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Floundering in Kathmandu
In Kathmandu I floundered, suffering from a lack of
motivation that I hadn't known since Bangkok, and yet again the reason was the
same: I was getting bored and wanted to get into India. My days centred round
battling with the Nepalese email system, wandering aimlessly through various
shady suburbs of the city, and killing time in numerous cafés with numerous
novels. But I wasn't miserable: I was far too apathetic for that.
It's always interesting, this drifter's equivalent of the
dole; because the whole nature of travelling requires self-motivation, it falls
down around your head when you lose interest. I found myself wandering through
the city, not even turning my head to look at the strange sights, because to me
the strange sights no longer felt strange. The dead goat rotting in the gutter
was mere street clutter; the half-crazed saffron-clad madman, clutching his
trident and dancing in public was, well, just another sadhu; the near misses of
rickshaws were familiar pedestrian obstacles; the rampant colour of a Ganesh
temple was simply another aspect of another building; the stench of rotting
rubbish was just part of the atmosphere; the hassle of the touts was but a fact
of life: nothing surprises when apathy strikes. I do, however, have three main
remedies for the apathy blues, discovered after long periods of aimlessness in
Asia.
Apathy Remedy Number One is to crash out in a pleasant spot
with a good book, good food and good company: this is a favourite solution in
India, where it's not so much used as a treatment for apathy, more as a
treatment for exhaustion. However in Kathmandu it didn't apply, because I'd
spent my entire Pokharan sojourn crashing out, reading and eating, and I'd got
pretty bored pretty quickly.
Apathy Remedy Number Two is to climb a nearby mountain, a
remedy that proved especially successful in Australia; but having spent three
weeks climbing bloody mountains, the last thing I needed was more uphill
struggling.
Apathy Remedy Number Three is simply to get back on the
road, where the challenges and surprises of travelling soon make apathy
unwelcome and impractical. But I didn't want to leave Kathmandu until I'd
either sent my email or come up against a definite brick wall, so for the time
being I was stuck where I was.
No more remedies came to mind, so I wallowed in my
indifference, biding my time for the return to India. There are far worse
places to be bored, after all.
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