A weekend on the road to Besi Sahar

We got back last Sunday from a weekend overnighter to Lamjung district, 120km west and 40km north of Kathmandu. We went to a small town called Besi Sahar where a Dutch UMN doctor has been working for the past couple months so mum and Carolyn (an American lady) went to see her as a kind of pastoral visit. So there were five of us in the jeep (mum, dad, Richard, Carolyn and myself). The jeep was definitely the most appropriate form of transport though the roads were generally in relatively good shape.

We stayed in the Tukuche Peak Hotel which was a basic but nice and clean trekkers lodge. The staff were friendly, the food good and the beds hard but clean. We left Kathmandu at 7.30 on Saturday morning and had a slow start getting out of the valley off the ring road. There is one road out of Kathmandu for all traffic going west. It is a one lane each way road that has been dug up at the main junction off the ringroad where there is a small roundabout and a stressed out policeman. The queues of buses and trucks go way back down the road and the minibuses and vans and cars and taxis and motorbikes are all unhappy about being behind them and so try to overtake the larger vehicles. This creates a second and sometimes a third queue of traffic on the one side of the road. At times this even manages to block the oncoming lane as the vehicles are unable to get back in the queue and still want to get to the front. A very stupid minibus driver managed to keep driving and went into a vehicle coming the other way (well on his side of the road). This of course caused a line of traffic to back up the road as the problem was sorted out with some yelling at the stupid driver who then proceeded to try and overtake on up the road in exactly the same fashion. We were a small vehicle too and it was much quicker in that second ‘lane’!!

Friday was a warm sunny day. It got very sticky in the jeep where your back touched the seat. The open window let a pleasant breeze in along stretches of road that cut into steep hillsides that were worn into valleys by a clay grey river which meandered and raged along its varying stretches. Other times the heat of a closed window was preferable to the nauseating clouds of black smoke that belched out of the orange fronted Tata trucks ahead which were loaded down with stones or large logged trees; or to the dust which rose along short stretches of unsealed road that reduced visibility to a few metres.

The verdant greens of the end of the monsoon vegetation accompanied us the whole day. From terraces, evidence of agriculture on improbable slopes to low lying paddy fields of vibrant green highlighted by the red sari of the lady working in the field. By the hospital in Besi Sahar we walked by rice fields where the ripe basmati gave off a heady scent that was so strong we thought at first we were smelling rice cooking. It was very rich. Apparently there are places particularly in the west of Nepal where the rice has not been planted this year some places because the monsoon never arrived and others because people have been leaving through fear of the Maoists. The lack of rice will soon cause hunger where it is the staple for the whole population. It makes the fragrance of ripened rice all the sweeter.

Along by the road we passed small clusters of houses where all the village seemed to be involved in the physically demanding work of breaking stones. The trucks in the river below are filled with rocks from the river bed by men standing in the water that almost reaches the axle of the trucks. The large rocks are brought up to the river and road sides. Here people squat under makeshift shelters of blue plastic or natural matting erected on four wooden posts and break rocks all day for a pittance to pave the roads as they stretch towards the west.

Buses full of passengers lurch around blind corners passing slower trucks. We saw a couple close shaves. Though not all are reckless there are some bus drivers who appear to take their lives, and those of their passengers, lightly. Along the road there are a few broken down trucks. These are marked out with rocks to warn other vehicles to give them a wide berth. When fixed the trucks drive off leaving their grave like markings as a hazard to other users of the road. I remember many years ago going to Kathmandu on the back of my dad’s motorbike and we were victim to one of these rocks! A good story after the occasion.

The green hillsides are scarred with red gashes like giant cuts where monsoon logged swathes of land have uprooted all the green and tumbled into the river or valley below. The road has places where the clearing away of landslides is still in evidence. On our way back in the rain we saw a team and their bulldozer clearing the road of some earth. They are very quick now at reopening the road. A little way along the road to Besi Sahar, past police checks where police in blue uniforms sit and check red coloured little vehicle registration “blue books”; past women carrying bundles of foliage at least three times their size on their back with the weight taken by a strap around their forehead; past suspension bridges which provide contact for people isolated by white water possibly cutting hours or even days off access to the road; past shops selling plastic containers tied and lined up outside, blue, white, red, green and yellow, we drove by a little old woman who was sitting at the roadside in the middle of apparently nowhere with bunches of bananas laid neatly on a cloth as the vehicles belched their noisy way by. A checkpoint manned by bored soldiers held us up for about five minutes as a young soldier took the opportunity to relieve the boredom of four months checking vehicles on a small road.

We stopped in Mugling to buy some fruit. It marks the half way point between Kathmandu and Pokhara and its main trade comes from the passing trucks and buses. It is a long street lined with eating places furnished with tables and benches holding people feeding on pre-cooked dahl bhat served on stainless steel thalis with water served in stainless steel cups. There are shops with piles of samosas, jalebis, syel roti and other Indian sweets; stalls with bananas and guavas; boys carrying round trays of neatly sliced coconut washed in tap water; makeshift stalls selling packets of wai wai noodles and chewing gum; carts piled with chickpea snacks and peanuts sold in newspaper cones and measured out in blackened tin measuring cups. This visible town front backs onto a busy invisible town of brothels, typical of an arterial town on the main route to anywhere.

As we neared our overnight destination we passed a stretch of brightly coloured houses. They were all typical of those built by returning Gurkha soldiers who invest their money in building houses for their families. One particularly gaudy one was covered in tiles, each one coloured from white to pink. A pastel palace! There were also more attractive traditional mud houses with thatched roofs and mud washed red walls. In Besi Sahar itself we saw the hospital which is still under construction/renovation though still operational at the same time. It was very interesting to see.

Having anticipated the good views of the mountains we had glimpsed as we arrived and hoping for some good photos I was rather disappointed to wake up to it still raining. There was low lying cloud with misty wreaths decorating the lower levels of the hillsides, the tops being obscured by thick clouds. The mountains were just a memory. Despite the rain we were fortunate to make it home safely, the hardworking road maintenance men having cleared the road by the time we made it to the landslide. It was a short trip but well worth getting out of the Kathmandu valley and seeing a bit more of the country.