Don't drink the water, but feel free to use the WiFi

I rearranged my room today. I remembered someone once related to me this idea about "The Potential Energy of Stuff", the crux of her idea was that cleaning your room, decorating, fixing or otherwise rearranging your living space infuses it with potential energy and in turn makes you feel more energised. I normally hate bastardised physics and other pseudo-science, but I like this analogy, indeed you do get a good feeling and an energy boost from fixing, cleaning, even moving your bed to a different spot in your room. It is something I don't do often enough, as any of my housemates will attest.

I'm sleeping in the loungeroom at the office at Kathmandu. Much more like a house than an office, perhaps 5 other volunteers are staying here, we get fed Dhal Baat twice a day except for Sundays. In a week or so I will move to Godawari, out in the hills. I can't wait. That last entry, typed in an airport, started off quite broad, but became more and more direct as my batteries ran down to nothing. Where was I up to?

Yes, volcanic ash cloud. I was at the airport, and saw all of the virgin blue flights were getting canceled all over the place. I went to the information counter, and the smartly-dressed lady pre-empted my request with a look that said "Hey, you think you've got problems?". She told me that she couldn't help me, I had to contact the other airline, or the travel agent. My housemate, being the solid-gold diamond that he is, had telepathically sensed that something had gone wrong, and taken a wrong turn on the highway, so that by the time I called him, he was only 5 minutes away. He dutifully waited for me while I plied and pleaded with the travel agent. After a while, the travel agent sent me home, telling me that the best thing I could do was contact China Southern airline in the morning.

So I came back home, promising my housemates that I was back for the night, but would be gone again before long. The next night I still had no idea how long I would be stuck in Brisbane. My housemates being champions of the highest order, bought me dinner at their friend's going away thing, at the Nepalese restaurant in Paddington. The Everest soup that night was bittersweet.

I became a ghost in Brisbane for two days. I was just starting to really worry that I might be stuck there for weeks, with no job and no room, dwindling away my last bit of money, and then the Good Agent called back. In my endless phone calls, I dealt with 4 travel agents, and in the middle was one who promised she could help, who had all kinds of ideas, who right there on the phone held seats on the parts of my flight she could get then, so confident was she that she could get the rest sorted. This resourcefulness, and her good phone voice, and that she genuinely gave a damn about what I was doing in Nepal, why I needed to get there so urgently, this made her stand out from the other three agents. And I began to fall helplessly in love with her. At my housemate's friend's dinner I was relating my story to another travel agent, and he told me that she was in fact the top travel agent in Brisbane, or Australia, or something. And, after two days of being a ghost in Brisbane, she called back and told me that there was a flight for me if I could get to the airport in the next few hours. Done, gone, whoosh

The only problem with the flight was that I had to spend the night in Sydney. Now I don't have a problem with Sydney any more. I discarded my innate Melbourne-based hatred of Sydney a while ago, it's just the cost of the place. As things stood, I had $100, just enough money to get my tourist visa at Nepal airport. There was transport from and back to the airport, $30 right there. All of my requests to friends for somewhere to stay were either declined or ignored. So I went to Surry Hills, for my friend there never answered his phone anyway, and he would no doubt have somewhere for me to sleep. Just to complicate matters, he was an alcoholic party animal. I arrived at his house, and he was on top form, drinking with several of his friends and fixing to go to a gig. He has a deep cavernous voice that is completely at odds with his pale, youthful face, and people find him intoxicating for his warmth, his honesty, and his deep melancholy. Every time I see him I forget to stop asking him how he is, so I do, and the answer is always depressing. Yet I feel hopeful for him, for some reason.

I wrote off my last bit of money, effortlessly gave it up for the love of the experience, and just prayed that some of the money that I was owed or otherwise promised would come through before I arrived in Kathmandu. We arrived at the bar, FBI something. There were some great bands I'd never heard of, Halal Hawaii and Tropical Punch. The floor was slippery and covered in broken glass, but no-one seemed to mind as they moshed away. When in Rome, I thought, and threw myself into that mass of flailing limbs. It was one of those mosh pits where there is something really loving in amongst all of that pushing and shoving. I saw a girl get elbowed in the face, and holding a tissue to her bleeding nose, jumped right back in there. This, I thought, is something that I'm not likely to experience for the next few months. Two hours sleep, give or take, and I woke up next to that same girl who had been elbowed in the face but kept dancing anyway. Bidding her goodbye, I made my way to the airport.

For the next 20 hours or so, airports and aeroplanes intermingled, altitudes and countries were blurred by the wash of flourescent light. Sydney Guangzhou Kathmandu movies flavourless food name passport number stamp wait in line sit down stand up, hey presto. During that time, one of my little ships had come in, O relief, and I could afford the three-month visa, the passport photo, the taxi from the airport, and still enough of a buffer zone, for here in the 14th poorest country in the world, your dollars go a long way. This house is quite Westernised, and staying in this loungeroom, I could believe that I'm still in Australia. That is, if it weren't for the noise of dogs, street vendors, temple bells and car horns. The city comes to life at about 6 in the morning as the sun rises, and settles down again as it sets. Within this of course, people follow many other rhythms. The gregarious South African man who I share this room with got home at 4:30 in the morning. He and I were equally relieved that the other did not find this to be improper behaviour.