Another Bus Ride/Journal Notes

Plans in Nepal are difficult to make and even more difficult to keep. “Nepali Time” means buses, taxis, and pedestrians must proceed at a leisurely pace without attention to any kind of schedule. During monsoon season, this becomes especially dramatic.

Travel here is easy, though, in some ways. As the only pale skinned woman traveler, I am easily found and can never hide in anonymity as I could in a Western city. Everyone will ask where you are going and they will certainly tell you when to get off the bus. Although I was nervous catching the bus from Ilam to Kathmandu, the bus driver himself retrieved me from the café I was waiting in.

Claiming that the roads are rough would be an understatement. Landslides this year have killed hundreds. Although the highway is paved, the countless potholes make comfortable travel impossible. The bus has woken me up too many times with a whack to the head just when I think I am getting used to it. My window is attached in such a way that a 5mm crack opens the bus to wind and rain. I place my rain jacket up as a shield.

Although the ride up to Ilam endless mountains spread across the sky to the east, now the fog obscures any view beyond the road. Maybe it is better that the fog masks the steep cliffs the road falls off into; I am deluded into safety. On these bumpy bus rides, motion sickness is all too common. Travelers will simply stick their heads out the window and vomit to the wind and all that is below the bus. Last ride, I gave some motion sickness pills to a grateful grandmother.

The jeep in front of the bus’s bumber reads “OCEAN GIRL”. The owners have certainly never been within 400 miles of the ocean.

We arrive at ten in the morning, 20 hours after leaving Ilam. I have not slept. This is the third cross-country bus ride I have taken, and all have been longer than expected.

The Farm (Part 1: The Food/Rant about Organic Farming)

Food and life are not separated in rural Nepal. Food is life and life is food. The farmers work to plant and eat and live. Subsistence farming is an entirely different relationship to the natural world than modern America has with its ubiquitous desk job lifestyle. Many of us easily remove ourselves from the natural world by forgetting that food means plant, land, and farmer. The organic movement embraces this cycle and urges people to understand the origin of their food. At Reep Republic, I lived these virtues and fully seek to enact them wherever I may travel.

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Chitwan, Dherai Garmi Chha (It's too hot)

A moderate heat is the worst kind of heat. It tricks you, letting you dry and cool for a brief relief before bringing you back to the inevitable swelter. It is an array of ebbing and flowing unpleasantries. It will lie to you. The constant, humid, tangible, sauna-like heat of the jungle is a different beast. It never pretends you will feel comfort in the form of dry skin, or slow, deep breaths. It is honest and cruel. The sweat will fall from forehead to eye, from nose to ground. You will taste the salt of your body on your lips. It will never cease. But this itself becomes a respite: your expectations are always matched. This is the way of life in the summer heat of Chitwan National Park.

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Entering Nepal (Again)

I’ve seen the sunrise almost every day. The sky lightens just before five, the haze lifts, and the car horns begin. This morning, the hotel owners next door began their day with a dose of Nepali pop music that drifts from their open windows. Street dogs bark back and forth, call and response. Believe it or not, this---the courtyard of the guest house, tucked far behind the main roads---is one of the quietest spots I’ve found in the city.

The climb to Swayambudanth temple was embarrassingly difficult. After climbing the city’s hills, its 263 steps from the base to the top where the stupa sits is a hearty challenge. Near the top of the stairs, just below the stupa, a man blocks the path almost entirely with baskets of seeds and spices, colored power and necklaces. He is performing a puja, a worship to Shiva, whose statue sits across from him. I walked past him, clockwise following the other worshippers spinning prayer flags that line the circular base of the stupa. It is covered in the multicolored prayer flags of Tibetan Buddhism that spread good fortune through the air that passes through them.

While shooting a video of swaying prayer flags above, a monkey steals my water bottle. I go after him. He’s a baby, and futilely tries to attack the screw-off lid with his teeth while I growl and lunge in hopes he will leave it. Instead his mother, watching close by, growls back with barred teeth. I retreat; the baby has won. Soon she gives up on the bottle and it rolls down the hill into a pile of trash that I assume was also stolen from other unsuspecting humans.

I spend another day at the Bouddanth stupa, alternating between walking around it in the traditional clockwise fashion and hiding in cafes when the rain hits. With feet full of new-shoes blisters, I hesitate to risk much extra walking. Earthquake reconstruction has finally finished, and the stupa is once again adorned with its golden spire whose buddha eyes stare across at worshippers. At a rooftop café, I watch a number of men climb a ladder up the dome to the base of the spire to hang prayer flags. Even as the rain and thunder hits, one man continues with his armful of prayer flags. He dutifully hoists them in the air while I hide under the café roof, taking his photograph from afar.

The city feels familiar. Fighting street dogs, goat head vendors, lounging cows, ruthless taxis, deformed beggars---it doesn’t feel as rough as before. I walk without the anxieties of a newcomer.