Riding High

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. But not just a 'beep' more of a 'treeeedle tri treeeedle' as the Nepali buses fly around corners they are meant to be driving around. Beeping a welcoming warming Namaste to the other flying treeeedle tri treeeedling buses. My transition from India to Nepal was marked by a fifteen minute time difference (always trying to state its separate identity while having the geographic mis-fortune of being wedged between two superpowers) and finally a comprehension of communication! After six years of first visiting and working in Nepal, I am actually realising the value of the painful hours of sitting in a wooden icy room, repeating strange new sounds. I remember working just to hold a pencil, willing my frozen fingers to warm up enough in order to copy down the vocabulary which our patient Nepali teacher was trying to share. At the time I felt like I had severely failed to grasp anything more than the most basic of understanding of the Nepalese language. But somehow, now, on my fourth visit to Nepal, my brain must have been teaching my subconscious, as communication is far easier than I remember.

This sort of helped as we sat perched on top of a bus. The sunlight was fading as the Dewali electric lights were illuminating the otherwise invisible houses and shops. Pink, green, yellow, orange – flashing rainbows dangling from every generator powered plug. My fellow passengers on the roof of the tin can bus were all men and young boys. The women and livestock all seemed to be squashed into the creaking carriage below. One pot bellied cheery farmer put his arm around Bruno as he began to explain that the next day was a special day during the Dewali festival when the sisters would 'tikka' the brothers. The pot bellied cheery farmer was on his way to his sisters house in preparation for this matriarchal tikka.

Sure enough the following day we rode past the most beautiful of tikkas plastered carefully onto the foreheads of boys and men of all ages. Pink, yellow and green grains of rice had been carefully placed on the metaphoric third eyes, while the fresh petals of golden carnations lay on top of shiny black hair of youths or the more traditional topi's of their fathers. What was even more entertaining were the many street dances, performed mainly by girls and young women but occasionally by pairs of couples: Live singing, twirling of hands, swirling of hips. The top of a bus was really the best place to view these colourful blessings of Dewali, and it made a change from being the object of stares to now be the uninvited onlooker However, the sun became too hot, and despite the stunning views of terraced fields and the rushing tumbling Kosi river, the grid beneath my bony bum seemed to grow harder, and eventually I relented and tip toed down the ladder to fight for a semi-cushioned place in the bus below.

Down 'below', inside of the bus, squawked chickens fresh for the pot and the wide kohl painted eyes of babies, who were not sure what to make of the blonde haired, teeth baring 'thing'. I wonder when I will figure out how to stop scaring local babus? The driver piled us all out (and down) several times: Twice for daal baat, and once in the dark on a hairpin bend for a toilet stop. I guess the men could have peed around one corner and the women around the other? Since I was wearing trousers I didn't pee anywhere. We all piled back in again and the bus remained intact. Two minutes later the bus would stop again and yet more Dewali travellers would squeeze the doors wider. And then another two minutes later – and so the ever widening spiral would continue, until, just as in the busy streets of India, I began to feel so insignificant. I sat watching a hundred lives interact for minutes or hours before continuing upon their separate web of journeys. Seats or spaces filled by one family would within minutes be replaced by different faces. Lives passed the moving windows, while Lives looked out of the same worn glass. I sat bumping precariously on and off my small seat, thinking about all the buses filled through of Lives moving around the country. I thought about the amount of buses which travelled on every different day, filled with different people or the same people, but different. I am one of so many; I am so little of so much.

Eventually, after covering 128 km in a little over eight hours rattled our way through the valley and towards the dim lights of one of Nepal's prime tourist destinations – Pokhara. Just as three years ago, Om Mane Padme Hum, seems to trill from every street corner, Nepali daal bhat continues to be dished up in incomprehensible amounts and the buses continue to treeeedle tri treeeedle as the laughing passengers wave down to foreign faces (me) from the moving bumping jolting travelling roof tops that speed through this land of hills and Himalayas.