Kathmandu to Delhi, by land
I finally decided if I didn't force myself to pack my bags and move out, I could find myself in Kathmandu a month or two from now, and there are other places I need to go. So I set a day and went to the bus station to catch a ride back to Butwal, the place where I spent my first night.
This is hard to describe without a map of India and Nepal, but most people go through the border at Sunnauli, which is several hours from the Indian, rail-connected city of Gorakhpur. That is how I came. I did not want to do that going back. Instead, I thought I would take another bus from Butwal all the way across Nepal to its far western edge and from there enter the Indian state of Uttaranchal, where I could catch another bus to Delhi. The idea was to prolong my travel time in Nepal while cleverly avoiding the parallel route in India, especially the intolerably annoying crowds of predatory liars in Gorakhpur and Sunnauli. There is another border entry point at Mahendranagar/Banbassa (Nepal/India), which is very unpopular mostly because before the ceasefire the Maoists were frequently blowing up bridges along that way.
(By the way, if you're wondering whose side I'm on and it's hard to tell from my writing, I can't say I'm on anyone's side. When comes to the issues and grievances, I am certainly on the side of the Maoists. How could I possibly be in support of a religious monarchy? And I've been hearing about the crimes of the Nepali army for years -- rape, massacre, etc. Very, very few people, it seems, are in favor of the king or the royal government in general. The thing is that the Maoists are a military, too, and they have their own rap sheet. I think it's naive to give into romanticism and turn a blind eye to the horrors of the war and pretend that the Maoist violence is somehow "good" violence. It's very sad. So many people are displaced, squeezing an existence out of the fringes of Kathmandu because their own valleys and villages became to unstable and too violent. Many, many are dead. And to many of the living, this is all just a intractably complicated mess, above their heads and beyond their control. The hope is, of course, that the Maoists and the newly forming parliamentary government will emerge from the current talks as some kind of hybrid entity that is peaceful and fair to Nepal's most helpless people.)
Anyway, after spending one night in Butwal, I got up at sunrise to look for a bus to Mahendranagar. I was told first that none would leave until the afternoon, then told that I could get an earlier one to somewhere halfway and find another bus from there, and then I was told, once I was on such a bus, that the bus would go all the way to Mahendranagar after all. I was rolling by 9 a.m.
As soon as I entered the bus I was adopted by two teenagers whose names were Vinod and Sagar. Wonderful guys. I'm so sick of using the words wonderful, beautiful, blah blah, etc., but my vocabulary has simply been taken off guard by Nepal. Is it just my imagination, or are there fewer words for good things? Show me hell and I can tell you all about it in crisp, painful detail, but take me out and all I can do is bob around cooing "wonderful, beautiful" like a pigeon. I will figure this out and solve the problem, just give me some time.
So Vinod and Sagar sat with me and asked me lots of questions, and told me anything I wanted or needed to know along the way. We talked in a mix of broken English and broken Hindi.
After about an hour on the road, Vinod turns to me and says, "now we enter Kapilavastu." I don't know if that rings a bell for anyone. Kapilavastu was the name of the capital of the small kingdom ruled by Siddhartha Gautama's father. So this was it, the place we were always told about, where the Buddha-to-be threw open the curtains of his protected existence and wandered out to encounter the sick, dying, and dead. Siddharta Gautama was actually born in what is today Nepal, very close to Butwal (the town from which our bus had just left) in a town called Lumbini. There were wise old men that ascribed a certain importance to the baby and prophesied that he would become a great spiritual teacher. His father, the king, responded by keeping him on a tight leash and getting him married as young as possible. Much later, once Gautama had wandered all over northern India, broken through and become liberated, and wandered all over even more, teaching, he spent several monsoon seasons back in Kapilavastu. Anyway, I was pretty thrilled to be in that actual place. It was one of the prettier parts of the journey, actually -- tortuous roads around rocky hills patched with lush green ferns and deciduous trees. Some farms in the flatter parts. Apparently archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of what the believe to be the actual city of Kapilavastu, but there was nothing like that to be seen from the road, of course.
Most of Nepal is inaccessible by road. There are only a few roads in the whole country, really. If you look at a map of Nepal, you can see the few roads that exist. Those are all of them. It's not like looking at a map of Florida, for instance, where you see big freeways, then normal highways, and even the streets in the towns and cities, knowing that beyond that are countless smaller streets, roads, paved and unpaved. There is pretty much no such thing as a piece of property that you can't drive to, even way out in the boonies. In Nepal it is totally different. Except for a few main boulevard-style roads in the middle of Kathmandu, I saw not a single road in all Nepal that was wider than the minimum width for two vehicles to pass each other. And there aren't a bunch of side roads. For anywhere off the road, you have to walk. And most towns and villages in Nepal are nowhere near a road. They are only near trails. You can walk or take a helicopter.
So, I was on the Mahendra highway, which runs the length of Nepal from Mahendranagar in its southwestern corner to Kakarbhitta in the southeastern corner, along what's called the Terai. The Terai is the thin strip of Nepal that runs parallel to the Indian border and is flat -- before the earth is thrown up into the sky. It is all forest and farms. It's not all quite flat. Compared the nearby Himalayas it is flat, but not always flat enough to go very fast in a bus. My hope was to reach Mahendranagar by early evening or late afternoon so I could cross the Indian border and find an overnight bus to Delhi.
Not far past Kapilavastu, we came to the back end of a line of buses and trucks as far as we could see up the road. Our bouncy progress slowed to a halt. At first I thought it must be a Maoist roadblock. There were no hills in that particular spot so we knew it couldn't be a landslide. The driver put the bus in park, turned off the engine, and went off walking somewhere. Vinod, Sagar, and I decided to go up ahead and see what the problem was.
At the front of the line we came to a big knot of people talking to each other. There were a bunch of people, both men and women, adults and children, sitting on odd pieces of wood and logs that had been dragged into the middle of the road. Behind them was a pile of burning tires that was almost burnt out by that point. Beyond that, there was another line of crap dragged into the road, including a huge pile of heavy boulders and some large tree brances. Some local police were standing around casually chatting with the villagers and blocked truckers. I couldn't figure out what was going on, it was so strange.
It turned out that the there had been an accident the day before. A truck had collided with a motorcycle, both passengers of which had died. The people sitting on the logs and boulders in front of the burning tires were members of the victims' extended family or families. They were blocking the road until they received a large compensation payment from the truck company that owned the truck involved in the accident. They wanted 25 lakh Nepali rupees, I think. This was their civil suit, essentially, and the knot of people was a sort of ad hoc street court. The police didn't seem to think this was anything worth getting too upset about, and neither did anyone else. That was the funny thing -- no one was mad. Everyone behaved as if there had been a landslide, or all their engines had broken down. I was getting a little impatient, but I also felt so bad for the family. There was one old woman in particular who looked so brokenhearted as she sat there on a log. I imagine there was little else they could do but this roadblock. What else? Hire a lawyer? No way. File a suit themselves? Where? It's very possible that they could not even read.
It was about noon and sun was as high as it could be. It was at least 100 degrees F and there were no shadows anywhere, even if you stood with your back against the side of a truck. People all over were gathered under the trucks to kill time and discuss what to do. Some vans and trucks just turned around. Try again tomorrow, what's the difference. Today, tomorrow, the next day. Many bus drivers, including ours, decided to trade passengers with buses stuck on the other side of the roadblock. Underneath a big-wheeled truck, we gathered to get some money back for the portion of our journeys yet uncovered. This was a complicated, time-consuming process, with the conductor calculating each individual's fare and mileage on a piece of paper.
After about half an hour, Vinod, Sagar, and I were trudging up the road with our bags. The family just sat there as crowds of people dragged their posessions over the piles of boulders and logs. No one complained. No one even looked annoyed.
After about another hour of standing around working things out with bus people on the other side of the blockade, we were rolling again. I had given up hopes of getting a bus to Delhi that night, and was now just hoping to reach Mahendranagar before it was so late at night I'd have to sleep outside.
The bus I was on, it turned out, was not going all the way to Mahendranagar, and eventually I had to jump off and find another bus. In the end, I got to Mahendranagar too late to cross the border. I got a room and a simple dinner and started early the next morning to continue.
Can't write more now, gotta go.
This is hard to describe without a map of India and Nepal, but most people go through the border at Sunnauli, which is several hours from the Indian, rail-connected city of Gorakhpur. That is how I came. I did not want to do that going back. Instead, I thought I would take another bus from Butwal all the way across Nepal to its far western edge and from there enter the Indian state of Uttaranchal, where I could catch another bus to Delhi. The idea was to prolong my travel time in Nepal while cleverly avoiding the parallel route in India, especially the intolerably annoying crowds of predatory liars in Gorakhpur and Sunnauli. There is another border entry point at Mahendranagar/Banbassa (Nepal/India), which is very unpopular mostly because before the ceasefire the Maoists were frequently blowing up bridges along that way.
(By the way, if you're wondering whose side I'm on and it's hard to tell from my writing, I can't say I'm on anyone's side. When comes to the issues and grievances, I am certainly on the side of the Maoists. How could I possibly be in support of a religious monarchy? And I've been hearing about the crimes of the Nepali army for years -- rape, massacre, etc. Very, very few people, it seems, are in favor of the king or the royal government in general. The thing is that the Maoists are a military, too, and they have their own rap sheet. I think it's naive to give into romanticism and turn a blind eye to the horrors of the war and pretend that the Maoist violence is somehow "good" violence. It's very sad. So many people are displaced, squeezing an existence out of the fringes of Kathmandu because their own valleys and villages became to unstable and too violent. Many, many are dead. And to many of the living, this is all just a intractably complicated mess, above their heads and beyond their control. The hope is, of course, that the Maoists and the newly forming parliamentary government will emerge from the current talks as some kind of hybrid entity that is peaceful and fair to Nepal's most helpless people.)
Anyway, after spending one night in Butwal, I got up at sunrise to look for a bus to Mahendranagar. I was told first that none would leave until the afternoon, then told that I could get an earlier one to somewhere halfway and find another bus from there, and then I was told, once I was on such a bus, that the bus would go all the way to Mahendranagar after all. I was rolling by 9 a.m.
As soon as I entered the bus I was adopted by two teenagers whose names were Vinod and Sagar. Wonderful guys. I'm so sick of using the words wonderful, beautiful, blah blah, etc., but my vocabulary has simply been taken off guard by Nepal. Is it just my imagination, or are there fewer words for good things? Show me hell and I can tell you all about it in crisp, painful detail, but take me out and all I can do is bob around cooing "wonderful, beautiful" like a pigeon. I will figure this out and solve the problem, just give me some time.
So Vinod and Sagar sat with me and asked me lots of questions, and told me anything I wanted or needed to know along the way. We talked in a mix of broken English and broken Hindi.
After about an hour on the road, Vinod turns to me and says, "now we enter Kapilavastu." I don't know if that rings a bell for anyone. Kapilavastu was the name of the capital of the small kingdom ruled by Siddhartha Gautama's father. So this was it, the place we were always told about, where the Buddha-to-be threw open the curtains of his protected existence and wandered out to encounter the sick, dying, and dead. Siddharta Gautama was actually born in what is today Nepal, very close to Butwal (the town from which our bus had just left) in a town called Lumbini. There were wise old men that ascribed a certain importance to the baby and prophesied that he would become a great spiritual teacher. His father, the king, responded by keeping him on a tight leash and getting him married as young as possible. Much later, once Gautama had wandered all over northern India, broken through and become liberated, and wandered all over even more, teaching, he spent several monsoon seasons back in Kapilavastu. Anyway, I was pretty thrilled to be in that actual place. It was one of the prettier parts of the journey, actually -- tortuous roads around rocky hills patched with lush green ferns and deciduous trees. Some farms in the flatter parts. Apparently archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of what the believe to be the actual city of Kapilavastu, but there was nothing like that to be seen from the road, of course.
Most of Nepal is inaccessible by road. There are only a few roads in the whole country, really. If you look at a map of Nepal, you can see the few roads that exist. Those are all of them. It's not like looking at a map of Florida, for instance, where you see big freeways, then normal highways, and even the streets in the towns and cities, knowing that beyond that are countless smaller streets, roads, paved and unpaved. There is pretty much no such thing as a piece of property that you can't drive to, even way out in the boonies. In Nepal it is totally different. Except for a few main boulevard-style roads in the middle of Kathmandu, I saw not a single road in all Nepal that was wider than the minimum width for two vehicles to pass each other. And there aren't a bunch of side roads. For anywhere off the road, you have to walk. And most towns and villages in Nepal are nowhere near a road. They are only near trails. You can walk or take a helicopter.
So, I was on the Mahendra highway, which runs the length of Nepal from Mahendranagar in its southwestern corner to Kakarbhitta in the southeastern corner, along what's called the Terai. The Terai is the thin strip of Nepal that runs parallel to the Indian border and is flat -- before the earth is thrown up into the sky. It is all forest and farms. It's not all quite flat. Compared the nearby Himalayas it is flat, but not always flat enough to go very fast in a bus. My hope was to reach Mahendranagar by early evening or late afternoon so I could cross the Indian border and find an overnight bus to Delhi.
Not far past Kapilavastu, we came to the back end of a line of buses and trucks as far as we could see up the road. Our bouncy progress slowed to a halt. At first I thought it must be a Maoist roadblock. There were no hills in that particular spot so we knew it couldn't be a landslide. The driver put the bus in park, turned off the engine, and went off walking somewhere. Vinod, Sagar, and I decided to go up ahead and see what the problem was.
At the front of the line we came to a big knot of people talking to each other. There were a bunch of people, both men and women, adults and children, sitting on odd pieces of wood and logs that had been dragged into the middle of the road. Behind them was a pile of burning tires that was almost burnt out by that point. Beyond that, there was another line of crap dragged into the road, including a huge pile of heavy boulders and some large tree brances. Some local police were standing around casually chatting with the villagers and blocked truckers. I couldn't figure out what was going on, it was so strange.
It turned out that the there had been an accident the day before. A truck had collided with a motorcycle, both passengers of which had died. The people sitting on the logs and boulders in front of the burning tires were members of the victims' extended family or families. They were blocking the road until they received a large compensation payment from the truck company that owned the truck involved in the accident. They wanted 25 lakh Nepali rupees, I think. This was their civil suit, essentially, and the knot of people was a sort of ad hoc street court. The police didn't seem to think this was anything worth getting too upset about, and neither did anyone else. That was the funny thing -- no one was mad. Everyone behaved as if there had been a landslide, or all their engines had broken down. I was getting a little impatient, but I also felt so bad for the family. There was one old woman in particular who looked so brokenhearted as she sat there on a log. I imagine there was little else they could do but this roadblock. What else? Hire a lawyer? No way. File a suit themselves? Where? It's very possible that they could not even read.
It was about noon and sun was as high as it could be. It was at least 100 degrees F and there were no shadows anywhere, even if you stood with your back against the side of a truck. People all over were gathered under the trucks to kill time and discuss what to do. Some vans and trucks just turned around. Try again tomorrow, what's the difference. Today, tomorrow, the next day. Many bus drivers, including ours, decided to trade passengers with buses stuck on the other side of the roadblock. Underneath a big-wheeled truck, we gathered to get some money back for the portion of our journeys yet uncovered. This was a complicated, time-consuming process, with the conductor calculating each individual's fare and mileage on a piece of paper.
After about half an hour, Vinod, Sagar, and I were trudging up the road with our bags. The family just sat there as crowds of people dragged their posessions over the piles of boulders and logs. No one complained. No one even looked annoyed.
After about another hour of standing around working things out with bus people on the other side of the blockade, we were rolling again. I had given up hopes of getting a bus to Delhi that night, and was now just hoping to reach Mahendranagar before it was so late at night I'd have to sleep outside.
The bus I was on, it turned out, was not going all the way to Mahendranagar, and eventually I had to jump off and find another bus. In the end, I got to Mahendranagar too late to cross the border. I got a room and a simple dinner and started early the next morning to continue.
Can't write more now, gotta go.
posted by Michael M. at 5:24 AM
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