Rain and Kathmandu - Sept. 25,2007

Well, back to this blog for awhile. It has been raining, effectively, since I got here in July. Everybody says it is the monsoon this year; but I think some of Global Warming involved as well. For the latest spell of rain, it starts in the night. If it is still raining in the morning, it might rain for most of the day. If the rain stops some time during the night, then it maybe will not rain during the day. There has been no traditional monsoon here this year at all. This is an aberrational monsoon with a lot more rain than was expected. As for myself, I guess rain and water are still following me around. It seems that where I go, some rain goes too. In Florida, it was not fun to have to walk to work and have to avoid the heavy summer rains. Most of the time, it would start raining while I was on the bus to work. Now, that I am a retiree, living here in Kathmandu; I don't care when it rains. So, it has been raining every day since I got here in July. Mind you last year and the 3 years previous, on my visits to Kahtmandu, it did not rain at all. So water is good, yes? Not when it floods like it is doing in the tarai, where both Indians and Nepalese are being affected. The flooded area are extremely dangerous with snakes swimming around everywere.

So, my guests never did arrive; they are still out at Bhoudinath at the NGO. I think they thought I did not have enough cooking things in the kitchen for their tastes, so they decided to stay where they are. I don't think they much like Thamel either, whick is much more hurried than Bhoudinath. I am still here from when I arrived on July 9th, 2007. This is amazing to me that I never seem to get very far from Kathmandu. This is my fourth visit here and I made the
monumental decision to take out a flat and furnish it with my own stuff. I did this so I could feel more grounded than the travel life style of the last four years. Now I don't know what to think of the global backpack train. Is it doing any good? The packers are leaving a lot of money in the various countries; but a lot of cultural dislocation too. Here in Nepal, cultural dislocation is a very serious phenomenon, like Globabl Warming. So Kathmandu gets it on two counts - cultural dislocation and global warming. In the midst of all of this is the Maoist uprising which aims at controlling the "tourist revenue". Nepal now depends on this so I think it would do the Maoist a whole lot of good it they would get with a program of actually building a better Nepal and not all of the very destructive crap they are into now. The papers talk a lot about what is going on in the villages; but not the Maoist leadership at all. They have never paid any kind of restitution to the Gov't or the affected people or villages.

Well, this is it for today. These are my thoughts for the moment.