I Wish There Were Phewa People

Published December 16, 2023

Pokhara, Nepal

The January 6th Insurrection

I have many friends that I can wholeheartedly enjoy, despite the fact that they hold wildly different political or religious beliefs. Even if I consider them to be silly, wrong, or dumb -- that's easy! We just avoid or sidestep those topics! Done and done.

Case in point, in January of 2021, two good friends of mine departed from our ski trip several days earlier than expected, saying they had “a calling,” and that they needed to “go and protest corruption in government.” The next day we saw the nightly news and… yep, they had flown to D.C. to attend what is now known as the January 6th Insurrection.

Seriously? Jeez guys! What are y’all mixed up in?!

When I asked them to please elaborate, they sent me texts saying that the news media was misrepresenting what was happening and blowing things totally out of proportion. They accompanied these texts with footage of “what was really happening,” but they had just pointed their cameras in a completely different direction! They had just chosen to photograph a different (albeit simultaneous) portion of what was going on that day, from a selective vantage point that painted the “protests” in a much better light.

Yeah. That’s what’s going on with these canoes.

I’m not saying this photograph is a lie… not exactly… but I’m also not NOT saying that! Lol

It certainly isn’t photoshopped or manipulated to distort reality, but simply by choosing to point my camera in a very specific direction and offer up a limited field of view, I am able to present to you a photograph that is not at all indicative of what it was like to be there on this particular day, nor is it a very accurate representation of the truth.

PHEWA LAKE, POKHARA, NEPAL

I find this photograph so peaceful and calming.

Which is funny, because this lake was one of the loudest and most chaotic places I visited in all of Nepal. Phewa Lake is extremely popular with the worst type of people in existence -- teenagers. And just to the left, right, and back of me, they are all yelling, flirting, acting obnoxious and crazy, and just generally being, well, teenagers. They loved to load as many kids as they could possibly fit into these canoes and then go out on the water and yell at the top of their lungs at other boats full of teenagers that were doing the exact same thing.

It might have been a weekend, or even a holiday, I honestly couldn't tell you. After TREKKING EVEREST BASE CAMP for two weeks, I had long since lost all track of times, dates, and even what day of the week it was. Nothing mattered anymore, only the fact that here in Pokhara we finally had a PROPER TOILET and a shower.

We'll just call it Loud Teenager Day on Headache Lake.

*****************************

The good news is, we never ended up capsizing our canoe -- a drunken specialty of mine that you can read more about HERE!

And there's only one other instance I can think of where I've ever written about teenagers, so if you really want to, I guess you can read more about them HERE. Bleh.