Our most recent expedition to Mahendranagar took place in January 2006... We spent a lot of time house wiring, catching up with Ganesh's family, and drinking lots of sweet tea! Despite all this, our most memorable email was from the journey home! Check out the story of the magic bus ride, and our photos below.

Photos
General photos of people and places on our Mahendranagar journey!

A typical house

Electrical Wiring
Ganesh's parents were building a new house, and Ganesh is a qualified electrician, so this is where he taught me the basic principles of house wiring, and I finally got a chance to put those electrical circuit theory subjects to good use!

The new house

The Magic Bus Ride
Jan 26th 2006

The last few days in Mahendranagar were not particularly eventful... the wiring was complete.. plastering had begun... and Bharat (Ganesh's brother who had recently 'escaped' from school) returned home on completion of the 'test match' (they won) with 51 new pet fish, now in a bucket being fed a steady diet of wheat flour.... (apparently there was a school holiday).. the strike that was keeping us in mahendranagar ended, and we bought our ticket back to kathmandu.. the election wasn't for another 2 weeks, the next scheduled strike not until then...

It was then that the magic bus adventure really began...

About 5 minutes after we left, an army post flagged us down, and took their 'right' for free transportation of army goods, to transport a house full of new furniture to kathmandu on the roof of our already very crowded bus (coming from a rural area, the bus aisle was elevated to the height of the seats with 50kg bags of rice... and on top of those bags were squashed the remaining passengers who couldn't get a seat)...

The bus, now very top heavy, skidded, braked and swerved along the road to the next police check post (there were 12 in total, each requiring all passengers to disembark and have their bags searched by the army)... I must admit, I didn't think too kindly towards the driver initially... overtaking trucks on blind corners, screaching to a halt at every passing cow and stopping at strange outposts where there was a commission deal with the only shop owner in miles... especially after the first tyre blew (although we carried on driving as we had to make it through the national park checkpost by 5pm - we made it at 5:03pm)... When the second tyre blew, I became very concerned about whether we would make it to Kathmandu at all... at a passing small town (with no tyre repair) we found out that another strike had been scheduled by the maoists.. and if we didn't make it back - we would be stuck in a small Nepali outpost for an indefinite length of time... Around 8pm the 3rd and 4th tyres blew... requiring an hour long stop in a ghost town while the remaining 4 tyres were rearranged to best get to our destination... ambling along the road at 30km/hour to avoid another blow out, we arrived at a reasonably large town at 9:20pm, 20 minutes after curfew... After extended negotiations with the police they let us through... Buses aren't allowed to run at night, (luckily we later found out), so we settled in the cold, leaky bus for the night... waking up around 2am to the sound of gunfire... the maoists were attacking the same police outpost we had been negotiating with to let us through.. only 300m down the road! It was a frightening 2 hours until the bus was allowed to run again (now with 4 new tyres)... and the journey continued in relative peace (disregarding the high pitched nepali music that was screeching out of the speakers, the vomiting children, and later, the passing musicians that serenaded me in borken english) until we passed the first maoist trap for the day... A bomb... in a bucket... in the middle of the road...

Our driver was unconcerned... Pressing on past, but it was a tense moment for us as the bus passed within 1m of a bucket bomb (apparently a trap for the army - when they came to disarm it, it blew up)... but we made it past... The second trap was by the 7 democratic parties, protesting against the election - they built a tower of burning tyres over a passing bridge... it was a reasonably short wait (45 mins), until an ambulance had to be let through, and our driver, ever watchful, seized the chance to get past before it could be recreated... The third trap was an enormous tree, cut down over the road... no one would move it, belivieving it to be another moaist trap... but our driver, (who we now had a growing respect for), hurtled down the wrong side of the road, passing 123 trucks, buses and cars, told us all to get off (we were used to it after so many check posts).. and wobbled precariously down a steep embankment, through a mustard field, and up the other side... it really did look as though he was going to tip.. but he made it through... and I was even proud of our bus crew, that they resisted 3 enormous on coming trucks, and a few punch ups, to stand by our right to drive down the left side of the road, while other trucks and buses, noticing our example, tried to push ahead... (from the other side of the tree)...

We finally did make it back to kathmandu, again, with only a minute or so to spare before curfew would have locked us out... with only checkposts to stop us after that, relatively unscathed... apart from rumbling stomachs, dirty clothes, and some minor rubber tyre smoke inhlation... And without strong enough camera batteries to dcument the jounrey home, I did pick up one small artefact (a decorative head from a building that had been destroyed in the fighting)...