A very long day

Our last day in India was 21st November and we prepared to head to the Nepalese border, a drive that normally takes about 5 hours or so. We left Varanasi at 5am and finally arrived in Lumbini, Nepal at 6pm - 13 hours later.

The problems were very typical Indian ones. The day of our travel was another festival day - it was Dev Diwali, which falls a month after Diwali and involves throwing a Diwali party for the gods. Millions of people (literally) headed down to the rivers to bathe. The photo shows one group in a river - the traffic had completely stopped so I was able to get out of the vehicle to take the picture. It's difficult to gain an impression of the sheer number of people on the road. I took a brief video which might give some idea of the noise, congestion and chaos. You'll see that one of our group, Marianna from Argentina, got out of the vehicle and just walked alongside it. So we were travelling at walking pace for kilometre after kilometre.



Eventually we reached open road. We had lost a few hours but were confident that we could still make the border before it closed for the evening. Then we encountered another problem. Three days earlier, a lower-caste man had been badly beaten up by some higher-caste men in a village south of the Nepalese border. The family of the lower-caste man had gone to the police and identified the culprits, demanding that they be brought to justice. Since they were lower-caste, the police simply told them to go away. Sadly, this is an everyday reality in India. So the family of the beaten man took action. They blocked the road leading to the border with a concrete girder and stood in the middle of the road armed with sticks and stones. They refused to move until the Chief of Police came and dealt with the problem.

We arrived on the scene only a few minutes after the road block had been set up, and waited for the roadblock to be lifted, along with thousands and thousands of other vehicles. The photo shows part of the massive traffic jam. About 2 hours later we were finally on the move again, and made it safely to the border.

We left the vehicle, walked to the Indian border post, had our passports processed, walked through No Man's Land (as they cheerfully call it) then had our passports processed at the Nepalese border post. We then staggered onto a bus and an hour later were at our hotel in Lumbini. It was pitch black by this time and so the scheduled sightseeing was cancelled, which is just as well as we were all pretty tired.

So welcome to Nepal. The guide books say that with Maoists running the country, almost daily bandhs (stikes which are violently enforced by the rebels) and constant power cuts, Nepal is even more chaotic than India. This should be an adventure! :-)