Nepal - traffic nightmares & dream journeys.

Travelling from Kathmandu airport to the Malla Hotel was less than half an hour through the most amazing traffic I have seen anywhere. There are no rules of the road in KMD & it seems as if the total population of 4,000,000 is on the road in every conceivable method of transport known to man.

On the way to Samata school we pass through a road widening area where they are just slicing off the front of houses & shops - Seems a bit dodgy to me. The traffic is almost at gridlock on the bone shaking roads. The dust, rubbish & pollution is horrendous. It's all very hot & tiring & time wasting. One day we had a huge traffic jam with a faceless army of bikers in their helmets coming towards us from all directions & blocking our way. A policeman had to walk in front to get us through – not something to be done lightly I thought!

A journey to Bhaktapur took us along Nepal's only motorway the Araniko Highway – 7.1 k built by the Chinese along the main route to Tibet 115k away. Nepal is 17% mountains & 16% hills, the rest is terai. There seem to be hundreds of dogs, mainly sprawling asleep on the roadside, but I hadn't seen a single cat. Just before Bhaktapur we suddenly went from motorway to a rural tree lined road, from which we could see the city to our left through the trees.

On another hot and sunny day, when the monsoon had well and truly ended, we drove to Dhulikhel. After Bhaktapur the road is much more rural & we started going up into the foothills. There are lots of brickworks in the valley & terraced paddy fields on the hillsides. The number of Tata trucks on the roads is amazing, going in both directions. The roads here are truly dreadful in places, with very deep potholes & ruts. It isn't helped by the volume of very heavy vehicles. Climbing a hill we can see a huge sandstone statue of Shiva on the top of a ridge. Bizarrely it overlooks a new water park being built in the valley, supposedly to attract tourism. It really does look incongruous. People walking along the roads use umbrellas to shield them from the hot sun. Kavre district is very lush & green – lots of different shades. We passed through Banepa town which has a very wide main street to make into a motorway later. There are problems in this area because they remove the clay & then the buildings collapse.

Driving back from Pokhara all of life is on the roadside. Water buffalo stand in the river. We are following the range of mountains on our left. We reached Dulegaon, quite an industrial area producing concrete & stone with a huge quarry in the wide river valley. In contrast there are also rice paddies. So you get both coolie hats & hard hats. Irrigation channels follow the side of the road.

After an overnight stay at Bandipur we had a lovely drive back down to the main road. It's very clear so the twisty & precipitous road is even more hairy than it had been going up! The remnants of terracing are on hillsides everywhere. Wild orchids grow on the roadside. Oddly there is an Agricultural Research Station on the road with lovely flowering trees. Children are walking uphill to school. We pass little encampments of wooden huts with hay stooks & animals.

Almost all of the way from Pokhara we followed the river Mar Yang Nadi on our left which varies a lot in size & flow of water. Whole hillsides are clothed in jungly woodland. In flatter places it had been cleared & de-forested for farming. Charcoal makers use the plentiful wood. Steep cliffs rise vertically up from the road on the right in places. There are shanty dwellings all along the road where women are talking, squatting & going about their daily tasks. 

Dry river wadi's come down from the foothills. The drivers signals seem to be the reverse from ours. A right flashing rear light seems to mean overtake. At Abu Khaireni the road forks left to Gorkha. People routinely carry vast loads in Nepal in baskets on their backs supported by material round their foreheads. Sometimes they look just like walking bushes from the back. Goods are also transported by 3 wheeled bicycles pulling a wooden truck on the back.

We passed through Mugling where the road branches off to the right to go to Chitwan. Mugling is quite a big, bustling town. We had a couple of very near misses overtaking trucks or avoiding the potholes in the road. Quite a few trucks are carrying water buffalo in the back who seem to be roped in through their nostrils & tied by their tails. It seems very cruel packed tight in the jolting trucks.

 

In this area the steep river bank on the other side is dotted with sheer waterfalls. There is a cable car the only one in Nepal, to Manakamana Devi temple. You can toil up the mountain from the other side. The temple is on a ridge high above the confluence of two rivers & if you make the pilgrimage here you can expect your wish to be granted. (Seat belts seemed like a good wish to me).

 

Red clay tandoor ovens are in almost all the buildings at the side of the road. There are a lot of very long thin deciduous trees – I have no idea what they are. The river bed obviously produces a lot of gravel for construction. On the hillsides the soils are red clay. The roads in Nepal are almost universally bad – but now the road is much worse & overtaking is very dangerous. There is evidence of landslides from the steep rock face on one side & stones & boulders litter the road as well as the potholes. Canna lillies grow wild on the verges. I actually think that Basanta, the driver, is driving faster than is safe & is overtaking where he shouldn't in his efforts to get to KMD by lunchtime. He is hooting his horn almost continuously & overtaking everything on the road including convoys of lorries. He either has a death wish or a pressing appointment with a woman!

 

We passed through some sort of army checkpoint where a convoy of vehicles was waiting. We were through quickly because we are a tourist vehicle & have precedence. There are a huge number of vehicles coming from KMD as well as going there.

 

We started to climb higher & diverge away from the river for the first time. This is apparently an “accident blackspot” which makes you wonder what the previous road is supposed to be. As we climb higher above the river gorge the traffic becomes worse & worse & so does the road. There are more & more huge, overloaded Tata trucks & buses which can only go very slowly and which are very obviously ruining the road. The ruts everywhere are unbelievably deep & dangerous.

 

The road became even more appalling as we went further into the foothills. Everything is now covered with a thick layer of dust & sand. You wouldn't know the vegetation is green. There is a choking pall over everything. Everything is grey. We are literally dicing with death in a vehicle with no seat belts. Vehicles drive on the wrong side of the road to avoid deep potholes. Their suspension must be shot. Motorbikes & scooters weave in & out of cars & lorries on both sides of the road, overtaking & undertaking all the time.

 

We are part of a very slow moving convoy uphill round hairpin bends with precipitous drops on the left side of the road & no barriers. The trucks belch out clouds of pitch black diesel smoke to add to the general pollution & discomfort. We have to have the windows closed despite the heat. There is a real danger of the heavily laden lorries tipping over as they negotiate the potholes & ruts. Unsurprisingly we passed a crash which had just happened between two lorries going in opposite directions. No one was giving way & there was lots of shouting. On our side of the road a truck had also collided with the tangled mess of electricity cables which is commonplace in Nepal. A huge amount of hawking & spitting was going on as the drivers tried to sort the mess out.

 

Reaching KMD & the Malla after the drive back from Pokhara seemed like coming home! I was almost relieved to be back in the pollution & dire roads that I knew so well!