Part I: Introduction

My nose and forehead were cold against the window as I strained my eyes to look straight down under the wing. We were flying through glaring white Monsoon clouds that towered above us even at 37,000 feet. I wanted them to be mountains. I was looking out the window in child-like anticipation hoping a mountain would appear, just a glimpse of snow and rock that might be Dhaulgiri, Annapurna, or even Mt. Everest. Suddenly the plane nosedived and in a few minutes we were landing at Kathmandu.

I was miffed not to have a glimpse of one of the great Himalayan peaks you would see on a clear day flying in to Kathmandu airport. I wanted to see Annapurna the most because I’d dreamed about her since I was seven years old. Annapurna is the eighth highest mountain on Earth and a hundred miles west of Mt. Everest, the highest of them all. A lot of my day dreaming from age seven upwards featured Annapurna and an assortment of heroic ascents (by me). My favorite dream was repreating the heroic climb a French team made in 1950 (and the American women’s expedition in 1978) when they made the famous first ascent in which Maurice Herzog lost his toes to frostbite. The three heroes of that expedition, Louis Lachenal, Gaston Rebuffat, and the Nepali Sherpa Ang Tharkey were my childhood heroes. But I wasn’t in Nepal this time to climb. I was there to help out with a conference that would take place in Naryangharh, a small city in Chitwan Province, 100 miles southeast of Annapurna.

The crowd at the airport entryway where western passengers hesitated before venturing out into the crowds, the heat and the unknown

Sitting in the plane as it taxied towards the terminal I looked out at the rain wet asphalt glistening in the emerging sunlight. Vast puddles on the runway reflected the fleeing dark clouds of a shower that had just swept across the valley. It looked steamy outside. The other passengers began heading for the hatchway as soon as the plane stopped and eventually a long line of them threaded out from the plane towards customs. Watching them I was suddenly hit with an overwhelming homesickness more intense than I had ever experienced. I didn’t want to get off the plane. I desperately wanted the pilot and crew to run back on board, start the engines and take me right back home to my farm and children. I felt vastly empty.

I sat for a while hoping the ache would go away and then looked around the plane’s cabin and saw I was the only person left on board. I twisted out of my seat and followed where the others had gone down the stairs to the ground and across the tarmac to the terminal. I still had that bereft feeling, a loneliness, and I wasn’t exactly sure why I was there or if I wanted to be.

Between the plane and the terminal there were two lines of Nepali soldiers in bright blue uniforms standing crisply at attention facing each other so they created a corridor for the debarking passengers to walk down. The soldiers held M-16 rifles vertically in front of their torsos and looked sharply across at each other the way soldiers are trained to do. I studied their faces as I passed down the aisle between them and caught the eye of one. I smiled and he instantly melted, smiling back at me. He totally lost his composure and clumsily dropped his M-16 which fell with a clatter to the asphalt. I picked it up and handed it back to him. All the other soldiers were smiling and nodding at me. “Hhhmmm,” I thought, “this can’t be such a bad place.”

This was my first glimpse of Kathmandu the far-away city with the exotic name

Twenty minutes later, past customs with my visa in hand, I walked towards the exit. I was going into Kathmandu with a Nepali man by the name of Prakash, who flew on the same plane with me from Germany. Prakash was one of the conference organizers and we were going to meet with several other men who were taking part in the conference. At the glass doors of the terminal’s main entrance I saw my fellow passengers from the plane staring out where a huge throng of people, Asians, waited for us to venture outside. It was the “face ” of Asia, I thought, and perhaps my fellow passengers were imagining the people on the outside were there to ask us for money. I pushed on the door and heard someone shout anxiously, “Alex, are you going out there? Do you know where you’re going?” It was the American woman I sat behind on the plane who was traveling for a few weeks with her young daughter. All the westerners standing there seemed paralyzed with fear at what was on the other side of the door, of what they did not know. I felt some of the same feelings and empathized with them but waved goodbye and turned again to go out into the throngs and in that instant, like a cloud’s shadow passing swiftly across a landscape, I thought, “now I have to forget everything I have ever known, forget everything, and go out there and immerse myself completely in this experience; open myself completely.”

Hundreds of bicyclists and motorbikes filled the streets in the morning rush hour in Kathmandu