Peeling Away the Outside Layer – Part 2
Kathmandu to Phedi, Nepal
By Keith Hearne
This morning I took what may very well be my last shower. The bus journey started at a little after 6:15 am, at which time the streets of Thamel and Kathmandu were alive with the same bustle that we encountered the previous day at around 3:00 pm. Do these people ever sleep? The hive of people selling and buying, horns beeping furiously in the morning madness. You’d be lucky to hear a minute go by on the streets without someone tooting their horn in your ear. At home, horns are mainly used for 2 reasons; in anger or in salute, however here it’s a whole different story. As far as I can make out most vehicles have more then one horn sound. I personally think that I heard 3 different distinct horn sounds from our bus alone on today’s journey. It seems to almost be a form of language, bringing some organization into the chaos of driving in Nepal. The horn is used when passing other vehicles, to determine who has right of way, to salute, to tell people to move. Some trucks even encourage it with ‘HORN PLEASE’ wrote across the back of the trucks. Another popular sign on the back of some vehicles was ‘LOVE IS LIFE’, a personal favourite of mine and might account for the numerous amount of men walking around holding hands and hugging each other on the side of the road, a trait that is a common occurrence in India and parts of Asia.
Today’s journey took 9.5 hours by bus and was almost every minute breathtaking. It kind of gave the first real exposure to the Nepal outside of Kathmandu. Constantly surrounded by huge, cascading valley walls, hovering high above us as we trundled our way through and over valley floors in our little steel vessel, baking in the back seats as the day began to heat up. Unlike the valleys in Ireland, we’re talking thousands of feet, and possibly hundreds of miles and a non-stop feast of eye candy all the way. I was pretty tired during my waking hours of the journey but just couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes for fear of what I might miss.
It was 8:20 am in the morning and all the valley houses and little communities of dwellings that seem to spring up round different corners were all heaving with activity. At some of the riversides there was amazing colourful sites of the women, dressed in striking vibrant red clothes, all lined up washing clothes. It was such a contrast to the greeny/muddy brown waters, slate coloured rocks and the myriad of greens all around that it was so striking to the eye, I liken it to a vibrant, stiking butterfly on a pale green flower. At sides of roads where there was running water or a small trickle from the overhanging rocks, locals washed and showered. The rice fields covered the hills for miles, round every turn, up every hillside, shaped in their unusually (or what seemed to be) totally random and unstructured ridges almost like steps up the hillside. Most of the valley walls were awash with hues of green jungle vegetation and trees, sometimes broken by a brown patch where a landslide had washed away part of the valley wall. It reminded me a lot of the valleys in some of the old war films from Vietnam, such as ‘Apocalypse Now’, where you had scenes of helicopters flying and weaving their way down the river, which meandered its way through the jungle. The only difference is that you don’t really take that sort of beauty in when you see it in a clip from a movie but here you have no choice, you become mesmerized by it, it’s really something else.
Once again the local Nepalese stunned me today, such a resilient but honest people. On more then one occasion we drove over the remains of roads which had been buried under landslides created by the monsoon like weather. People worked to clear the debris and mud from the road and pack the roadsides up with stone to try prevent it from happening again. While that in itself is not a major thing it’s the thought that these people do this every year, with their hands and shovels clawing into the land in defiance, sort of like saying “we’re going nowhere”. Every year the monsoon season comes, washes roads and houses away and they just come along with more stone or corrugated iron or whatever it takes and to build it all up again. They seem to have an impenetrable will and way about them, not even Mother Nature can shake these people.
At another stage in the journey we were caught in a traffic jam that seemed to be miles long and disappeared round the corner up ahead, so we left the bus for a while to shake out our weary bones. In a matter of minutes we were surrounded by, or rather Hilary, one of the girls, was surrounded by throngs of local people, giving the kids lessons on the European coins that they had and where exactly they were from. There were literally about 25 people all gathered around her in a circle and amongst them two very young kids with their father and brother, Cabina & Sayir. The people really do seem to have a genuine honesty and interest, and I think Hilary learned a lot from them in that short period of time as well.
They have so little in a lot of ways, but at the same time you only have to meet some of them and spend a little time with them in the beauty of their own country to realize that they have so much in other ways. It really could change the way that you look at your own home life and what it is we have. Thomas, my little brother, doesn’t know how lucky he has it. I’ve seen kids his age here that are out working, sitting at a road side quarry of some sort, we passed numerous ones on our way, just sitting there for hours breaking stones, most of which are either used for roads or packing up the landslides or steps and houses up the mountains. Either that or they are out selling tiger balm in the city streets, or harvesting grass for the livestock that people keep. Never mind worrying about where he can get money for credit for his mobile so that he can play snake, it’s a whole other life here and with it comes a whole other set of worldly or daily worries.
Read Part 3 .
