<%
# platform sniffer for browser DIV switchout
set user_agent [platform_browser_version]
set platform [lindex $user_agent 0]
set browser [lindex $user_agent 1]
set version [lindex $user_agent 2]
%>
<%
# this code fixes the layout for the historictraveler.com site
if {[brand_from_cobrand_id [get_cobrand_id_from_page]] != "primedia"} {
ns_puts ""}
%>
<%
if { [string compare $browser "ns"] == 0 } {
ns_puts ""
}
%>
Outside Online
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Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)
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Naked planet: monks on a Lo Manthang parapet in 1991 (Thomas Laird) |
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III. WANDERVÖGEL
IN 1972 TOM LAIRD, a year out of high school in Gainesville, Florida, was part of the great transcontinental traveling freak show that began in the States and Europe, pirouetted its way across the Bosporus into Asia, followed the Silk Road or the Spice Trail into India, and finally nested in Kathmandu, where it became infamously known as the Rock and Roll Raj. From London to Paris to Rome to Athens, Laird became slowly infatuated with his mother's supreme passion, art: the Babylonian display at the Louvre, the Pietà at the Vatican. On the Spanish Steps he purchased a copy of French adventurer Alexandra David-Neel's Magic and Mystery in Tibet, a romanticized account of Tibetan Buddhism, almost a 19th-century fantasy, but it gave him the dream, of remote kingdoms where diamonds lay about on the ground.
There were no maps, only travelers exchanging information. He went to Istanbul, to Tehran. Already Laird was beginning to feel that Kerouac was a coward, he didn't go far enough—fucking Marrakech, big deal! Afghanistan was the real beginning of the adventure. He took a 48-hour bus ride to Chicken Street, the hippie meeting place in Kabul, passing through the horrible bleakness of Kandahar, where three Frenchmen had just been decapitated by a mob for looking a bit too longingly at a local woman. He took another bus to the Khyber Pass and down to Peshawar and then a night train across the Pakistani plains to Lahore. All the hippies were bugging out to Kashmir or Kathmandu, take your pick, and after a few sleepless nights he was on the train to the Nepalese border and then standing by the road in the Terai with his thumb out.
An American-made cargo truck stopped and he crawled in the back under a canvas tarp protecting a ton of sacked sugar. It was the monsoon season and it rained all night while they motored up into the hills. He awoke at dawn because the truck had stopped. They were on the Damang Pass, above the Kathmandu Valley, and, given the monsoon, it shouldn't have been a clear morning and he shouldn't have been able to see the Himalayas, but there they were in a dazzling panorama, from Annapurna to Everest, the clouds curdled below the peaks.
Immediately Laird knew that whatever he was going to do in life, he was going to do it here, just the details had to be worked out. Which sounded insane, of course, but he couldn't deny the exhilarating physical sensation of his life about to assume its shape, to grasp its purpose. Foreigners visiting Nepal fell under the spell of the mountains and the culture all the time, and now Laird was one of them. He was 19 years old, halfway around the world from his childhood, and convinced that he had come home.
<%
if { [string compare $browser "ns"] == 0 } {
ns_puts ""
}
%>
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