Monsoon Season's Greetings

We were volunteering in a remote village in Nepal, but we figured it'd be best to get out of the village before the monsoon eroded the paths through the rice paddies and trapped us there forever.

In addition to the daunting four-plus hour trek back to the road, Nepal was dealing with an indefinite transportation strike. We waited along the side of a road, keeping our fingers crossed that a truck would drive by and let us hitch a ride. Luckily, one came by right around the time we finished our second round of mango juice boxes. We tossed our packs up to the guys already in the back of the truck, and got pulled up inside. We were sharing the back of a truck with about twenty people and at least ten goats.

The truck dropped us off at a little town that sells fruit and cold drinks near a bridge. We had to wait there until a vehicle happened to be going to Kathmandu. We had some more mango juice boxes, and read our books with our legs dangling over the side of the bridge for about two hours until such a vehicle showed up. Again, we threw our packs in the back of a truck and jumped in.

It was a typical pick-up truck with a tarp and some metal bars covering the bed. We fit eighteen (yes, eighteen) people and our luggage into the back of this truck. We all huddled together and had to fully drop the tarps and tie ourselves in due to the monsoon occurring outside.

The obnoxious driver's helper kept shouting out "Kathmandu Super Express! Only 500 rupees!" (which is an exorbitant amount, but you can pretty much charge whatever you want during strikes). He should have called it the Vomit Express because nearly half the passengers lost their daal bhaat (rice and curried veggies) on the bumpy, winding road back to the capital. We kept having to rearrange seats so those suffering from motion sickness could access a window or the open back end of the truck. Those sitting closest to the back had to hold onto the clothing of the sick ones so that they weren't pitched out of the back of the truck and over the side of the mountain.

The six hour ride back into the city was actually very enjoyable. The people crammed in the back with us were so nice, and we had a good time despite the huge language barrier. The other side of the tarp had a really bad seam that let a lot of water in, so we fished out our ponchos and pack covers, and the guys patched up the mini-monsoon occurring inside. They went on and on for ages about how "raamro chha!" (great) our idea was. From then on, we were no longer the strange foreigners but the foreigners who could hold their own (and their daal bhaat) on the crazy ride.