TRAVEL NARRATIVE
STRANDED IN NEPAL DURING THE FIRST WAVE OF COVID-19
I WAKE UP IN A HOTEL SUITE IN KATHMANDU, AND WHEN I TRY TO STRETCH IN BED, I FEEL SEVERE CRAMPS GRIPPING MY THIGHS. So I lie there paralized, alone with my eyes closed, remembering I didn’t finish the journey. I had planned to climb Mera Peak, but after four days in the Himalayas traveling with an old sherpa friend named Pasang and a 19-year old porter, I decided to quit and head back. I believed the main reason was the heaviest pre-monsoon rains that I had ever experienced in my past trips, but there was another reason that I was trying to ignore. The day I left, Spain decreed a state of alarm for Covid-19. For the first time, the people I loved in my home were at greater risk than mine in the mountains, and I would have to walk for weeks without any news from them.
To come back from where we came from took us several days, and at some point, we saw other trekkers suddenly changing direction and heading back to the Lukla airport. Pasang was able to book a ticket for me in a different airline, but it was the last flight, they had to stay. Noticing my unease, he insisted I should not worry as they could walk to Kathmandu much faster if they went without me. News among the trekkers was confusing, but that flight was actually the last effort to take people off the mountains since two days earlier, European countries had urged citizens to come back before closing their airspace. There was a sense of trepidation for the 20 people getting on the small aircraft while the propellers were roaring. The plane ran down a slide-shaped runway, and someone cried, “Woohoo!” But when the plane started shaking violently in all directions, nobody made a sound anymore. During that flight, I learned that just before the turbulence, a cold breeze gets inside the plane, reminding me of how fragile it all is.
2
AS A EUROPEAN CITIZEN, THEY CAN'T DENY MY ENTRY IN THE EU. My departure to Spain is in three weeks, so my flight is still scheduled, lockdown in Spain is intended to last only two weeks, and there are still no Covid-19 cases in Kathmandu. But in the meantime, Spain has quickly become the most dangerous place to travel to. Following the advice from the Spanish Foreign Ministry website, I report to the embassy that I'm in Kathmandu, but I choose to stay.
I'm in an old Newari hotel, and thanks to a friend, I can stay in a suite for very little money. I’m often the only guest in the east wing and rarely see others; it is like having my own apartment. I adore the Tibetan decoration inside the Hindu architecture, partially in decay. The pagoda roofs, the intricate courtyards, and the clay altars semi-hidden in the garden among the lush vegetation make me feel I’m among a temple’s ruins. I feel like living in what Buddhists call the Bardo, the in-between, a dreamlike state, one in which there is no coronavirus. But my illusion is shattered when I wake up on the 24th and see the staff is quickly packing everything to leave. The Kathmandu government has declared a lockdown without a previous warning after a Nepali student who had returned from France tested positive. Hotels close around Kathmandu, and tourists have to leave, not knowing where. The staff cannot answer any of my anxious questions. They tell me they will shut down in a few hours, but I can stay because they know me. They feel for me, some give me their telephone numbers and assure me it will only be for a week, the hotel manager lives in an adjacent building opposite the old wing, and the gatekeeper will also come every day. I call Pasang, and we talk in disbelief. How is this possible after just one case and without any warning? “Maybe our government is lying to us,” he says.
I know, the Nepalis don't believe a word their government says anymore. “We don't have a democracy”, a group of Thakali caravan drivers had told me in 2016 in Upper Mustang, “We have a demon-crazy.”
Although the staff tells me not to go out, I rush into the streets out of curiosity. As I turn the corner, the scene is surreal. A large group of locals hurries to buy food at a small grocery shop, opposite the store, there are the remaining flames of a bonfire in which the owners have burnt the cardboards used to transport the food;, behind them, the image of the ever-crowded Bishnumati Bridge now without a soul. I’m far away from the tourist center, where the locals don’t speak English, so I have to bend over the counter pointing with the finger to what I want and insist until someone understands me and translates. All I get is a tube of Pringles, biscuits, and all the water bottles I can fill my rucksack with. Even the water is past the expiration date.
But I can consider myself fortunate for turning back in time. Nepal also closes its airspace, and many of the travelers I saw in the mountains are trapped, waiting for rescue helicopters and government aid to get food and shelter.
Nepal Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli, leader of the CPN-Maoist party, is in the hospital recovering from a second renal transplant and the country knows the many weaknesses to fight an epidemic from the very beginning. The Nepalis have access to free Health Care since the war ended in 2006, but their hospital system is characterized by poor facilities, undertrained personnel, and a ratio of one doctor for every 850 people in the Kathmandu valley, in some rural areas they don’t even have clinics. In a country where political corruption is the norm, early in the quarantine, the Health Ministry is accused of taking kickbacks while purchasing Chinese personal protective equipment, resulting also in delays and the delivery of useless testing machines.
The government tries to emulate developing countries' measures thinking that a quarantine that starts even before there is community transmission, together with testing, and contact tracing is the only answer. But besides tourism, the country heavily depends on remittance, and there are four million Nepalis only in India. As the tragedy unfolds there, the second most populated country in the world, Nepal unconstitutionally blocks the entry of their own citizens who fear the hunger more than the disease and walk risking their lives through mountains and rivers to cross the porous borders.
Two days after the quarantine started, a woman named Eva, from the Embassy of Spain, includes me in a WhatsApp group together with other stranded Spanish travelers who have managed to gather in one of the guest houses the government allowed to keep open. She announces dramatically they are doing all they can to evacuate us in one of the European evacuation flights destined to Paris or Frankfurt, from there we will have to fight to come back home. No help. Enraged and puzzled, people start complaining, alleging we could get stuck in a European city with all hotels closed. She writes if we stay, we will be dumped in the streets, soon with a shortage of food as borders are closed, and it will be a matter of time we will all get sick with Covid-19.
Everybody starts writing at the same time, a seventy-year-old woman complains, and then Eva immediately blocks her and explains what she just did should be a warning to the rest of us; we are there just to listen.
I’m shocked at her sadism and the counterproductive way she tries to spread the panic; the idea that quarantine and blockage are the same things. Our real problem is there is no Embassy of Spain in Nepal. The embassy in Nepal is located in India, and it is not only responsible for tourists in India, but also Spaniards in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan. Nobody expected all those countries to have diplomatic problems at once. They are overwhelmed and want to get rid of us by having someone else send us back, so we don’t complain publicly. Her speech is nothing but a story of riots and locals with machetes that would scare the hell out of any tourist.
I lived in Munich for many years, but no friend could travel to the north to pick me up. I have family in Madrid, but how could I tell them to take me in after stopping over two or three different airports when they had been in isolation for weeks. The other travelers start speculating with the idea of getting an embassy permit and hire a car once they are in Europe, but my risk of being stuck in an airport for days trying to come back to my hometown in The Canary Islands is much higher.
That night I stay awake. There is a window as large as my bed. I stare at the moon’s mountainous surface, the same way I do outside my tent when altitude prevents me from sleeping at base camp. I see the starless night fading into pre-monsoonal clouds and refuse the feeling of signing a contract I can't read first. The world is quickly changing, and everybody is improvising; I must base my decision on today. There is something else, an overwhelming feeling; the dream of every traveler is to stay when everybody else leaves.
So I stay, but I promise that whatever happens, I can't let myself get sick in here.
3
FOOD AND WATER ARE MY BIGGEST WORRY. There is no transport and only small grocery stores can open as the glass counters in these places are placed blocking the entrance. The suite is spacious, but I don't have a kitchen. I don't want to ask for favors even when all my sherpa friends call me to tell me they will defy the lockdown to pick me up with their motorbike and take me to their homes. After all, I travel alone for self-reliance. I can´t be a burden to others, so I encourage myself thinking this deprivation is my chance to prove the strength I could not demonstrate this time in the mountains.
Everything remains frighteningly empty at the beginning. My diet consists of tuna sandwiches, milk, and yogurt that I get going around the corner. I clean the room with my wool undershirts and share the suite and the tuna with a semi-feral, tabby cat that the gatekeeper used to feed and was always around in the garden. I don't think it is a coincidence that she is female and I name her after the 21,000 ft. mountain I was going to climb. Mera presses her body next to mine in the dark when the nightly rainstorms start.
After I tell the hotel manager what I’m eating, I found some sardine cans and avocados on my doormat outside the room, but soon I realize I must venture further.
The first I see are the slums below the Bishnumati Bridge; a man squatted on a platform by the river cuts his son's hair while the family circles them; the elders sit on benches near an abandoned rickshaw cart. Children play with balls and chickens. Nobody wears a mask. “The beloved river of Vishnu” is a landfill the government has commissioned to clean several times, but no-one, not even the police patrolling the bridge above in opened trucks, notices the Dalit, the untouchable, living in rooms made of uralite sheets. The river acts as a thin boundary between the quarantined families to the left and people socially isolated for years to the right.
My hotel is far from the common tourist mess. So, now I have to walk up and down the ubiquitous slopes of a Himalayan city in the afternoon, when it is allowed to go out for food, just for two hours, at exactly the same time the rain starts pouring down. I wear my mountain wind jacket, cover my mouth with the wool cloth I wear in the mountains, place my camera under my arm to protect it from the rain, and carry my rucksack hoping to fill it with enough food and water for several days. I crouch sometimes dodging all the entangled wet wires overhanging from utility poles and try to remember all the pharmacies I pass through; they are the only places that are always open and sell water too. The police officers I met along the way dressed in camouflage uniforms, carry large bamboo batons, called lathis, to dissuade people from sitting on their house thresholds to chat. They patrol the streets in open trucks and use extendable claws, normally used to recover corpses from the water, to grab and push those defying the quarantine.
In a couple of weeks, grocery shops are surrounded by stray dogs waiting for the sellers to give them some food. Used to the travelers’ food, they now rest their heads on the sidewalk, too weak to sit. People’s suffering remains indoors, but I will never forget the bewilderment in the animals’ eyes. In Thamel, the tourist hub, no incense smell or music comes from each store to flood the streets anymore. On some main roads, piles of rubble accumulate, and construction workers have left their rudimentary wooden machines as if a sudden tragic event forced them to run for their lives.
Many think the lockdown extension is a way to ensure nobody will celebrate the springtime festivals and the New Year. The massive chariot-pulling processions carrying Buddhist and Hindu deities or the tongue piercing festival are too Tantric and visceral for an epidemic, too dangerous; thus, priests are alone at the temples to perform the pujas. All the attention is directed to the cremation grounds at the Pashupatinath temple, in which, although it has been closed to the public, a rising number of corpses could not be kept secret for long. The country has seen fewer than ten cases of Covid-19 for almost a month and we all start adapting to one of the hardest lockdowns in the world. But on April 21st, newspapers in Kathmandu announce that local contagion has started after eleven Indians who had crossed the border hid in a mosque in the southern district of Udayapur. Now everybody knows airports would not open before August. Evacuation flights had stopped weeks before. I remember the silence at home when I called to tell the news.
In the Narendra Modi era, the Muslim community had been scapegoated in India, accused of spreading Covid-19 with their religious gatherings. Many of the emigrants who sustain Nepal are denied their rights to come back and now crowd out at the border. The improvised quarantine facilities in rural areas are traps in which they get sick, and the Nepalis confined for a month feel they have been good for nothing. An incompetent government has sealed their fate, so they find their own ways to open.
4
SAHEEL IS A 26-YEAR-OLD MADHESI, A MUSLIM NEPALI OF INDIAN HERITAGE, that I met in Thamel. He emigrated from the Terai plains to Kathmandu to find a job in one of the Thangka shops in the hub. I was photographing there when I heard people whistling at one another. Soon I see that, some men are following me, I intuitively grab my camera, the leather strap is around my neck and I‘m worried if they pulled from it, they would drag me along the street.
In that moment, Saheel walks further and introduces himself. He is nimble-witted, has crow-black hair, and wears the same cloth mask everyone wears in a terribly polluted city. Because of his eyes, I imagine him having a beautiful face. He asks me if there is anything I need. Do you know if there is any open restaurant? I ask. He guides me away from the main streets through narrow alleys, where there is no one. To follow a stranger whose face is half-covered around deserted narrow alleys is way beyond my solo travels protocol. I follow him, but take my hand in my pocket to grab the brass whistle I always take to the mountains in case of an accident as I prefer walking alone. He takes me to a pub where only three local men are and asks me what I want to eat. Whatever you have, I say, understanding it is officially closed and he is asking a friend for a favor to get some money. They both get into the kitchen to discuss, but Saheel comes back disappointed, saying we better find another place.
We talk all the way to there and he takes from his pocket something that resembles a passport to show me the picture of his two-year-old baby inside it. I notice the painted kohl around his eyes, a way to protect children from the evil eye. Saheel tells me he had no job for a month in a country with no welfare and is doing what he can there to survive. I know what he wants; it is something that nobody has asked me since my first trips to Nepal during the last years of a long decade war. Some Nepalis used to ask foreigners to buy them a can of powder baby milk that would last a month in a one-child family and costs $17, the salary of a week in Nepal, most of the time, they go back to the store to return the powder milk and get the money back.
Saheel takes me to another narrow alley where people, mainly Nepalis, are crowded, forming lines on both sides. Two Chinese women in Hazmat suits guide them to a water drum to wash their hands before crossing the stairs to sit on a balcony to eat. We ask one of the women if it is possible to can for the food, but she shakes her head, so tell Saheel that I don’t want to eat there. Before I leave, I turn to take a photo, and an angry man waiting in line turns back to shout me not to do it. I put the camera down, but as soon as he walks back into the line, Saheel tells me, “Take the photo, I’m here.” I hesitate for a second, and this time the man walks violently to Saheel. I shout him it is not worth it and we leave quickly but, I understand better what people in that alley are feeling when the next time I pass by, I find several stranded Chinese tourists taking pictures with their cell phones, one of them is using a selfie stick to film himself explaining why the people go there.
We turn around, and then, I come across a large group of foreigners slowly walking together in the direction to the restaurant. A 6-foot tall man in front seems to lead them. They are about 15 people, all wearing cloth masks and dusty trekking clothes. Since we were in quarantine, I had not seen other foreigners, but I knew there were 10,000 travelers in the country when the lockdown began, and not all could leave. I’m not surprised about their appereance. They look like ghosts and seem defeated; they came to a poor country as privileged tourists and now depend on the country's food relief program.
Further ahead, a man in his sixties approaches Saheel crying, showing him his hand. They speak in Nepali but, Saheel again is protective and tells me to hurry up. He tells me someone has stolen his money and hurt his hand. I ask further, but he shrugs his shoulders, “He is on drugs, you know? Glue.” It seemed the shop owners prevented people in trouble from coming, but Thamel has a different meaning right now.
Eventually, Saheel has the idea to take me to a bakery he knows is open. A little away, there is a Thamel for the locals. In the peripheral, narrow alleys, women squat in the streets, elbow to elbow, to sell vegetables. If what I long for is to eat something warm, they make small hard-dough pizzas they warm up in the oven. It is better than nothing. I buy him the baby food, and at the pharmacies, he calls his brother Nakir by phone, who comes to pick me up with his rickshaw. Saheel registers his phone number on my cell phone and tells me he is always in Thamel, trying to survive, and will help me with anything I need.
On the ride to the hotel, Nakir turns his face back and offers me to buy hashish; it is a typical offering as Kathmandu still evokes in so many ways the mystic hippy trail. I refused politely and guess Saheel knew he would offer it to me. We are going home at the speed of a bicycle on an empty road. I never went so fast. Nothing remains of the chaos that makes South Asian cities what they are. “No cows, uh? No people,” he shouts. The more I laugh, excited, the more encouraged Nakir is to ride faster.
I meet Saheel again a few days later. This time there are even more men controlling the hub, asking me what I was searching for. When I ask for a supermarket, some would lead me a few steps ahead and knock on the steel rolling door for someone inside to open. After coming out, I encounter others, Do you want shawls, trekking boots, a haircut, didi? I can see the feet of some shop owners under unlocked doors, and from time to time, I hear repeated whistles traveling along the streets, sometimes they are warning others that the police is coming or there is a new foreigner searching for something. Rickshaw men also follow the few foreigners that they see, offering, paradoxically, tour guides around deserted places.
Saheel wants me to take photos of what is happening in his country and leads me to the backside of the Annapurna Hotel where about 200 Nepalis people also wait in line to get food. One the way there, I see many children, Saheel gestures to one wearing his mask on his chin to fit it properly. Children don’t feel embarrassed, they walk resolutely with their friends and take it as an adventure, but I also see some thinking they are going to be shot when a policeman measuring their temperature points at them with the handheld device. A blond western woman gives food packages to each one, her hair and surgical gloves are completely covered in sweat. She runs, to and fro, looking spent, and in less than 10 minutes, she shouts, “Finito”. The food is gone; the rest will have to arrive earlier the next day. So, the line dissolves, without reproaches, people turn and go home, business as usual.
5
SEVEN WEEKS HAVE PASSED BY SINCE I ARRIVED. From the rooftop, the Himalayan range can be seen in the distance for the first time in decades. Every day I wake up before dawn at the sound of Asian Koels crazy for one another and leave bananas on the balcony for the silver langur monkeys that invade the garden trails before the gatekeeper arrives. I have stopped recalculating when I might come back. One evening, I’m sitting on a step at one of the porches facing the garden. I’m surrounded by mango trees, weeping willows, and star jasmine. The lights along the garden trails are lit just for me, and above them, there are sculptures of dancing Hindu gods and goddesses. Tiny Mera is playing around and, from time to time, she stops and looks at me, like a child checking if a parent is there. Although I’m used to traveling alone, I had taken for granted a whole safety net to see it disappear overnight. I used the skills I had learned in the Himalaya; self-confidence, alertness, acceptance. Now I listen to that beating voice within me. I look around and finally feel it, the awe that had escaped me in the mountains, and I realize I have been happy all the way into this journey.
Then, an email from the French embassy comes unexpectedly. They urge me to go to the embassy and get a ticket for one last repatriation flight that will take place that Saturday. My first reaction is to erase it without telling anybody, but Spain has already flattened the curve while the worst is coming here. I feel like a Freeskier who has been waiting at the top of the mountain for the right second to jump.
I go to Thamel one last time to say farewell to Saheel. I see the disappointment in his eyes. We can’t shake hands, but instead, he takes his mask down his chin, only then I see the typical discoloration around his nose and mouth, his front teeth gone, but the roots still there; all the signs of someone who has been a glue sniffer; someone I would have never dared to talk to. I'm dazed and hurt. Gasping for air, I whisper, “I don’t want to go,” battling also the tears I had held back for two months; I fear the uncertainty of being trapped in France, I fear getting sick, but most of all, I fear coming back to a country that has changed while I was not there.
“You will be back soon, you'll see,” Saheel says. I nod with a sad smile he can’t see and wish him the best, then, I turn away and leave.
