Nightly nightmares

Prayer flags in the wind

I'm on the hunt for a book. I bought 'The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lama' whilst in Kathmandu & gave myself a crash course in Tibetan history, philosophy and religion. There was a sense of urgency to learn as much as possible. Stories about China's strict border control and contraband reading list were in equal parts frightening and frustrating. I wanted to be informed about the Tibet/China situation before crossing over. I speedily read and posted it home, hoping for a chance to revisit the book. Particularly now given that I am writing the Tibetan chapter of my book.

This book gave me nightmares.

Tibetan philosophies and history is not all fuzzy hugs, hippie karma and rainbows. Well, rainbows feature fairly frequently in folklore as denoting the birth of reincarnated spirits. Tibetan history is awash with bloodshed, treachery, hostile invasions, political turmoil and poisoning. Reaching thousands of years before the 1949 invasion. Their history is deeply embroiled with scripture describing the plateau's spiritualscape of demons and portals to the many layers of hell.

I would suddenly bolt upright in the middle of the night, gasping for air. A showreel of images dancing in my mind. Spirits with claws and multiple eyes. The stench of rotting flesh. The feeling of feet stomping on my chest and dead men on horseback. I would flick on the light, casting ominous shadows on the damp hotel room walls. I would listen to the gurgle of water trickle through rusty pipes, trying to catch my breathe. The smoggy streets of Tamil silent. Strict nighttime curfews, enforced by stick swinging police, meant only the foolhardy would wander through the labyrinth of lane-ways after 11pm.

This became a nightly routine. Falling back to sleep difficult. My head failing to find a comfortable position on the lumpy concrete sack of a pillow.

In retrospect, there were other reasons why sleep eluded me during my 3weeks in Kathmandu. I drank countless cups of coffee, indulged in sugar infused snacks, hung out in reggae bars drinking cheap vodka, became addicted to Twin Peaks, contorted my body under the tutelage of hardcore yoga junkies, became feverous with the flu - so it was almost no wonder I woke in cold sweats from the most vivid dreams.

Yet the impeding unknown caused my heart to grip in fear. Once we crossed into Tibet anything that could go wrong could be disastrous. The region is twice the size of France and virtually cut off from the world due to geographical and political obstacles. We would be ascending altitude at rates unadvisedly by medical professionals and camping in sub zero temperatures.I doubted I was physically prepared for the challenge (hence the half hearted attempts of yoga. I dread to think how my favourite pose, the corpse pose, would have 'prepared' me).

Road to Everest

Once I was in Tibet I fell in love with the rolling tundras, soaring mountains and searing sunlight.

But I also complained bitterly the whole time! The physical discomfort of extreme temperatures and altitude was & remains like nothing I have ever endured. Unless I don't find this book soon gosh darn it!

Day of Yester

I'm missing ten days in the outback; and fret over a slew of threadbare days from Kathmandu. I only have mere fragments of time from Hungry and Bucharest. Then there are vast tracts of unaccounted days from London. For sections of my travel journal are so bald and patchy it makes John Lithgow look like a spokesperson for ‘The society for ridiculously lush manes of hair’*

I wrote with the upmost regularity whilst on the truck**. Flicking through the pages the legibility is poor, reflecting the state of roads in third world countries, and the content enormously over-wrote. Some entries I thought would only take up a handful of lines, but rambled forth into two or three pages; typically incoherent ramblings, rehashing the most mundane details of the day. Though looking back on it, the ‘mundane’ occurrences are often the most memorable, like - storing toilet paper in every pocket, communal peeing on roadsides around the world, pouring buckets of water into squat toilets (to be clear my whole journal is not solely about bowel motions and toilets), border crossings with stony faced guards armed to the teeth, broken conversations with friendly Iranians, tea with Turkish mayors, meeting local militia, sleeping in a sleeping bag brimming bottles of drinking water in Tibet or cooking on a Yak dung fire.

It wasn’t always a bed of roses on the road. In fact, many beds where literally fields of thistles and faeces. So there were the hissy fits but also absolute hilarity. I tried to include these aspects in my journal as in the words of Oscar Wilde ‘I never travel without my diary. One should gave something sensational to read in the train.’ So I tried to get to the guts of daily life and record sensational snippets of campfire chat as well as the smells, sounds and sights. I tried to recapture the smell of rotting fish, not just airy fairy wisps of happenings.

Now that I’m back in Sydney, I intend to keep journaling. I face the dilemma of lack of discipline and fear of nothing to write – the same issues as on the road. Does anyone else have these issues? I’m putting together a post with tips about how to successful keep a journal.

*‘The society for ridiculously lush manes of hair’ is an entirely fictional entity. Though if you feel compelled to start said institution please do consider me for membership, even just for the novelty factor of having a founding member with a bird’s nest of frizzy locks a la Ron McDonald esque

** I was part of a group who spent six months driving Overland from London to Sydney, camping on roadsides, beaches, abandoned airstrips and quarries