about that. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to package that experience into a few pithy anecdotes just yet. It’s still way too raw. There’s a process of sanitation, and post rationalisation that needs to happen between the adventure and the inspiring tale.
With this in mind I tuned into the rower’s YouTube promo video for their corporate speaking, ready to cynically pick them apart, but instead I was really inspired, and got a better understanding of why I want to be here on this journey, based on their retrospective musings and what they’d learnt.
A few things they said really hit home; firstly forgiving themselves for mistakes early in the challenge, because the person that made those mistakes didn’t know any better, and that person didn’t exist anymore, having grown into the new better person as a result of those mistakes. Also when things went wrong they came to think of it as a success, because they’d set out to leave their comfort zone and things going wrong meant they’d achieved that.
I can really relate to that. Part of my survivalist Britannia mentality is to see exactly how deep of a shitpile I can climb out of and still smell of roses, because being able to do that gives me the confidence to deal with any life choice I make, and therefore the freedom to choose any life I want.
Meanwhile I’m hanging out with the tandem pilots at Frontiers Paragliding, and the more I speak with them the more I realise these guys are literally among the best pilots in the world. They include the altitude record holder, an ace aerial photographer and the team that attempted the trans-Himalayan Odyssey. It’s the most exciting and adventurous end of the sport. These guys are the Top Gun of paragliding. They live the sort of free life, travelling to fly and work, that would inspire so many that don’t have the courage to break from the familiar.
But the most inspiring part of their life for me, is seeing that their day to day reality is just as full of shit as anyone else’s. They get all pissy about the working conditions, and the people they have to work with. They are continuously skint, spending as fast as they earn, they bitch that they haven’t had a break in months and are sick of eating this foreign food. But deep down they know they are living a charmed life. Importantly it’s a charmed life which no one has handed them on a plate, it’s a life they’ve chosen to take for themselves, putting up with all the discomforts along the way. Those discomforts may by now have been transformed into pithy anecdotes, but at the time they were thankless moments of hardship.
Their inspirational life stories are available for the price of a beer, and a plane ticket to Pokhara.
Friday, 28 May 2010
Dharma-Wit
Until now on this journey I’ve managed to avoid much contact with the freaks and geeks that make up the India-Nepal backpacker circuit, but here in Pokhara, the restaurants I regularly eat at is a big draw for them as well as me, so over meal times I get to hear the profound discoveries about the world they share with each other.
Most of the discussion tends to focus around how much they have paid for things, or “been ripped off” to use common parlance. There seems to be a genuinely held feeling that the whole country exists to service the needs of this naive flotsam with bulging wallets that do nothing but plead poverty.
Once in Camping Mousafir, the bottleneck stop for any overlander heading down the west coast of Africa, an elderly new-age-traveller, Fred, overheard some Quebequois youngsters telling a beggar that they had no money. Now it’s fair to say that the Québec accent is enough to wind anyone up, but Fred tore into them with gusto. “If you don’t have any money then fuck off back to Canada. Don’t insult these people by telling them you have no money. If you’re too tight to share your wealth with people who have nothing at least give them the dignity of telling them you don’t want to share it with them.”
It’s a logic that’s hard to argue with and since then I’ve never dared to tell a beggar I don’t have any money.
I ask a girl from Elephant and Castle if she is in Pokhara on holiday, “No I’m travelling” she replies without a hint of irony. I immediately and involuntarily adopt the most Brit-abroad stance on everything, including an overdeveloped cockney accent, and the urge to call her “darlin’” or “swee’heart” at every opportunity. “Oh yeah, so you more into all the culture ‘n that? Oh yeah, that’s swee’ darlin’. I like the culture stuff too, but me, I’m jus’ on me ‘olidays. I come for the cheap beer really.” She can’t get away from be quick enough.
Nuttiest of the lot is Catwoman. She’s maybe 20, shaved head from Bologna Italy, with an effervescent personality and a penchant for delivering eulogies on the merits of various diets. Just last night I had to listen while the entire restaurant sat enthralled by one of her lectures on the health benefits of Tofu Ice cream. She mixes Italian words in with crap she talks in English, making her sound so much more authoritative and worldly. I call her Catwoman because she carries a tiny kitten around with her in bright pink plastic basket, who she has christened “Meaowmeaow”. Meaowmeaow should actually be called Meaowmeaow the second, as Meaowmeaow the first disappeared after one of the local stray dogs (Woofwoof?) got hold of it.
Catwoman is only beaten into second position on the freakometer by the Ethiopian, who wonders around town with half a tonne of fabric wrapped in a beehive turban, and barely the tiniest stitch covering the rest of his skinny shinny black body. Sometimes he also carries a carved 2m stick which no doubt has some ceremonial importance, but more practically helps him hobble barefoot over the sharp stones. Now he might actually carry off a shred of credibility if it wasn’t for his unmistakable heavy Chicago accent. The fact that he stays in a lovely little hotel also leads me to wonder how he’s paying for his endless Pokhara sejour? I bet he sold a successful car dealership before the crash, or owns the franchise to a couple of McDonalds back in the US.
He is also a lecturer in the important things in life. “The dog is happy because he is not enslaved by the need to work in an office”. The lounging stray looks back angrily as the Ethiopian points him out with a prod of his ornate walking stick. I pray that the dog bites him back, but it seems it too is cowed by the Ethiopian’s aura of profundity.
There’s a trio of English Cougars here too patiently sitting out their 2 month Indian visa exile in Pokhara before returning to their homes in Goa. It’s not really fair to call them cougars, as I haven’t seen them with any younger men, but I think the only thing holding them back is their British reserve. They met in the restaurant and all 3 are radiant 50-somethings with beautiful long blond greying hair, smooth soft tanned skin and peaceful smiles. Very attractive, if it wasn’t for the fact that they sit each day transfixed by the Ethiopian, like devotees at the Ashram, slowly nodding and gently moaning in agreement with each new insightful revelation. “The sun puts heat in our bodies and warmth in our hearts” he says on a particularly hot lunchtime. Sounds like the horny Chicago car salesman is on the pull!
Last night, as I sit for dinner, Catwoman hands me a stapled menu of films explaining to me in Italian that there is a French guy who has collected all the best, most inspirational films in the world, and he’s trying to get to India but has run out of money, so is now offering to burn the films of your choice onto DVDs for a small fee. I flick through looking for a Steve Martin film where he plays a fake evangelist preacher, but I can’t remember the title. I’m also in the mood to watch The Wages of Fear in preparation for the drive back down the mountain but needless to say the films on the list are all far more worthy than my shallow search for easy entertainment.
The Scouse lads at the next table are curious about the list and not having understood the Italian explanation ask me what it’s about.
“Some lazy French chancer is trying to make a bit of cash by selling pirated DVD’s” I stop short of delivering a full lecture of my own to the restaurant which would have gone something along the lines;
“Not only is this weasel stealing the intellectual property of the filmmakers, people who he professes to respect and admire, but worse, he’s also stealing business from the Pokhara DVD shop 3 doors down the road that also sells all these titles. In the process, he’s depriving genuinely poorer people of their source of income. If this Dharma-wit really doesn’t have the money to get to India, then in the wise words of my old friend Fred, he can fuck off back to France.”
Most of the discussion tends to focus around how much they have paid for things, or “been ripped off” to use common parlance. There seems to be a genuinely held feeling that the whole country exists to service the needs of this naive flotsam with bulging wallets that do nothing but plead poverty.
Once in Camping Mousafir, the bottleneck stop for any overlander heading down the west coast of Africa, an elderly new-age-traveller, Fred, overheard some Quebequois youngsters telling a beggar that they had no money. Now it’s fair to say that the Québec accent is enough to wind anyone up, but Fred tore into them with gusto. “If you don’t have any money then fuck off back to Canada. Don’t insult these people by telling them you have no money. If you’re too tight to share your wealth with people who have nothing at least give them the dignity of telling them you don’t want to share it with them.”
It’s a logic that’s hard to argue with and since then I’ve never dared to tell a beggar I don’t have any money.
I ask a girl from Elephant and Castle if she is in Pokhara on holiday, “No I’m travelling” she replies without a hint of irony. I immediately and involuntarily adopt the most Brit-abroad stance on everything, including an overdeveloped cockney accent, and the urge to call her “darlin’” or “swee’heart” at every opportunity. “Oh yeah, so you more into all the culture ‘n that? Oh yeah, that’s swee’ darlin’. I like the culture stuff too, but me, I’m jus’ on me ‘olidays. I come for the cheap beer really.” She can’t get away from be quick enough.
Nuttiest of the lot is Catwoman. She’s maybe 20, shaved head from Bologna Italy, with an effervescent personality and a penchant for delivering eulogies on the merits of various diets. Just last night I had to listen while the entire restaurant sat enthralled by one of her lectures on the health benefits of Tofu Ice cream. She mixes Italian words in with crap she talks in English, making her sound so much more authoritative and worldly. I call her Catwoman because she carries a tiny kitten around with her in bright pink plastic basket, who she has christened “Meaowmeaow”. Meaowmeaow should actually be called Meaowmeaow the second, as Meaowmeaow the first disappeared after one of the local stray dogs (Woofwoof?) got hold of it.
Catwoman is only beaten into second position on the freakometer by the Ethiopian, who wonders around town with half a tonne of fabric wrapped in a beehive turban, and barely the tiniest stitch covering the rest of his skinny shinny black body. Sometimes he also carries a carved 2m stick which no doubt has some ceremonial importance, but more practically helps him hobble barefoot over the sharp stones. Now he might actually carry off a shred of credibility if it wasn’t for his unmistakable heavy Chicago accent. The fact that he stays in a lovely little hotel also leads me to wonder how he’s paying for his endless Pokhara sejour? I bet he sold a successful car dealership before the crash, or owns the franchise to a couple of McDonalds back in the US.
He is also a lecturer in the important things in life. “The dog is happy because he is not enslaved by the need to work in an office”. The lounging stray looks back angrily as the Ethiopian points him out with a prod of his ornate walking stick. I pray that the dog bites him back, but it seems it too is cowed by the Ethiopian’s aura of profundity.
There’s a trio of English Cougars here too patiently sitting out their 2 month Indian visa exile in Pokhara before returning to their homes in Goa. It’s not really fair to call them cougars, as I haven’t seen them with any younger men, but I think the only thing holding them back is their British reserve. They met in the restaurant and all 3 are radiant 50-somethings with beautiful long blond greying hair, smooth soft tanned skin and peaceful smiles. Very attractive, if it wasn’t for the fact that they sit each day transfixed by the Ethiopian, like devotees at the Ashram, slowly nodding and gently moaning in agreement with each new insightful revelation. “The sun puts heat in our bodies and warmth in our hearts” he says on a particularly hot lunchtime. Sounds like the horny Chicago car salesman is on the pull!
Last night, as I sit for dinner, Catwoman hands me a stapled menu of films explaining to me in Italian that there is a French guy who has collected all the best, most inspirational films in the world, and he’s trying to get to India but has run out of money, so is now offering to burn the films of your choice onto DVDs for a small fee. I flick through looking for a Steve Martin film where he plays a fake evangelist preacher, but I can’t remember the title. I’m also in the mood to watch The Wages of Fear in preparation for the drive back down the mountain but needless to say the films on the list are all far more worthy than my shallow search for easy entertainment.
The Scouse lads at the next table are curious about the list and not having understood the Italian explanation ask me what it’s about.
“Some lazy French chancer is trying to make a bit of cash by selling pirated DVD’s” I stop short of delivering a full lecture of my own to the restaurant which would have gone something along the lines;
“Not only is this weasel stealing the intellectual property of the filmmakers, people who he professes to respect and admire, but worse, he’s also stealing business from the Pokhara DVD shop 3 doors down the road that also sells all these titles. In the process, he’s depriving genuinely poorer people of their source of income. If this Dharma-wit really doesn’t have the money to get to India, then in the wise words of my old friend Fred, he can fuck off back to France.”
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
Gulliver's Travels
A moment of self congratulations if you’ll allow me; I’ve taken a scrapyard bus and driven it from Croydon to the Himalayas on waste. Reason to be proud, for me and for the many people that have helped me along the way.
If you’ve never met me you wouldn’t know that I am almost two metres tall. Here in Nepal I feel like Gulliver arrived back in Lilliput.
Nepal is fantastic. Calm and clean. Compared with India, there’s no litter along the streets, and grassy meadows butt up to the road. It took me a while to realise the sound of incessant truck horns are missing from the air, and the two day drive from the border I’ve only been run off the road once by oncoming trucks. Believe me that’s very good stats.
I was told before I got there that Indian women were beautiful. I think they can be, but only on the rare occasion they smile. Here in Nepal the women are stunning and it’s the second happiest country after Bhutan, so they, and consequently I, have a lot to smile about here in the land of the little people.
It’s strange to think that from here to the North Pole, it’s all communist. The country is potentially only a few days away from civil war. A deadline for integrating Maoist militia into the army is about to pass, but seeing as only a few months back they were killing each other, it’s hard to see how they will reconcile their differences. If the deadline passes without an agreement there’s a chance the country will descend back into fighting.
Pokhara is a little removed from the troubles, at least I’m counting on the fact it will be. If it does go bad here in paradise, the Indians will take 10 days to issue a visa so I can exit. So once again I’ll be screwed by the pace of Indians doing their work so diligently.
I was in Niger in 1999, while the government was violently oppressing a student uprising. A couple of the friends I’d made there worked for the UN and together we’d gone for a drink at the local five star Hyatt hotel. Sitting by the pool we had a view down over the river, and on the opposite bank was the university campus. Leafy, green and lit up by the occasional thunder flash and the sound of Kalashnikovs.
We’d unwittingly got front row sun loungers to the end of the revolution, with the waiter bringing us gin a tonics to wash down the show. If the fighting does come to Pokhara I half think it will be comparable. I’m parked in the tourist suburb, and the fighting isn’t likely to spread to this end. Being 21st century Moaists, they don’t want to jeopardise the country’s biggest foreign exchange earner. And even though the season is at an end, it’s still busy.
From here you can take the Annapurna trail, and this is where the climb to Everest starts. The reason I’m here, is that it’s also a mecca for paragliders, renowned for being one of the best sites in the world. Today I had my first flight. Amazing. At one point, as I was in the air tightly circling up on a punchy thermal with 2 other pilots and an eagle, the clouds parted to reveal Annapurna, the towering snow peak camouflaged against the fluffy cumulus clouds below it.
The tandem pilots here are world champions and world record holders. They lead a romantic life moving around the world, following the seasons like migrant workers harvesting the winds. They fly tandems to earn money and then spend it on adventures to fly outrageous peaks or on competition entry fees. In my eyes they are the real giants of Pokhara alongside the mountains.
In the sky they are very professional, but the pre-flight preoccupation amongst them is who’s going to fly which girl. Patrik, a handsome French acro pilot who speaks like the shellfish in the dentist’s tank of Finding Nemo, charms some Spanish girls into his tandem harness to whirl them round the sky. I land after him and we cross paths as I am walking back to the bus in town. I’m short of breath and drenched in sweat. He’s all smiles and relaxed on his moped, with the cutest Spanish girl on the back riding out to show her a “leetle playce” only he knows. Surf-bums of the sky.
I hear myself muttering, “if I was 10 years younger” which is quite a scary thing to catch yourself thinking. But even quicker I’m wondering what happens to these guys when they turn 40? Are they still eeking out a living flying tandems, or do they end up in a job selling photocopier supplies?
Unlike 5-year-plans would have you believe, life’s options aren’t that polar. Pero, a Macedonian pilot is thinking of going back to finish his degree, but he’s worried about joining the rat race and giving up this life. Tom the oldest pilot on the hill, who retired from his career several years ago and can still pull the splits in his late 50s, has given Pero the sense that this life is something he can always come back to.
Like Pero, I’ve always been petrified of what the future holds, planning and working towards a goal and anxiously worrying that I won’t achieve them. But then in a revelatory moment a while back I realised that I’d been worrying about, and then successfully achieving, or failing in those goals since I was at school, and the only constants was the anxiety, and the unshakeable fact that things always work out OK in the end, even if the plan doesn’t.
It’s a philosophy at odds with my pessimism over the environment and this sustainably fuelled experiment I’m carrying out, but ironically if I was worried about my personal future I wouldn’t be here, and I’m sure that destiny will provide after this journey and something will work out.
If you’ve never met me you wouldn’t know that I am almost two metres tall. Here in Nepal I feel like Gulliver arrived back in Lilliput.
Nepal is fantastic. Calm and clean. Compared with India, there’s no litter along the streets, and grassy meadows butt up to the road. It took me a while to realise the sound of incessant truck horns are missing from the air, and the two day drive from the border I’ve only been run off the road once by oncoming trucks. Believe me that’s very good stats.
I was told before I got there that Indian women were beautiful. I think they can be, but only on the rare occasion they smile. Here in Nepal the women are stunning and it’s the second happiest country after Bhutan, so they, and consequently I, have a lot to smile about here in the land of the little people.
It’s strange to think that from here to the North Pole, it’s all communist. The country is potentially only a few days away from civil war. A deadline for integrating Maoist militia into the army is about to pass, but seeing as only a few months back they were killing each other, it’s hard to see how they will reconcile their differences. If the deadline passes without an agreement there’s a chance the country will descend back into fighting.
Pokhara is a little removed from the troubles, at least I’m counting on the fact it will be. If it does go bad here in paradise, the Indians will take 10 days to issue a visa so I can exit. So once again I’ll be screwed by the pace of Indians doing their work so diligently.
I was in Niger in 1999, while the government was violently oppressing a student uprising. A couple of the friends I’d made there worked for the UN and together we’d gone for a drink at the local five star Hyatt hotel. Sitting by the pool we had a view down over the river, and on the opposite bank was the university campus. Leafy, green and lit up by the occasional thunder flash and the sound of Kalashnikovs.
We’d unwittingly got front row sun loungers to the end of the revolution, with the waiter bringing us gin a tonics to wash down the show. If the fighting does come to Pokhara I half think it will be comparable. I’m parked in the tourist suburb, and the fighting isn’t likely to spread to this end. Being 21st century Moaists, they don’t want to jeopardise the country’s biggest foreign exchange earner. And even though the season is at an end, it’s still busy.
From here you can take the Annapurna trail, and this is where the climb to Everest starts. The reason I’m here, is that it’s also a mecca for paragliders, renowned for being one of the best sites in the world. Today I had my first flight. Amazing. At one point, as I was in the air tightly circling up on a punchy thermal with 2 other pilots and an eagle, the clouds parted to reveal Annapurna, the towering snow peak camouflaged against the fluffy cumulus clouds below it.
The tandem pilots here are world champions and world record holders. They lead a romantic life moving around the world, following the seasons like migrant workers harvesting the winds. They fly tandems to earn money and then spend it on adventures to fly outrageous peaks or on competition entry fees. In my eyes they are the real giants of Pokhara alongside the mountains.
In the sky they are very professional, but the pre-flight preoccupation amongst them is who’s going to fly which girl. Patrik, a handsome French acro pilot who speaks like the shellfish in the dentist’s tank of Finding Nemo, charms some Spanish girls into his tandem harness to whirl them round the sky. I land after him and we cross paths as I am walking back to the bus in town. I’m short of breath and drenched in sweat. He’s all smiles and relaxed on his moped, with the cutest Spanish girl on the back riding out to show her a “leetle playce” only he knows. Surf-bums of the sky.
I hear myself muttering, “if I was 10 years younger” which is quite a scary thing to catch yourself thinking. But even quicker I’m wondering what happens to these guys when they turn 40? Are they still eeking out a living flying tandems, or do they end up in a job selling photocopier supplies?
Unlike 5-year-plans would have you believe, life’s options aren’t that polar. Pero, a Macedonian pilot is thinking of going back to finish his degree, but he’s worried about joining the rat race and giving up this life. Tom the oldest pilot on the hill, who retired from his career several years ago and can still pull the splits in his late 50s, has given Pero the sense that this life is something he can always come back to.
Like Pero, I’ve always been petrified of what the future holds, planning and working towards a goal and anxiously worrying that I won’t achieve them. But then in a revelatory moment a while back I realised that I’d been worrying about, and then successfully achieving, or failing in those goals since I was at school, and the only constants was the anxiety, and the unshakeable fact that things always work out OK in the end, even if the plan doesn’t.
It’s a philosophy at odds with my pessimism over the environment and this sustainably fuelled experiment I’m carrying out, but ironically if I was worried about my personal future I wouldn’t be here, and I’m sure that destiny will provide after this journey and something will work out.
Monday, 17 May 2010
The Great Unknown
I did my first solo flight today. Obviously I’ve flown solo before, but this was solo in the sense that there were no other pilots around. I assessed the valley all by myself, and decided it was flyable. A young lad showed me the way up to a tiny launch site, barely big enough to lay out he wing, and below I picked out a number of options for landing fields.
I took off full of nerves, repeating mantra like; better to be on the ground wanting to be in the sky, than in the sky wanting to be on the ground.
Gentle thermal lifted me straight of takeoff but they also dropped me and it was hard for me on my own, with my skill level and with no other wings in the air to show me the currents to really get lift, so I headed out into the valley and there found plenty of turbulent thermals, which pitched and turned me. I was expecting it, but it was stronger than I’d thought so I found an area without lift and headed down and landed in nil wind in the largest unploughed field, edged by low power lines.
All in all a good, brief flight, though there’s a catch-22 that I would have enjoyed this first solo flight more if I’d been with another pilot to share it with.
I used to hitch a lot and in Panchgani I discovered that cross country paragliding requires you to hitchhike in order to get back to where you started. I’m so happy to have rediscovered this old friend. Just like being in turbulent air, where you only have partial control and have to manipulate what the conditions give you, so hitch hiking requires the same relinquishing of control over route, schedule and comfort. I don’t know why I love that so much.
I took off full of nerves, repeating mantra like; better to be on the ground wanting to be in the sky, than in the sky wanting to be on the ground.
Gentle thermal lifted me straight of takeoff but they also dropped me and it was hard for me on my own, with my skill level and with no other wings in the air to show me the currents to really get lift, so I headed out into the valley and there found plenty of turbulent thermals, which pitched and turned me. I was expecting it, but it was stronger than I’d thought so I found an area without lift and headed down and landed in nil wind in the largest unploughed field, edged by low power lines.
All in all a good, brief flight, though there’s a catch-22 that I would have enjoyed this first solo flight more if I’d been with another pilot to share it with.
I used to hitch a lot and in Panchgani I discovered that cross country paragliding requires you to hitchhike in order to get back to where you started. I’m so happy to have rediscovered this old friend. Just like being in turbulent air, where you only have partial control and have to manipulate what the conditions give you, so hitch hiking requires the same relinquishing of control over route, schedule and comfort. I don’t know why I love that so much.
Two Drunks Brawling
From the darkness of the bus I moved the curtain over just enough to point the telephoto lens out at the two brawling drunks.
One of them passed out on the floor was really wasted, he just wanted to go back to sleep while the other one beat him, slapping his body and head, standing on his ankles, pulling him across the ground by his hair, and at one point stamping on his head with his boot.
Funny, you might think that an Indian drunk was wearing boots. But this was part of his uniform. A police uniform. The second drunk was a policeman. What he was doing was nothing short of torture, and for no other reason than the sadistic pleasure of being in a position of power and able to get away with it.
Around him 3 other officers watched the dis-coordinated drunken beating dispassionately and after the 10 minutes that I had been watching one made a half hearted attempt to stop it, but it continued.
I got dressed and confronted the officer. I asked him for his name and he took off his name tag and hid it in his pocket. His reactions were slow enough I was able to grab it, release myself from the officers pathetic lock and take a photograph of it. It’s Hindi so I have no idea what his name was.
Twenty minutes later the SHO arrived on the scene and asked me why I had taken the officers badge. I quelled any idea that he could somehow blame me for the confrontation by showing him the photographs I’d taken and telling him I’d be emailing them to my numerous contacts in the Newspaper.
The drunken officer was there too, but had given himself time to sober up and the overpowering whiskey smell of his breath had now been cleaned away.
As it happens I have 3 breathalyser kits which were freebies from the Mobility Tech expo in Milan, sitting in the glove box. I don’t know why I kept them, but remembering they were there I grabbed one and challenged the officer to blow up the bag. He refused and I asked the SHO if he would order the officer to do it. He didn’t.
There was much discussion amongst the officers and I went back to bed. Next morning I made an official written complaint to the SHO, much to his bemusement: What would I care about a street drunk getting a deserved kicking?
So there you have it. The great Indian police. So full of procedure and self importance. Drunk on duty, sadistically flexing their power over someone too weak, and powerless to defend themselves, both physically and by their ability to access their rights. And while one acts, the others are complicit, firstly in the activity, and perhaps later in the cover up.
India is desperately short of police officers. Some regional offices are 30-40% down on staffing levels. The reality is that most Indian police officers are at best incompetent, at worst smart enough to know how to use the system to their advantage. There is no sense that their role is to serve the community, despite the inane slogans posted in the stations. A junior officer in Pushkar told me that his salary was 15,000Rs, but on average he topped it up with about 3,000 from bribes, and that as he got promotion he expected both incomes to rise.
I have no doubt the Bhimtal SHO, in Utranchal, will sweep this under the carpet as I am just passing through this small town and there is no need to follow it up, and that’s why I am posting the photos online (see the gallery), and mailing them to Anvinash and Avijit at the Times of India. I hope they will publish them.
One of them passed out on the floor was really wasted, he just wanted to go back to sleep while the other one beat him, slapping his body and head, standing on his ankles, pulling him across the ground by his hair, and at one point stamping on his head with his boot.
Funny, you might think that an Indian drunk was wearing boots. But this was part of his uniform. A police uniform. The second drunk was a policeman. What he was doing was nothing short of torture, and for no other reason than the sadistic pleasure of being in a position of power and able to get away with it.
Around him 3 other officers watched the dis-coordinated drunken beating dispassionately and after the 10 minutes that I had been watching one made a half hearted attempt to stop it, but it continued.
I got dressed and confronted the officer. I asked him for his name and he took off his name tag and hid it in his pocket. His reactions were slow enough I was able to grab it, release myself from the officers pathetic lock and take a photograph of it. It’s Hindi so I have no idea what his name was.
Twenty minutes later the SHO arrived on the scene and asked me why I had taken the officers badge. I quelled any idea that he could somehow blame me for the confrontation by showing him the photographs I’d taken and telling him I’d be emailing them to my numerous contacts in the Newspaper.
The drunken officer was there too, but had given himself time to sober up and the overpowering whiskey smell of his breath had now been cleaned away.
As it happens I have 3 breathalyser kits which were freebies from the Mobility Tech expo in Milan, sitting in the glove box. I don’t know why I kept them, but remembering they were there I grabbed one and challenged the officer to blow up the bag. He refused and I asked the SHO if he would order the officer to do it. He didn’t.
There was much discussion amongst the officers and I went back to bed. Next morning I made an official written complaint to the SHO, much to his bemusement: What would I care about a street drunk getting a deserved kicking?
So there you have it. The great Indian police. So full of procedure and self importance. Drunk on duty, sadistically flexing their power over someone too weak, and powerless to defend themselves, both physically and by their ability to access their rights. And while one acts, the others are complicit, firstly in the activity, and perhaps later in the cover up.
India is desperately short of police officers. Some regional offices are 30-40% down on staffing levels. The reality is that most Indian police officers are at best incompetent, at worst smart enough to know how to use the system to their advantage. There is no sense that their role is to serve the community, despite the inane slogans posted in the stations. A junior officer in Pushkar told me that his salary was 15,000Rs, but on average he topped it up with about 3,000 from bribes, and that as he got promotion he expected both incomes to rise.
I have no doubt the Bhimtal SHO, in Utranchal, will sweep this under the carpet as I am just passing through this small town and there is no need to follow it up, and that’s why I am posting the photos online (see the gallery), and mailing them to Anvinash and Avijit at the Times of India. I hope they will publish them.
Friday, 7 May 2010
The Cost of Failure
If you make 1000 one inch widgets in your widget-making factory, they won’t all be one inch long. Some will come out longer, and some will be shorter. There’s a natural statistical variation which if your widget making machines are in good condition, and run by well trained widget-makers will be quite a small variation, or if you are a British manufacturer from the 70’s and 80’s the variation will be massive and that’s why no one bought the lazy crap you made.
The British idea of quality was to make your widgets within a certain tolerance, no bigger than so much, and no smaller than so much. The Japanese realised that only striving for perfection was good enough.
A Japanese Engineer/Philosopher (I can’t remember his name and have a mental block with it being Tamagochi, that’s not it but it’s the best I can do) came up with the idea of measuring the cost of failure caused by a widget not being the perfect size. Once the widget is installed in the machine, and it fails, there is the cost of lost working time, the cost of the repair labour, and finally the cost of the replacement widget. He multiplied that by the probability of his widgets failing before their designed lifespan, and he realised the cost of failure is always disproportionately more than the cost of investing in the process to make the widgets better. I vaguely remember an amazing formula to calculate C.o.F for any widget you might want to make. On that basis he came to the conclusion that it was no less than immoral (his words, albeit in Japanese) to make any widget a size other than the exact size they are supposed to be.
That was in the 1970’s, by the 80’s the Japanese were producing the best products in the world, and by the 90’s everyone in the world knew the Japanese were producing the best products in the world and were desperately trying to understand and copy what and how the Japanese were doing; including getting hairy-arsed Geordie fitters to do Tai Chi at the start of the day on the assembly line. WTF?
I’d been thinking about the Cost of Failure after my engine rebuild. The pistons and the liners are pretty simple parts, and comparatively cheap, but the work required to replace them is disproportionate. Its not a fair comparison because the truck is 21 years old, so they have already outlived their designed lifespan.
But this was in the back of my mind when Ravitej, the CEO of Mago Construction who contacted me out of the blue to help keep the expedition on the road with sponsorship cash, was talking about how sustainable energy infrastructure may be expensive, but the eventual financial cost of not going down that path was much higher.
Lord Stern from the London School of Economics has produced a world renown paper which looks at the financial cost of climate change, compared with the cost of implementing solutions now to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Needless to say it’s much cheaper to deal with it now before it becomes massive.
But the reality is that the pre-emptive cost would have to be paid primarily by the developed, industrialised nations, whereas the picking-up-the-pieces payments would come from the pockets of developing nations.
This is the same issue Tamagochi faced, in that the cost of producing better widgets is borne by the widget maker whereas the cost of repairing a machine with a broken widget is paid by the widget buyer.
However what made Tamagochi a 1970s visionary was that he saw that the widget buyer the widget maker lived in a metaphorical symbiotic Buddhist temple together and swam in the same sea hunting for prawns as the sun set (my words – I doubt he ever said anything like that, not even in Japanese). Basically the relationship between producer and buyer is tied, so it’s in everybody’s interest to minimise the failure. There are no winners when the widget breaks.
The cost of developing nations struggling with climate change will be evetually be borne out by all nations, directly through increased aid, but indirectly in so many more and expensive ways.
The British idea of quality was to make your widgets within a certain tolerance, no bigger than so much, and no smaller than so much. The Japanese realised that only striving for perfection was good enough.
A Japanese Engineer/Philosopher (I can’t remember his name and have a mental block with it being Tamagochi, that’s not it but it’s the best I can do) came up with the idea of measuring the cost of failure caused by a widget not being the perfect size. Once the widget is installed in the machine, and it fails, there is the cost of lost working time, the cost of the repair labour, and finally the cost of the replacement widget. He multiplied that by the probability of his widgets failing before their designed lifespan, and he realised the cost of failure is always disproportionately more than the cost of investing in the process to make the widgets better. I vaguely remember an amazing formula to calculate C.o.F for any widget you might want to make. On that basis he came to the conclusion that it was no less than immoral (his words, albeit in Japanese) to make any widget a size other than the exact size they are supposed to be.
That was in the 1970’s, by the 80’s the Japanese were producing the best products in the world, and by the 90’s everyone in the world knew the Japanese were producing the best products in the world and were desperately trying to understand and copy what and how the Japanese were doing; including getting hairy-arsed Geordie fitters to do Tai Chi at the start of the day on the assembly line. WTF?
I’d been thinking about the Cost of Failure after my engine rebuild. The pistons and the liners are pretty simple parts, and comparatively cheap, but the work required to replace them is disproportionate. Its not a fair comparison because the truck is 21 years old, so they have already outlived their designed lifespan.
But this was in the back of my mind when Ravitej, the CEO of Mago Construction who contacted me out of the blue to help keep the expedition on the road with sponsorship cash, was talking about how sustainable energy infrastructure may be expensive, but the eventual financial cost of not going down that path was much higher.
Lord Stern from the London School of Economics has produced a world renown paper which looks at the financial cost of climate change, compared with the cost of implementing solutions now to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Needless to say it’s much cheaper to deal with it now before it becomes massive.
But the reality is that the pre-emptive cost would have to be paid primarily by the developed, industrialised nations, whereas the picking-up-the-pieces payments would come from the pockets of developing nations.
This is the same issue Tamagochi faced, in that the cost of producing better widgets is borne by the widget maker whereas the cost of repairing a machine with a broken widget is paid by the widget buyer.
However what made Tamagochi a 1970s visionary was that he saw that the widget buyer the widget maker lived in a metaphorical symbiotic Buddhist temple together and swam in the same sea hunting for prawns as the sun set (my words – I doubt he ever said anything like that, not even in Japanese). Basically the relationship between producer and buyer is tied, so it’s in everybody’s interest to minimise the failure. There are no winners when the widget breaks.
The cost of developing nations struggling with climate change will be evetually be borne out by all nations, directly through increased aid, but indirectly in so many more and expensive ways.
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