the boots saga

ok. see these boots?  they're more than boots.  let me tell you a story ...

back in january, tom and i were in palolem.  and man, my bag was heavy, and i was sick of people being like "o, big bag!" every time they saw my bag; it made me feel like a high-maintenance princess even though there wasn't really all that much stuff in there.  i started obsessing about ways to make the bag smaller.  i was a bag-anorexic.  and i don't want to talk smack, but tom's bag was sort of large too.  so gleefully we packed up some extraneous items and sent them to denver, including tom's hiking boots. and there was much patting of backs over cleverness in dropping some weight. 

flash forward to february.  so tom and i parted ways for a bit, me to vipassana and he to coorg.  at honey valley, tom met up with an american lawyer guy, i think named mike, who had been trekking in nepal and loved, loved it.  meanwhile, at the last day of vipassana (the day you're allowed to start talking at like 10:00 a.m.), i started chatting with the lovely spirit marina, who also had been trekking in nepal and (surprise) loved it.  who doesn't love nepal?  so when tom and i meet up again, we go (back, in his case) to honey valley, where we meet the aussies, who also have been trekking in nepal and (do you see a theme here?) loved it.  they said that: the thing about the annapurna circuit is that its what they call a teahouse trek, meaning that basically you can show up almost entirely unprepared for a serious hike and it will still work out for you.  you can buy everything you need in kathmandu (e.g., sleeping bags, parkas); you can store all of your extraneous items like high-heeled shoes and laptop computers in kathmandu; you can hire porters to carry your stuff; you can hire guides to show you where to go and where not to ... and you don't need to carry food or a tent, because teahouses dot the trail, happy to provide beds and snacks of increasing price corresponding to increasing altitude.  all of which sounded great, right, because i deliberately did not pack enough stuff to be prepared for trekking in the himalayas.  so we get all pumped on trekking, go back to mysore and locate a "trekking in the himalayas" lonely planet to plan our trip and spend almost all our free time talking about how to work in the trip to the busy schedule and do-we-do-this-circuit? and when-should-we-fly-to-bangkok? and how-should-we-get-to-kathmandu-from-varanasi?  and then tom's like, "crap" because of course he can't wear new balance in the himalaya and he sent his fully broken-in hiking boots to denver.  hm, hm, what to do, should tom's dad send his boots back to us?  should he buy boots in bangalore/delhi/kathmandu?  should he just wing it in the new balance, super-rough-it? 

we shop in mysore.  hilarious indian-made hiking boots, like the size of bigfoot king of the monster trucks, are tried on and found to be wanting.  tom spends hours online looking for likely sporting-goods shops in southern india and maybe delhi.  finally, one weekend break from yoga, tom takes a train into bangalore and rickshaws around the city in search of some decent boots.  (i go to puttaparthy, more on that later.)  and yes!!!  italian made boots, not cheap but otherwise excellent.

but.  as it turns out, (1) a direct flight from kathmandu to bangkok is prohibitively expensive and (2) a connecting flight through delhi is impossible because (a) there is no such thing as being "checked through" delhi; you've got to go through customs which is in itself horrifying because (i) have you heard about indian lines?  they are everything and more that you've heard and (ii) remember the story about the fateful pill?  yeah, tom really wants to go through indian customs again plus (b) its impossible to come back into indian immigration unless you've been out of the country for at least two months, per the new visa rules in effect as of january 2010, which of course we wouldn't be.  the details of (b) are confirmed by a travel agency, who actually goes so far as to call the government immigration office to make sure.  so nepal is bagged, about two days after tom bought the boots. 

and i'm still bag-anorexic.  so, from mysore, another chunk of stuff is sent back to the states, this time to my mom.  sending stuff internationally from india is sort of a process because you've got to get it wrapped in cardboard and then sewn up in a linen bag and then you have to sign all this stuff attesting that its all kosher, etc and then you have to stand in line at the post office to send it.  literally like an hour after the second batch of stuff is sent tom remembers that he has no reason to keep carrying the italian boots, which incidentally are big enough to make it sort of hard for him to close his bag.  there is anger.

from mysore, we go to madurai, where it is insanely hot.  like crazy hot.  and we're both kind of not feeling so good.  but one day i'm feeling worse and tom lights off for the post office.  two hours later, i call to see if he's ok.  he's still in line.  an hour later he comes back and throws a box into a corner of the room:  after waiting in line #1, tom is told that in face he should be in line #2.  and at the end of line #2, the post office official for no particular reason insisted on talking to the guy who had sewn up the bag. but the dude was nowhere to be found.  and the postal lady was like, "well now i've got to see in it" which of course was impossible because then you'd just have to sew it all up again, right, and get out of line, etc etc. 

a couple days later we got to varkala, home of easily-accessible tourist needs (like postal services), and tom and the boots parted ways.  but it was a fun ride while it lasted.  and that is the story of the boots.