It's a frustrating thing...

Working at home becomes rather less productive when there's no juice in the lines, so I attempted journey this morning across town to my office, despite foreknowledge of certain civil unrest. This voyage is harrowing and uncertain at the best of times, Kathmandu traffic being what it is, and takes a hair over half an hour. It becomes noticeably more so when roving protest gangs, ranging in size from a few dozen to a thousand or more, cheerfully obstruct traffic and quite consciously bring the maximum disruption possible to an already disrupted and inconvenient city. Today it took me an hour to give up my foolish ambition to... well, to actually get a proper day's work done, something that hasn't happened for anyone in Kathmandu since the start of this crisis. In that hour, I covered half the distance to the office, and was ultimately defeated by hordes of red-flag-waving militants and their advance guard mounted on several dozen motorbikes, all members of the Young Communist League of Nepal, the youth wing of the Maoist party. I was startled by their strict organization and near-military discipline, apparently a hallmark of the Maoists. Thankfully, none of the other parties' own youth militias appeared, and extensive conflict was forestalled.

They even (I think) invited me into the rally as I (non-belligerently, I hope) took photos from the sidelines. I think, however, that such participation violates both my contract and my ideological leanings, so I pretended the tourist and stood slack-jawed while they pass instead. I'm hearing now that the tear gas has been brought to bear by the police, and that a handful of Young Communists have been hospitalized. I'm comfortably ensconced in the CECI office down the street from my home, well away from the violent proceedings. I do, however, have a handful of photos from this morning's demonstrations, and I'll post them when I get home.

In the meantime, I'm aggravatedly contemplating the fact that it took me an hour to throw up my hands in defeat during my morning commute, and another hour to return to my own neck of the woods. Two hours to travel nowhere.

Kathmandu is a hard town if ever there was one.