Country Archives: Nepal

Last night I shared the room with a brother of my host Jiwan. He is development officer for the village. I’m not sure what that means, exactly.

I had tea at Kolama’s, then breakfast at Jiwan’s, and then was rushed on a motorbike with Tonka, teacher at a primary school in the Jamuna community. I was told he would help me find a guide to track down the Red Panda. The ride went past the degree confluence again. I do understand now why yesterday everyone said it’s a dangerous road. It certainly is more dangerous on a motorbike than on a bicycle. After a few kilometers he stopped, locked up his motorbike in a shed at the roadside, and we climbed up on beautifully narrow and steep footpaths to his school, between terraces and people’s houses. He said it’s a 20 minute walk and he does it every day. The weather was lovely and the kids where taught outside the building in the sun. Elderly ladies with weathered faces sitting near-by, chatting
The guide, Tonka said, would come over ‘after some time’.

The guide and a boy and I left at noon and walked up to the forest. We had a short rest at someone’s house where they had a glass of alcohol each. To my surprise the path we followed was paved.
We climbed around in the forest, through young bamboo and between old trees. But all we found was the ‘Red Panda toilet’ and orchids.

Tonka had finished his classes and took me back on his motorbike. I asked him to drop me off near the confluence, 27N88E. It was just some 150m away, on the slope above me. I set out through terraced fields and across overgrown terraces. I stumbled on a man-made path which led me directly to the confluence. The GPS was still a little shaken from the motorbike ride and the trees didn’t help with getting a good fix, but I can say with some certainty that I was either directly at 27N88E or at least within a small radius. I was not the first person at the spot, for sure, but the first with the intention of visiting it for the Degree Confluence Project. I took the pictures required by the DCP and walked back to Pyang.

These confluence visits are getting more and more awesome. They keep bringing me to places that I wouldn’t have visited on my own and which few, if any, other travellers go to. The resulting experiences are fantastic.

Back in Pyang I said hi to Kolama and had one of her wonderful teas. She said I shouldn’t have taken a guide and I can see now why that is. Next time I will know where to look for the Red Panda, and when (in the morning!). Then I got invited from house to house for a glass of Tin Pani. Last but not least I had one at Jiwan’s before dinner.

I shall leave Pyang tomorrow, towards Phikkal. I really like this place and I will visit again should I ever come back to Nepal.

After a sweet coffee for breakfast (I’m lookig forward to real coffee, by the way, but this one is great, too) I left the house for a quick stroll around the village in beautiful sunshine. Soon I was picked up by an elderly lady (Komala, as I learned later), who showed me the Hindu chamber in her house (even though she said she was Buddist) as well as a Hindu temple on a little hill (which, btw, is the only place where I have reliable mobile signal). The air was a little clearer than yesterday and the view over to Jamuna was amazing. Unbelievable that I had cycled all along those mountains yesterday. The distance, as the crow flies, is really just a few kilometers, but in between there are 2 river valleys that needed to be descended to and climbed out of again.

It was market day today, so the place was crowded and colorful.

I got to taste tin pani, the local ‘wine’, literally ‘three waters’, because it is somehow distilled by stacking three bowls on top of each other.

I also tasted chulri, a snack made of milk fat.

Occasionally, (not just here) people ask me how much my bike costs. I’m down to US$ 500, which is way off but still a freaking lot for the people in the countries I tend to travel in. If my maths don’t fail me, the Nepali Rupee is worth less than the Indian one, which makes traveling here incredibly cheap. I’m paying 325 Nepali Rupees per day here (granted, I don’t have my own room and share all facilities), which includes food (100 for the bed only). That’s a bit more than 2 Euros per day (about 70 eurocents for the bed)! I hope (for them) that there is an error somewhere in my calculation.

It is warm here during the day if the sun shines. But it gets quite chilly in the evening when the sun sets (around 6pm). It’s less than 10 degrees now and if nothing else, the temperatures make me want to go back down to the plains. My clothes are not suited for this.

Houses here don’t have any fire places or other ways of heating. And no insulation, either. They have lovely earthen stoves, but those are used for cooking only. Electricity is available at night only. I was told yesterday that the villagers feel very underprivileged, understandably, and many would like to migrate. The road to here is fun for me, but it is no fun if it’s the only connection to the outside world. Supplies for the local shops are brought in by pack horse from Phikkal.

There is very little light pollution and the night sky is so full of stars.

The plan was to reach 27N88E, an unvisited degree confluence, today, and then go as far as Phikkal, which I had come through yesterday. According to one of my maps the confluence is located not far from the road connecting the villages of Jamuna and Pyang.
Straight line distances between all the places are not huge, a few kilometers here, a few there. But the winding roads easily double that.

So I continued on the paved main road, which climbed up to Ilam, then near Barbote I took a right turn onto an unpaved track. It was quite stony but not too steep and ok to ride, albeit slowly. It then descended quite steeply into a valey where a bridge crossed a river. I felt very happy to go down this way, not up. On the other side the track climbed up, and impossibly steep so. Every now and then I had to get off the bike and push.

The sun was setting already when I finally cycled past the confluence. It was 150 meters off the track, on a steep hillside. But for today, finding a place to sleep had priority. Locals had told me that there was a hotel in Pyang, not far ahead. I did find it, roughly 2km from the confluence.

The hotel is more of a homestay. I’m sleeping in the same room as my host. The same thing happened in Iran, where the guy dragged the mattress from his bedroom to the living room to sleep in the same room with me. I don’t know whether that is a sign of respect, or if they think I might run away with their possessions during the night.

His brother showed up after dinner and told me that they’d rarely seen any westerners here, if at all. Especially none on a bike. He also asked me how long I wanted to stay, and that they’d like to show me a Red Panda. Apparently that’s a rare species found in the mountains near-by, but I hadn’t heard of it. They said that tomorrow was impossible, maybe the day after would work, and I should stay a little longer. Why it was impossible they didn’t say.

Cycled: 40km

Rahasal Child Orphanage, near Ilam – Pyang

I left Charaali to the north. It was a misty day again, like pretty much every day since I landed in Dhaka 4.5 weeks ago.
After 6 kilometers the first mountains appeared in ‘the distance’, layer after layer. What I saw were only the first ‘hills’, not the the high peaks of the Himalayas. After 10 kilometers the road started to climb and I was leaving the plains behind me.

I climbed up to 1700m, slowly, and then down a little to a place called Phikkal at 1500, where the road turned west. If everything goes according to plan, I will come back here from a different direction (roughly northish) in a couple of days. The road followed a ridge with slight declines, before going down into a river valey to 500m. That part of the road was an awesome ride. Then it went back up.

A few kilometers before Ilam, my destination for the day, I was stopped by a young man who invited me to stay the night at a child orphanage he was volunteering at. He had seen me a while back coming back up from the plains (he had brought a Danish volunteer to the airport who’d been at the orphanage for 3 months). He and his brother are taking care of 6 little kids, the youngest just 2 years old. She had been found abandoned in a public bus.

I received a fine dinner and before going to bed we watched a Nepali movie about domestic violence, in which one of the girls had starred.

Electricity is a luxury here. It is usually available from 6pm to 6.30, and then from 7pm through the night. The orphanage had just moved into a new building that was semi-finished (the kitchen and a 2nd storey were still missing). It is being funded by donations and government as well as municipality help.

Cycled: 72km

Charaali – Rahasal Child Orphanage, near Ilam