Let me tell you a little about Nepal

Imagine a cheesy action movie where the jungles that the hero is fighting in have obviously been constructed on a rather small soundstage in Burbank.

And imagine that this particular production has hired a magnificent artist but a horrible art director.

And imagine that, consequently, the painted backdrop of snowy mountains is grossly out of proportion to everything else, that the mountains look as if they hail from a larger planet and are only visiting.

That is what it is like to hike in Nepal, or even to drive in Kathmandu on a clear day. The Himalayas are too big to be real, and yet you can walk on them. I know, I have. These anomolies, unearthly in beauty as well as size, are the backdrop of a nation - a small, proud, troubled nation.

Kathmandu, the capital, has the marks of a big, growing city. It's filled with that frenetic grasping of all the people who have come to make for themselves better lives. They rush around in old cars and on old motorcycles, they call to you from their storefronts, they are today's sellers and tomorrow's consumers.

It's in the leaving of Kathmandu that you meet Nepal, though. Driving west out of the city's namesake valley you crest the hills that surround it and wind down into an older, more scattered world. Houses of clay, mud and thatch peek out at random from amongst the ubiquitous greenery. The river that leads you way is host to women washing clothes and men bathing. For hours of twisting highway you pass almost nothing, and almost everything.

Pokhara is dicotomous town, at once a sleepy tourist nook and a rushing, pulsating commercial center. Mahendra Pul, the central market, is a mass of cars and pedestrians and eerily similar shops, with alleys and malls leading to yet more of the same. But retreating to Lakeside, the tourist district set against the beautfiful Phewa Tal (lake), you'll find rows of single-story shops and quiet guest houses and happy restaurants. If you're lucky you'll find something like the Little Tebetan Guest House, a restful haven of gardens and hot showers at $2/night.

Then there are the villages. Little splatters of humanity seperated by miles of wondrous trail and forest. And the mountains watch as they grow and shrink and migrate and settle. They watch quietly and confidently.

The people of the villages are smilers. They smile at you as you peak in their doors, hoping for tea. They smile as you attempt simple Nepali words, like they would at a child trying to string together his first sentence. They smile as you duck under their low doors and trip on their winding trails. And they smile as you leave, wishing you well and bidding you return.

And the mountains watch, uninterested, or unaffected, just there, bathed in light, moon or sun, never once showing any sign that they know that you see them. Not like the clouds that shy away or the birds that find a higher branch. One get's the feeling that they are either completely oblivious or all knowing. Many have erred on both sides.

Many haved asked what Nepali time is, how distant it is from America by the hands of the clock. I say now that sunrise is Nepali time. When you sit above the clouds, watching the sun climb to the elevation where you found yourself in your sleeping bag, sipping tea that steams clouds from your hands, watching the mountains beam orange, and with your Nepali brothers you smile.