Nepal - Day 1

We woke up early on the 19th of June to pack and eat breakfast. By ‘we’ I mean myself and Neha, an eighteen-year-old Nepalese girl who had agreed to accompany me. We’re both Bahai’s and met in the general course of community activities. Neha has taken several years of traditional Indian dance and is also an excellent singer.

By 7:00 AM we reached the taxi stand. The ‘taxi’ was a large white car, which had extra seats in the trunk. There were two people in the front, four of us in the middle and two more people in the back. Neha and I got the window seats and spent the next five or six hours with wind blasting us in the face as we stared out over the Indian countryside.



The Indian countryside is primarily flat, and vibrantly green. The roads are lined with trees and inhabited by cars, trucks, cows, horse-drawn wagons and motorcycles. Little side roads of brick or dirt stretch off across mustard and wheat fields, leading to little villages of straw and brick. There’s something very fascinating about seeing the people in these fields, or trundling along the road, and knowing that they live lives so extremely different from my own. What does the tiny boy herding the humongous water buffalos dream of?

We reached the Indian-Nepali border at around 1:00 PM. The countryside here was even flatter, and a strong wind blew the dust of the road into our eyes. We went through the process of securing myself a Nepalese Visa - a long line of filling in forms and ledgers. There was no problem from that end, and soon we were walking into Nepal.



We caught a rickshaw into the town where we were to catch a bus. As we were riding along we caught site of blue mountains in the distance and both of us joyfully exclaimed, “Mountains!” After five months of flat India I hadn’t even realized how much I missed mountains, and Neha was in a similar boat. The line from the first Lord of the Rings movie went through my head, “I want to see mountains again Gandalf!” I understood that!

We arrived in town, purchased bus tickets and then looked around for some lunch. The restaurants looked dubious at best so we decided on a junk food lunch of biscuits, juice and the Nepali equivalent of Mr. Noodles. We found a little patch of grass in a field and had a very pleasant and relaxing meal.

At 4:00 PM we boarded our bus. I can’t say what the first three hours were like because I was reading The Count of Monte Cristo. But after three hours it had grown too dark to read and I looked up to find the fields replaced by forest. It was a familiar scene, the road winding through a canyon of trees, and immediately made me think of Vancouver Island.



It was a long journey and seemed to take place in fits. I would begin sleeping when the driver would turn the radio on, or we would stop at some lonely little gas station, a single lit oasis in a dark and unknown country. Finally I seemed to get some real sleep because I woke up in an entirely different setting.