kinard wrote:Enjoyed those blogs AIA, even the ones you deleted. I'm never shy to hear peoples travel experiences.
Okay then, here's my journey to Nepal:
[from the previous entry] "I’m getting the next bus out of here to Kathmandu. There are two busses per day to Kathmandu, the posh one (refreshments, a toilet, seats) and the clapped out homicidal Indian one. Now I’m battle-hardened I’m going for the latter."
14. Guns 'n' Bruises
24 Dec 2002
So here I am finally sending a report from a cybercafé in Kathmandu. Taken a while; here is the final stage of how I got here.
It was just as well that I'd attuned myself to the Indian bus experience - I really needed it over the last two days. There I was, on time, ensconced in my reserved seat and observing the incomprehensible chaos around me. Everybody has a ticket and a seat booked - seemingly the same seat booked. Hence the usual disputes over seats with the guy being the most ferocious turning out to be the ticket collector, so he has no idea. Amongst the melee of people in the aisle are passengers with tickets, hopeful ones without, friends saying farewell, vendors (pink beards are in today), beggars - including one who is clearly a pickpocket; I see him trying to get a Tibetan's wallet and who pesters him so much he finally gets a good thumping (Tibetans pacifists? Who claimed that? - actually amongst the variety of ethnicities on display here I'm afraid I'd have to describe the thief as Romany) and, to top it all, an old guy with a big stick with ribbons which he shakes around and asks for donations. The driver's shrine this time had a huge multi-coloured corn dolly - too stylised to tell which deity it was but the driver seemed to have extra help anyway, as you shall see.
Departure time of 2 p.m. arrives followed by a flurry of inactivity for an hour in the sweltering heat (sorry again Britain); I'm expecting a repeat of Syrian Arab anyway so I'm not bothered except that I'm very nervous about the state of my stomach and I'm already suffering akin to DVT. Many of the knowing passengers have big rugs crammed in by their legs - I guess they've made their choice between death by hypothermia and losing their lower limbs. Close call.
And finally we're off. At the first set of traffic lights we turn into the busy junction and the luggage tumbles off the roof, nearly flattening a holy cow. We'd never have left Delhi if it had been injured, unless the Tibetans had managed to eat it before anyone noticed. As we turned into waste ground to fix the luggage down the guy with the weird stick reappeared - I think he's been sitting down by the driver and waving it at demons (i.e. traffic) to protect us. I suppose it's fair enough he should expect donations; but perhaps 'payment by results' is missing the point somewhat. Mind you none of the passengers are giving. By the end of the trip I'm less convinced he's a shaman and more inclined to see him as a Tibetan variant of the universal mad uncle phenomenon. However if I feel the runs coming on I may just have use of that stick
Ninety minutes after departure time we're directly opposite the bus stand we left but on the wrong side of the dual carriageway. The engine is turned off and then on again, off and then on again; the bus rolls forward into traffic then reverses into a car behind - well the driver can't see as the ticket man is blocking the aisle on the suddenly crucial mission to ascertain every passengers' age. It's so Indian, even down to the cockpit being crammed with a driver, two ticket collectors, two luggage boys and a bleedin' witch doctor, and nobody can make a decision.
Hey, we move, and keep going this time. New views across NE Delhi's suburbs: families squatting in drainpipes; many with less. I've built up a picture concerning all those half-built brick buildings I see everywhere; I think a lot of families living in tents and suchlike try to scavenge bricks and when they've got a few they'll say, 'Hey, get some cow dung together - we can do half a wall here.' And over the years they might manage four walls and a ceiling and their children can live in comfort. I see goatherds looking after their wee charges foraging about in the most unlikely places, and the usual mountains of cowpats and the army of people making them. I see a performing bear, and out into the countryside lots of wild peacocks and trees festooned with real 'Tarzan' creepers.
But back to the people; at the end of my last report I made a brief reference to the invisible children of Britain (As an aside in Nepal at this moment there'll be even more kids running about as the Maoist students' organisation has closed all schools indefinitely. Turning up to teach in Nepal is going to be even more interesting than I'd anticipated). Gazing out the window as we drive through the outskirts of Delhi it occurs to me that the same is true of adults. You walk around the suburbs of an English town and you find yourself in a ghost town. The children are all away at school and the adults all away at work; only the retired provide any life - water a car here, weed a herbaceous border there, maybe walk a dog. In the evenings it's the same - the streets are still deserted as people either congregate in the same places as everyone else for their entertainment or stay in their own box staring at their own box. A few will gather together for some royal occasion or rig up some event once a year to remind themselves they're a 'community'. I'm not criticising here; I'm even more anti-social given the chance. At least most people are considerate enough to send Christmas cards at this time to ex-colleagues they haven't spoken to in ten years and never will again; I never even bothered doing that.
But it's so different in India. Any time of day or night, and place - city, suburb, village, countryside (okay I did fly over the Thar desert, but I'm referring to wherever people can use to ingenuity to survive in the most marginal areas imaginable) there they are - working, washing, eating, crapping, praying, living, dying - all out there. I know I've gone on about this before but I find that three weeks in I'm still just as moved by the lives these people lead. I understand better now why Mahatma Gandhi was and is ridiculed for his sentimental attitude towards Indian poverty, yet I find that I am coming around to his view.
Talking of views - the next day a thick fog had descended so I didn't see much of The Gangetic Plain really, apart from the houses of the Tharu. The Tharu are the tribe that occupy the Terai - the region of Northern India and Southern Nepal that was jungle until recently. Despite the availability of bricks they see no reason to alter their traditional mud huts with straw roofs. They look brilliant, and there are thousands.
As the tedious hours roll on the bus makes frequent wee and food stops but in both the bus and in the communities we stop at there is no one who speaks a word of English so I can't follow any of the announcements and thus miss all the cues to jump off and settle my stomach with water or chai and I don't stretch my legs. By now I have DVT of the butt and I'm really feeling the rigours of a long-distance third world bus journey. I might also point out that the road doesn't seem so long on the map, the terrain is flat and the road is in good condition, being the Great Trunk Road across North India. Yet a journey is grimly slow because it carries every truck heading across India, all going at the pace of the weakest link - usually a bullock cart ahead (the only one not pumping out loads of choking fumes).
So an uneventful but jolly enough jaunt took us across India through a succession of identical scruffy flea-pit towns until, as the sun begins to set and I start to finally dose, we suddenly hit the Nepal border. Nepal! What can I tell you about Nepal? Well fair enough after a couple more hours driving through the monotonous Nepalese Terai you do know you're in Nepal when the road suddenly veers upwards, which is the cue to overtake slower trucks on blind hairpin bends as bigger trucks loom down on us; the moonlight ominously suggests huge shapes and deep deep drops - yup it's the promised white-knuckle ride of the Nepalese night bus and it doesn't disappoint.
But in the border town, Sunauli, what was distinctively Nepalese? Was it the raggedy street urchins begging mischievously? No, that's a common sight by now. Architecture? No, it's just an ugly dirty Terai town. Is it the offhand officious border guards who only have to stamp your passport but endeavour to make it a display of how unpleasantly they can do it, or the customs who insist all the bags are brought down from the roof and lined up alongside us even though they don't want to search any? No, I’m sure that's a common experience across many borders.
So was there anything that stood out to say 'Welcome to Nepal'? Oh yes. And when I suggest that there is something that stands up and smacks you in the face when you enter Nepal I'm being close to literal. The first unmistakable sound of the humming of something quite sinister came when a young heavily tooled-up soldier started barking at an elderly Tibetan lady, then proceeded to push her around and shove her, then grabbed her and her bag and marched them the ten yards to the customs table where she'd already been waived through. They fully searched the bag and of course nothing untoward was in there.
When we set off every few minutes we'd stop at a checkpoint and a soldier or policeman (who at least wouldn't be waving a loaded automatic rifle around the aisle) would shine a torch in our faces, ask what's this or that, search everything and then allow us to move on until we'd repeat the whole charade a few miles down the road. Oh yes, you know you're in Nepal when you are immediately and repeatedly made to be aware that this is a state under military rule - at least in the parts it does control. Interestingly from what I've heard in the Maoist areas at the first roadblock they give you a pass so you can just go through the rest unimpeded.
Now I'm not going to crassly suggest the Royal Nepal Army should attempt some 'charm offensive'; I do know why they're doing this and why they target busses and waive through trucks. I have read the recent reports of Maoists boarding busses in India with bomb on their laps, jumping off and an army checkpoint and detonating the bombs, killing a number of soldiers. I'm not judging that here, but I am suggesting that terrorising old ladies is a sign of a government that is losing it - the moral ground, the argument, and is directionless, scared. I wonder if those of you who told me how laid back Nepal is have been in the last year. I'd like to think - and I'm sure I'll find out soon enough, that the people are just as good-natured and get on with their lives without such fear, but the army seem to be a breed apart, alienating itself from the people it's supposed to be protecting, and with very nervous fingers on triggers. For those of you who warned me to be careful of the Maoists - I'm wondering if they're the main concern.
By the time we left Sunauli there was still about seven hours travelling ahead; I had phoned ahead to check about getting into my flat in Boudha and was told to arrive at 1 p.m. the next day. So when the bus gets in at 2-3 a.m. I'd have nowhere to stay. Normally I'd rough it but I figured there'll be a curfew, there's my bowels, my bags, it's cold - yeh, I'd get a room for the night. There'd be no food however and I was by now facing a dilemma; squits versus starvation. We pulled into another dusty town with roadside cafe at midnight. I marched straight in and ordered dhal bhat and chiya - all in Nepali, and had a wonderful meal. The girls kept refilling and I kept eating. A Tibetan looked at my meal and muttered, 'Bit predictable' - well maybe but it was my first meal in over two days, my first in Nepal, my first ordered in Nepali, and the rice, lentils and boiled cabbage was just brilliant thank you.
The shuddering, juddering rife over the mountains seemed to fix my stomach (or was it the meal?). We got into Boudha at 3 a.m.; it was not what I'd expected. I was expecting a settlement like Majnukatilla in Delhi but actually it's just the stupa and one row of buildings around the perimeter. There's a little more tucked behind but it's really small, and there are no hotels here. I found my flat very quickly - locked up of course. So all I could do was to sit and wait. Which was great. Already at 3 am there were a dozen elderly Tibetans doing kora (walking around the stupa as a religious practice). I joined them for a few circuits. Within a hour there were over fifty of all ages including a couple of young guys doing full prostrations around it. The dog that had enthusiastically done quite a few now curled up asleep at my feet (dogs that latch onto Buddhist buildings are generally naughty monks in a previous life trying to do penance).
By 8 a.m. I was feeling bloody cold. Right by me a caff opened - very friendly girls, awful coffee and chiya. A dodgy looking local geezer turns out to be very nice and informs me that the Maoist indefinite schools' strike was called off this morning (on again in February) but that there's an all-out strike across the country this weekend for three days. The Maoists are starting to turn the screw - especially around Kathmandu. There are loads of beggars. I give to a sadhu but not the twelve year old girls with babies; I spot them passing around two babies and watch one working up a tearful look. Then I spot a white guy across the cafe - he stands out because he's dipping into his wallet for every beggar that homes in on him - first day in Asia son?
At 10.30 am I'm watching my breath freeze and I consider it's in the upper 20s in Delhi. I'm not wingeing fellow Brits, but I will be buying a woolly hat very soon. Now it's time to pick up that key - my plan is to wash and sleep. More when it happens.