Tuesday, May 8, 2007

The rains have started.

Beating down on the roof all night last night. Even drowning out the noise of the staff room television. The press corp is returning piecemeal from the brou-haha in Pohkara. Bedraggled and hollow eyed from four days of putting on frilly underwear and dancing around a giant phallus. And downtown the YCL is burning tires to protest the situation, putting a foul smelling pall over Thamel.

Lauer took a pass on this sodden, sodding, town and who can blame him? Nothing here but the crossbred weed that grows alongside of the golf course and inbred Arkansas welfare cheats with dreadlocks to their tie-dyed shoulders and the sour waft of enlightenment trailing them up Freak Street. Orange splashes pegged into the middle of their single eyebrows by the wandering paintpot-beggars of Patan.

The laundry is accumulating in drifts along the Vajra’s faux-marble corridors and the wait staff have walked out of the kitchen because of rumors that the royalist cook was putting saltpeter in the staff meals. We have to fetch our food now from the line, which has improved the service immeasurably.

Sunday, May 6, 2007

The storm clouds are hanging

low and black over Kathmandu. The Moaists are on the march. Steadily infiltrating hotel, restaurant and bar staff, organizing unions under the YCL umbrella.

Here at the Vajra the situation is tense. A standoff has developed over the issue of laundry and flight confirmation, with staff withholding favors in hopes that the waning tourist season, and the demonstrations expected early in the monsoon season, will give them more leverage. The kites wheel in the late afternoon over the gold-domed temples of Swyambu, looking forward hopefully to the fulfillment of rumors that the Moaists will bring a return of the sky burials in which this savage Gurka race once indulged. And the press corp hunker unhappy over Everest beer that is never cold enough looking forward to the luminous day that Matt Lauer and his team fly in some decent weed on the NBC tab.

Meanwhile I am working voodoo spells on Rutra-put Vaj, the round faced smiling bastard down in the laundry. A heavy mojo that will see his spleen pounded into sweetbread by Drukpa Kunley.

Updates as the situation warrants

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Thanks to our sponsors

at the Daily Gleaner , p-Mate and the HONK Campaign, we have been able to secure occasional reporting on the developing situation in Asia from NoP reader Sanders Brownstone. Mr. Brownstone, previously a West-Coast-based commodities broker and now working full-time as a Minister in the Church of the Southern Unification, is ABD on his Asian-studies PhD at the Mellon University of the Pacific Rim.

We look forward to Mr. Brownstone’s insights.