Going to the Valley

After a day in Kathmandu, we met up with our contact in Nepal, Nabaraj, for a ride out to the Lamjung Valley.  The trip from Kathmandu to Lamjung takes about 5 hours down windy roads.  Kathmandu is itself a valley, so to get to Lamjung, you take the main road up the mountain and then back down into another valley.  This up and down movements continued for most of the journey.  Driving out of the city, I recognized the same feeling I get when I drive home to Orange County from Los Angeles.  Suddenly the houses are more spread apart, there is less yelling, less honking.  With that, though, came poorly paved roads and precipices leading down into white water rapids.  Thinking he was Mario Andretti, our driver laid on the horn while overtaking the slower vehicles as we made hairpin turns down the mountain.  Yes, he honked the horn to let cars know he was on the wrong side of the road, that way, if there was another car coming around the bend (likely) that we could not see (very likely), they would hopefully slow down until we passed.  After one especially terrifying time of coming around the bend to meet a very large truck head on, I thought that Mario would take it easy on the gas.  I was mistaken.  Instead, he floored it and was just able to get back onto the correct side of the road before the truck came within inches of our car.  Nepali music (a mix between Indian and Chinese music) continued blaring and he continued veering.  I kept imaging headlines reading, “Three American volunteers found in a river in rural Nepal five days after tragic crash,” or “Americans stupid enough to trust a random man in a van plummet 100 feet to their death outside of Kathmandu.”  I decided not to tell the driver that we cared more about actually getting there than how quickly we got there.

Every few minutes during our drive down, I felt a cool drop of water on my face.  It wasn’t raining, and there were no fountains or waterfalls we passed, so I couldn’t identify the source of the water.  Then I saw it.  Mario was spitting out of his window, and sitting two rows behind him with my window open to compensate for the absence of air conditioning in the heat, I was in his line of fire.  Thankfully we had plenty of anti-bacterial wipes to satisfy my germophobe bordering-on-obsessive-compulsive mind.