We just arrived in Kathmandu -- after a spine-crushing 7-hour bus ride. 7 hours to travel 100 miles -- no joke. We of course had seats in the back of the bus where the smells are lovely and the bone-rattling bumps are magnified 10-fold. We may need a day to lick our wounds.
The buses here are deserving of a short write up. They are invariably painted or decaled in garrish greens and reds, and the front-windshield is almost always festooned with tassels. Right now, because there is another 4-day festival in full swing -- Tihar -- all the buses are strung with marigolds and other tacky objects. Little statutettes of Shiva or Vishnu or Buddha sit or recline or lay supine on the dashboards. The horns of the buses sound like music played at a carnival. People are crammed into the buses like clowns in a volkswagon. When there is no more room inside, the people sit on top of the bus. When there is no more room on the top of the bus, the people hang onto the sides of the bus. And when there is no more room on the sides of the bus the people grab hold of the people who are hanging on the side of the bus. On the way to Besi Sahar -- the town at the beginning of the Annapurna Circuit -- we saw a bus where you literally could not see the bus; it was a jumbled mass of Nepali's rolling on wheels.
The buses are local in every sense of the word. They stop anywhere and for anything. A guy I was sitting next to today told me that on his bus to Besi Sahar the bus driver was stopped by an angry man standing in the middle of the road. It turned out the bus driver owed the angry man a substantial sum of money. Apparently, everyone sat in the bus for 2 hours while the the debtor and creditor negotiated a settlement, with a local policeman acting as the impartial mediator.
Porters -- Unlike the porters in the Andes, who carry their massive bundles on their back with ropes tied around their chests, the porters here carry their massive bundles by means of a strap over their foreheads. It's a tried and tested tradition. And, of course, the bundles they carry are insanely heavy. We saw one guy carrying a mid-size fridge; another guy we talked to said he was carrying 65 kilos. I don't know what that is in pounds but it is more than I can bench-press (but that is not saying much since I've never really been the swarthy type.) Apparently porters in the Himalayas have been carrying bundles with their heads for a long-time. Maurice Herzog, in his great book called "Annapurna" reported that porters back in the 30s were hauling loads with forhead straps. (BTW, if any you are so inclined, I recommend picking up Herzog's book -- it's a great read. It all takes place in the area we just hiked. It's the story of the first successful ascent of an 8000 meter peak. What makes it entertaining is that it's not just about the ascent, it's also about the members of the expedition trying to locate the peak so they could climb it.)
In Manang, we watched 50-year old woman haulding 50-lb boulders on their back, one at a time, carrying them from the river-bed below up to the Manang plateau where a family was building a stone house. The climb had to have been 300-400 feet. They started work at sunrise and didn't stop until sunset. Tough, hardy Tibetan women.
The festival of Tihar. As far as I can tell the sole purpose of the festival is to give little kids an excuse to run rampant, singing the same songs all over town and extorting money from shopowners. Part of the reason the bus ride took 7 hours is because we got stopped a half dozen times by packs of pre-pubescent children trying to wring some money out of the bus drivers.
We've decided to go to the Everest region. We happened to snag an early flight to Lukla on the 8th. We just couldn't pass up the opportunity to get that panoramic of Everest, Makalu, Cho Oyo, and Lhotse from the top of Gokyo Ri. It'll be a 12-15 day trek to the Gokyo sacred lakes, the same trek we tried to do when we first arrived in Nepal. I hope to report from Namche Bazaar -- our second stop on the trek where there is supposed to be a great view of Everest.
Hope all is well.
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