Who Dat?

Back in the 80s, long before the X-Games existed, Tom Haig traveled the world as an extreme athlete. He visited more than 50 countries as an international high diver, doing multiple somersault tricks from over 90 feet.

That life came crashing down one Sunday morning in 1996. While training on his mountain bike, he smashed into the grill of a truck and became paralyzed from the waist down. But less than a year later he completed a 100-mile ride on a hand-cycle and traveled by himself to Europe and the Middle East.

Since then he has continued to travel the world as a consultant, writer and video producer. He spent six months launching a Tibetan radio station in the Himalayas and shot documentary shorts on disability in Bangladesh, France, Albania, Ghana and most recently Nepal.

Monday, March 27, 2017

20 Pools - A Swimming Odyssey: Pool # 11: Club Bagmati, Suryabinayak, Nepal

Before leaving the states I'd searched for swimming pools in Kathmandu and discovered a 50-meter 8-lane pool seven miles from my house. I naively assumed I could leave work, hop on a bus, take in a swim and be home before dinner. My plan was thwarted because 1) Kathmandu buses aren't accessible and 2) the traffic in Kathmandu is so bad it would have taken 90 minutes to travel those seven miles. Even if I had been able to get on the bus, I never would have been able to get to the pool before closing time. And I never would have made it home in time for dinner.

Oddly enough, on my way to work (the hospital DID have an accessible bus) we went past a sign for a resort pool in my neighborhood. My sister, Nikita, told me the pool was way too high up the side of the mountain for me to get to - that I would need a taxi in order to go there. But like nearly every bit of information I got in Nepal, there where bits and pieces of facts surrounded by tons of speculation.

The truth of the matter is that Nikita didn't know how to swim and had never been to the pool before. Just three weeks before I was to leave Nepal, Nikita told me she went to the pool and she thought I could probably get there. She said she and three of our co-workers from the hospital were taking swimming lessons after work.

At first I was angry because I could have actually been working out every day after work. The pool was less than two miles from our house. But seeing as it was winter, it had only recently opened up. Winter in Nepal is a relative term. I arrived the second week of February and was never even once tempted to wear anything more than a t-shirt. For me, swimming in an outdoor pool in "The middle of winter" would have not been a challenge. At the Osborne Aquatic Center back in Corvallis, they keep the outdoor pool open all winter and use it as the warm-up pool for high school meets - even in freezing weather.

But no matter how much I would have protested, people weren't going to show up at that pool until May. Nonetheless, the neighborhood pool was open and I was going! Nikita and the group of women from the hospital escorted me up a steep, but short road up to the Club Bagmati pool. It was a nice workout, but nowhere near as difficult an assent as the Sherpa pool or even climbing to the temple at the end of the street we lived on.

Getting up to the pool wasn't a problem, but everything else was. My new neighborhood pool was the worst, least-accessible full-sized pool I'd ever been to. The locker rooms and toilets were up five steps and their doors were too tight for my chair. I rolled up against a row of bushes and nonchalantly changed into my suit. I wasn't really blocked by anything, I just became an elephant in the room. And it's not like public nudity is accepted in Nepal - it's super shocking. But being in the chair, I just assumed people would get my situation and not make a big deal of it - which they did.. kinda. It still freaked 'em out, but they just had no idea what they could do about it.

I was ready to hop in the pool, but the pool wasn't ready for me. The pool was on a raised deck that had to be accessed by a smaller rinsing pool. It was three steps down into the rinsing pool, followed by five steps back up to the deck. Nikita and her friends (who are all very good-looking I might add) had no problem convincing a band of men to come over and help me through the obstacle. For some reason, lifting people in chairs in Nepal is ten times more complicated than it is in the States or Europe. When I ask for assistance in America I'll get two guys, tell them how to do it, and they go. But in Nepal and India it is a huge committee decision and one I don't have a vote in. They discuss it on the side, then start grabbing wheels and body parts until I have to yell to make them stop. Eventually they will listen and I'll show them what needs to be done - but it never happens on the first try. And given the same situation the next day, the same group of men will go right back into their committee and start all over again. It never fails.

Eventually, I made it to the pool deck only to discover the Club Bagmati pool, my new home pool, was a complete piece of shit. It was a 35-yard arcing pool with no lanes and a two-foot deep shallow end. It was full of thrashing teen-agers none of whom could actually swim. I flopped into the deep end and tried to swim a few laps, but it was impossible. I got cannonballed twice and even had one drowning woman grab on to me as she had ventured too far from the side of the pool.

Instead of trying to workout, I joined Nikita and our friends to give them swimming lessons. One of the women took to the water fairly well, but the other four were panic-stricken and thrashing. Nobody knew how to breathe and they didn't really feel like listening to me when I tried to show them. To them swimming was akin to witchcraft and anyone who did it was defying the laws of physics. No matter how I pleaded for them to watch and copy my stroking, they just kept up their panicky thrashing. Getting Nepal to learn the crawl would not come easily.

Although the first attempt at the Club Bagmati was less than positive, I didn't give up. My video project at the hospital was finishing up and there was no reason for me to go to work if I didn't have a film shoot scheduled. During the last three weeks I ended up going up to the pool in the middle of the day when it was nearly empty. I wore my suit to the pool so I didn't have to dress in public. I found a group of workers at the club and trained them how to carry me up and down the steps to the pool. With the pool almost entirely to myself, I could bisect the arc into a 30-meter straight line. I got back to cranking out my mile workout. Even though I was breathing in some caustic Kathmandu air, I was getting back into shape.

One thing I discovered when swimming in Malaysia is, unlike the bike, swimming is a sport you can bring with you anywhere you go. Even on vacation.

Which brings us to vacation and Pool # 12: Himalayan Villa, Pokhara, Nepal
      

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