ransvestia
But we had acquired the beginnings of what in Mexico would be called Montezuma's Revenge, but which in that part of the world I dubbed Genghis Khan's legacy. When we landed at Bamyan which was nothing but a dirt strip with no buildings I was suddenly force- fully taken with the idea that I'd feel a lot better quicker if I could patronize a powder room. There was no habitation in sight so I de- cided that a bush in the field was worth two in the park and I went over to it to "pay my respects." I was too much in a hurry to notice in the beginning that there was a male native sitting under a nearby tree smoking his pipe but when I rose up to pull up my pants (I was wear- ing a pants suit as did most of the other women on the tour), I found that I was not alone. However, as I was performing in a most native fashion, the only novelty in the situation was the fact that I was a foreign woman instead of the local variety.
But I was only the first. That night the "legacy" hit several other people and two days later on the bus out of there it hit my roommate in another way. She must have gotten ptomaine poisoning because she was so ill that she couldn't sit up in the bus seats and actually fainted. The dirt road was a mass of chuckholes and the little mini-bus jounced terribly. I had to lay her on two seats with her legs crossing the aisle and then sit on the arms of the seats myself with my legs over hers to keep her from bouncing off on the floor. It was pretty un- comfortable for both of us although she was "out" for a good part of the time.
In that part of the country we saw not only the enormous Buddha statues carved into the side of the hill they are about five or six stories high — which Bamyan is famous for but we jounced most of the afternoon up a canyon over a ridge and down into another canyon to see one of the most fantastic and unbelievable sights in the whole world. This is a "lake in the sky" as it were. It is a lake between the two sides of a canyon allright but at the end of the canyon where it widens out to a plain there is a natural dam that the lake itself has apparently built by some of the same processes as you may have seen at Yellowstone or other volcanic areas the deposition of limestone around the edges of a pool. But in this case it was a curving dam across the whole canyon which was at least 100 feet high. The water flowed over it in a number of places and I climbed up the side to be greeted after quite a little effort with a lake at eye level as I reached the brim. The lake was like tea in a teacup filled to overflowing, which is what it was doing. The guide said that they had not been able to
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