Outside.

You may have gleaned that Kathmandu’s hardly a paradise. Hell, let’s add a little more hyperbole: Kathmandu is surely the most unlivable city I’ve ever seen. From the sidewalk-spanning pools of garbage and the raw sewage stink of the holy Bagmati to the suffocating dust-fog and the absurd, broken Nash Equilibrium of the local traffic, this place is nearly as hideously dysfunctional as developing-world metropolises get. The great tragedy is that this lunacy makes it easy to forget that this, one of the world’s worst cities, is located in one of the world’s most beautiful countries. I’m discovering that it’s painfully essential to leave Kathmandu frequently (once a month, ideally) to avoid gruesome burnout and remind myself of the incredible offerings of Nepal’s vast outdoors.

My two-day rafting trip the weekend before last is a harrowing and entirely worthwhile case in point. Waking at the uncomfortable hour of 5 AM, I trudged from (comparatively) ritzy Baluwater to the narrow, nerve-jangling tourist ghetto of Thamel, to meet my erstwhile raftmates (including a half-dozen Vancouver Islanders!). None were in tip-top shape, the innocent victims of liquid overindulgence two nights before (!) and a far-too-early morning. For my part, I hadn’t had an instant of sleep the prior night, kept conscious first by my appetite for episodes of Deadwood, then by rare insomnia, and then by the glorious news that I’d passed my foreign service exam.

We all dozed fitfully through a blessedly uneventful bus ride, three hours north of Kathmandu to the district of Sindhupalchowk, on the Tibetan border, parking on a gravel plain on the banks of the Bhote Khosi river, and tested the dark, swift, shallow waters while our hosts prepared an inoffensive lunch and briefed us on river safety. The river was as cold as you’d expect of water that quite literally melted yesterday; every abrupt dunk provoked spasms of gasping and the familiar, unhelpful urge to go fetal to preserve body heat. That passed, thankfully, and by the afternoon of the first day many of us were cheerfully hurling ourselves into the water in the rare calm stretches between white-knuckle rapids.

It’s a good thing too, for once we got on the water every one of us spent some involuntary time in it each day. The Bhote Koshi hosts genuine rapids (often Class 4 on the 1-5 scale) that took obvious delight in hurling us from our rafts. Rounded rocks taller than I am dotted the river in most places and many more concealed themselves under small swells of water.

I’m a reasonably experienced rafter, as BC has some mighty rapids, but the Bhote Koshi was definitely an exercise in intensity, with surprisingly few calm and quiet spots. Those few serene places often sported riverbanks half-crowded with happy children waving at us; and more than a few cheerfully swimming alongside our immense rafts. I think it amused them enormously, the sight of foreigners swaddled in protective equipment while the children themselves swam unconcerned through some unsettlingly quick water.

Even those kids had the good sense to stay clear of the meaner rapids, one of which provided us with a moment of collective terror that rivals just about any of my more foolhardy moments. Entering a particularly sharp rapid early on the Saturday afternoon, the second-to-last of six rafts in our tour, our far-too-quiet guide shouted commands that we six rafters failed to hear over the water’s roar. We struck a vast rock, inadvertently wedging ourselves ourselves high onto it, while the water continued to pound at the lower edge of the raft. Hydraulics worked their magic, and the boat abruptly flipped, a moment after we all realized we had no power to prevent it. Rafters and guide, we all pitched into the cold water.

It’s quite a thing, to be utterly at the mercy of the elements – I don’t think I’ve ever been so aware of my own useless inertia. Instantly separated from my compatriots, I found myself flying downriver with absolutely terrifying speed, bobbing, gasping. Instantly my lifejacket seemed a useless thing, a frustrating, waterlogged, purposeless anchor – I was momentarily furious at it for failing to keep my head above water. In retrospect, I suppose that my quarrel was with the fuzzy boundary between water and froth in a river that angry; lifejacket or no, you’ll never float above the foam, and I’m now sure that the lifejacket kept me much closer to the surface, where I could enjoy the occasional furtive breath. South Asian river water is as healthful a beverage as turpentine (it’s clear and looks clean but surely hosts a swarm of novel ailments), but in between involuntary bobs it was impossible not to half-fill my mouth with the stuff as I grabbed at sparse lungfuls of air. Each time I reached the surface, I could only clear my airways by half-sputtering, half-swallowing, and I’ve no doubt I welcomed a healthy dose of giardia (for which I’ve since pre-emptively self-medicated) into my body along with a pint or two of river water. I remembered after a moment to point my feet downriver and lie on my back (the finest advice I’ve ever received), and a great back monolith that then seemed fifty feet tall rushed up to smack my soles. For the most part, the river guided me around the more savage rocks and my bent legs cushioned the unavoidable impacts.

Eventually, I found myself in reach of a rescue kayak, which I assume came to me, since I was probably too concerned with breathing to reach it under my own power. I wrapped my legs around the bow until it reached a nearer raft. I was hauled from the water, substantially bruised and mildly bloodied, but ultimately no worse for the experience. I was not especially coherent at the time, I’m told, but did manage to ascertain that everyone else in our raft had been similarly plucked from the water, and the raft had then righted itself without supervision. Our paddles were snatched and returned by other rafters downstream, and someone even managed, miraculously, to find my missing sandals. My sunglasses, however, are gone forever. We were repatriated to our raft, lectured unduly by our guide, and resumed our journey. Some were more shaken than others; we eventually redistributed the less experienced rafters to other rafts where they felt more comfortable; our harrowing flip was not repeated. At least, not by us – a couple of other boats had similarly life-affirming experiences.

That experienced, however startling, reinforced the terrific importance of getting some occasional contact with nature at its unyielding best. Kathmandu challenges the soul but rarely the body; you can flirt with death in rush-hour traffic (which I typically avoid) but there’s no exhilaration to be found. Out in the Bhote Koshi it was possible to remember, often forgotten in Kathmandu, that there are places where I can exert myself without a particulate filter on my face, where a deep breath is a pleasure rather than poison, and where every small joy needn’t be fought for tooth and nail against the aggravations of the city.

This is still Nepal. Ugly pinwheels of flotsam and thick black bubbles often whirl in the eddies behind riverside rocks, and behind every village and home on the bank a small, stinking landslide of junk flows down to the water’s edge. Very few people here give a second thought to tossing garbage down the nearest hill or into the river behind their homes, and so mounds of torn plastic and wadded paper blight many views that should be pristine. Sewage processing is inadequate in the big cities and simply non-existent everywhere else; even along the lovely Bhote Koshi, the houses perched fifty feet up the cliffside often simply discharge their drains from overhanging pipes directly into the river.

But the Bhote Koshi is beautiful far more often than not, black rocks and deep gorges presenting an illusion of isolation impossible to find in Kathmandu. Many of our crew swore off rafting permanently after we capsized; I was ambivalent, myself, but in the two weeks since I’ve felt a powerful need to get back on the water or do something comparably exhilarating in clean air. Two days out of the city recharged me enough for the past two weeks of hard work; I think I’ll need to make a regular ritual of it. Surviving Kathmandu demands no less.

P.S. Pictures will follow – my camera stayed at home, but Craig and Kristen have a waterproof point-and-shoot that likely captured some candids of me in the throes of mild terror.