4. Nepal: Bus ride to Arughat Bazaar

The locals have a way of not talking about distances but about time to get to a place. This is a rather clever thing when interacting with westerners who have some strange notion that distance is real, time is relative. The bus ride was supposed to be 130Km. Tika promised us that we would do it in eight to ten hours. The distance, you see, is hardly the issue. The road-conditions, the bus-condition, the number of friends of the driver we encounter on the road are all to be taken into account. We picked up little kids travelling alone, we picked up a school teacher, we lost a poter at a stop (he was later found - he had boarded another bus), we hit some pretty bad stretches of road where the surface was more like play-doh than like any road that I had ever seen.

On the bus when a young porter, Hari, wanted to sit next to me, I had no problem with it. He spoke better Hindi and better English than most of the other porters. After chatting with him for a while, I saw that he left and Tika sat next to me. I learnt much later that there is a very distinct hierarchy among the porters. Only those at the top are allowed to sit with the tourists. Hari, on the other hand, was at the very bottom of the totem-pole, since this was his first trek. At times, the bus got stuck behind another bus that broke down. The simple solution of going around the broken down bus could not be implemented for two reason. One, the road was not wide enough and two, the bus drivers don't let other drivers down. We waited until the other bus was repaired.

A word about these buses is in order. The buses are boxes of tin with wheels and motor. Inside the bus, the seats are steel frames welded onto streel rails that run along the bottom of the tin-box. A thin piece of foam covers a ply-wood board becomes the seat and the back-rest. The window may not open if closed and may not close if open. Many of the fittings are either broken or patched-up in a rather unconvincing manner. However, the music system always works. The base is set to low, the treble is set to high and is capable of playing the most popular Nepali songs. In our case we were treated to a hundred repetions of a love song whose opening bars were greeted with the same gusto by our Nepali friends - every time.