Day two and we dined with the Sherpa porters, cooks and guides by a campfire. There is no electricty in this valley other than our flashlights and my Sony World Band radio.I turn it on getting a scratchy Nepali station playing local music sounding much like Indian music. The Sherpa are happy and break out their cigarettes. Damn, they love smoking tobacco. I think about joining them, but my lungs are torched by today’s trek.

There was no culture clash. We were hungry after the hard steep climb. The Sherpas seemed fine. It had been a hard trudge on the trail. They were carrying forty kilos each. Our load were small backpacks.

“The first thing a westerner learns in Sherpa is “Carry this.” The next is “Carry me.”

Dorge says the trail will become steeper and we will have to cross a landslide. I wonder if the Sherpas have as many words for steep as the Eskimos have for snow.

Lance and I drank two glasses of whiskey. Dorge said none for the porters or anyone else in our crew. After dinner we went to out sparate rooms. Our legs are noodled and neither of us are acclimated to breathing at this altitude.

The trekking crew are gathering in the next room. They are smoking heavily and playing cards. Laughter and cursing. I can’t decipher the swears, but I can tell that they are all in good humor. Working in nightclubs had taught me the menancing tone of calling someone something bad.

I turn on my Sony Wordband radio expeceting nothing, but static.

No one here knew nothing of the troubles in Kathmandu.

Several nights ago Lance and I had stood on the roof of our Thamel hotel. The protestors ran down the narrow street. The police were behind them. The soldiers trapped them and started shooting. They saw people watching from the roofs and aimed up and pulled their triggers. The officers had told them that this was a comminist uprising and they were going to kill the king.

Kathmandu didn’t exist here.

There was the trail and the villages and the river and the Himalayas covered with snow.

After this I was flying to Paris with a stop-0ver in Frankfurt.

No one was waiting for me at either terminal.

I had friends in Paris.

I would call them from Kathmandu.

There are no phones here.

Only word of mouth.

All I am is a trekker in a lodge by a cataract raging through the valley. I open the window. A billion stars are overhead. Something strange aboput the ground. Millions of fireflies carpet the grass. Blinking like the stars. This place is magic. I breeathe in the air. Only the earth, the river, and the smoke of a smouldering fire.

We’re heading higher tomorrow.

No one on the way but Sherpas. Yaks too.

The poverty here is crushing.

Porters are paid $2 a day.

We’re paying ours $5.

They’re carrying forty kilos. I’m carrying five.

Just so I can see a glaciar at the end of the trail.
The room next door is quiet.

THe crew is asleep.

I go to bed to join them.

The Cafe le Flore