Recorded on the trail while trekking in Nepal, the Diary continues.......
Up before dawn again. It's a bit of a battle to see what is the first sound in the morning - is it the local roosters, or is it our cook boys rattling the pots? They seem to stir about four-thirty - I'm instantly awake and stay that way. But getting to bed at eight to eight-thirty means a tremendous amount of sleep, so the early rise is no problem. Anne, though, hadn't slept at all well and was feeling very tired. The weather's still fine. A bit of cloud hanging around, but mostly sunny days; and we're all putting on sunscreen. A few pink legs and faces.
We're always amazed at the amount the porters carry.
Day three of the trek was hard. I think it was the hardest so far, very hard for me because I hadn't eaten for two days and was just weak. We did a lot of climbing, and rough climbing, and the breathing was very heavy.
The legs are fine, they don't seem to be dragging, but great gulps of air have been necessary for much of the day. Mohandra is very solicitous, and there's no doubt that all of the party will be well looked after by the leaders. Obviously it's no joy for them if people become sick. As it happens, quite a number of us now have the trots, but no headaches or nausea. It's all been confined to a dietary situation - and they tell us this is a bit unusual. Normally there are not this many who get the trots, so they're a bit on their guard. One extra precaution has been to put a pile of dirt inside the lavatory tent so that after every use we can scrape a bit of dirt over the top. Not that there's any flies. It's an absolute joy to be in a place where there are no mosquitoes and no flies. No blow flies. (The occasional fly, but they never settle on us or bother us.) In Australia we'd be demented. With the amount of filth and refuse lying around we'd be demented with flies.
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Lunch on day three came and went without me feeling in the mood for any more dictation. So here I am at lunch on day four.
Day three ended with us still going upwards, and the tents had been pitched on a ledge overlooking a glorious valley. In fact there was about a metre of dirt between the opening of the tent and the edge (precipice) of the hill. Anybody doing any unwise wandering at night would have found themselves falling into the farmer's garden, tumbling away into the abyss. Needless to say, a most spectacular spot. Before we'd arrived the cloud had come in and it became very thick and foggy. I wasn't the only one who had found it a hard day because, without exception, our people headed for their beds. I think even if there'd been an opportunity for a small party people would have turned it down - it was a hard day and we were grateful for the rest. Thank goodness Anne was able to sleep like a baby all night, and is much restored today.
While it's been a steady climb today, day four, it's been much easier and I've felt fit as a trout. So that has helped. The terrain has changed. It's more open mountainside rather than hillside, although I know it's a travesty to call these uplands "mountains", given what lies ahead.
An interesting feature of the landscape has been the rhododendrons; and it's no exaggeration to say that we are surrounded by a rhododendron forest. In spring it must be a glorious picture of pinks and reds and purples. Because of the altitude, or perhaps just because they're very old, the trees are stunted and gnarled and broken. Where we're sitting there's a small settlement and I suppose for two, three hundred, metres around where the huts are the rhododendrons have been cut off, and they've just left the stumps in the ground. Obviously used them for firewood. So you have to look a little bit further afield to see intact trees. Mohandra says that there are magnolias here as well, and that they make a glorious picture in spring-time too, although we haven't seen any yet. And up the ridge where we've been walking there have been some magnificent specimens of some sort of pine tree, the ones that I described earlier as having very feathery leaves. But they're grand old trees, and covered in moss and lichen; and given the altitude they could well be hundreds of years old. It's a great joy to see them when you know how desperate the local people are for firewood They've left the big ones, and hopefully it will stay that way.
Before lunch they give us a cup of hot cordial, not something you'd think of drinking at home. But I'm tucking into this hot lemon juice, and it's delicious.
The route up the hill was apparently laid out by Edmund Hillary and his associates. World Expeditions: "The Classic Everest trek follows the old expedition route taken by Everest climbers in the 1950s when Nepal was first opened to the outside world and Everest could be tackled from its southern approaches. It is indeed a classic route which takes you from the Himalayan foothills of Solu, inhabited by the Sherpas, and the beginning of the Tibetan Buddhist culture in this area, to the base of Everest (Sagarmartha in Nepali and Chomolungma in the Sherpa language)." In the old days there were tracks between villages and houses, but they didn't interconnect; and it was through the intervention of the mountaineers that a connected track was made all the way to the top. But it's become a major commercial thoroughfare. Certainly in terms of this country. We're passing people all the time going up and down. About eighty, ninety, per-cent of them would be locals. All carrying baskets with goods, and even baskets carrying empty bottles down again. Every place, every house we stop, every house we pass, has things for sale. They have a small display of Coke, Fanta, Seven-up, some apples, some barley sugar, other bits and pieces, cigarettes. Not a very large stock of Safeway standards but obviously the right range for someone to have carried up. The price goes up the higher we climb the mountain because everything has to be brought up here by hand, by foot, on the track. No canned drinks, and that makes sense: although bottles must be heavier to carry they go back for refilling, whereas the cans would trash the countryside. Anne and I stayed off the soda pop for the first three days, thinking that it would make us thirsty. But the stops that we make are so frequent that if you want to you can go from lemonade stop to lemonade stop and not suffer in the meantime. We're each carrying two large water bottles, and we found yesterday, on day three, that we drank the lot. So we didn't fill up fully last night and today we've been having Seven-up along the way; and it's not making us thirsty or feeling sticky or bilious, and we might continue that practice. At the moment (at this altitude) the Seven-up and all the drinks cost twenty-five rupees for a very small bottle, about a five or six ounce bottle. Twenty-five rupees is a dollar, so it's not cheap. Will be interesting to see how pricey it becomes.
Coming through the rhododendron forest has been quite eerie because the trunks are twisted and gnarled and covered in green moss; and completely soundless. No birds. I don't know why. No animals. No transistors. Someone said it would be great ......[tape erased]...... pass lots of trekkers, going both ways; those going the same way we seem to cross and re-cross each other each day depending where we stop and for how long. Typically not many words are exchanged. Most people's minds seem to be on their feet and the next step, but as you pass each other there's often a hullo and a bit of a grunt. People don't seem to stop to compare experiences. I suspect that sort of thing is saved for the evenings around the campfire, figuratively speaking, in the lodges, in the places where people put up for the night. But we've got all our accommodation travelling with us. Most of the backpackers ........ they're not carrying tents and food because they stay in huts along the way. Not all that salubrious, and I gather from speaking to a Canadian chap that where it's a two storey set-up the bunk room is in the upper storey; and because the fire is smouldering away down below them with no chimneys - none of the houses has a chimney - that the smoke just filters up through the floor and makes for a quite unpleasant place to doss sown. Still, if that's the only choice you've got, then you take it.
We've been walking all morning in shorts. We started out - it was quite chilly - and I decided to wear the shorts and the tee-shirt. Most others had their strides and jumpers on, and within about ten minutes we moved out into the sun and everybody was peeling off.
Here we're at our lunch stop. The cloud has come over, although we can still see blue sky in the distance, but it's really quite chilly and I guess something of a foretaste of what lies ahead. Everybody's now got a jumper on, and jackets of some sort. I don't think I'll put my tracksuit pants on just yet because they're awfully hot to walk in.
And as we've moved up the hill we've started to see large wood stacks. I think I remarked that lower down they seem to be somewhat improvident about saving wood for their fires, but up here they've got large stacks - and indeed under shelter. It could be that the wood is a lot more damp and takes many months and years to dry out, so they need to store it up and keep it out of the weather.
There are the occasional goats, not so many. They look almost like pets rather than being there for their hair or their meat. Wherever the people have goats they have to put some sort of protection around their vegetable patches, or else tether the goats. So we see these sort of makeshift fences of wood, sticks, cross-members, and bits of branches - sufficient, apparently, to keep the goats away. There seem to be radishes growing, and lettuces. Potatoes, but not everywhere. You would think the potato would be more prevalent because it's nutritious and easy to grow. One thing we've seen a lot of is chokoes - absolutely huge vines of chokoes growing from tree to tree and dangling all around the house. But there are relatively few vegetables. You see a settlement of two or three houses and there's not much of a kitchen garden at all, and it's surprising to think that the dozen or twenty people who might inhabit the settlement can live off that amount of food, because up in this high country there's no sign of them growing the millet and the grain crops they grow lower down. Maybe they make their living simply from trade. Those twenty-five cents bottles of lemonade might be enough to keep them sustained.
The nights are obviously very long here, because children, children, children.
Every place we go to there's a crowd of children, and they're very young. It's almost as though there's the grown-ups and there's the toddlers and nothing in between. The figures that follow confirm that Nepal has a significantly higher birthrate than Australia, especially if you (mentally) eliminate net migration from the Australian figures:
Population (millions) 1960 1990 2020
Australia 10.2 17.0 25.5
Nepal 10.1 18.9 29.1
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Well, here we are at lunchtime on Saturday parked on a lovely verge beside a rushing stream. We've had our usual light (in quotes) lunch, starting with our hot cordial. And then we had hot salami, sliced with some sauce over it, spinach with a bit of carrot through it, sliced and chipped potatoes (very good), platter of sliced yak cheese (not so bad), and an enormous pot of pancakes. More like flapjacks - quite thick, quite sweet. And if we don't eat them with the meal proper, we've got plenty of jam, peanut butter, and honey to plaster them with later. Then we've all finished up with peeled and cored apples. The apples wouldn't get a Safeway contract, but very welcome. And then the ever-present tea.
The balance of the walk yesterday, Friday afternoon, was superb, mostly downhill or gentle incline. Extremely picturesque: we crossed a pass, lots of craggy rocks, and finished the night at Junbesi - far and away the biggest settlement since we left Jiri on Tuesday morning. We arrived somewhat after four, so I think it was our longest day on the track so far. I asked Mohandra whether the town had been there before trekking became the local institution and he said "yes" and pointed out some old buildings, and said they'd been there for a long time. On a prowl around the town we found, and looked over, a Buddhist monastery. Quite a small affair, really just one large room where the Buddha and other ornaments are, with an upstairs where the monks .......
Tape 2 - Side 1
The proof of the age of the settlement came when we asked the monk the age of the monastery. He said three hundred and fifty-five years: and then like a doctor proving the age of an old person, added that it was built in1636. Spot on bar one year! The interior was very gloomy. This particular town, Junbesi, is lit by electricity - they have a small hydro plant. But the power seems to come and go, and it wasn't until we were leaving the monastery some minutes later that the light was working enough for us to see the Buddha and the rest of the ornaments and the painted walls.
On the passes and the high places we've seen tall poles erected, and prayer flags - not always on poles, sometimes strung across the trail or strung into trees. These are white fine cloth with words painted or stamped on to them, and small pictures. The monks, it seems, paint these prayer flags as part of their routine. Andrew bought one for two hundred rupees, about eight dollars; and then, as he was leaving, the monk gave him a small one on a tiny piece of fine paper as a gift.
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It's now Sunday lunchtime and we've stopped in a splendid spot overlooking a valley - surprise, surprise! It's been a glorious morning - in fact a little bit hot - and lunch is being called on at ten-fifteen. Really quite leisurely this morning, not much uphill, mainly following a creek valley. The place we've stopped is quite sheer, and terraced, and the cook boys are about three levels above us; and we've stretched out with our table and chairs, and our tarpaulin, on a little platform at the back or side of a house, just off the trail.
We've come through a most enchanting village where there's been some concerted attempt to grow a garden in the style that we would have it at home. Great banks of flowers. Anne amazed to see cleome everywhere.
Clumps of tree dahlia, and large clumps of bamboo - and large bamboo at that, with perhaps eight inch diameter trunks. Tamarillo tree. The usual marigolds, dahlias, and carnations. I don't know why we're surprised to see these things, but it brings a shock of recognition every time we see a flower that we know. The occasional rose - not many. This particular spot has lots of creepers and vines. We're not sure whether one is a weed or something useful. It could be a choko, which I've remarked on previously. We've also seen banana passionfruit - which we could identify!
Saturday's walk was a lovely easy day. Mostly level walking around mountainsides and, because the walk itself was easy, it was a long day and we didn't reach camp until around four-thirty. It was our longest both in time and in distance - we covered quite a stretch.
Things in the domestic environment seem to have become more orderly. The houses are neater. There are wood stacks. I remarked earlier that the wood was thrown in random piles around houses, and not much of it at that. But at the height we're at now there are almost invariably stacks of wood, very neatly piled, sometimes under cover. And the drying-out corn, instead of being slung from the eaves as it was lower down, is now piled in airborne stacks up bamboo poles. Not a helpful description. What did I mean?
We crossed another suspension bridge this morning and this time over quite a substantial stream, rushing very wildly.
The water was the clearest greeny-grey. This is the water that comes from a glacier - something I didn't know before, and something I'll be interested to find the explanation for. The rivers are fed by glacial melting. Glaciers, in addition to melting, move (at glacial speed!) and this movement grinds the underlying river beds. The melting water takes the pulverised rock downstream. The process produces fine-grained particles, so fine that they remain suspended in the water, and the optical effect of sunlight on the stream results in the blue-green "glacial" colour.They say the Himalayas are a new mountain range, and I suppose that means that the rocks are mostly volcanic. The Himalayas are not volcanic in origin. They were formed, around 40 or 50 million years ago, by the northward movement of the Indian sub-continent - which was then a separate land mass - and its collision with the Asian land mass. The Himalayas were thrust upward by the force of the collision, and are still slowly rising. World Expeditions expanded on the general geography of Nepal: "The Great Himalayan Range, which runs from Pakistan through India, Nepal and Bhutan, is the result of the collision between the main Asian continent and the Indian sub-continent. Nepal bore the main brunt of this collision, which resulted in the string of great peaks which run its 800 km length. Of the world's 14 peaks over 8000 metres, eight are in Nepal. Although Nepal is a small country of around 141000 sq km it contains the greatest altitude variation on Earth - from the Terai at near sea level to the highest point on earth, Mt. Everest (Chomolungma) at 8848 metres. From south to north you cross from tropical jungle through the terraced hillsides of the Himalayan foothills up through pine and rhododendron forests to the peaks and glaciers of the great Himalayan range which forms Nepal's northern border with Tibet." The rocks seem to have been the same all the way along the trail. There were a couple of interesting features lower down. The rocks had tiny black pebbles embedded in them, obviously harder than the base rock because they were sticking out. Andrew tells us they were garnets. There seems also to be an amount of mica - the rocks break up and flake, and the trail is often flecked with shiny specks.
As before, the trail is full of people. We have been passing and re-passing pretty much the same characters day by day. There's an elderly Swedish gent who's apparently been here a number of times. He's travelling alone, with a very light pack, and obviously dossing down in the small hotels that we pass. Hotel is a word that's totally inappropriate - they're people's houses with a spare room or a loft or a place where you can throw down your pack. In some of the larger settlements they boast of a shower, but we are abstaining from using such facilities because the showers are heated by the burning of fuel. This is a Nepali tragedy, that they're cutting down all their trees and will leave nothing for posterity. When we get to Namche Bazaar we'll be able to shower because they have solar heaters there.
We've had two occasions, including lunch yesterday, when we were able to bathe in a stream and do our washing.
As far as the bathing was concerned there weren't too many takers, and I gather from those who have bathed both times that the water yesterday was significantly colder than it had been two or three days earlier.
For some days now we've been travelling at heights much greater than anything in Australia, from anywhere from ten to thirteen thousand feet. This morning we've had our first really clear glimpse of high snow-capped peaks, although yesterday we should have been able to see Everest for the first time but it was an overcast day most of the time and it was just lost in the clouds.
Washing. What washing we do we attach with nappy pins to the back of our day packs and it swings in the breeze as we trek along. The socks we washed yesterday weren't dry because it wasn't a sunny afternoon, and they're back on again today. With any sort of luck with this sunny day we'll have them dry by nightfall. No doubt we're all less fastidious than we were when we left home. When the body washing options are between a small bowl of warm water in the morning and a frigid stream every third day it's easy to content yourself with the view that you don't smell all that much. And I don't think anybody does, in fact. We've been sweating a lot on the upward climbs, but we're not grimy in the way we would be at home with dirty collars. Shaving is not something that attracts much attention. I'm the only one of the whole group, including Mohandra our leader, who has shaved every day or indeed shaved at all. And there aren't too many clean-shaven people on the trail.
In terms of the ethnic mix I think there are probably more English than anyone else that we've passed, followed by Swedish, and a few Swiss, one Canadian chap, one American. The American was stranded at Junbesi. He'd been booked on a trekking tour with the promise of ten or so people, and when he arrived at Kathmandu he found that there was just one other person, a sixty-eight year old lady, and himself, and one guide. They then flew into Junbesi or nearby, and he immediately fell ill. Because the lady had a tight schedule she had to go on with the guide, and he was left by himself in a very strange place without any of the language. We had quite a chat with him: he was somewhat joyful to find people who could emphasise with him and speak his language. We saw him a day later. He was on his feet, and on the trail; he'd found himself a new guide and was off. But it must have been a very lonely experience for him.
Most of the tummy trouble seems to have left us. But I've now developed cold sores from the sunburnt lips. We had a nasty event yesterday, when Julianne fainted. We were resting up after coming down a fairly steep slope, sitting around in a backyard, and she was on a log - and passed out cold and fell sideways, fell splat on the ground. Quite unnerving! She had no sensation of fainting, she was just gone. Didn't take long to revive, but it was alarming for all of us. It obviously wasn't altitude sickness, but it was hard to find an explanation; probably that she had been walking at the head of the group and was a bit overheated and then sat there cold - because it was a cold afternoon - sat there cold, waiting for the rest of us to catch up. And she'd been sitting there for some time before we got there. Maybe that, maybe some sort of shock or hypothermia; but we'll certainly be on our guard to see that that sort of thing doesn't happen again. Julianne, and Shannon her husband, are experienced bush walkers and have trekked previously, so it came as a double surprise.
As I've said, there have been local festivals going on over the last few days. There was the day of the cow, also the day of the dog. Yesterday was the day of the brother and sister. Dunbar, our first Sherpa, has a sister in the settlement we were at last night, and so very appropriate that he should party on at her place. After we were settled down for the night Mohandra our leader joined him, and a good time was had by all apparently.
When we got to camp last night the cook boys found that the pressure valve to the pressure cooker had been left behind at lunch time, and the porter who was carrying the cooker, the kitchen boy, was sent back to get it. That's the rule it seems: you leave something behind, you backtrack and find it. Setting off in the dark over those treacherous trails is quite an ordeal. It wasn't until this morning as we were pulling out that the lad arrived back empty-handed - just in time to be loaded up to carry his share of the kitchen gear today.
Back in Kathmandu last Sunday - it seems an awfully long time ago - a party of us had gone down from the hotel towards the main centre and got ourselves on the trolley bus to a place called Bhaktapur. It was quite a long journey really. Bhaktapur was some few miles out into the country, and to see the trolley bus rattling its way out beyond the suburbs of Kathmandu was quite entertaining. Bhaktapur is an old city, and its principal feature is a series of temples around a square. We had a most interesting day. Lots of shopping - lots of shops anyway - and much to see. The place was substantially devastated by a recent earthquake, and I guess these old temples have been rebuilt to an extent. They don't look rebuilt, they still look very ancient. There's a small pavilion in the square which was donated quite recently by the West German government, and people talk affectionately of Helmet Kohl as the man who gave them the pavilion. Kohl was the West German chancellor from 1982 to 1998. The 1988 Nepal earthquake, magnitude 6.9 on the Richter scale, killed more than 700 people, injured thousands, and damaged perhaps 50,000 buildings throughout the country. Poor Nepal suffered another devastating earthquake in April 2015, 7.8 magnitude. In Bhaktapur, population around 80,000, some 30,000 houses were destroyed and some 120 monuments significantly damaged. There were 9000 deaths country-wide. There was an avalanche on Mount Everest, nineteen climbers perished, and others were stranded until able to be airlifted out. We were picked up by a small boy, a youth I guess, who offered to be our guide and was a very good one at that. He had lunch with us, having first taken us to his favourite restaurant - some family venue no doubt - and then declined to take any money for his services! He did see us right back to the trolley bus, however, and stayed long enough for us to take around the hat and press some money upon him; and we figured out later that the amount he received for his half day's guiding was more than our porters will receive for their three weeks.
It was a fairly drab day. It had been raining quite a bit in the morning, not unpleasantly, but we had pulled out the el cheapo umbrella - which immediately broke a rib. But it proved very serviceable later on on the trail in those first couple of days when it was unpleasantly hot; and, especially on the first day, when I'd forgotten to keep out the sunscreen, the umbrella was a godsend.
On the way back from the trolley bus terminal to the centre of Kathmandu Anne and I stopped at the central telegraph office and rang home. It seemed awfully disorganised with a lot of people waiting around, and it wasn't clear who was doing the ringing out. There were about five young chaps behind the counter, two of them just chatting and one of them seeming to do most of the work. It was necessary, in order to make a call, to fill out quite a large form with your particulars and information, and who you were calling, and the number, and all the rest. Because I didn't remember the country code for Australia I thought that there was going to be a problem, but apparently not - there must be plenty of Australians calling out. Anyway, it only took about ten minutes wait and we were through and quite clear, although listening to Tom's voice on the other end it was obvious that there was one of those annoying time delays between speaking and hearing. Tom, Dan and Laura, although not incapable, were being generally looked after and supervised by their uncle Bill, who had moved in for the duration.
On returning to the hotel we were given our duffle bags and proceeded to separate our gear into those things we were taking on the trek and those things which were being left behind in custody in Kathmandu. We're lucky in a way that the two suitcases we brought, quite by chance were of sufficiently different size that one fitted inside the other. So we've effectively got one case only in the lock-up.
We also, next morning, left our valuables with the tour company. We didn't have many valuables, really; the only things we've left behind have been travellers cheques, credit cards, and a bit of Australian currency. Anne had had the good sense to leave her rings at home. In the end we decided to take our watches with us. It was a tempting thought to think we could go for three weeks without knowing or caring what time of day it was, but in the end we didn't believe that would make us very comfortable.
So having packed our gear, a few of us then caught a taxi to the Monkey Temple, so-called. This is on a quite steep hillside overlooking Kathmandu. Not far out. And the taxi took us around the back way so that we were dropped right at the temple, the temple being a series of buildings, Buddhist. The view of the city is very spectacular. We were there just at sunset and it was most picturesque. They call it Monkey Temple because the buildings are covered in monkeys. Little monkeys climbing and jumping all over the place, off the bits of stone that stick out, or off flags - they don't require much to make a toe-hold, believe me. Also packs of dogs around the place, which are less attractive. They're all fairly unattractive, really. The place has a high stench from all the animal droppings; and we'd been warned to have nothing to do with dogs or animals in this part of the world because sometimes they can be rabid. It wouldn't be a very pleasant end to your holiday or your life to go down with rabies.
It was a lovely way to spend an evening as it fined up, and we stayed there till well after sunset; and then made our way down the steps at the front of the temple area, steps which went all the way down towards Kathmandu itself. And we struck a road and after, I suppose, about half-an-hour of walking we arrived at the Thamel where we'd been the day before, this time coming at it from another angle. We found it was really quite vast, much bigger than we'd imagined, and a different variety of shopping, different sort of shops in the part that we went through. We found a couple of squares where there were produce stalls. It's a place absolutely bursting with life, and a place that we'll be going back to again and again when we return to Kathmandu.
Monday morning it was up bright and early, stow our valuables, put our cases in line for the lock-up, and put our duffle bags in line to be thrown on top of the bus. The bus wasn't just a bus for the thirteen of us plus our leader and the two Sherpas, but also for the number of porters who had been engaged already - not the full complement of porters by any means. But we had a bus full, and a few rode on the roof.
Moreover, there were a couple of little boys one of whom was effectively hitching a ride back home. He'd been to Kathmandu to have glasses prescribed - in fact one of the few sets of spectacles I've seen in our travels - and he tagged along as a "boy Sherpa", and later peeled off when he reached his home town. His principal task, apart from carrying his own small backpack, was to carry one of the portagas lanterns so as not to break the filament.
So we piled into the bus and set off for Jiri.
The whole of our trekking journey is more or less north to northeast, and the road from Kathmandu to Jiri is generally in that direction. The first several days of the trek have been generally in an east-northeast direction. Later on we start pointing more north towards Everest itself.
The bus was a pretty old bus, with a large cabin area; and in with the driver at any time there were a couple of girls and three or four chaps. All seemed to be having a great time, and the driver - although he would flick his eyes left occasionally to share a joke with his friends - was the most attentive and expert driver I've ever seen. His double-declutching and the swinging of the wheel, which had three-and-a-half full turns from lock to lock, was really a pleasure to behold. He kept at it all day - we didn't get into Jiri until after dark, and then the porters had to unpack, and to pitch camp for us. This was our first experience of living in the tents. While we were waiting for this to happen we holed up in a teashop and had drinks; also discovered the two dollars bottles of rum.
The journey was brilliant. Hairpin bend after hairpin bend, but without any sensation of unease. It started to rain late in the day and the boys who'd been on the roof climbed in through the windows - they kept climbing in and out through the door for most of the journey; and there were quite a number of spots where the bus had very carefully to manoeuvre around a hairpin bend, so they would run out along the side, or hang right over the edge, to see that we had enough clearance, then whistle or bang on the roof to indicate to the driver that all was clear.
The road is sealed most of the way. It suffers from landslides and washaways, and there is a most amazing amount of work that's been done along the roadside. The road has been built up in many places, and there are great stone walls made of piles of thinly sliced pieces of stone that are all wrapped in heavy gauge wire netting; so they sit there like pallets of stone, and sometimes they're fifty feet long. And you can see they're there to stop further wastage of the roadside. Sometimes you can see the road is actually built on top of these retaining walls; and everywhere there's a gully where there's concern about erosion they've built these great stone revetments way up the gully and way down the gully beyond and below the roadside so that the water is being directed and coursed down without gouging more of the hillside away. We could see this all the way along - even quite unassociated with the road there was this sort of retention being done to prevent erosion. Quite remarkable work. Not sure whether done by the national government (you would presume so) or whether by local communities. No sign of the wire mesh rusting away, although you would think that it wouldn't have the life of the stone (!), and if it's a necessary part of the structure then they're in for trouble in future years when the wire starts coming away and the stone begins to shift.
Jiri is emphatically the end of the road. Thereafter everything is on foot. Jiri has one main street, a wide street, and on either side there are buildings side by side just like any town - two and three storeys high. Nearly every building is a shop, with a number of them selling fabrics, great bolts of cloth. Full of stock. So business must be brisk, although no sign of it that evening when we were there. Here was our first encounter with the filth, and the smell of human excreta. Our little campsite was really just a vacant block more or less in the middle of town very close to a creek, and the stench was not inviting.
After the rain it was a surprisingly cold night, and I was up early - around five-thirty - and went for a stroll down the main street; and it was alive and bustling. Every one of the shops was opening for business, and we're clearly among a people who live by the sun. I guess, put very simply, once the rooster crows it's time to be up.
While Jiri was a big settlement compared with what we've since been seeing it would still, in the precincts of the town, have had no more than two or three hundred people. But looking from Jiri the hillsides were dotted with farmhouses. Big. Big farmhouses. And so within the general area there would be quite a substantial population and it's clearly a road-head, an important focal point for trade. It's from here where everything sets off, on back, for the remoter parts east; and it's the place where people come through when they're heading for Kathmandu. I was so wrong. Jiri's population circa 1990 was around 3,900 - although this is in the Jiri district, not the town alone. For the faint hearted the natural hazard risk factors for Jiri, out of ten, are: landslide 8, drought 7, flood 10 and earthquake 9.9.
As we discovered next morning, the end of town is actually just an end of a town. At the end of the street there's a wide area, a sort of turntable where buses can turn around, and beyond that it just falls away into a track. And the track is where the trek commences.
To be continued.........
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