"The Answer, My Friend,"

Spent the last four days outside of the valley.

Chris and a friend and I saw Pokhara, which has a stunning view of the Annapurna, allegedly. Some mist and fog restricted our vision to near ridges and deep valleys and whatnot. As Chris remarked, "That John Denver's full of shit." Pokhara is some kind of heavy tourist spot in the fall and spring, and seeing as it's January it was pretty lazy, though not cold. We did some boating across the lake and walked up to a pagoda on a hill.

On Wednesday we met Mike in Bhandipur. He's been volunteering for a Film Festival, and they showed a couple films in the small brick square of the hilly Nepali village. "Ujeli" is a lo-fi flick, a story about a Nepali girl married out of grade school. Nepalis laughed at jokes I didn't understand but I was more than satisfied with participating in a local showing of indigenous, low-budget, socially-oriented cinema. They followed it with a documentary about a geologist working fifty years ago in a much more virgin Nepal

After seeing an impressive mineral cave with cathedral sized chambers we watched the dull sun dissolve into the foggy horizon. On our last night our proprietor, Khrisna Pradhan, played some surprisingly loyal Bob Dylan to me on his harmonium. He's a retired English teacher. I felt like a young Magister Ludi. Cigarette smoke poured from his nose and mouth and the fingers pumping the airbox.

Yesterday we rode back to Kathmandu on the roof of a long public bus. We crammed inside when the sun went down and the road became too cold. Cars and buses jammed the city streets as we returned to the capital. We walked a bit and cabbed a little, and ate Korean food and went to bed dirty, at home.