JOURNEY - on Mastering Ukemi Daniel Linden (feel good novels txt) 📖

out of doors during the summer in Florida, but sometimes you get a break. An early afternoon thundershower had dropped the temperature by thirty degrees. After it passed and the rain dried up it had only recovered by half.

I was discussing the upcoming journey with two of my students. They had asked to see pictures of our earlier trek and we got the old photo albums out. My wife had been there first on a trek almost twenty years ago and her pictures are in slides, but she had a few to show as well as the several hundred from our trip together from five years previous.

“This is the town of Jiri.” I said. “This is where the road ends. If you want to go east toward Bhutan, south toward India, or north toward Tibet you need to go from this point on foot.”

“Are the paths well maintained?” asked Ron, a wonderful guitar player and singer.

“That depends on the season.” I said. “During the rainy season, the same as here, the paths are slick wet clay and hard stone. It’s very dangerous and very unappealing to trek.” I found another picture and showed it to him. “Here is a photo of Laurie going straight up. It doesn’t look like much, but look closely at the path. It’s stones buried in clay worn into the hillside. The only direction you can travel once you leave the road is either up or down. We didn’t cross fifty level feet again until we got back.”

“The rainy season is the same as here?” he asked.

“Well, yeah, it is. You know, if you got a globe and put a pen on Orlando, Florida and then gave the globe a spin it would drag that pen right across Mt. Everest. Orlando and Mt. Everest are the same latitude.”

“Really! Wow,” exclaimed Jeremy. “I wouldn’t have guessed that. You think of all that snow and ice, I guess I assumed that it was a lot further north, what with all those people freezing and all. That’s wild.”

“It is all about the altitude. I would imagine that if you could step outside thirty thousand feet straight above us it would be about twenty below zero, right now. I don’t know, but around there, somewhere,” I said. When you are in the low country Nepal is a lot like Florida. There are a lot of the same plants and except for the humidity it even feels much the same. Of course, once you go into the foothills or higher, it quickly changes.

“The paths dry out during the autumn months and then begin to turn to a nasty dust that gets into everything. Because the only level place to stand or squat is on that path, and because yaks and other beasts don’t exercise toilet manners there is a lot of dung that gets worked into the clay during all the wet and rainy months. After this dries out and turns to dust everyone breathes it in all winter and you see people hacking and coughing all the time. They even have a name for it.”

“What’s that?’ Ron asked.

“It’s called yak dung hack.” I said.

They both laughed. I saw Laurie coming across the patio and motioned her to come over. “Honey, what do they call that bad lung infection up in the high country in Nepal?”

“Yak dung hack,” she said. Then she looked at Jeremy and Ron and said, “You don’t want it.” With that she turned around and went on her way. We watched her go and then I picked up another picture.

“This is a field of marigolds about eighty-five hundred feet up. You can see how all the fields are intensely terraced in order to have a level spot to plow and cultivate. Imagine that all that work was done by hand.”

“Why would they grow marigolds if the amount of cultivatable land is so precious?” Jeremy wondered.

“You know, I can’t tell you that. I just don’t know, but I will say that it is very important to the Nepali people to have those flowers around. They seemed to be everywhere. And something else; they stain the hell out of your cotton clothes. When we first arrived in country we were greeted by our sirdar and he gave us all a necklace, you know, like in Hawaii, of marigolds. I thought it was wonderful until I got to our hotel and found golden and red stains on my shirt.”

I started paging through the album looking for something more interesting than a field of flowers when Curtis and Chris walked up and asked if they could sit down and join us. They took a couple of chairs and leaned over to look through the pages with us.

“Sensei, Chris and I have been talking and we would like to ask you something,” said Curtis.

“Go ahead.”

“First, is this trip going to be aikido educational? Are you going to be teaching along the way?”

“I intend to explain everything I know about Ukemi to Christian while we are traveling. Yes, that is my intention.”

He looked pleased and said, “We were wondering if your trip to Nepal is filled.”

I sat back in shock. There was probably nothing they could have said that would have surprised me more. Curtis and Chris have both done a bit of traveling, in fact Curtis spends nearly all his free time in Europe because he met a fine woman at an aikido seminar in Germany and enjoys her company. In fact they have both been to Europe with me several times. Chris travels a great deal for vacations and work, so I guess it shouldn’t have been that big a surprise, but roughing it just isn’t something that I would have guessed that they would have been interested in; not the rough part, the long walk part. But now I had to decide how to answer.

“For you two?” I asked. “Or are