Dec. 20th, 2020 06:58 pm

aches

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a window cut in a thick concrete wall peers out onto foggy mountains and foliage

I wake up three days into the trek in Jagat, and I am sore. I ache. I eat breakfast, throw my pack on my back, and we’re on our way. As we get moving, the soreness starts speaking in new ways — the ankle that seems upset, the knee (not even the one I’d hurt a few days before I got on the plane!) that has had enough of the up and down, the bruises on my hips from a badly adjusted pack that was busily driving the hard part of its frame squarely into my ilium.

As I keep taking steps, mile by “Nepali flat” mile of rolling elevation change, each ache seems to submit to the inevitability that I will continue walking, and each one subsides from my consciousness in its own time.

That is, every ache but one. The one ache that will persist all day — the one that drove me to get on a plane and start walking in the first place — stays stubbornly at my side. Maybe one day, it, too, will dissipate. But today is not that day. Maybe not this trip, either.

* * *

The last few days of the trek are upon me. On the other side of the river, back at the beginning, I remember the expectation of being ground to dust. I hoped that the operation of walking for a few weeks would turn me into a pile of ash, from which I could partake of some mystical Phoenix-like rebirth. But there was nothing magical about a trail that would fundamentally change who I am. Staring down the end, I find that I am exactly the same as I was before, with the same fears and hopes and desires and longings and cravings, relating to the world in just the same ways as before.

The same as I always was, indeed — just maybe a few pounds leaner...

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a trail leads ahead through Fall-colored brush, with near-looking snowfields on mountains on the left, and snowy mountains straight ahead, seemingly equidistant

There’s no two ways about it — the valleys carved out by the rivers are just plain ol’ big, and, of course, so are the Himalayan mountains, too. But, I think, the thing that makes it a mountaineer’s playground is that the sense of scale lies to you. It gets to your head.

By way of comparison, maybe it’s instructive to think about places where your sense of scale matches the reality. You go to the Tahoe basin, for instance, and you look around, and you point at a peak on the horizon, and go “I could probably get there”, and you’d be right; it’d be a day’s work of hiking, and up you’ll go. Or you might find yourself in Zion National Park, and you’ll see a feature in front of you, and go “oh, that’s totally climbable”; if it’s not about to break in half, chances are good that someone has already put up a route on it.

The converse is true in other places, of course. When you go to the East side of the Sierras, you might stand on a peak, and point at another peak, and go “man, it would be an enormous pain in the ass to get there”, and you’d be right; there’s just so darn much terrain between you and the something else, and it’d be days of hiking, if not technical travel, to get to wherever it is that you’ve aimed your finger.

The Himalaya is special, though. You look up beside you, and just uphill of you, you see a friendly snowfield, a little ways down from the top of the valley you’re in. You get the urge to run up, pack a snowball, and throw it — maybe it’d be a half hour away. You glance down at the topo, and you discover very quickly that your eyes have fooled you: you’re sitting pretty in your village at eight thousand feet, but the top of that wall is easily a 14'er, as if it were no big deal.

Maybe that’s what keeps people coming back: the peaks of unimaginable prominence that just sit there there on the horizon, and pretend that they’re there for the taking -- or, maybe, just the way that the impossible suddenly feels human-scale.

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a line of trekking agencies waiting to greet clients at Kathmandu Airport

During my time in Nepal, I came to think of it, sort of, as “Whose Line Is It Anyway, the country”; the more time I spent there, the more I came to realize that, well, there are no rules, and the points don’t matter. And just like a good Calvinball game, we came out ahead, with a final score of oogy to boogy. By the time I got on the plane to head home, there was nothing on earth that could surprise me, or Kempy for that matter. I think we hit peak surprise somewhere in the middle of the trip, but it’s hard to know exactly when.

Expandcalvinball )
(images shot on Portra 400, and on Ilford HP5 Plus.)
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Mani stones along a trail.

Hiking along the trails in Nepal, you’ll often find big piles of flat stones. Upon closer inspection, you’ll find that the stones have inscriptions upon them — lettering that doesn’t appear like any of the other Devanagari script that you’ll see around the country, but instead usually in either Lantsa or Tibetan scripts (not that that’ll help you, of course, because you can read none of the three of them). They have been painstakingly carved, and there’s just an enormous number of them; sometimes, you’ll find piles four or five feet tall by thirty feet long by a few feet wide, all made of these flat stones, all with the same lettering on them. They’re a curious artifact.

Expandom mani padme hum, and mantric innovations )
(images shot on Portra 400, on Velvia 100, and on Ilford HP5 Plus at box speed; video courtesy of Kempy.)
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Binod and Mr. Yak Poo’s guide stand in a dining room.

The end of the Manaslu circuit meets up with the beginning of the Annapurna circuit, and there really was a stark contrast indeed between the crowd on the two. The Annapurna circuit seems to attract a hashtag-bucketlist collection of folks — young, tough, fit people carrying way too much and romping down the trail in cotton T-shirts — whereas we were surprised to find ourselves, it seemed, in the bottom decile of age range on the Manaslu circuit. In part, this might be because the Manaslu circuit is lesser known than the Annapurna circuit; in part, it might be because guides are required by law on the Manaslu circuit (and, anyway, most of the teahouse owners don’t really speak English). But even yet, we met the acquaintance of a handful of interesting folks along the way.

Expandthe people you meet )
(images shot on Ilford HP5 Plus at box speed, on Portra 400, and on Kempy’s Pixel 3.)
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Binod a good distance away on a trail that is indistinguishable from its neighboring foliage

The thing about our guide, Binod, was that he wasn't a bad guy, he was just a little ... inexperienced. He was kind of a young guy, younger than we were, early 20s; he said he'd been around the Manaslu circuit three or four times before, and been on many treks prior to that, but as we found, it was kind of hard to get a straight answer out of him. But being inexperienced is fine, as long as you can find the way eventually, as long as you have three simple words at your disposal: "I don't know". Binod, we found, was not very good at using these words on matters of any import.

Expandthe shifting of the ruse )

This is the first of a handful of stories from Nepal. If you don't have a Dreamwidth account, but you want to get notified so you can read more things like this when I write them, I also have an e-mail list; I promise I'll only send mail for things that I write that go here on this blog.

(both images shot on Ilford HP5 Plus, pushed to ISO 800.)
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a few trails that lead into low brush, and subsequently up and into the mountains
you are quiet and wide open

kodak portra 400. more coming soon.

(previously)
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In the lineage of yogis that I have from time to time studied with, we note the concepts of Shiva and Shakti as two energetic bodies: Shiva, the body of Being, and Shakti, the body of Becoming. Being is raw, undiluted consciousness and observation, peace and attentive calm; Becoming is the creative, wild, powerful, energetic force of change. We do not prioritize one over the other, and we find them both equally important, but also we know that neither of them are the end goal. Samadhi, or transcendence, is where "I" is no longer, where bodies and energy is no longer, where there is no difference between me and you, the inside and the outside, or even Being and Becoming. But for those of us still on this plane, Shiva and Shakti are separate, but inextricably linked.

Kamasi Washington takes a slightly different view on this, with his two-CD thesis, Heaven & Earth. He presents Earth as a gritty view of the present, of a place of real work, of abject reality; Heaven, on the other hand, he gives as something of a dreamland, an idealistic floating place, with the challenge that it is distinct from us. He, too, gives a view of the merger in his final note, Will You Sing, conjecturing the transcendence of the merger of the two. In the mean time, while they are still separate, he presents the alternatives as equally important concepts: Heaven must exist as an ideal, and Earth must exist to remind us of what we are.

With weighty subjects like that in mind, we come to an important topic.

* * *

During the week, I wrote that the Kiwis are just deadly serious about their ice cream. Well, I suspected that to be true, but I could not really know until what they call Thursday evening (but the rest of us Stateside call Wednesday night), when I reached what must be the terminus of my little self-guided ice cream tour of Auckland. Giapo -- 4.6*, according to Google, and even more unusually for an ice cream shop, "$$$" -- was just a five minute walk from Island Gelato Co, and I knew I was in for it when I went flipping through their FAQs, and found their central claim that "We are not for everyone—we are for the dreamers, innovators, artists, and all ice cream lovers. Giapo is for the people who are ready to see ice cream as a platform for freedom and art." Deadly serious, indeed.

ten ice cream flavors, and a menu with some prices that seem exorbitant until you realize 1NZD ~= 0.60USD

Giapo sells itself as an experience, then, rather than just simple ice cream. The whole process is heavily regimented, in fact: when I walked in, they rounded up all of the Giapo first-timers, and rather than simply taking our orders, went through an elaborate tasting process, where they brought out samples of all eight flavors, and had us try each of them in sequence. This was a quite foreign concept indeed to me: my usual procedure is to choose by looking and commit to my decision, safe in the knowledge that there is always room for more ice cream later. Giapo, on the other hand, does not even have their ice cream on display, and you do not get to see the visual form of your final creation until you have ordered it; each flavor is served differently, as I'd soon discover. I went through the tasting experience along with my five new friends in my tour group, and at long last, selected an ice cream -- NZ Hokey Pokey, in a pretzel Incredible Cone. The other flavors were certainly good, but I felt I needed to compare the basics, after all, and with the fact that Giapo doesn't serve in cups, it seemed like there would just be too much going on with a second flavor.

I should take a moment to note exactly what I mean by 'a pretzel Incredible Cone'. This particular ice cream shop seems to make everything to order; this particular Incredible Cone is a waffle cone (no sugar cones to be found here) dipped in chocolate, with pretzels around it (also dipped in chocolate). They also have a white chocolate, as well as a chocolate and gold, Incredible Cone; other ice cream substrates available include their "Selfie Cone" (a cone with some sort of an edible picture frame), the King of Cones (a cone about a meter tall), a Giant Squid Cone (a cone with a giant squid shaped thing on the top in which the ice cream resides; the form is said to be 3D printed), and their Two Wearable Cones (cones that are formed to fit on your fingertips, with the ice cream on top; you get two of them, for they are somewhat smaller). As I was considering these, my NZ Hokey Pokey Pretzel Incredible Cone arrived, still smoking from its unexpected chocolate shell having been hardened with liquid nitrogen.

A small plastic ice-cream-sample spoon was sticking out out of the side of the shell, as an invitation of where I should even start with this thing. And so I did: I started with a spoonful of ice cream, and a little bit of shell. Maybe I should get the basics out of the way to say that the ice cream was truly excellent. But I had not just ice cream, but a whole adventure of flavors in front of me: this cone had what seemed like a double-scoop on top of it already, and a truly massive chocolate shell with a line of Hokey Pokey (you'll recall that to be a honeycomb-toffee-like thing) down the side of it, and that was to say nothing of my chocolate-dipped cone.

a colossal ice cream cone, about twice the height of my hand, and about the diameter of my fist, with a spoon sticking out of the top

Where my beloved J. P. Licks, or even Rick's Ice Cream, is the down-home creamery of Earth, Giapo is the explosive constellations of Heaven. Giapo is not kidding when they say that they "do not comply with the traditional meaning of ice cream [...] that most people understand it to be"; Giapo's Incredible Cone asks more questions than it rightly can even begin to answer. How should I eat it? is only the start; is this even ice cream that's front and center? is another.

I took it with me as I walked back to my hotel, about a ten minute walk. I wasn't even finished with the cone by the time I got back, and it seemed daunting at that point. By the time I even got to the pretzels, my sense of taste was overloaded. It was unusually crisp and dry of an evening, given the patterns I'd seen so far that week; the rest of the week, it had rained on me every night as I went for my ice cream (it didn't stop me, and it didn't seem to stop any of the other Kiwis, either). The weather in Auckland seemed to change on a moment's notice, which the Kiwis in the office had been accustomed to by that point: at some point, I stood up from my workspace before lunch to see bright sun, wandered into the office's depths to take a leak, and by the time I emerged again, it was pouring buckets at a forty-five-degree angle outside my window, and a moment later, it was sunny again. But anyway, here I was with my overload of carbohydrates -- just me and a moment of clarity on the city.

ice cream in front of some mid-to-high-rise buildings

Giapo is the raw Shakti of ice cream: it is the raw expressive energy, the transformation, the Becoming. On its own, it is just too much. Rick's and Licks, on the other hand, are the Shiva of ice cream: the stillness, the steadiness, the Being. On their own, after all, they may not be enough.

By the time I made it back to my hotel room, I had a big chunk of waffle cone and chocolate in my hand, with just a taste of now liquid sweet cream in the middle. I considered chucking it, considered whether it was by now too much, considered if I had now already rightly had the Experience, after all. I ate it anyway, committing myself to pushing myself over the top in sugar consumption.

Heaven and Earth each remind us of a space in between, and of our own role in bringing one to the other. Shiva and Shakti, on their own, remind us of what they each bring to us, but they also remind us of the need for both together. Giapo and the simpler creameries are duals, too: Becoming to remind us of the simplicity of Being, and Being to remind us of the excitement of what's possible. Neither are transcendence on their own, but if we can learn to hold the feeling of both at once, maybe that is where we can break the cycles and patterns that bind us.

a mostly eaten ice cream cone

Heaven or Earth, Shiva or Shakti, Being or Becoming, it was over. All that was left was the echoes of the chocolate and ice cream and hokey pokey and pretzel and waffle cone in my bloodstream. I went to bed, and the next evening I got on an airplane and went home. On the plane, they served me one last New Zealand ice cream: "gingernut and triple chocolate".

It was alright, I guess.

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a Google Maps screenshot with about a billion ice cream shops within a half mile radius

The thing that you've got to understand about this country is how deadly serious they are about their ice cream.

For instance, yesterday evening, I went to Island Gelato Company (4.3* on Google Maps), a four minute walk from MELT (also 4.3*), where I went the night before. Despite it being 55 degrees out (Fahrenheit, for I have not at all assimilated in my two-and-a-half days here), and raining, there was a line; the small glass storefront was full. The presentation of the choices was gorgeous, enough that you'd assume that the place is a chain, with so many options; as it turns out, it is a chain, but of only two stores. For my NZ$9.50 (that's US$6 or so), I got two scoops, for I needed to try two different flavors, see. The gelato I got (half Darkest Chocolate & Sour Cherry, half Buttermilk & Dulce) was, if not truly exceptional, certainly very good. The night before, when I got the national flavor of ice cream, Hokey Pokey (that's vanilla with honeycomb toffee -- and no, I am not joking about New Zealand having a national flavor of ice cream), I found, also to be excellent.

But the most surprising thing, perhaps, is that these two were not a fluke: I have reason to believe that there are, perhaps, tens, if not hundreds, of ice cream shops in and around Auckland of such quality.

Perhaps I should skip lunch today. And dinner, too, for that matter.

Deadly serious, indeed.

an array of ice cream flavors

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