Handshake of Carbon Monoxide, A Gentle Wave Goodbye

 

The New Panda Hotel was a solid place to stay. But the hotel market in Kathmandu is absolutely dense and cut-throat. Hotels offer interesting and diverse incentives to compete. As I wandered the neighborhoods I took note of different options and different areas. Relocating often gives you access to a whole new cultural experience. Yog jumped out at me with high-beams on.  

Yog appears to be a cluster of businesses expertly targeted toward creative travelers. A small fitness center, roof-top restaurant, free yoga classes, a co-working space and an office area specifically for digital nomad types.

I was spending more time meditating and had been doing some basic yoga on the roof at Hotel Panda. Taking a class at what is arguably the birthplace of yoga seemed like a no-brainer. So I switched my hotel to Yog basically for the free Yoga.

Yog looks like it was a dream partnership between a few young and educated Nepali kids who are very good at knowing what modern travelers want, and a fairly large pile of investment cash. The place is unbelievably beautiful. The design energy that went in to each alleyway, each room, each special space, was absolutely impressive. Local kids who didn’t stay at the hotel would come just to shoot their social media pictures there. But… as I learned, perilously, these kids don’t know anything about building safety and they’re making huge mistakes that are going to get someone killed.

I wrote all about this in a published review which I link here if you’re interested, but the short version is my hotel room sprang a gas leak and because I didn’t like the smell and am comfortable with the cold, I opened all the windows and turned the fan on high speed. I’ve never smelled uncombusted LPG before; it smells like rotten cabbage. Where I’m from, uncombusted gas smells like rotten eggs… civilized like. I assumed it was just a sewer gas smell that was particularly bad, but I learned later that it was in-fact a carbon monoxide death waiting to happen.

I woke up with a headache a few times and told the management and they immediately knew it was gas; this had clearly happened before. All the showers are gas fed, and they’re fed by flexible tubing that runs through a hole bored in the windows, so each time the window opens the line stretches and moves. There are no CO detectors and if I hadn’t opened the windows and turned on the fan I certainly could have died, it was a serious leak. The gas problem is a fatality waiting to happen, they know it… and they’re not fixing it.

I gave the team the benefit of the doubt and some room to try and fix the problem, and during that process, I started looking closer at other parts of the building. The rooftop restaurant structure is terrifying and many times more dangerous than the gas issue. It will almost certainly collapse if left as is, and likely under the stress of just a few too many people, having a good time and dancing. A whole lot of young people are going to die if they don’t fix it.

I wrote the US consulate about it, they referred me to the Nepali tourist police, who I also wrote in earnest, with photos; I received no reply. Google wouldn’t publish my review, trip advisor did.

I considered setting up a google alert, but I don’t know that I want to wake up to the news someday that a bunch of European kids died when a rooftop collapsed in Nepal. I don’t know if there’s anything else I can or even should be doing. Working on it dominated a few days of my trip and it’s been on my mind ever since. Despite my professional allegiance to international building codes, I am at my core a pluralist and recognize that different standards are a very normal part of travel and being in different countries. People are going to die at Yog and although I feel like I’ve done what I should do… I am and likely always will be anxious about it.

Just a few weeks later Myanmar would be rocked by an earthquake that would level buildings as far away as Thailand. A much smaller quake would bring the roof-top structure in Nepal tumbling 6 stories down like a house of cards. I contested the silencing of my review with Google… no reply. Yog Hostel currently has a 4.9 rating on Trip Advisor. Terrifying.

….

The yoga class that came with my stay wound up being… basically a stretchy sales pitch. The guy was fine, but not really a teacher, mostly a practitioner with the right look. I wound up taking a class with a real teacher just a few doors away. My teacher there was great, she was the kind of person who is very clearly and comfortably on a spiritual path that asks nothing of you but finds a good part of its energy from giving what others need. She saw exactly who I was and what I needed and helped me shape my practice in a single session.

I left Yog and went back to Hotel Panda for the remainder of my stay. Maybe it was coincidence, or maybe the stress brought it on, but I got very sick for the next 7-8 days. My throat started to close and I had trouble breathing, I hallucinated more than once, I’m sure I was running a fever, but I didn’t have a thermometer.

The worst of the sickness passed but some of it stayed with me straight back into Thailand.   

The people at Hotel Panda were concerned, but there’s relatively little they can do. I’m thankful that it was a safe and reasonable place to be while I recovered, no gas leaks, no collapses.

I’ll use these closing paragraphs about Nepal to share some of the beautiful experiences I had there. Despite how much I’ve written about the difficulties, it’s what I’d like most to remember.

“Auntie” is a phrase of endearment for women of a certain age that doesn’t have anything necessarily to do with blood relations. Pan Puri is a classic and ubiquitous street dish made from hollow puffed balls of crispy grain, cracked open on the top like a hardboiled egg and filled with a protein, served with a side of vinegary, spicy sauce that is scooped up with the Pan Puri and eaten with one gulp. They are flavorful, fun, crunchy, tangy and among my favorite street foods of all time. I stopped at a little pan puri shop and was introduced to the neighborhood “Auntie”. Several school age kids in the shop gushed over how good a person she is and how much she helps and looks out for them. One of the girls was a musician and while we talked about music and drums she pulled the conversation back repeatedly to how beautiful her Auntie was. The girl was busy studying business in college and it seemed like they were helping each other out. The girl was bringing back her school learning, and Auntie was teaching “street” lessons. I returned to Aunties shop a half dozen more times during my stay, always to a warm smile, groups of friendly people and spectacular pan puri. Sometimes you can just see it in people, what the kids said was true. She was an important person here and they were lucky to have her. I took a chance and on my last visit said, “Thank you Auntie, good bye.” And her eyes lit up, very happy to add another little nephew to her vast and always growing family. Her business wasn’t listed in Google, I imagine she’s doing just fine without reviews, but if you’re ever in Thamel, here’s how to find her: Google the New Panda Hotel and start there. Walk to the main road “Kushlechaur Marg” at the end of the alley and turn right. Walk a few hundred yards following the road as it turns to the left and becomes Jogin Pakha Marg. Pass a small alleyway on your left, just after the Everest Boutique Hotel and Spa, Aunties shop will be in a row of small street level shops on the left hand side. She is about 5’2” and always wearing red, she may be having a nap. If it’s after school has let out, there will be kids there. Ask for the pan puri. You won’t regret it.

Another beautiful gem was Mira’s coffee shop owned and operated by Raju and his partner. He had a guitar and some hand percussion sitting out for patrons to play with and I was hit instantly with this deep longing. Despite putting in a lot of effort to trying to find musicians in Nepal to play with I had been completely unsuccessful, no one was interested, messages went unreturned. So coming upon these instruments freely available and intended for public use reminded me of something I had otherwise given up on in Nepal. Raju is a quiet and modest guy, but he has a great voice and a solid talent for rhythm guitar. As he and I played some simple Nepali pop songs together, other traveler musicians stopped in and instruments were traded. The coffee was excellent and the baked goods supplied by a rogue Swedish hermit living in a hotel somewhere in Thamel were remarkable. They are apparently picked up at his door and he is never seen. He lives here because it’s cheap, and he’s nice enough in text messages, but he’s an uncommonly introverted person in a city of exhausting extroverts. He makes spectacular baked goods in a society that is just beginning to value this type of cuisine. An unusual detail, that for some reason committed itself to my memory.

I returned to Raju’s place several times, and like Auntie’s popularity, from all over the neighborhood friends could be seen and heard stopping in and calling his name, “Raju, Raju!” It is clear his success is not the coffee or the banana bread, it’s just him. He is maybe 25, and such an obviously respected member of this community I think if he ran for public office he would win in a landslide, but he just simply doesn’t possess that gene. He is instead the type of person who seems destined to run a successful coffee shop, bringing together people from all over the world and raising the standard of living for his neighborhood, his people, and eventually, his family. Mira’s can be found on Google and if you’re nearby, please say hello on my behalf. 

Finally, New Panda, the place that helped keep me alive while I got sicker and sicker is also worth sharing. Most recently crippled by covid, the hotel market has been handed many tough decisions. Once boasting 20+ workers, the hotel was reduced to a skeleton crew of people with a clear and likely deserved loyalty to the owner. The hotel is the last remaining property of a powerful family that stretches 15 generations. Several buildings having been sold to survive various economic downturns and to make room for the dreams of the owner Santos’s children who are promising football players frequently competing in Japan and other, larger sports markets. His small employee team includes a group of young women who clean the rooms happily and fastidiously. They were genuinely delighted to see me buy a Nepali drum and enjoy playing it on the roof. They brought me room service, smiles and wishes of good health. The young desk manager is a budding social media expert, having brought the struggling hotel from a review benchmark of the low 3’s to an impressive mid 4’s in just two years. He checked in constantly to see what I needed, what would be helpful and if anything could be improved. He slept on the couch in the lobby at night. He was devoted, hungry and helpful without being pushy. The owner’s mother, a small woman with a thoughtful disposition, tended the beautiful gardens on the roof and elsewhere around the hotel. I caught her frequently staring off into the distance of the valley and then returning to her work in a pattern that has likely repeated for years. New Panda was a welcome home during an otherwise difficult stay. I’m glad I found it.

Nepal was a complicated place for me, but not without some beautiful moments and I’m happy I got to experience a piece of it.