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Chapter Five

“There is a Bazaar where everyone seems to be buying and selling things from all over the world, and you meet all kinds of people. It is as noisy as hell and very dirty but a very nice and interesting place in a lovely valley.”

A CHINESE TRAVELER, 700 AD

ASIA, 1972

After the unrelenting difficulty of travel across India, part of which included the specter of war, Kathmandu exuded a feeling of welcome. Our friends, Bill and Patty and Ted and Cathy, were already there as previously agreed. We checked into the Snow Lion Hotel, famous for being the headquarters of Sir Edmund Hillary at the time he undertook his first successful ascent of Mt. Everest with the Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. Other hotels had their own history and attributes. The black market money exchange was in the Panorama. Hash and ganja came by room service at the Inn Eden.

I began searching for horses to provide local transport and we moved into a house known as the Double Dorje in Bodha. Horseback riding offered not only a pleasurable means to take in the remarkable scenery; it also served well during our forays to and from the commercial center.

Bodha is one of the more isolated corners of the Kathmandu Valley where Bill, Patty, Ted and Cathy had taken up residence. It was about eight miles from the city center of Kathmandu. Bodha is home to a giant stupa built at the time of the Buddha’s death and one of the eight most revered spots in the Buddhist world.

The giant eyes on top of the great stupa structure lend a certain beneficence to the surrounding area. Shops selling chai and chaat, prayer flags, singing bowls and cymbals encircled the stupa. Pilgrims to the holy site ritually circumambulated the shrine.

Life was very simple and very primitive. It was necessary to take appropriate precautions to stay healthy. Going to market, carefully shopping and cooking, boiling water, and house keeping were necessary activities and yet there was still plenty of time for enjoying meals with friends and exploring the exotic culture. The whole valley ran out of food about eight at night and provisions would not be available until the trucks arrived with produce the next morning.

Bill and I purchased Russian-made motorcycles. There was practically no traffic, dirt roads were the norm and I cannot remember even one traffic light.

One day, the Hog Farm bus, with Wavy Gravy as its admiral, limped into Kathmandu, infusing the scene with a whiz-bang but weary energy. The grueling trip up the steep mountain road was not achieved without difficulty. Nepalese bus drivers enjoy pointing out to the Western tourists the unreachable remains of all types of vehicles that didn’t make it across, including other buses with less astute drivers. Unfortunately, Wavy and his wife, Billy Jean, would soon have to leave for a U.S. hospital due to Wavy’s bad back. One of the Hog Farmers was Dr. Larry Brilliant – a genuine M.D. and counter-culture hero, and he insisted Wavy go home.

Soon after the Hog Farmers arrived, a Mercedes-Benz van, driven by a guy known as German Ted, pulled into the stupa area. He and his wife, Tory, had with them the first Afghan mastiff dog that I had ever seen, an incredibly fantastic specimen of the canine world. I approached Ted and found out that he had acquired the dog in Afghanistan where the breed was rare and had, for centuries, been guard dogs for the caravans. I determined then that I would, someday, have one of those proud, majestic beasts.

It was at this time in Kathmandu that we all became aware of the plight of the Tibetans. Thousands of Tibetan refugees were fleeing to Nepal from the Communist Chinese takeover of their country. They were living in mud and squalor in tents all across the Kathmandu Valley. They nevertheless seemed to us to be very bright, happy, energetic people, exuding sheer goodwill, despite their hardship. They drew all of us into their lives and we found ourselves wanting to help them.

But first, I began a quest to find some hash to potentially smuggle to Amsterdam. Since it was legal, I had very few problems obtaining it; but the Nepalese were quite adept at controlling its leaving their country. Nonetheless, in my explorations, I established some valuable connections with customs officials and other government appointees who would prove beneficial in the future in other ways that had nothing to do with hashish smuggling.

Our home, the Double Dorge, was a sprawling 150-year-old structure that, like all houses in the valley, had ceilings that were less than six feet tall. Hog Farm bus rider, Milan Melvin, shared half the house with us. Milan had a long, checkered history on the scene. He was one of the first underground disc jockeys to play rock and roll music on FM radio in San Francisco in the late ’60s. One night, on the air, he made the startling announcement that he had been an FBI informant infiltrating anti-war activists. After a personal 180, Melvin married the sister of Joan Baez – Mimi Farina. While the marriage was short-lived, it did give Milan an odd credence that weighed against his former informant career.

Our next-door neighbor was an attractive Canadian woman dubbed “Buddy Lynn” for her easy manner with males. She introduced me to General Wangdoo. The General was one of the heads of the Khampa resistance – guerillas who were fighting on behalf of Tibet and funded by the CIA. They were located in the Mustang Province at the outermost reaches of the Nepalese/Tibet border. I spent afternoons at Buddy Lynn’s Bodha house, fascinated and intrigued by Wangdoo’s tales of life and the battles that he had fought, which were less militarily significant and more a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communists. His story began with the CIA “recruiting” eight teenage Tibetan boys to train them for high altitude mountain work. In 1959, the freshly trained teens were parachuted back into Tibet with radios strapped on their backs for the purpose of starting the first resistance cells. According to General Wangdoo, he was the only one of the eight who actually survived that first drop. Also, it became apparent in his tales that he was a CIA favorite because he grasped that they desired paper more than body count. His guerilla outfit would raid storage depots and remote Chi-Com military outposts and General Wangdoo would come out with information, such as how many gallons of diesel fuel were being used to supply the convoys that brought the Chinese military up into Lhasa and other parts of Tibet. The CIA spooks were much more desirous of this kind of information and numbers to sift. The guerilla attacks were mostly on the re-supply convoys.

Buddy Lynn eventually turned Wangdoo on to LSD and cocaine and bragged about having sex with him. It was also the General’s great pleasure to hear any music by Jimi Hendrix. Another twist in the story was the General’s appearance. While at training school in Colorado, he was shown many John Wayne and American Old West, cowboy and Indian movies for entertainment at night. And as fashion sense and style would have it, the General, not speaking any English at the time or understanding any of the dialogue of the cowboy movie plots, adopted the style of John Wayne’s adversaries, i.e., the Mexicans. He wore pants with conchos down the sides and bandoliers of bullets slung across his chest, a Tibetan Pancho Villa in fine attire.

Rebecca and I made our initial attempts at trekking in Nepal by going up to Nagarkot, the first high ground out of the valley where one could have a clear view of the majesty of Mount Everest. Going through the remote mountain villages and coming upon a festival with big horns, colorful masks, and dancers dressed as animal spirits was truly exciting and fueled the fires for more adventuresome treks.

When we returned from Nagarkot, we were invited to the wedding of Hog Farmer Tom Glen and his gorgeous Tibetan girlfriend, Latchu. Then, as the prayer wheel turns, things got really unbelievable.

Buddy Lynn married General Wangdoo. She whispered to me after the vows that she would set it up so that I could accompany them to the Mustang area where the guerilla army was headquartered. The only Tibetan fighters I’d seen were the ones that hung around Lynn’s Bodha home. They would come and go at the General’s bidding with fistfuls of one-hundred dollar bills supplied by the CIA. The General told me that a one-hundred-dollar bill, in Mustang, bought one pound of rice. Like the value of the money, “everything” he said, “was totally out of control.” To his dismay, audio cassette players with big speakers had been rolled into the guerilla camps and a speech by the Dalai Lama was broadcast calling for a peaceful resolution and an end to the attacks on the Communist Chinese.

Three days after their marriage, Buddy Lynn was attempting to continue behaving like a Western woman in a typical Western marriage. The way that General Wangdoo’s wife should be conducting her life was totally different. The General thought that Lynn’s wifely duties consisted of cleaning, cooking and doing the laundry. No more Western visitors and no more intellectual and historical discussions were permitted with their neighbors. He expressed this by grabbing Lynn behind the neck and frog-marching her out of our Double Dorge house right in front of us in order to make his point. It was the last time we saw the General. Within weeks he and his main mobile attack force were ambushed and killed in a high mountain pass by Nepalese army sharpshooters.