Border-crossing Adventures

After our hurried 11-day Rajasthan loop, our much-reduced group from Kolkata (now consisting only of me, Giselle and Ana) reached Delhi, India’s mighty capital city. There we said goodbyes to Ana, who took her flight back home via Dubai, and Giselle and I sailed on fr yet another adventure. I will not write about Delhi because, frankly, my 24-hour stay in the city was uneventful (except for a scam we turned on the scammer – oh yeah – and about which I may write later).

So on February 11^th Giselle and I took yet another train ride, this time to Gorakhpur, a city in central-north India that is known for nothing BUT for being the train hub for those wishing to cross to Nepal overland. Due to some confusion on the train tickets, Giselle and I were separated into different classes for the trip. However, this apparent inconvenience turned out to be a defining moment of my trip, for it was during that train ride that I have met Sarah and David.

Dave and Sarah are a couple of extremely friendly and intelligent Americans from Massachussets (ok, Dave, we know you’re from Ohio – dang!) who were sharing the same cabin (a “cabin” in India being the 8-bed niches in which train space is divided) with me. We quickly warmed up to each other in conversation, and little did I know how much more time I’d spend with them before I was done with Nepal. They have been travelling a lot, having been in South America (shamefully not in Brazil) before tackling India, Nepal and Southeast Asia, and they also have great stories they upload on their BLOG. The one thing I don’t like about them is that they have this habit of choosing the worst possible pictures of me whenever citing me on their blog.

Dave and Sarah

Reaching Gorakhpur, we found Giselle again and the five of us (Giselle and I, Sarah and Dave and Giselle’s unreasonably big and unmanageable bag) got into a bus for the Indian-Nepali border in Sunauli. We went through the immigration rubber-stamping of both countries and finally entered Nepal. We had to take a 4-km bus ride to the (slightly) more substantial city of Bhairahawa. The funny fact was that said bus was already full. The Nepali drive just said: “NO PROBLEM, my FRRREND, you go on top the bus”. So, the four of us, along with a lot of luggage, enjoyed the only uncrowded and cool spot possible in a Nepali bus: outside of it. Upon reaching Bhairahawa, Sarah and Dave bought tickets to Chitwan wildlife reservation, their first stop in Nepal, while Giselle and I got ours to Kathmandu.

Goodbye to India

Our little gang on top of the bus 

We were starving, and we had half an hour before my bus, and one before Dave and Sarah’s, so we all had a hurried lunch of life-saving, redeeming Chowmein in Bhairahawa. Giselle and I reached the bus station 5 minutes before the appointed time, only to have a handful of ever-smiling Nepalis tell us that it had already left. WHAT?? And then we discovered one of the lamest national facts of my trivia treasure: Nepali time zone is FIFTEEN (yes, fifteen) minutes ahead of India’s, despite the country being minuscule and right in the middle of the Indian time zone. Indian Standard Time (IST) is GMT +5:30 (with this half-hour difference to other time zones being already odd, but understandable for the convenience of having a big country running entirely within the same time zone), but Nepali time is GMT +5:45, and these freaking 15 minutes made us lose the bus. I did some research on this and there’s no reason for that except to reaffirm Nepal’s sacred place as a single nation ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FROM INDIA. And, of course, nobody thought it would be nice to tell us while crossing the border.

We even tried hitching a ride in Dave and Sarah’s bus to Chitwan in the hopes of catching our bus along the way, but in some city up in the road we had to buy the last two backseat tickets for the overnight 10-hour uphill ride to Kathmandu.

Here I have to stop and tell you a little about what is riding a bus in Nepal is like. The terrain all over the country is incredibly rugged and steep, which means every road is curvy and narrow. Narrow roads make for small-sized buses, which also make for small luggage space, which means that everybody’s luggage is placed in the middle corridor. People who didn’t get a seat also seat there in whatever way possible. If you’re in the back of the bus, you have to hop from armchair to armchair through people and bags to find your way to the door. The roads are also all in terrible conditions, and the drivers are all crazier than in India (and I thought that was not possible). So you have maniac drivers speeding over holes and bumps on the road, and in each one the passengers fly from their seats like popcorn from a cooking pot. The drivers also pay no attention to the mile-deep abysses besides the roads, and the tire is always kissing an unsure-looking slope or rock. To set the atmosphere for that, every driver likes to pay his compliments to the passengers by introducing them to his favorite songs (all of them a young woman screaming to the limits of the human voice pitch range) in the loudest sound system I have ever seen in a bus. Now picture yourself in this ambience seating in a backseat, the bumpiest spot of them all, in a position in which you hit your head on the ceiling every major bump. Welcome to the joys of bus-travelling in Nepal.

Chinese pose while Giselle shuts down

The still empty bus

Nepalis must have nerves of steel and titanium bladders to stand trips like this with just one stop and even sleep through it. Giselle was able to doze off from time to time, but I couldn’t. I was rewarded for my wakefulness, however, with one of the most beautiful sights I have seen.

Nepal’s energy matrix is,like Brazil’s, mainly based in hydroelectric power. However, as a Himalayan nation, their water reserves depend on the mountains’ water cycle, which means there is a very dry season from mid-winter to early spring. During this time, Nepalis experience extended power cuts that can last up to 12 hours a day.

It was during one of these blackouts that we were crossings the mountains of the Kathmandu valley. The sky was fully starred, and the black mountains set against the dark night sky made it impossible to distinguish what was mountain and what wasn’t. The thousands of battery-based emergency lamps dotted the valley with star-like light spots, and these, together with the actual stars, created an eerie but very beautiful sensation of being suspended in the middle of the sky, with stars all the way above and below you. It was one of these moments that happen from time to time while we’re travelling, where unexpected beauty is found in unpredictable moments, and suddenly it makes all worthwhile. It’s really a shame that I couldn’t take a picture of that to share it with you: the moving bus made that impossible, and the faint light wouldn’t be captures by the camera anyway.

We reached Kathmandu by 4 a.m. or so, and it was a little surprising and depressing to see the city completely blacked out. I would never expect a city that big to be completely dormant, but the place looked like a ghost town while we were trying to find our hostel. The day was dawning when we got settled in one of the best hostels I’ve ever seen, Alobar1000, and went to sleep eager for the next day’s discoveries.