Tag Archives: travel

Durbar Square

I’m staying in a room in Freak Street that’s little more than a plywood box. I’m not sure there’s much more than corrugated iron between me and the sub-zero December air. In the room next door, a couple of guys with some very pure-looking grass. I spend several hours stoned in the most pleasant way – none of the nausea and toxicity of British hash.

Breakfast standing in the freezing fog in Durbar Square. Not many folk about, and the guy cooking some kind of Asian-style eggy bread on a low charcoal burner is friendly. I breathe in the mist, the cold, and the gorgeous unfamiliarity. I’m just happy.

In a second-hand bookshop, I pick up a copy of Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Travelled.” Happy hours are spent over coffee and in odd corners, just reading, unhurried, un-harassed. Nepal is such a blessed relief after the fractious, pestered journeying through India.

Mike, the guy who’s motorcycled from England, reappears. I last saw him in Jaipur, when three of us rented bikes and saw the Bollywood filming in the fountain gardens.

We celebrate Christmas with water buffalo steak, and begin planning an end-of-season Annapurna trek.

Dungeon (II)

Two yellow-Dayglo-clad policemen approach me rapidly, enquiring, essentially, what on earth I’m doing wandering along the hard shoulder of an M road. Pretty soon, it’s apparent why they’re here themselves – the motorway is in lock-down, two officers having been shot a by a driver who’d then abandoned car and legged it. These guys are remarkably un-phased by me, though – presumably I don’t match the description.

Marooned motorists have congregated in the Little Chef, but at the slip road some are being filtered into a diversion towards York. I take up position and try to thumb a lift. Mostly, they drive sceptically by.

Finally, and visibly reluctantly, a white van halts. It’s a Channel 4 news crew who’s been covering the incident.

“OK, we can take you just as far as the next roundabout, to get you out of here.”

Dungeon (I)

The car is stuffy and the couple’s mood sombre as they beckon me in from the verge. I’m relieved to be underway again, and anything’s better than the smell of chickenfeed from my last lorry lift.

“We lost a son to hitching, you know.” says the man. “The car mounted the verge and hit him.”

The journey continues mostly in silence. I’m really tired now – I’ve been up for 24 hours, travelling from Cambridge, unexpectedly out on my ear after Zelda unceremoniously announced the end. A wild, unwashed hippy, horse and carting from Edinburgh doesn’t fit with her gleaming spires? We share stale coffee from their flask, and finally pull over on the hard shoulder.

“There’s no real junction here, but if you walk up to the flyover you can join the main road to York.”

I scramble up the road siding and emerge onto a deserted stretch of dual carriageway. It’s non-obvious where to head, but perhaps there’s a fork near the distant Little Chef?

Land of the Picts

There’s a woolly mammoth outside the window
I’d take a picture, but I’m on the phone to you.
It seems a shame, but
Maybe next time I take this train
She’ll still be there under the street lamp.

The August snow is lying thick now
Plenty of work for the gritters and the ploughs.
I hope the drifting
Won’t stop me driving back home
Where the compost festers by the window.

Far in the frozen North
In my empty hall of stone
The summer snow is falling
Sad penguins are calling
We should rebuild Hadrian’s wall
And never cross it at all.