The Wait

“You are American?” the Thai custom agents asked.
“Yes,” I said somewhat cautiously not knowing how the Thai felt about the USA these days.
“We love you,” they echoed each other. “Yes, we love Americans. And we love New York.”

After untold hours in cramped jets, days in airports, thrust into a time warp where space and time collided, to hear I was loved from total smiling strangers was striking a celestial chord within. I love Thailand. I love Bangkok. I gathered my things and went off to seek shelter and shower, happy to be back in the land of the friendly, even if only a twelve hour layover.

Fifteen minutes from the airport the Regency sounded like a royal night of slumber, however, my body wasn't understanding where it had been dropped into - sleep escaped me and the roosters next door crowed non stop from 5 a.m. - the airport would be the better place to hang out until my 2 p.m. flight to Nepal. I had been warned. Royal Nepal airline is not the best for schedule. I could relate to that, not having a propensity towards keeping to schedule myself.

If you're going to be stuck at an airport, Bangkok is the place to be. I was ready for Thai food and didn't care when my flight to Kathmandu was delayed a couple of hours. Questing for my favorites, green curry and Thai iced tea, was easy since there are so many culinary delights at the Bangkok airport. The airport is multi-level and layered with shops that sell everything from dried fish to new camcorders and Chanel perfumes. There are even massage salons and after the food frenzy and a two hour out of body massage, I thought I was ready for anything.

Royal Nepal Air gets to their ticket counter whenever they damn well please. When it finally opened, the line was expectedly long with well-traveled people, mostly aroma-ripened Euro-youth, some brightly dyed and dreaded, who had obviously been backpacking across the planet since they could walk. Two more flight delays and seven hours after the scheduled departure, the jet taxied off into the dark. But the flight is a party plane, packed to capacity with laughing, chattering, diverse languages. Cheap synthesized music plays old movie themes and the stewardesses aren't seat belt gestapos. The cabin smells of musky stoutness and urine, and there's a river on the bathroom floor that you have to step around carefully. The back dozen seats are filled with dark skinned men joking and gesturing. My window seat, carefully chosen to maximize the view of the Himalayans, showed only the pitch blackness of sparsely populated regions. The plane finally rattles its way up into the night for the three hour flight.

At the Kathmandu airport, the customs agents push luggage through a non-functioning scanner. They don't even bother pretending that they're looking for anything, they just take your $40 visa fee and send you along to the throngs of hawking taxi drivers and hotel screamers. Fortunately, the kind people from Hotel Karma are there to greet me.

Through unlit streets we weave – dark glimpses of cattle scurrying through open doors in narrow passageways, cars, motorbikes and pedestrians vie for position and dogs own the night. An impossibly large bus is trying to navigate its way through a narrow corridor where electric wires and lights are hung for tomorrow's contrived World Tourist Day celebration. My driver refuses to budge in his futile attempt to get by the bus blocking the road, where the oncoming traffic has the right of way, while onlookers are imploring him to please back up. Finally, he decides to comply - the plug removed things progress through the tightly curving city. The air is acrid as we arrive at the noisy center of Thamel, the tourist district of Kathmandu, where the hotel is located. A band is playing next door, motorized vehicles and rickshaws are honking, people are yelling and there's a faint smell of urine in my room. I pull out my sleeping bag and cocoon into dreamless sleep, knowing Kathmandu will be waiting in all its squalor in the morning.