Operation Jungle Storm, Pt. 2

Part 1
What would the next days bring? Only time would tell...

The next day brought a tropical rain storm and I spent the entire day huddled in my thatch-roofed cabin reading a history of the Indian Uprising of 1857. Party over here.

The day after, however, I awoke to find a beautiful blue sky. After rain and endless days of fog, it was the the first time I've seen the sun in this young decade. I went for a walk, aimlessly wandering the rural roads that of the spread-out village. A pair of young children invited me to their house and their mother produced a selection of local Tharu specialties. Best of all, the Tharu eat pig, which I haven't had for months, and I was given a small strip of pork coated in a spicy brown seasoning. The meat was tender and the spices reminded me of the smell of summer barbecues across the ocean. I couldn't place what exactly. Was the seasoning the same as the hot dip I used to eat in my grandmother's house in Mexico, or was it closer to the fragrant, viscous steak sauce coating overcooked meat in a little restaurant in the small towns of the American South? Either way, as I sat alone surrounded by the fields of yellow flowers blooming beside rice paddies shimmering in the warm sun, that bite of pork at the same time grounded me in the reality of the nomadic life that had brought me to the Nepali jungle and transported me magically back home, though I don't even know where home is. Maybe home isn't a country or a house, but the taste of seasoned pork after 10,000 kilometers wandering far away from everything I've known.

One thing you instantly notice about Nepal is that there are animals everywhere. In India of course you find cows wandering the streets and will often find a goat tied to someone's stoop or a cage full of chickens sitting in the muck at the side of the road surrounded by empty paan packets, cigarette butts, and piles of burnt potato chip bags. In Nepal, or at least in the towns of the Tarai, one can hardly walk without tripping over a loose chicken. Everywhere you turn, there are buffalo grazing on mounds of hay, children struggling to pull goats out of their neighbors' vegetable patches, and piglets darting across the street in their little, pigletty panic. Buffalo are still used to haul stuff around town and there seem to be an infinite supply of puppies slipping and sliding their way over the mighty peaks of foot-high furrows. In Thakurdwara, the larger clearings where many households have their fields are looked over by wooden watchtowers, where guards in the night keep an eye out for intruding rhinos and other hassles. At harvest times, I was told, if you hear someone shouting in the night, it is probably a man chasing away a deer; if you hear an odd munching sound followed by lots of people shouting, the harvest has attracted wild elephants.

I strolled for hours on the little dirt roads around town, chatting up the villagers as I went. As usual I was quite popular amongst the local children, but I noticed (it would be impossible for me not to) that I was a veritable superstar for Thakurdwara's young, unmarried women. They would beckon me over with smiles and waves and speak to me in very poor but enthusiastic English. Typically two or three of them would then halt the conversation every minute or so, start conferring with each other in Nepali on matters of English grammar, and then they would all turn to me with beaming smiles and their spokesperson would ask me something to the tune of "you have girlfriend?", "you are marriaged?", or "you like Tharu girls?". Ghostface Buddha is of course a shameless, shameless flirt and I enjoyed this treatment greatly. I later found out from Gautam and a French lady tourist at my lodge that the entire town knew where I was staying and the single girls were spreading the news of my comings and goings amongst themselves, prying anybody in the tourist trade likely to have business with me for information. By the end of the day, if I was retracing my steps past a house I had already visited, a pretty young lady would come rushing out of the house with a plateful of hot food and insist I eat in the family garden. When I got back to the lodge much later that night, the staff asked me what I would like for dinner, and all I could do was lie down on a table, touch my bloated stomach and say "I've eaten seven times already." Having been interrogated by many of these same girls, they understood.

During my wanderings I had eventually stumbled upon the village market, which locals call "the temple" for the simple reason that on one side is the village's temple. That's right. Thakurdwara is such a rustic little village it only has one Hindu temple. Past the temple in a patch of forest where the undergrowth had been cleared, villagers from across the Tarai were setting up little market tents beneath the towering trees for the next day's festival. The Maggi festival is the largest event of the year for the Tharu, combining a New Year's celebration with temple visits and market gatherings. I perused the tents, curious what villagers from other towns in the region were coming here to shop for. The answer, apparently, was bras. There were hundreds of tiny tents selling all sorts of little crafts and specialties, or harder to find goods such as CD's and fake Reebok hats brought from the larger cities for the fair, but nearly every stall had a selection of brassieres hanging from its tentpoles. Indeed, I observed, there was nowhere to by a bra in Thakurdwara, and who knows how hard to find they must be to find in villages even further from the market towns and highway. Of all the products of Western civilization, the bra is perhaps the one that has caught on most universally among the people of the Indian Subcontinent. While most of the women are still in saris and many even still wear veils, it is not the least bit uncommon to see a bra hook protruding beneath the traditional undergarments. I know little about the relative merits of different types of female underwear (save from an aesthetic standpoint) but surely there must be a practical reason for this craze. In any case, the bra-sellers of the Tarai were fixing for a day of good business.

Finally, as my legs grew weary of ambling about the countryside I turned towards the lodge, passing the previously described gauntlet of admirers. As I passed by the gate to the national park headquarters, familiar voices called from the fireside. It was three members of the conspicuously nubile Park Ranger Force. They expressed indignation that I had not come to visit the day before as I had promised. I provided the excuse that, objectively speaking, the weather had been a godawful torrent and I certainly could not have been expected to walk two miles through a thunderstorm to assist them in feeding the infants at the crocodile-breeding pens (oh, how I regret missing that opportunity). They accepted this excuse and pleaded for me to cross over the electric fence (elephants have a tendency to cross through there in spring on their way to the fields, sowing havoc in the neighboring army camp while they're at it). "You want chai?" They asked. Though I did not phrase it with this much detail, I replied that if I had one more glass of chai that afternoon, sugar would probably start pouring out of my ears. They conferred amongst themselves for a moment. One of them said goodbye with a knowing look. Two of the others smiled, waved, and excused themselves to their duties with the crocodiles or whatever. It was conspicuously vague. The last remaining one opened the gate and beckoned me come to the fire. "You learn to me English and I learn to you Nepali," she said, inching closer towards me on the log by the fire.

You know what they say about wildlife rangers: they have a lot of game.

The next day the Maggi festival began in earnest around 4 in the morning. I, for one, was asleep because it was first of all it was 4am, and secondly I certainly was not going to hike out past the village to jump in a freezing river. One cold, wet New Year's dunk per annum is quite enough. I rested heartily, until I was awoken around noon by the approaching sound of drums and singing women. I fumbled my way into some trousers and went outside to survey the clamor. A circle of middle-aged women had formed nearby, clapping and singing, while a man played the drum and a handful of other men danced. The center of the proceeding was a man in the Tharu approximation of drag. On his lower body he wore a bright long skirt, to the great amusement of the Tharus, which he twirled in the custom of the local girls. Above the waste, however, he wore a sweater and a woolen hat and looked remarkably like Dave Chapelle's crackhead character, and danced head down, twirling the folds of the skirt without the slightest trace of dexterity or enthusiasm. While the locals and the two other tourists at the lodge were gobbling this up, I was unimpressed. I was apparently a greater connoisseur of drag shows than the average Tharu and, turning my nose up at the lackluster spectacle, I returned to bed.

Later in the afternoon I made it out to the "temple" where the fair was in full swing. The patch of forest swarmed with people buying, selling, visiting the temple, playing carnival games, gambling, and above all playing the fucking flute. The atmosphere was congenial and rather hokey, like an American state fair transplanted into the jungle, with flutes and bras everywhere, and a great number of recently killed chickens dangling from ropes. The most popular game seemed to be some variation of horseshoes involving throwing a ring over a grid of little tin boxes, followed by a game of cards which Santoosh assured me I shouldn't bother trying to understand as only Nepalis seem to like it. There was also a large, round wooden construction like a giant bowl in which daring drivers amazed the crowd by driving their motorcycles and even a tiny car in loops high on the banked surface...but enough of that; back to the flutes.

I heard the flutes from miles off. Strange, as bass usually travels farther than treble, but clearly these flutes were fashioned with demonic arts that negated the usual rules of acoustics. I got to the fair and found that cheap little flutes were being sold by the thousands, mostly to children but also to grown men, none of whom took the slightest interest in covering any of the finger-holes to produce an actual note, and many of whom positively delighted in producing the shrillest, loudest, most terrible sound possible. This wasn't the first time I've thought the piccolo, like a handgun, should only be sold to licensed buyers, but now that opinion of mine is firmly set in stone and it will probably be one of the things I am yammering on about when I am a doddering old man, along with holographic nipple piercings or whatever else will be outraging me about the youth in 2057.

The day after the fair, it was time to leave. I rose early in the morning and reluctantly began to retrace my course towards Delhi, sustained only by a zealous urge to get back faster than I had come. I passed the Karnali bridge, and the clouds had risen into puffs at the top of the gorge, allowing light to filter through with clarity and shine on the steep, forested river banks through which the river rushed as though the Himalayan peaks were but a few steps into the receding mist. Not far past there, we were stopped by what I assumed was an army checkpoint. Wrong; they were Maobaadis, Maoists.

The lightly fortified Maoist camp was right there for all to see off the edge of the highway, and the armed rebels stopped the bus, but without any rancor. The conductor, familiar with the routine, began to fish out a nominal sum of money for passage, but the Maoists politely declined. Instead, they said, they wanted us to load the roof with a pile of firewood for the next Maoist base, which would be accepted as our payment, and they let us on our way.

Over the next five hours, we stopped countless times to pick up stray passengers and luggage, often at infuriatingly short intervals. Nepalis seem to expect door-to-door service from their buses. When a bus pulls up 50 yards away and starts loading passengers, a Nepali may wait for this whole scene to finish and the bus to drive those 50 yards and stop again for him. The day dragged on. About five kilometers from the Maoists with the firewood we were stopped again, this time by the Nepali soldiers. "Any Maoists about?" they seemed to wonder, without really caring. It's peacetime in Nepal, but the Army is making a great show of its authority where it has control, without lifting a finger to dislodge the opposing Maoist authority kicking its heels down the road. I noticed that these soldiers weren't from the army per se, but from the paramilitary police. Fuck the police.

More towns and more random stops later we ran into the real army, and they held us up for longer. It was becoming tiresome. Half an hour further on, I saw ahead a crowd of people holding a rope across the highway. Great, more Maobaadis I thought. Nope, my neighbor told me, these were Khaobaadis. Khaobaadi is a truly delightful term. Where 'Maobaadi' means 'Maoist', 'Khaobaadi' refers not to a political persuasion but to general brigandage and means 'Eatist'. This concerned me somewhat, as I was clearly identifiable as a foreign tourist and would be likely to have money on me. My neighbor reassured me that these were not like the mountain bandits who take your money at gunpoint. In fact, he told me, Nepalis had become so accustomed to roadblocks, strikes, and forced 'donations' of every kind, that now people just block the roads for whatever damn reason they feel like. In this case it turned out, the "Eatists" were taking their nickname to its logical extreme. They were Tharu villagers celebrating the second day of Maggi, and were blocking the road and demanding money so that they could take their families out for a picnic in the afternoon. This only pissed me off more as we idled for the conductor to negotiate a price, and the Khaobaadis, in a meaningless mimicry of their Maoist brethren, printed a receipt for our donation, in case we ever needed to show the Central Picnic Secretariat our right of passage. I fumed. If it were up to me, I would have put these Picnicists' ideological resolve to the test and driven the bus at full speed towards their flimsy rope barricade to see if they were really going to put their lives on the line for the revolutionary cause of tuna sandwiches.

We were stopped 20 kilometers later, again by the Army, doing a fucking marvelous job of maintaining the rule of law along the highway. 10 Kilometers further on, men in uniforms again waved us over, and we stopped again for a handful of smiling Maoists to unload their firewood and trudge off into the woods with their load. Why we had to deliver wood to a guerrilla camp surrounded by trees I will never know.

By this point the bus had become unbearably crowded, and the introduction of a fully-grown goat into the aisle did nothing to improve conditions. The goat stalwartly refused to move to the back of the bus, inciting a confusion of pushing and shoving. From right beside my head I heard a sudden, chaotic sound, and turned to see that the little tan handbag the girl across from me had been cradling was in fact a live chicken. The chicken panicked in the commotion and began squawking loudly, shaking its head in all directions and flapping its wings in fear. The small girl struggled to control it. It eventually wrested itself free, the girl only capturing it by its string-tied feet, and the chicken squawked madly as it flopped about in her lap. Before her older sister could intervene to regain control, the chicken had flapped its wings squarely in the face of a neighboring baby, immediately turning that child to a shrieking panic, which soon swept over the myriad Nepali babies on the bus. In the meantime, two men had lifted the flailing goat and were carrying it at chest height while the conductor and several passengers yelled, and the goat was summarily ejected from the crawling bus, its owner hopping out after it.

Asia.

Finally we arrived in Mahendra Nagar and I still had to cross the border. For this purpose I enlisted a horse-drawn "tonga" to cover the distance quicker. Within minutes, the overexcited horse began to buck violently, the cart bobbed like a seesaw with a fat bully jumping on the far end, and the bench collapsed from beneath me, sending me tumbling to the floor of the wagon. Not only did I feel that intense, unwarranted embarrassment of the man who has through no fault of his own fallen through a broken chair, but I also severely pulled the entire left side of my back in the fall, which still hurts. Another ridiculous fucking injury in the line of duty.

I'm back in India. Immediately after crossing the border I noticed how shitty Banbaasa was. It was full of rubbish and smelled like crap. Some rather unfriendly bus drivers herded me onto the direct line to Delhi, a local, all-night bus with metal seats that gave me one of the worst nights of sleep of my life, in a line of work in which I routinely sleep in horrible conditions. We arrived at the horrible main bus stand of Delhi at 4am, in a lousy, wet cold, and I was forced to take a rickshaw from the periphery into the city center in a fog so dense even flashing tail lights disappeared after 30 yards. It's time to go South for the winter. I'm beginning the longest tour of my journey, a sweeping exploration of months across South India, and I'm starting in the belly of the beast. I'm going to Mumbai.

Operation Jungle Storm, Pt. 1

Forgive the lateness of my posting. It is uncommon to find broadband internet and wild tigers in the same location. For the few of you who couldn't guess, my last excursion was to the village of Thakurdwara on the outskirts of Bardia National Park in the remote southwestern jungles of Nepal. That's right: Ghostface Buddha left India. My journey to this isolated spot was a three-day affair by train, bus, bicycle, rickshaw, foot, and jeep.

The story begins, as so many of mine do, with an Indian train that was approximately six hours late to a destination supposedly less than six hours away. Passing through the massive state of Uttar Pradesh, the train became an embodiment of the territory it crossed: outrageously and uncomfortably crowded, constantly patrolled by beggars and clueless hawkers ("Why, yes, we all did just get on a 5-hour train to shop for wallets! What? What do you mean you haven't sold a damn thing?"), and reeking of man and machine. The pair seated across from me were a near-miraculous couple of elderly peasants, whose one gift in life appeared to be the mastery of constant belching. The wife, at about 15-second intervals for most of the trip, would summon a croak-like belch which would be followed by a few seconds of wheezing as her tongue hung out of her dessicated mouth, and concluded each performance with a burp of a slightly different timbre. Her husband was more restrained, as he was usually asleep, but every half-hour or so he would awake and produce a series of sounds reminiscent of a dragon ingesting a heard of distressed buffalo deep within the Earth. There was something biologically wrong with these people, and I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised to hear that their families had married them off to each other at a young age for the sake of the village.

After a night in the surprisingly un-awful Uttar Pradesh city of Bareilly, I boarded a public bus to the small border town of Banbaasa. Needless to say, it was late. My surroundings grew continually more rustic, ramshackle Indian towns giving way to listless villages with crumbling Sikh gurudwaras until we entered the edge of the Tarai, the strip of jungle that has separated India and Nepal for centuries. I got off the bus and hiked down a half-paved road. A man pulled up on a bicycle and demanded I hop on. I balanced my backpack across the grocery rack and straddled it as my lift pedaled on out of town and into the woods, cutting through fern-lined dirt tracks until finally we emerged at a canal, followed it to the river, and he deposited me at an Indian police checkpoint. The road to Nepal was across a one-lane bridge atop an open dam ("barrage"? I'm no engineer). I joined the flow of Nepalis crossing the river on foot, completed the necessary formalities at Indian Immigration, and walked the remaining three kilometers across no-man's-land to Nepali Immigration, from where I hired a cycle-rickshaw to carry me the last seven kilometers to the Nepali border town of Mahendra Nagar. All told it was a bit of a performance.

The contrasts between the Indian and Nepali sides were evident immediately. Replacing the junk-strewn concrete villages of India, alongside the Nepali road were mud-walled huts and thatched roofs. I had difficulty speaking to some of the Nepalis, because they had soft voices and didn't like to bother you. In Mahendra Nagar I had boiled eggs for dinner, and was tossing the shells into the dirt. A Nepali man chastised me. "The shell is natural, but does not look so nice to throw trash on the street." Holy shit. We're not in Uttar Pradesh any more, Toto.

Another night in a crappy hotel. In the morning, a bus to Ambaasa, a random little intersection near my final destination. Though the bus was zippy, going was slow. We constantly stopped for passengers and Nepali Army checkpoints. Armed soldiers boarded the bus and gave everybody the once-over. They were looking for Maoists, who were suspected of smuggling arms through these parts. They found none on our bus. Perhaps they should have looked more closely at the convoy coming in the other direction: five cargo trucks full to bursting with cheering Nepalis waving red flags adorned with the hammer and sickle. That might be a good place to look for Maoists.

Until recently, Nepal had been in the throes of a latter-day communist revolution, with large swathes of rural Nepal being controlled by the Maoist guerrilla army. Now the Maoists are the largest party in parliament and peace has been restored but the army is clearly still wary of the rebels stocking munitions. As we drove along, we saw each town with its Indian-style symbolic town-gate. But rather than being adorned with elephants, Hindu gods, and frumpy-looking local politicians, the towns around were were painted with the hammer-and-sickle and communist slogans in Nepali and English. Across the lintel would be portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, with the Nepali Maoist leader Prachanda discreetly in the corner. After some five hours we came to the Karnali bridge, an epic new suspension bridge across the gorge where the Himalayan foothills spew forth a river onto the lowlands. It's been less than ten years since the entire part of the country West of the Karnali river has even had a reliable connection to the rest of Nepal. No wonder there's so many Maoists.

The bus stopped here for a chai break and I was invited to sit and drink with the locals. "What is your job?" one of them asked.
"I'm a journalist." I said. (Close enough)
"You're a journalist?" he replied, "Great, you're a journalist, I'm a socialist!"

There was much laughter. When it died down he repeated "OK, you be journalist, I be socialist."
"Can't I be both?" I asked ingenuously.
"You're a socialist?"
"Yeah, sure" I answered.
"What kind of socialist?" he asked, putting my knowledge of left-wing ideology to the test.
He probably would have been surprised by my knowledge on the subject, but instead I cheekily raised my glass to my lips and answered "A tea-sipping communist." The crowd could hardly contain themselves, and chai was on the house.

Directly across the bridge we passed through the edge of the national park until I hopped off at Ambaasa, which turned out to be two chai stalls, some houses, and a police checkpoint by the turnoff for a dirt road. There I sat for several hours, talking to a dude named Santoosh over a campfire and waiting for his jeep to show up and take us to the lodge. Under darkness again now, Santoosh and I were joined by his colleague Santosh and a pair of Brits. The jeep took us down the dirt track through the woods, splashing through streams and catching an assortment of deer and buffalo in its headlights. We arrived at the lodge late at night and I began planning my next day. I was to go on a full-day jungle walk with the lodge's expert guide, a fellow with a fiendishly difficult name who introduced himself by his surname, Gautam.

It was too good. "Gautam?" I asked.
He began to answer "Yes, you know, like..."
"People call me Buddha."

The next day, Gautam and Buddha hiked off into the forest together. The entire day we didn't run into a single other visitor. Even in the high season, this park is so out of the way for most tourist that it is visited by an average of ten people a day, including Nepalis. In the middle of winter, we literally had an entire national park to ourselves. We tromped along a riverbed and crossed into a dense jungle on the other side. Almost immediately we began running into tiger prints, and we both got very excited. Shortly thereafter, we heard a rustling in the bushes. We stopped, silent as rocks, and Gautam crept forward through the undergrowth. I could just see his hand waving for me to come. I slinked on between the branches, holding my breath, and emerged to find myself in a small clearing mere yards from...a giant, floppy wall of rhino ass. Rhinos are practically blind so we got even closer. I caught a few glimpses of its face, but it wouldn't turn around. It seemed unaware of us, which was good, but to entice it to turn and show its face would have required making sudden noises near a rhinoceros over open ground. Discretion being the greater part of valor, we chose instead to spend some time admiring the flaps of leathery armor on its big, gray butt.

As the morning went on we saw an innumerable variety of birds, as well as three species of deer: the spotted deer, the hog deer (a strange, dark, portly creature with antlers), and even the vanishingly rare swamp deer. Gautam taught me the basics of animal tracking in the jungle, but wisely insisted on doing the actual tracking himself. Walking along another riverbed I said "Look! Elephant tracks!" And indeed, they were elephant tracks. Locating where a herd of elephants has walked in soft mud is, I must tell you, a subtle and delicate art that I am proud to have mastered. We set off quickly in pursuit of the elephants, hoping we would find them lingering around a nearby bend. Cutting through the woods, we heard splashing, and ran to the riverbank, where we were disappointed not to see wild elephants, but a group of local elephant-drivers taking their mounts for a washing out in nature.

We tromped about the jungle and the grasslands for the entire day in search of more animals, hoping to find wild elephants or even the elusive royal Bengal tiger. At one point we found more tiger prints surrounded by a mayhem of deer tracks and a very clear trail of drag marks leading off into the bushes. Some deer wasn't coming home tonight. We pressed further up the river to a good tiger-waiting spot, and waited, and waited. After a few hours identifying birds with the binoculars we heard noise coming from the distant trees. A pack of monkeys was making a clacking noise, which Gautam told me was the warning of a tiger patrolling below. A group of deer crept out from the long grass and stood frightened in the open ground, looking in every direction but especially towards where the monkeys were yelling. The tiger was almost certainly in the stand of trees, not more than 100 yards from our position. We lay in complete silence and watched the scene unfold. The clacking began to subside, and through the binoculars we could see monkeys cautiously hopping between trees in our direction. The tiger had gone to the other fork of the stream, and though it was still close by there would be no way for us to approach it undetected. We concluded the day with no tiger sighting. Gautam apologized, and took some time to explain how rare it is to see a tiger in the wild, but I fully understood and wasn't disappointed at all by our close brush with the tiger. Gautam seemed sad too to have missed it.

We left the park at dusk. The lodge was on the far side of Thakurdwara village. At the park gate I heard a lot of giggling, and was soon invited to the fireside by a pair of attractive young park Rangers from the village. They told me that the Maggi festival of the local Tharu people was coming up in two days and they insisted that a nice boy like me stay for the festivities. Why the hell not, I figured, how many chances would I get to see an authentic rural festival here? I said I'd think about it.

On the way back to the lodge we passed through the edge of the village. I was invited into a longhouse to sample some of the local brews: "roxi", a hard alcohol made from rice that tasted a bit like kahlua, and "chaang" or "rice beer", a urine-yellow concoction that tasted like a bargain white wine with rice floating in it. After politely consuming two large bowls of this stuff, I discovered that it was not only closer to wine than beer in its taste, but also in its potency, and I was quite drunk. Gautam and I merrily hiked the remaining way through the fog as a silly drunken smile crept on my face, getting sillier and sillier. I tried and failed to read a book, then had dinner. At about this time, Santoosh walked in and asked me if I had happened to meet some park Ranger girls. I said that I had, and Santoosh told me that apparently I had become the talk of the Ranger force, which was largely composed of 18-to-22 year old Tharu girls, and that those who had not met me were most eager to, while those who already had spoke very highly of me.

Santoosh and Gautam asked if I would be staying to see the Maggi festival. With quite a bit of chaang floating in my system, and more than a little bit of an ego merrily bloated by the reports from the Ranger base, I agreed to stay. What would the next days bring? Only time would tell...