Returning to a Five Star Hotel after a long day sightseeing is a wonderful relief: Climate control, a clean room, food you recognise and someone who can understand you when you ask for Scotch and Soda. Having a hot shower and then crawling between crisp, white sheets artistically thrown across a sumptuous bed that sits in a room you can play a small soccer game in is about as good as it get in my world.
At the end of your 4 or 5 day stay, a nice smiley person presents you with the bill. And while you stand there, mouth open, thinking, “It didn’t seem that expensive when I booked in…” the nice person tells you how wonderful and pleasurable it was to have such a fine upstanding person like you staying at their property and they, with all their might, hope that you will return one day and bestow on them the pleasure of your superior company.
Five days ago I feel ill with a sever case of amoebic dysentery. I’ll spare you the gory details but suffice to say that I decided to move from my small and quite lovely guesthouse to a five star western hotel and call a doctor. I ended up on two lots of antibiotics and oral rehydration salts daily. Hey, nothing special, right? Many, many people get dysentery in Asia, I know that! But I hadn’t planned on it. Oh! I was prepared with meds and I’m still not sure why they didn’t work, but they didn’t and for the past few days I’ve been recovering in luxury. Sometimes western capitalism has its uses. First rate allopathic drugs — a pill for every ill. And a predisposition for sanitary environments, just to name two.
I’ll be home tomorrow. Happy that I have had a wonderful and interesting and often times joyous and loving experience. The people, the places and the dysentery all combining to make good fodder. Not simply for dinner conversations but, like the experiences people talk about when they climb a mountain, I have learnt stuff about myself that I don’t think I would have learnt so easily any other way.
And, as the plane pulled up from the runway and I watched Kathmandu fade below and the humongous white capped mountains of the Himalayas grow large — I had this epiphany that the next time I return to Nepal it will probably be to climb Everest! Which means I probably won’t be returning to Nepal in a hurry (grin).