Kathmandu to Tambuchet-My wild ride

Last Thursday I ran out of work on my project. Coincidentally, Craig and Heather, an architectural engineer and a doctor who had come to the Mountain Fund to do some work on a rural clinic, were heading back to Tambuchet in the mountainous Rasuwa district due north of Kathmandu on Friday. Would I like to join them?

Hell yes!

Okay, to be fair, I had a moment of panic Thursday night and several dear friends talked me off the ceiling. Here's the thing: Although Tambuchet is only about 150 km from Kathmandu, getting there involves a 10-12 hour ride on crazy bad roads and I am prone to motion sickness.

But with some encouragement and Dramamine, I signed up along with Clancy, a volunteer who is taking a gap year between college and medical school.

The first order of business was loading the truck with lumber, a water tank, lighting fixtures, a water heater, and various other tools and supplies.



As we were loading up, I almost chickened out when Craig suddenly asked, "Do you think we should move the gas tanks away from the tailgate in case we're rear ended?" "Gas tanks? What gas tanks?" "The two full tanks of propane." Uh, yeah, I definitely think we should move those away from the tailgate. And cushion them. (Stay tuned: the propane tanks are going to play a prominent role in a future post.)


Fairly quickly we rose out of the smog that persistently blankets Kathmandu and were rewarded with lovely views of the valley.




The view from the back of the truck, with Clancy's feet:



One of the first things we saw was this ominous portent:



After an hour and a half or so, we stopped for breakfast at a tiny roadside restaurant. No surprise, on offer was dahl baht, this time 2 kinds with 2 different kinds of beans, plus sil roti, the round fried bread on top.



What do I mean when I say bad roads? Besides the one about showing up for the final exam and realizing I haven't been to class all semester, my only other recurring nightmare has me driving along a mountain road that gradually gets worse and worse until I am stuck on a precarious ledge and can't go forwards or back, which is when I wake up with my heart pounding.

The last 50 km of this road was like one snapshot after another directly from my nightmare. At one point we were actually driving through a stream bed for about 100 feet. In most places the road was barely wide enough for the truck. Here's a good shot of the road down into Syabru Bensi, about 7 hours into the trip:



At one point, we were stopped for about 20 minutes waiting for repairs to this truck:



The break gave me a welcome chance to stretch my legs and take some close up photos of the rice that was being harvested.





At another point we were brought to a halt for half an hour by this truck, which was parked smack in the middle of the road. The occupants were rounding up sheep and goats that had been grazing in the hills an loading them into the back of the truck. What I like best about this incident is the fact that at no point did it concern anyone involved that we had to pass this truck. Yes, this is a 2-way road. It was about this wide, with a massive drop-off on one side for most of the ride and we blithely passed buses and trucks with only about 3-inches of road to spare.




After about 6 hours, we stopped in Kalikastan (pronounced KaliKAst∂n), where the Mountain Fund sponsors a hospital, to unload some of the supplies we had brought.


The drive was fascinating in several ways. The road is relatively new, and has only been extended from Dunche, at the entrance to the Langtang trekking region and about an hour past Kalikastan, to Tambuchet in the last 15 years. At some point we passed a man, a woman and a baby on a motorcycle on the side of the road. The man flagged our driver and we pulled over. After a brief negotiation the man threw a large backpack into our truck and we drove off. 4 hours or so later we suddenly pulled over and stopped in a small town. The man came out of a house, exchanged a few words with our driver, and grabbed the backpack before we drove off again. On my bus ride home, we would pull over in towns and people would hand the driver envelopes or rolls of papers that we would deliver down the road, or would load bags of grain onto the bus that got handed off a few towns later. There is only one bus in each direction per day, and not a whole lot of other traffic, so it seems everyone helps each other out and the bus acts like a modern-day pony express.

Maybe hours into the trip, and without consulting us, our driver decided to earn some extra money by picking up a couple of men who needed a ride to Tambuchet. Although our truck appeared empty by Nepali standards with only two of us riding in the back, we were carrying a lot of fragile equipment that couldn't be sat or trod on. When we stopped in Syabru Bensi to buy a few last food staples, we were swarmed by people waiting for the bus. About 20 people tried to climb in the back of the truck, seeing that we were carrying other locals. With the language barrier it was impossible to communicate why we were waving them off.

Several times along the road we were stopped by young boys who stepped in front of the truck then demanded money, usually about 25 rupees (about 35 cents). Our driver told us they were Maoists, and signs of the Maoist uprising of 2006 were evident in the hills:



All in all, the trip was 10 hours of bumpy, dusty, tooth-rattling, bone-jarring excitement door to door. It was hard to complain with views like this, though: