Basketball at Midnight

It was a long, tedious, and sometimes difficult journey, but I made it to Sikkim. My final marathon busride of the adventure is over. I don’t think I have a ride more than 4 hours long for the rest of my stay. For those counting, that ‘rest of my stay’ is six days. I haven’t yet absorbed that fact and so I’m not going to reflect on it at the moment. It just dawned on me earlier today. Six days.

As for the journey, it started fantastically. Once again, I was on top of the bus, and we left about an hour before sunset. We reached the ridge around the Kathmandu valley exactly at sunset (according to the GPS), which was one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen. The colors were so deep and rich, and there were just enough clouds in the sky to catch and accent the colors. On top of that, one of the Himalayan ranges could be seen from the ridge, and the last moments of pink sunlight illuminated the peak when the rest of the mountains were nighttime blue. I thought, mistakenly, that that would be the last Himalayan peak I would see in Nepal.

When the sunset had finished and the stars came, things began to go badly. Not bad with the stars – they, too, were fantastic, and as it was nearly a half moon, I had some time to absorb their depth before it came out. However, we were hardly 30 km from Kathmandu when we were stopped. The best information I got was that there was a fight and a Nepali killed another on the roadside, and so the delay outside Pokhara was replayed outside Kathmandu. The police, once again, stopped traffic in both directions for 4 hours to do whatever they do when some dies near the road. I can’t imagine what that could be or why they couldn’t just move the body to let the traffic by. But, it happened. Although we left Kathmandu at 4:30pm, it was not until 11pm that we were moving again.

It continued that everything natural was wonderful and everything logistical was terrible. The sunrise, again, was marvelous (I’m running out of words that express ‘goodness’), and low lying mist came rolling from the foothills on the Terai, which is rice farmland in the south of Nepal. The Everest range could be seen in the distance as well, which was a worthy replacement for the sunset range I had seen. Around mid-morning, however, we were stopped again. Apparently the town had called a Travel Bandh (strike) in protest of the federal government not fixing the road. They wouldn’t let anyone pass. So I found some more tea, talked to an Australian headed towards Everest, and waited. I was about ready to hike to the next town to catch another bus, like I did in Pokhara, when we started moving. It was, still, about 2.5 hours later.

The road ended about 2 hours before the border. If you heard about the dam in Nepal that broke in August and flooded a town and a highway, that’s where I was. The UN had set up refugee camps, but no work had begun to restore the road, bridge, or town. Fortunately, there was a man who spoke good English on my bus. He deserves a digression, at least, to tell his story.

Ganga, the man, lives in the Eastern Terai, about an hour from the flooded village. He had left Nepal several years ago, went to India, took a plane to Dubai, and then snuck across the border to Iraq. After some trying, he got a job working food service for the US soldiers through one of the infamous contracted businesses providing military support. He learned quite a bit of English, and had some interesting insights about the soldiers he met : “Most soldiers are from Texas, no?” and “Most soldiers are black, no?” He came back recently, and plans to try to go to Afganistan to do the same type of thing. When I asked him how he found out about the opportunities in Iraq, he said that he just went and that it was highly illegal. He didn’t clarify what part of it was highly illegal, but I’m guessing the border jumping. His motivation was entirely economic, and I guess he feels that there is more opportunity in Afganistan right now.

Anyway, Ganga helped me navigate through the tractor, then walking path, then boat, then tractor, then rickshaw, to a town that had a bus stop. Because I was so low on time (as it is, I only have 5 days in Sikkim), I had to motor on to the border and pass up his invitation to visit his family for dinner. Again, I rode on top of the bus. The sunset this night had similar deep, stunning colors, but was lacking the mountain backdrop from the night before. Still, not too shabby.

I arrived at the border at 8:30pm, 28 hours after I left Kathmandu. This morning, I woke up at 6:00am, sunrise, and hiked across the border to catch the bus to the transit point to Sikkim. As I walked across the bridge separating Nepal and India, I looked over my shoulder and saw a Himalaya — possibly Everest– greeting the morning sun. That was the last Himalaya I saw in Nepal.

In my nine days in Nepal, I rode inside a bus for 23 km, going to Lumbini from the border. I probably rode on top of the bus over 1,000 km. I joked with Boris, back in Bandipur, that I could probably outfit a bus with seats on the roof and sell rides to western tourists for $25 (in comparison, I paid about $10 for buses that made my 28 hour journey). In India, I had to ride inside for the four hour journey to Sikkim, and I missed the open air, the unimpeded views, and the feeling of relative freedom.