KATHMANDU - When blogging for pleasure, there are few deadlines. But typing yesterday's entry about the trip near the Tibet border for some bungee there was a deadline. When I returned from the border, after three and a half bumpy hours on the road, I found the entire backpacker ghetto dark. The power was out.
In our hotel, the man who works 12 hour days was still at his post. At the desk he had a candle, half-burned. The power apparently had been out for some time. I asked him when he expected regular light.
"I do not know," he said. "Maybe eight."
I squinted and saw the clock above his left shoulder: 6:30.
Our room had no light, not even enough to poke around for the cheap Chinese flashlight I had in the bowels of my bag. My iPod had no charge. We had nothing to do: I went to find an Internet cafe.
Thankfully the Nepalese power grid is sporatic enough that several places have generators. I found one down the street from Cosmic Hotel, and started playing around on Facebook, reading the New York Times and slowly typing a blog entry. With 90 minutes to kill, I didn't do too much typing. Then I heard an annoying screeching sound, like the sound a microwave makes when done cooking, only this was a constant note. After 30 seconds, it went away, and I went back to typing.
A little while later it started again, only this time it didn't stop.
"Sir," the manager of the Internet cafe said, "little power. Only five more minutes." The generator was about to go out, shutting down the computer and deleting my prose. I typed franctically, adding several paragraphs in just a couple hundred seconds. I felt the surge that I did at a newspaper, with a half a front page story to finish and an editor stoppping over every few minutes to see if it was complete.
I finished the piece (although it probably would have benefitted from an edit or two), and the power soon came back on. Now, the next day, I have another deadline: a bus to catch back to India. And with 30 seconds to spare, I can say that this is another deadline that I hit.
