Frugal Traveler: In Europe, a Few Coins for a Wealth of Culture

Lourdes Segade for The New York Times; Djamila Grossman for The New York Times; Jock Fistick for The New York Times

Left to right: outside a small performance space at Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona; Volkesbühne in Berlin; inside the Kaaitheater in Brussels.

I figured I might someday take an amibitious cultural jaunt through Europe, catching a classical concert at La Monnaie in Brussels, a musical off Las Ramblas in Barcelona, and cutting-edge dance performances in Berlin — all from the best seats in the house. I just imagined it would have wait until I retired as the Frugal Traveler columnist and retrained as, say, a plastic surgeon to the stars.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @nytimestravel for tips, features and photography from all over the globe.

Djamila Grossman for The New York Times

Tending bar at the Madame Claude bar and performance space in Berlin.

In this job, experiencing European culture has typically meant going to museums, preferably on days when they are free. For performing arts I've settled for concerts-in-the-park, and waited in line for hours for a heavily discounted, obstructed-view nosebleed seat to Chekhov's "Three Sisters" at the Comédie-Française in Paris.

But it turns out that to gorge on performing arts in Europe, you don't have to book philharmonic tickets months in advance or ask the concierge to procure a last-minute box at the opera. Instead, you seek out the kind of performances that you (or starving artists you know) might see in your own city: alternative arts in settings not necessarily promoted at the tourist information booth and not always listed in your guidebook. In other words: Europe, Off Broadway style. Not only will this approach save you money — lots and lots, in fact — but it will also grant you access to an intimate, often quirky side of cities usually reserved for discerning residents and a smattering of traveling artists hooked into the local scene through friends and colleagues.

In May, I spent three long weekends in three cities — Barcelona, Berlin and Brussels — all of which are popular with tourists and have affordable and thriving arts options. I decided to see as many shows as I could, as long as they were all under 20 euros (a little over $25 at $1.28 to the euro).

My endeavor did require a certain amount of intrepid travel, though not the kind that involves eating ants or crossing rivers on makeshift rafts. Think, instead: combing through foreign-language listings using Google Translate and, inevitably, sitting through a dud performance or two. The payoff, though, was a dazzling and utterly diverse set of shows ranging from the nearly mainstream (but still cheap) to the over-the-top and provocative, all taken in amid crowds of local artists and art lovers — and very few tourists.

Barcelona

Not only is the cultural scene in Barcelona not particularly international, it's often not even Spanish. The city's emphasis on its Catalan heritage and language can make it feel the most insular, but can also be an advantage: those looking for an immersive experience need look no further.

"What Barcelona longs to be is a city of creativity and innovation, especially if you compare it with other cities in Spain," said Francesc Casadesús Calvo, the director of Mercat de les Flors, what a friend in town called "the temple of dance." "Catalans are not afraid of new ideas, and we love the sparks that provoke innovation."

Mercat de les Flors resembles not so much a temple as an airplane hangar inside a cathedral. The cavernous performance space is housed in a beautiful building constructed for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition and later used as a flower market. The show I attended there was a four-part, 16.50-euro performance by IT Dansa, a company of dancers who come to Barcelona from around the world to study, now celebrating its 100th anniversary.

It was my first contemporary dance performance in years, so the notes I took were an exercise in clichés — "raw emotion," "lithe bodies," that sort of thing. But two pieces stood out: "In Memoriam," by the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, which featured mesmerizingly violent movements performed by dancers who appeared connected by string; it put Hollywood fight scenes to shame. And "Whim," by Alex Ekman, a Swede, was a raucous and hilarious ensemble free-for-all set to a soundtrack that ranged from Nina Simone's version of "My Baby Just Cares for Me" to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" — not a musical selection I expected to find in Barcelona. Strangely enough for a dance performance, language was a slight barrier: the program was in Catalan.

The regional pride that pervades the city is perfectly understandable in an area with a fervent independence movement, but it can be a hurdle of sorts for tourists. After seeing a chamber choir performance of Catalan Baroque works at the smallest hall in the grand Palau de la Música Catalana (8 euros), I mentioned to a taxi driver in Spanish that I had enjoyed the concert but was sorry I couldn't understand what the director was telling the audience. "You were in the cradle of Catalan culture," he replied. "If he had spoken Spanish, people would have gotten up and left."

Seth Kugel is the Frugal Traveler columnist for the Times Travel section.

17.36 | 0 komentar | Read More

Explorer: A Rinse and a Roll on a River in Nepal

I will admit that after 25 days of third world travel with my future in-laws, my motives for going off to paddle some difficult white water last year were complex. Yes, I've been a kayaker for a decade, and the Bhote Koshi River, which pours down the Tibetan Himalayas into Nepal — rated Class V during high water, but in winter "a classic Class III," according to one outfitter — appeared to be within my abilities.

Amrit Ale

There are rafting and kayaking trips available on the Bhote Koshi River, which pours down the Himalayas into Nepal.

But I was also a 41-year-old man who had lived alone most of my life, some of those years in wilderness. While the trek in Nepal with my fiancée and her sister and parents had been lovely, when they opted for a couple of days of sightseeing in a national park, I welcomed the idea of peeling off with one of the porters, who was also a river guide. Which is how he and I came to be standing between the river and the road at 8 a.m. one day in February, fog rising off the water, wearing wet suits and helmets and life jackets, flagging down a rickety local bus and hoisting plastic kayaks onto its roof.

A few hours earlier, we had arrived at a riverside restaurant at first light after two hours of winding roads from Katmandu in a shared taxi. We sat in the cold mist and ordered milk chai.

"Mark G, what will we eat?" Saroj asked. In Nepali, you add "gee" after someone's name as a sign of respect.

He wasn't asking for my order as much as my prediction. I said, "Chapatis and eggs?"

Saroj exchanged a volley of Nepalese with the waiter and then announced, "We will eat noodles."

Saroj and I had been hiking together for 19 days. He was from a village but had worked as a river guide for seven years and lived in Katmandu. Many Nepalese men appear to Americans as extremely polite, shy to the point of deferential, quick to smile. Saroj not so much. He wore shoulder-length hair tied in a knot, smoked cigarettes, spoke little and smiled slightly while bemusement flashed in his eyes. He spoke English in blunt declarative lines that could sound surly, all of which is to say he acted like almost every river guide I have ever known. When I had first asked him about guiding on the gentle rivers in India, his eyes lighted up. "Ah, very difficult to make Sikhs wear helmet on turban."

After our noodles we changed into river gear, and I climbed aboard the bus while Saroj rode on the roof minding the boats. We contoured along the steep flank of river canyon terraced for farm plots like a big green wedding cake. In the villages, brick structures clung to the hillside, smoke curling from stove chimneys, and schoolchildren in uniform raced to jump aboard. After half an hour, the driver stopped and ordered everyone off. Saroj lowered the kayaks and climbed down.

"Bandh," he said. It was early 2012, and the latest round of government price hikes on natural gas had sent Nepal into turmoil. Students shut down the highways in what is called a bandh — a cross between a protest rally and a sit-in. Gas lines in Katmandu wrapped around the block, and power outages crippled the city every day for six hours or more. Among the many plots to produce electricity was a proposal to dam the very river we were approaching.

"Now we walk," Saroj said.

We shouldered the heavy boats and trudged, paddles in hand, through the next village, where adults and children regarded us as spacemen. A blacksmith hammered metal in his shop. After a mile Saroj said, "We launch here," and we crossed a delta of cobble and garbage and lifted the boats over boulders to the river. The plan was to warm up on the easy section, then drive farther up the canyon to run the hard stuff in the morning.

The water was low, and the rapids were rocky but not fierce. Waterfalls poured down from the steep jungle off sheer rock walls. Unlike wild places in America, people actually live here: we paddled past stone homes jutting over the banks, and men swimming while carrying a rope across the current to haul felled trees. The rapids were choked with boulders, and Saroj and I snaked between them without so much as an Eskimo roll, which was fine with me: the water was cold and I had no dry-top with rubber gaskets on throat and wrist to keep warm and dry. Saroj lent me his own life jacket, and I ended up wearing a farmer-john wet suit, three layers of fleece and a windbreaker — warm enough as long as you didn't submerge.

17.36 | 0 komentar | Read More

In Transit Blog: F.A.A. May Relax Restrictions on Electronic Devices on Planes

If you're reading this just as the flight attendants are making the "shut down your portable electronic devices" announcement, take heart. Soon you may not have to speed-read your final words before taking off. The F.A.A. is considering loosening its ban on portable electronic devices during takeoff and landing, Nick Bilton and Jad Mouawad report. That's right. You and your fellow passengers may be able to keep on texting and e-mailing and shopping and playing video games until you're above the clouds. A decision is expected in September.

17.36 | 0 komentar | Read More

In Transit Blog: Tapping Artisanal Beers and Booze at Hotel Bars

Hotel restaurants have long poured private label wines. But with the rise of artisan distilling and craft brewing, bespoke selections are now the toast of hotel bars around the world.

In southern Brazil, Ponta dos Ganchos commissions three distinct blends of cachaca, aged two to eight years, from Adega Scherer distiller, available in caipirinhas as well as neat  at the beach resort.

In the United States, the Brown Palace Hotel and Spa in Denver recently teamed with local Wynkoop Brewing Company to create a series of cask beers using ingredients specific to the hotel, including honey produced from rooftop beehives.

The Fairmont Copley Plaza in Boston recently debuted its new Oak Long Bar Blend, a bourbon with notes of vanilla and port from small batch producer Angel's Envy, at its Oak Long Bar + Kitchen.

Perhaps most impressively, 10 years ago, in anticipation of its 25th anniversary this year, the Wauwinet on Nantucket Island bought a proprietary barrel of single-malt whiskey from the island's Triple Eight Distillery; it's now available as the resort's unique 10-year-old Woody 25. Guests can sample it at the Wauwinet bar or order a 750-milliliter bottle through room service for $250.

17.36 | 0 komentar | Read More

Frugal Traveler: In Europe, a Few Coins for a Wealth of Culture

Lourdes Segade for The New York Times; Djamila Grossman for The New York Times; Jock Fistick for The New York Times

Left to right: outside a small performance space at Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona; Volkesbühne in Berlin; inside the Kaaitheater in Brussels.

I figured I might someday take an amibitious cultural jaunt through Europe, catching a classical concert at La Monnaie in Brussels, a musical off Las Ramblas in Barcelona, and cutting-edge dance performances in Berlin — all from the best seats in the house. I just imagined it would have wait until I retired as the Frugal Traveler columnist and retrained as, say, a plastic surgeon to the stars.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @nytimestravel for tips, features and photography from all over the globe.

Djamila Grossman for The New York Times

Tending bar at the Madame Claude bar and performance space in Berlin.

In this job, experiencing European culture has typically meant going to museums, preferably on days when they are free. For performing arts I've settled for concerts-in-the-park, and waited in line for hours for a heavily discounted, obstructed-view nosebleed seat to Chekhov's "Three Sisters" at the Comédie-Française in Paris.

But it turns out that to gorge on performing arts in Europe, you don't have to book philharmonic tickets months in advance or ask the concierge to procure a last-minute box at the opera. Instead, you seek out the kind of performances that you (or starving artists you know) might see in your own city: alternative arts in settings not necessarily promoted at the tourist information booth and not always listed in your guidebook. In other words: Europe, Off Broadway style. Not only will this approach save you money — lots and lots, in fact — but it will also grant you access to an intimate, often quirky side of cities usually reserved for discerning residents and a smattering of traveling artists hooked into the local scene through friends and colleagues.

In May, I spent three long weekends in three cities — Barcelona, Berlin and Brussels — all of which are popular with tourists and have affordable and thriving arts options. I decided to see as many shows as I could, as long as they were all under 20 euros (a little over $25 at $1.28 to the euro).

My endeavor did require a certain amount of intrepid travel, though not the kind that involves eating ants or crossing rivers on makeshift rafts. Think, instead: combing through foreign-language listings using Google Translate and, inevitably, sitting through a dud performance or two. The payoff, though, was a dazzling and utterly diverse set of shows ranging from the nearly mainstream (but still cheap) to the over-the-top and provocative, all taken in amid crowds of local artists and art lovers — and very few tourists.

Barcelona

Not only is the cultural scene in Barcelona not particularly international, it's often not even Spanish. The city's emphasis on its Catalan heritage and language can make it feel the most insular, but can also be an advantage: those looking for an immersive experience need look no further.

"What Barcelona longs to be is a city of creativity and innovation, especially if you compare it with other cities in Spain," said Francesc Casadesús Calvo, the director of Mercat de les Flors, what a friend in town called "the temple of dance." "Catalans are not afraid of new ideas, and we love the sparks that provoke innovation."

Mercat de les Flors resembles not so much a temple as an airplane hangar inside a cathedral. The cavernous performance space is housed in a beautiful building constructed for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition and later used as a flower market. The show I attended there was a four-part, 16.50-euro performance by IT Dansa, a company of dancers who come to Barcelona from around the world to study, now celebrating its 100th anniversary.

It was my first contemporary dance performance in years, so the notes I took were an exercise in clichés — "raw emotion," "lithe bodies," that sort of thing. But two pieces stood out: "In Memoriam," by the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, which featured mesmerizingly violent movements performed by dancers who appeared connected by string; it put Hollywood fight scenes to shame. And "Whim," by Alex Ekman, a Swede, was a raucous and hilarious ensemble free-for-all set to a soundtrack that ranged from Nina Simone's version of "My Baby Just Cares for Me" to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" — not a musical selection I expected to find in Barcelona. Strangely enough for a dance performance, language was a slight barrier: the program was in Catalan.

The regional pride that pervades the city is perfectly understandable in an area with a fervent independence movement, but it can be a hurdle of sorts for tourists. After seeing a chamber choir performance of Catalan Baroque works at the smallest hall in the grand Palau de la Música Catalana (8 euros), I mentioned to a taxi driver in Spanish that I had enjoyed the concert but was sorry I couldn't understand what the director was telling the audience. "You were in the cradle of Catalan culture," he replied. "If he had spoken Spanish, people would have gotten up and left."

Seth Kugel is the Frugal Traveler columnist for the Times Travel section.

17.36 | 0 komentar | Read More

Explorer: A Rinse and a Roll on a River in Nepal

I will admit that after 25 days of third world travel with my future in-laws, my motives for going off to paddle some difficult white water last year were complex. Yes, I've been a kayaker for a decade, and the Bhote Koshi River, which pours down the Tibetan Himalayas into Nepal — rated Class V during high water, but in winter "a classic Class III," according to one outfitter — appeared to be within my abilities.

Amrit Ale

There are rafting and kayaking trips available on the Bhote Koshi River, which pours down the Himalayas into Nepal.

But I was also a 41-year-old man who had lived alone most of my life, some of those years in wilderness. While the trek in Nepal with my fiancée and her sister and parents had been lovely, when they opted for a couple of days of sightseeing in a national park, I welcomed the idea of peeling off with one of the porters, who was also a river guide. Which is how he and I came to be standing between the river and the road at 8 a.m. one day in February, fog rising off the water, wearing wet suits and helmets and life jackets, flagging down a rickety local bus and hoisting plastic kayaks onto its roof.

A few hours earlier, we had arrived at a riverside restaurant at first light after two hours of winding roads from Katmandu in a shared taxi. We sat in the cold mist and ordered milk chai.

"Mark G, what will we eat?" Saroj asked. In Nepali, you add "gee" after someone's name as a sign of respect.

He wasn't asking for my order as much as my prediction. I said, "Chapatis and eggs?"

Saroj exchanged a volley of Nepalese with the waiter and then announced, "We will eat noodles."

Saroj and I had been hiking together for 19 days. He was from a village but had worked as a river guide for seven years and lived in Katmandu. Many Nepalese men appear to Americans as extremely polite, shy to the point of deferential, quick to smile. Saroj not so much. He wore shoulder-length hair tied in a knot, smoked cigarettes, spoke little and smiled slightly while bemusement flashed in his eyes. He spoke English in blunt declarative lines that could sound surly, all of which is to say he acted like almost every river guide I have ever known. When I had first asked him about guiding on the gentle rivers in India, his eyes lighted up. "Ah, very difficult to make Sikhs wear helmet on turban."

After our noodles we changed into river gear, and I climbed aboard the bus while Saroj rode on the roof minding the boats. We contoured along the steep flank of river canyon terraced for farm plots like a big green wedding cake. In the villages, brick structures clung to the hillside, smoke curling from stove chimneys, and schoolchildren in uniform raced to jump aboard. After half an hour, the driver stopped and ordered everyone off. Saroj lowered the kayaks and climbed down.

"Bandh," he said. It was early 2012, and the latest round of government price hikes on natural gas had sent Nepal into turmoil. Students shut down the highways in what is called a bandh — a cross between a protest rally and a sit-in. Gas lines in Katmandu wrapped around the block, and power outages crippled the city every day for six hours or more. Among the many plots to produce electricity was a proposal to dam the very river we were approaching.

"Now we walk," Saroj said.

We shouldered the heavy boats and trudged, paddles in hand, through the next village, where adults and children regarded us as spacemen. A blacksmith hammered metal in his shop. After a mile Saroj said, "We launch here," and we crossed a delta of cobble and garbage and lifted the boats over boulders to the river. The plan was to warm up on the easy section, then drive farther up the canyon to run the hard stuff in the morning.

The water was low, and the rapids were rocky but not fierce. Waterfalls poured down from the steep jungle off sheer rock walls. Unlike wild places in America, people actually live here: we paddled past stone homes jutting over the banks, and men swimming while carrying a rope across the current to haul felled trees. The rapids were choked with boulders, and Saroj and I snaked between them without so much as an Eskimo roll, which was fine with me: the water was cold and I had no dry-top with rubber gaskets on throat and wrist to keep warm and dry. Saroj lent me his own life jacket, and I ended up wearing a farmer-john wet suit, three layers of fleece and a windbreaker — warm enough as long as you didn't submerge.

17.36 | 0 komentar | Read More

In Transit Blog: F.A.A. May Relax Restrictions on Electronic Devices on Planes

If you're reading this just as the flight attendants are making the "shut down your portable electronic devices" announcement, take heart. Soon you may not have to speed-read your final words before taking off. The F.A.A. is considering loosening its ban on portable electronic devices during takeoff and landing, Nick Bilton and Jad Mouawad report. That's right. You and your fellow passengers may be able to keep on texting and e-mailing and shopping and playing video games until you're above the clouds. A decision is expected in September.

17.36 | 0 komentar | Read More

In Transit Blog: Tapping Artisanal Beers and Booze at Hotel Bars

Hotel restaurants have long poured private label wines. But with the rise of artisan distilling and craft brewing, bespoke selections are now the toast of hotel bars around the world.

In southern Brazil, Ponta dos Ganchos commissions three distinct blends of cachaca, aged two to eight years, from Adega Scherer distiller, available in caipirinhas as well as neat  at the beach resort.

In the United States, the Brown Palace Hotel and Spa in Denver recently teamed with local Wynkoop Brewing Company to create a series of cask beers using ingredients specific to the hotel, including honey produced from rooftop beehives.

The Fairmont Copley Plaza in Boston recently debuted its new Oak Long Bar Blend, a bourbon with notes of vanilla and port from small batch producer Angel's Envy, at its Oak Long Bar + Kitchen.

Perhaps most impressively, 10 years ago, in anticipation of its 25th anniversary this year, the Wauwinet on Nantucket Island bought a proprietary barrel of single-malt whiskey from the island's Triple Eight Distillery; it's now available as the resort's unique 10-year-old Woody 25. Guests can sample it at the Wauwinet bar or order a 750-milliliter bottle through room service for $250.

17.36 | 0 komentar | Read More

Frugal Traveler: In Europe, a Few Coins for a Wealth of Culture

Lourdes Segade for The New York Times; Djamila Grossman for The New York Times; Jock Fistick for The New York Times

Left to right: outside a small performance space at Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona; Volkesbühne in Berlin; inside the Kaaitheater in Brussels.

I figured I might someday take an amibitious cultural jaunt through Europe, catching a classical concert at La Monnaie in Brussels, a musical off Las Ramblas in Barcelona, and cutting-edge dance performances in Berlin — all from the best seats in the house. I just imagined it would have wait until I retired as the Frugal Traveler columnist and retrained as, say, a plastic surgeon to the stars.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @nytimestravel for tips, features and photography from all over the globe.

Djamila Grossman for The New York Times

Tending bar at the Madame Claude bar and performance space in Berlin.

In this job, experiencing European culture has typically meant going to museums, preferably on days when they are free. For performing arts I've settled for concerts-in-the-park, and waited in line for hours for a heavily discounted, obstructed-view nosebleed seat to Chekhov's "Three Sisters" at the Comédie-Française in Paris.

But it turns out that to gorge on performing arts in Europe, you don't have to book philharmonic tickets months in advance or ask the concierge to procure a last-minute box at the opera. Instead, you seek out the kind of performances that you (or starving artists you know) might see in your own city: alternative arts in settings not necessarily promoted at the tourist information booth and not always listed in your guidebook. In other words: Europe, Off Broadway style. Not only will this approach save you money — lots and lots, in fact — but it will also grant you access to an intimate, often quirky side of cities usually reserved for discerning residents and a smattering of traveling artists hooked into the local scene through friends and colleagues.

In May, I spent three long weekends in three cities — Barcelona, Berlin and Brussels — all of which are popular with tourists and have affordable and thriving arts options. I decided to see as many shows as I could, as long as they were all under 20 euros (a little over $25 at $1.28 to the euro).

My endeavor did require a certain amount of intrepid travel, though not the kind that involves eating ants or crossing rivers on makeshift rafts. Think, instead: combing through foreign-language listings using Google Translate and, inevitably, sitting through a dud performance or two. The payoff, though, was a dazzling and utterly diverse set of shows ranging from the nearly mainstream (but still cheap) to the over-the-top and provocative, all taken in amid crowds of local artists and art lovers — and very few tourists.

Barcelona

Not only is the cultural scene in Barcelona not particularly international, it's often not even Spanish. The city's emphasis on its Catalan heritage and language can make it feel the most insular, but can also be an advantage: those looking for an immersive experience need look no further.

"What Barcelona longs to be is a city of creativity and innovation, especially if you compare it with other cities in Spain," said Francesc Casadesús Calvo, the director of Mercat de les Flors, what a friend in town called "the temple of dance." "Catalans are not afraid of new ideas, and we love the sparks that provoke innovation."

Mercat de les Flors resembles not so much a temple as an airplane hangar inside a cathedral. The cavernous performance space is housed in a beautiful building constructed for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition and later used as a flower market. The show I attended there was a four-part, 16.50-euro performance by IT Dansa, a company of dancers who come to Barcelona from around the world to study, now celebrating its 100th anniversary.

It was my first contemporary dance performance in years, so the notes I took were an exercise in clichés — "raw emotion," "lithe bodies," that sort of thing. But two pieces stood out: "In Memoriam," by the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, which featured mesmerizingly violent movements performed by dancers who appeared connected by string; it put Hollywood fight scenes to shame. And "Whim," by Alex Ekman, a Swede, was a raucous and hilarious ensemble free-for-all set to a soundtrack that ranged from Nina Simone's version of "My Baby Just Cares for Me" to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" — not a musical selection I expected to find in Barcelona. Strangely enough for a dance performance, language was a slight barrier: the program was in Catalan.

The regional pride that pervades the city is perfectly understandable in an area with a fervent independence movement, but it can be a hurdle of sorts for tourists. After seeing a chamber choir performance of Catalan Baroque works at the smallest hall in the grand Palau de la Música Catalana (8 euros), I mentioned to a taxi driver in Spanish that I had enjoyed the concert but was sorry I couldn't understand what the director was telling the audience. "You were in the cradle of Catalan culture," he replied. "If he had spoken Spanish, people would have gotten up and left."

Seth Kugel is the Frugal Traveler columnist for the Times Travel section.

17.35 | 0 komentar | Read More

Explorer: A Rinse and a Roll on a River in Nepal

I will admit that after 25 days of third world travel with my future in-laws, my motives for going off to paddle some difficult white water last year were complex. Yes, I've been a kayaker for a decade, and the Bhote Koshi River, which pours down the Tibetan Himalayas into Nepal — rated Class V during high water, but in winter "a classic Class III," according to one outfitter — appeared to be within my abilities.

Amrit Ale

There are rafting and kayaking trips available on the Bhote Koshi River, which pours down the Himalayas into Nepal.

But I was also a 41-year-old man who had lived alone most of my life, some of those years in wilderness. While the trek in Nepal with my fiancée and her sister and parents had been lovely, when they opted for a couple of days of sightseeing in a national park, I welcomed the idea of peeling off with one of the porters, who was also a river guide. Which is how he and I came to be standing between the river and the road at 8 a.m. one day in February, fog rising off the water, wearing wet suits and helmets and life jackets, flagging down a rickety local bus and hoisting plastic kayaks onto its roof.

A few hours earlier, we had arrived at a riverside restaurant at first light after two hours of winding roads from Katmandu in a shared taxi. We sat in the cold mist and ordered milk chai.

"Mark G, what will we eat?" Saroj asked. In Nepali, you add "gee" after someone's name as a sign of respect.

He wasn't asking for my order as much as my prediction. I said, "Chapatis and eggs?"

Saroj exchanged a volley of Nepalese with the waiter and then announced, "We will eat noodles."

Saroj and I had been hiking together for 19 days. He was from a village but had worked as a river guide for seven years and lived in Katmandu. Many Nepalese men appear to Americans as extremely polite, shy to the point of deferential, quick to smile. Saroj not so much. He wore shoulder-length hair tied in a knot, smoked cigarettes, spoke little and smiled slightly while bemusement flashed in his eyes. He spoke English in blunt declarative lines that could sound surly, all of which is to say he acted like almost every river guide I have ever known. When I had first asked him about guiding on the gentle rivers in India, his eyes lighted up. "Ah, very difficult to make Sikhs wear helmet on turban."

After our noodles we changed into river gear, and I climbed aboard the bus while Saroj rode on the roof minding the boats. We contoured along the steep flank of river canyon terraced for farm plots like a big green wedding cake. In the villages, brick structures clung to the hillside, smoke curling from stove chimneys, and schoolchildren in uniform raced to jump aboard. After half an hour, the driver stopped and ordered everyone off. Saroj lowered the kayaks and climbed down.

"Bandh," he said. It was early 2012, and the latest round of government price hikes on natural gas had sent Nepal into turmoil. Students shut down the highways in what is called a bandh — a cross between a protest rally and a sit-in. Gas lines in Katmandu wrapped around the block, and power outages crippled the city every day for six hours or more. Among the many plots to produce electricity was a proposal to dam the very river we were approaching.

"Now we walk," Saroj said.

We shouldered the heavy boats and trudged, paddles in hand, through the next village, where adults and children regarded us as spacemen. A blacksmith hammered metal in his shop. After a mile Saroj said, "We launch here," and we crossed a delta of cobble and garbage and lifted the boats over boulders to the river. The plan was to warm up on the easy section, then drive farther up the canyon to run the hard stuff in the morning.

The water was low, and the rapids were rocky but not fierce. Waterfalls poured down from the steep jungle off sheer rock walls. Unlike wild places in America, people actually live here: we paddled past stone homes jutting over the banks, and men swimming while carrying a rope across the current to haul felled trees. The rapids were choked with boulders, and Saroj and I snaked between them without so much as an Eskimo roll, which was fine with me: the water was cold and I had no dry-top with rubber gaskets on throat and wrist to keep warm and dry. Saroj lent me his own life jacket, and I ended up wearing a farmer-john wet suit, three layers of fleece and a windbreaker — warm enough as long as you didn't submerge.

17.35 | 0 komentar | Read More