Kat Out of the Bag Chapter Twelve By Steve Rudd

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Dinner-time came and went, and on us four hardy men trekked. I hadn't been feeling too well for the past couple of days, so I hadn't been eating all that much. The reason I was probably feeling so down and out was no doubt due to the lack of food that I'd consumed, so it was bit of a Catch-22 situation all round. Never mind, because what I really craved was drink. Not just a dirty glass of water but a beer... an ice-cold bottle of Tuborg all to myself.

Even if I really fancied water, the rigmarole that you have to go through to ensure that it's going to be safe enough to drink by boiling the stuff is a time-wasting turn-off when you need liquid refreshment now - like there's no tomorrow. Sweat broke on my chiselled forehead, and my ears detected the raging river down at the foot of the sheer-drop ravine to our right while my shaded eyes subconsciously confided in my best interests that events were about to take a turn not necessarily for the better, but for the bizarre at the very least.

Before I even knew what I was doing, my feet were on a break and I was hunched over, hands-on-hips, squinting at an energetic twenty-something guy scrambling down the scree-scraped slope in front of us, making tracks in our direction with a deadly vengeance.

From a mile away you could tell that he was a Westerner, full of tall travel tales about how he'd indulged in a Russian Roulette-esque threesome with a couple of alluring cross-dressing blokes back in Kathmandu, had cordially ingested enough hash there to kill an elephant, AND how he was now both dazed and confused up in these innocently menacing mountains with barely a penny to his common-as-muck name.

Hey - I'm Dave! How you doing? Wow - I've been chilling out round these parts for, what, four days now... and you're the first English person I've seen in all that time. Hey, you are English, right? You sure look English, what with your chic T-shirt and shorts set-up and that ready right hand of yours that I guess you'd like me to shake in order to fully make my acquaintance. Hell! Put me out of my misery, man.

If only I could have, I would have. You got me; I'm English through and through, born and bred. And, as you can probably tell by my infuriatingly broad accent, I'm from Yorkshire. True to form, the well-mannered Englishman within perpetually prevents me from being anything other than polite upon meeting somebody for the first time: wherever they might be from, whoever they are - and whatever they might have done. As predicted, Dave proceeded to spew forth a whole bunch of eyebrow-arching anecdotes and silly stories concerning his travelling experiences so far out East.

He'd headed into Nepal for a little light trekking after having toured much of the Indian subcontinent. He'd lost his head in Goa, lost his will to live in Delhi, and here in the rugged heart of the Himalayas he had evidently lost his patience with the poor Nepalese man who had the trying job of guiding Dave through the Langtang valley. Dave confessed that he'd considered going-it-alone without a guide. The trekking routes are, for the most part, extremely clear; only in extreme circumstances do people really get lost in the mountains.

Continued..... Next Page

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