Nick Williams stood on the Kathmandu airport terminal loading dock surrounded by a pile of camping gear for 20 people, large olive barrels filled with food, several white water kayaks, and a flock of bedraggled, frustrated clients. Williams, a normally upbeat Nepal expedition guide for North Carolina’s Nantahala Outdoor Center, was tired and disgusted.
This was the third day that our group of 20 clients and three rafting guides had lugged to the airport the mountain of gear it took to support that many people for days in the rugged mountains and on the rivers of Nepal. Each morning for those three days we loaded our gear onto a bus and rode to the airport in vain attempts to fly to the destination we had originally signed up for over a year before this trip took place.
We were trying to catch a one-hour flight to a town in eastern Nepal southeast of Sagarmatha National Park, which includes Mount Everest within its boundaries. Each day we were refused permission to fly by the Nepali airport personnel because of dangerously high winds at our destination.
Our original goal was to stay only briefly in dirty, smoky, bustling, exotic Kathmandu, long enough only to recover from the halfway-around-the-world flight. We would then fly to eastern Nepal and take a long bus trip to a jumping-off point for an arduous four-day foothills trek in the shadow of the Himalayas, assisted with our gear by native porters and their Sherpa bosses.
At the end of the trail would be the put-in for a five-day raft and kayak trip on the Tamur River, an exciting Class III-V whitewater run southwest of 8586-meter Mount Kanchanjanga which had been closed for many years to adventurous Western river runners by the Nepali government. We would be among the first to sample its many rapids now that the once-sacred river was again open for business from outsiders.
We never made it.
After three days of trying, Williams and his fellow guides finally gave up. They aborted the original plan – despite the fact that raft guides and porters had been waiting for us at the Tamur put-in for days with no news of our whereabouts – and decided to head by bus for nearby rivers instead. Our group – mostly experienced kayakers and mostly Americans but including two Mexicans, an Irishman, and a South African – took the news calmly and without major complaint despite our disappointment at not being able to accomplish our original goal.
On adventure trips, particularly to the Third World, one must be prepared for anything, including, as was the case with us, not getting the trip you paid for. Fortunately, our group was seasoned enough to know that travelers have to be flexible on adventure trips, particularly in the Third World, where unpredictability is a part of the culture, much less the weather. One must live in the moment and make the best of what comes one’s way. It’s a Buddhist thing.
We may have been flexible, but we also had paid dearly for some outdoor action. Our guides knew this and made sure we were kept busy during our three-day downtime in between trips to the airport. Each afternoon, after the airport non-experience, we took vigorous walking tours of various villages in the Kathmandu Valley, hiked and biked around nearby hills, and visited Hindu and Buddhist temples, museums and other historic and religious sites in the Valley – a variety of activities which successfully kept the least flexible of us too busy and amused to get really irritated that the trip wasn’t turning out the way we had planned and paid for it.