Mailing a Package from Kathmandu, Part 1 of 2

September 12, 2007

On my journey through India, I had accumulated so much stuff that by the time I reached Nepal … and saw the mountain ranges that I wished to enter looming above me, I soon realized that this was not going to work out well for me if I didn’t shed some ballast. A lot of ballast. Easier said than done.  I mean … some of these items symbolized many hours, even days of tenacious bargaining. Running the gamut of false emotions including tears and prophecies of my non existent children starving if I paid the asked for price. This, added to utilising all the tricks and devious devices from the world of psy-ops.

What to do?

I consulted other travellers in the lodge I was staying in and a trip to the Nepalese post office in Kathmandu was put on the agenda. In retrospect, the only thing I’ve found comparable was buying a train ticket in India.

Now the first thing I had to do was find an adequate cardboard box. Yeah … in your dreams, kiddo. You have to know people who know people who have access to cardboard boxes. Three quarters of a day later, I went to a rendezvous with an ex-Ghurkha in a shabby backstreet alley and paid for the cardboard with a lot of paper.

Packing was the easiest part. Although limited by the size of the cardboard box, I worked for hours until I found the … the … well … you know those wooden 3-D puzzles. I got more stuff to fit inside the box than the box was big.

Difficult, was the mustering of the trust needed to hand this meticulously packed and sentimentally invaluable package to an Asian postal clerk, considering I had just left a country where they are rumoured to take the unstamped stamps of your mail to resell them if you don’t personally watch them stamp the stamp.
To mail a package in Nepal, you have to start out early in the morning, very early. You want to be in the line up before the doors open.

The doors are unlocked and you have the Calgary stampede in a nutshell, but why should I partake of this calamitous event, I don’t even know where I have to line up inside anyway … but, the flow just sort of spills you into the building. It is in this maelstrom that I do a preliminary recon. I latch onto a backpacker who appears to know what he’s doing and he sets me up in the appropriate line to purchase a stack of papers.

Many different sizes, colours and forms. An artificial hush starts to hover over the perpetual pandemonium, growing, the more people are involved in scribbling long words into tiny rectangular spaces. The western travellers congregate and we help each other figure out the forms and joke about the inane stuff and it takes on a bit of the “Group W” bench part in Arlo Guthrie’s, Alice’s Restaurant, and a good time was had by all and I have my stuff sorted and I get to the man who is the first to test me. He doesn’t understand what I’m saying but that’s okay because he says yes a lot and smiles and helps me plaster the package with coloured semi filled out forms and he suddenly asks me, in impeccable English, if the package is seaworthy.

Seaworthy? What are they gonna do? Float it down a mountain stream and hope it finds me?

My facial expression must have said it all and his smile takes on a new depth. I read the look in his eye, incongruous with the smile and realize that I don’t want to go at this guy from the wrong angle.

He asks “All things wrapped in plastic?” He’s done this before and I sense it better not to lie to him although I understand what is about to happen. I shake my head.

“Sorry,” he says, in a smiling sing-song, but with finality.

I consult other travellers who are in the same predicament and we head out to find plastic bags, which is much easier that finding cardboard boxes. I mean, the law of averages says we have to get a break some times.

I return to the “western” corner of the post office where we all unpack our packages, admire each others trophies, and line the cardboard boxes with plastic. I repack, but somehow the stuff has expanded and now I’ve cut the tape and have none.

Well … what do you know … on the curb, just across the street is a “Tape Wallah.” That’s a guy who sells you tape to re-tape your package for an outrageous fee. Somehow, the systems problems create their own solutions here.

Stay tuned for Mailing a Package from Kathmandu, Part 2 of 2

About the Author: Pendragon suffers the horrible fate of being a 20 year old trapped in a 50 year old body. He likes to write, and has a very active and entertaining non-video presence on LiveVideo.com.