The Nepali immigration office was located next to a tourist information centre and several people directed me there with friendly waves and ‘namaste’s. I filled out the form and handed over my $30 USD and passport photo. The two uniformed officials were both wearing the traditional caps (topi) and politely asked where I hailed from. A few minutes later I walked out with a Nepali tourist visa freshly glued into my passport. Now to get to Kathmandu.
It was about 3pm and I knew the bus trip to the capital took 8-10 hours, which would mean a few hours travel in the dark – something I was keen to avoid. From what I had seen on the road from Gorakhphur the buses were ponderously slow and overladen, and as much as I wanted to travel like the locals, I admit that 10 hours on a packed, crawling bus on a dark road notorious for bus crashes was not something I was looking forward to. So I cheated. I spoke to a local tout and arranged a car and driver for a price I was happy with. I can’t have argued hard enough, because the tout tried to jack the price up on me a few minutes later, claiming that he had miscalculated the exchange rate. I knew I was paying too much anyway, so I simply threatened to walk down the road and hop on a bus, picking up my bag as I spoke, and suddenly he was all smiles again.
“No problem. My mistake”. Yeah right.
He also offered me some marijuana for the trip, assuring me it was ok in Nepal to smoke. (It’s not. It is very common – the stuff grows like a weed by the side of the road – but not legal).
“No, thanks”
He shrugged. “It is long trip, 5-6 hours”. Perhaps he had a point, but – leaving any personal position on drug use aside – I wanted to take in the scenery and preferred to have my wits about me and keep an eye on my driver. I also didn’t need to be involved in any bribery scam with the local law enforcement. And I don’t do drugs, Mum.
My driver, Samil, was a pleasant kid of 22 who was married, had a young son of 2 months and spoke passable english. He provided a couple of cassettes of Hindi and Nepali pop music for the trip, and was kind enough to stop several times to attempt to obtain some music in english. To no avail, as it turned out. He was, of course, angling for a tip, but it was thoughtful service. A couple of the songs had choruses in english anyway. I recognised the tune of ‘It’s raining men’, but the chorus was, for some reason, “It’s ready to go”, and I couldn’t work out whether it was an erroneous translation or just a flagrant abuse of copyright. Probably both.
The road initially remained flat and the usual traffic persisted. I’ve already commented on the hand-decorated trucks I saw in India and since Gorakhphur these had been joined by tractors adorned with tinsel, a number of them Massey Fergusons. Every tractor I saw on the road had tinsel streaming from the cab and bonnet and I wondered why this had never caught on in the Waikato. It certainly looked festive. Several times we stopped for cows wandering on the road.
“International driving”, remarked Samil, as we waited at one such stop. We both laughed.
The road soon began to climb and it deteriorated rapidly, with large sections obviously being damaged by slips and rockfalls. We passed three men working on one such section with shovels and a hand cart. I wondered where the rest of their gear was, only to pass their camp a few hundred metres away. An open fire was being used to melt the pitch in a drum, next to a pile of gravel and rocks. (Later I was to see a sign which read “MAN at WORK”, and have a chuckle to myself; until we passed a solitary figure digging at the road).
Twice we passed through checkpoints where Samil paid a toll. Caually dressed men wandered out from a roadside kiosk to collect and I wondered if this was a Maoist tax, but Samil told me it was a local tax for road repair. Sure enough, not far beyond each checkpoint the road required some major work. There seemed to be more men engaged in collecting the tax, however, than were working on the road. I guess that’s international, too.
I had observed at least two military camps since entering Nepal, though no armed patrols or groups of troops. The hammer and sickle was daubed everywhere in red paint, along with depictions of Che Guevera and what I assumed were Maoist slogans. A number of barricades consisting of a tree trunk which could be lowered across the road were evident but appeared abandoned.
As we climbed I also began to see women, alone or in groups, carrying loads in baskets draped on their backs and attached to their heads by straps. (Around the village of Phutung I often see such women carrying large loads, of bricks in particular). We were a fair way from town and I wondered how far these women were trekking. Small streams by the road were being used for washing clothes or drinking.
The number of broken down vehicles seemed to be increasing, too. Branches and rocks were strewn across the road in the place of road-cones, but as it got dark break-downs around blind corners could be a real hazard. Samil was employing the usual honk-and-flash overtaking technique and on the whole I didn’t feel too uncomfortable. There were a couple of times when he chose to overtake approaching blind corners which had me groping for the Jesus-handle, but I was glad I had decided to opt for the car. Early in the trip Samil had asked about New Zealand, including the state of our roads and, apropos of nothing, the possibility of me sponsoring a work visa for him. (Ha ha!). I asked him what he would do there, and he replied, inevitably, “drive”.
“Mmm”, I said, as we undertook a truck on the left, inches to spare. He then enquired about obtaining a ‘paper’ for driving in New Zeland.
“You’d have to sit a test”.
“Yes yes, a test. For what?”
“A test of the road rules”, I said, smiling in anticipation.
“What are they?”
Several times we engaged in honking-duels with other vehicles that would not – or could not – let us pass. One, a canopied ute, just seemed to resent us passing. The other was a large bus. It was dark by this stage and the road narrow and serpentine. The combination of headlight flashing, indicating and horn blasts of various tones reminded me of the finale from ‘Close Encounters’. I was waiting for Samil to turn to me and say that he would now allow the computer to take over the conversation, when an agreement was apparently reached and we ducked past.
The time was approaching 9pm before we reached Kathmandu. I had been seeing glimpses of scattered lights for a few minutes but had thought that they were too diffuse to be a city of 740,000. As it turns out, Kathmandu itself is diffuse. Before I knew it we had swapped a narrow road flanked by bush or a dizzying drop for narrow streets lined by brick houses, honking at cyclists and any other road-user smaller than us. I was in Kathmandu.
