2 November (Kathmandu –Besisahar)
The alarm rang at 5.00am after very few hours of sleep. Eugene provided an extra alarm call with several long farts.
‘Sorry.’ He leapt out of bed and legged it to the bathroom. He emerged rather soulfully several minutes later. ‘I think I’ve got giardia!’
Since the incubation period for giardia is a minimum of 10 days, I told him he was probably suffering from paranoia.
Narayan arrived right on cue while we were having breakfast and we bid fond farewells to the Mahalaxmi and set forth into the chilly dawn and the great unknown. We are actually going trekking! Eugene carried his own backpack and Narayan carried mine. It’s so swollen by a down jacket and foam mat that I, being a 40kg weakling, could hardly carry it down the stairs.
A whole convoy of coaches awaited a 7.00am departure to Pokhara in front of the British Council. I would have taken ages to find ours without Narayan. We had front seats so an excellent view if little leg room. The road was incredibly bad. It’s hard to believe that it’s one of Nepal’s major highways. Our vehicle was also somewhat short on suspension. Luckily, Eugene is just as excited as me by splendid scenery and we gawked and gasped when we rounded a bend and beheld our first view of the Himalayas. My eyes soon grew droopy but I struggled to keep them open because I didn’t want to miss anything. We had a pit stop with an Asian style loo, but at least it wasn’t communal like in China. Nothing is worse than trying to perform with a herd of curious oriental eyes watching you! At around 10.30 we stopped for lunch. Our restaurant was beautifully located at a bend in a river with grass banks to sprawl on in the sun. I was already starving! We sampled our first dahl baht (huge mounds of rice topped with a watery lentil curry with veg and pickles on the side – Nepal’s staple food). I thought it was pretty good.
We arrived in Dumre (mega dump!) at around mid-day. There followed a wild wild ride on the roof of a bus to Besisahar, the starting point of our trek. Since hot sun blazed down and there appeared to be several hundred people crammed into our 60-seater vehicle, the roof was the place to be! There was a great crowd up there too: a German couple called Gerard and Gudrun, John from Britain and Serge, a real character of a French guy who seemed quite morose at first but was delighted when he found that I spoke his native tongue, and talked enthusiastically, flinging his arms about in animated Gallic fashion to illustrate his stories of travels in Pakistan. He had to make a panic grab for the roof railing whenever we hit the biggest potholes.
When our conveyance, which should probably have been scrapped sometime after the First World War lurched off, we had all made a wild grab for the side and even Narayan let out a cry of ‘Shit!’ We didn’t know how we were going to survive five hours of such abuse but it’s surprising how quickly you adapt to adversity. Crossing rivers could be pretty scary. The journey was further enlivened by Tata trucks decked out with tinsel and Hindu gods bumping along in the opposite direction, full, roof and all, of cheering election campaigners. At a police check point, Gerard nobly clambered down with all the trekking permits. Unfortunately, the bus started to move off while he was half way back up the ladder. His panic-stricken face appeared over the top. ‘Wait!!!’ He ended up with one leg on top of a backpack, the other hanging in mid air. One hand latched onto someone’s head and the other clawed frantically at thin air as the bus lurched over a rocky stream bed. We all dragged him over the scramble of bodies and backpacks as he shrieked his head off and cheered when he made it back to his position at the front, where he had a good view of all the precipices ahead and could illustrate them graphically with his facial expressions for the benefit of anyone who couldn’t see. When we finally bounced into Besisahar we were all nearly too stiff to climb down but we were still laughing. I think everyone had enjoyed every minute of it, especially Gerard.
We thought we might have been short changed on our first ‘tea house’ room. It was barely big enough for two narrow plank beds with thin mattresses, dark, dingy and made of hardboard. We decided to look around the village to see if anyone else had anything more luxurious. It was too dark to see much but everywhere else looked pretty similar. There were no other trekkers in our guest house so over a solitary dinner, I got out my Lonely Planet guide, opened it at the language page and persuaded Narayan to teach us some essential Nepali. LP suggested such key phrases as ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got diarrhoea’. We mastered a few greetings, numbers and ‘thank you’ which seemed to please Narayan. He then taught us ‘Resum Piriri’ a Nepali folk song. We were worried it might be rude words but he assured us it meant ‘We go up up up’ which seems appropriate as a trekking anthem. I was covered in dust from the ride on the roof but couldn’t face a cold shower although at this altitude (only about 800m) it was warm enough to sit around in a T-shirt even after dark. Instead we lay in our room writing postcards until the lights went out abruptly at 10.00pm. The space between our beds was so tiny that I had to assure Eugene that I wasn’t trying to touch him up, I was merely looking for the torch.
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