All Go On The Gompa is a travel book about a failed tour of Bengal, Sikkim, and of Nepal. I had never wanted to go to India, ever. I refused. I resisted. I wept. I sulked. Karl, a self-obsessed Leo (and now ex), was convinced that the more rigorous and painful the holiday, the better the experience. To me, I am a sensuous, pleasure seeking Taurus with an eye for a chaise longue and a large cake. A holiday is all about indulgence i.e. tongue hanging out, spit dribbling down your chin while napping, picking a bit of fluff from your navel, and feeling tetchy that the pool temperature maybe a little too cool. Note that there is no mention of wild animals, raging rivers, cliffs, slippery rocks, snakes, spiders, or poo – human or animal. They say opposites attract and it provided for a relationship best described as the immutable force meets the irresistible object – me being the irresistible part of course. Karl had turned into a desert storm of nagging and harassing, so eventually I accepted my fate. I caved in. I packed. I wept again. Arriving into a hot and steamy Kolkata late in the night, confirmed for me that it would be tears before bedtime, and in the morning, and the afternoon. In the first five minutes of meeting our guide, Sunni, I developed a pathological instant dislike of him, knowing I was in the hands of a complete fool. To rub salt into that wound, we were also the only ones on the tour. It would be hell. Five weeks. Five weeks of hell. I did the only thing a girl could do: I found a bottle of gin and a long straw, and it went downhill from there. From Bengal to Sikkim and on to Nepal I was a weeping, soggy, wailing bag of misery. You know the look a woman would give if she had been taken to a country that she didn't want to go to, spent a night in a rat infested hotel, driven for kilometres along dangerous roads and gorges where she constantly shat her pants, went without a flush toilet, peed into a variety of smelly cesspits, drains and containers, almost drowned in her own oedematous foam, nearly arrested by angry soldiers firing artillery around her, tricked into staying at a mould-filled resort, transported on a variety of wild animals, participated in unsolicited exercise without her consent, and worst of all had to travel for bloody weeks with the biggest loser tour guide God put breath into. Yep! That was me, alrighty.
