Day One - the bus trip that took years off my life, but luckily , did not take our lives

Hello again everyone. This is your erstwhile journalist speaking. I regret that some of you have visited and found nothing but a title to quench your curiosity as to what we've been up to for the past month. So enough complaints, ok??? Will you be a little happier if I told you how it all began? In a hair raising $1.50 'local bus' ride up into the Himalayas, taking a total of 14 gut wrenching, brain jarring, knee bruising, confidence shattering, ass numbing, deals-with-God-making hours. No lie.

We arrived at the bus terminal with our porter and guide and procured seats for the '8 hour' bus trip up to the town where we were to begin our trek. So we took our seats and enjoyed the exotic sights of a bustling third world city beginning its day of bartering and begging for a leg up in the world. First all the tourists took their seats, some forced to climb, bent at the waist, over the 10 foot long, 2 foot high, pile of bags of cement and other supplies to get back to their seats. Then the locals got on, carrying everything from chickens to babies, to tomatos in baskets, goats, and everything in between. So the bus filled up to standing room only. Then standing room only got filled up. Then people and animals and things just crunched up against each other until the final inch of usable room had been occupied.

The Mac bus started with a roar and began its slow chugging way up and out of town. After a mile or so, the driver pulled over to the side of the road. I thought it was the first stop to let people out, but how wrong I was. This was the first stop to let more IN! Unbelievably, more humans crunched in to this ready-to-burst piece of metal and I found myself suddenly sharing arm space with a woman carrying a naked baby in a papoose. All I could think of was, this baby is NEVER gonna make it to the top of the mounain without having to pee, and where's she gonna pee!!! On me? God, I hope not. She kept drinking her mother's milk too, so I was sure I was in for it, seeing as the baby was sharing my leg, along with an greasy plastic bag her mother had placed there for safe keeping. So I crossed my fingers. And all the while, more and more people climbed up onto the already supply-laden ROOF of the bus, holding on for dear life as the bus began again and careened around corners and into muddy Himalayan potholes.

The first two or three hours of climbing passed without any real problems or concerns and Jessica and I were absorbed in the beauty of the tiny foothill villages and the lush green of the stepped mountain sides where the locals grow everything from corn to wheat to potatos and cabbage. And the baby didn't pee! So we had our first break for lunch and were introduced to the local staple meal of Dahl Bat; a giant serving of rice, with lentil soup and curry with some vegetable or another to accompany it. We discovered that our guide and porter had eaten it twice a day, every day (since the age of 3) of their entire lives. That worked out to be something like 15,533 servings, approximately, so far. And they were only 24 years old. I couldn't do it, I'll tell you that much. But I digress. We had to choke it down and get back on the bus before it left us to fend for ourselves.

Several more hours passed, our butts definitely feeling the pain now. The shocks haven't existed on this particular vehicle in years, I'm certain, and the screech of metal on metal didn't give me a sense of security about the brakes either. But you learn to close your eyes and ears. Many times we'd look out the window, only to see sky and falling rocks thrown over the side of the cliff by the tires of the bus beneath us. The roads are unbelievable narrow and certainly weren't paved, nor could they ever even dream of it. Serious bumps and hairpin turns made the ride even more exciting. At one point, we came to a halt because a dump truck had lost a tire right in the middle of the road, mid-turn on a hill, and was stalled. The next thing we knew, the driver had told everyone to get off the roof of the bus and walk a little ways. It was then that we realized that he was going to try to+J2932 navigate through a veritable crevice beside the truck, the only way to get by. Luckily, a steep earthen wall rose up right next to it, so when we tipped over, as I was absolutely certain we would, we would land gently tipped onto it and all the hundreds of us human hands could push it off and move it on. As he approached the turn and ditch, I couldn't help but do that sort of bowling english move you do when you want the ball to veer in one direction or another and you think that if you lean hard enough to that side, the ball will feel your energy and knock over all the bowling pins... You know what I'm talking about, right? Well, I did it, and it worked! Miraculously we did not topple over and we did not get stuck (for very long) in the deep muddy tracks. And then everyon got back up on top and we putted along again on our merry way up the mountains.

So our feeling of confidence lasted for awhile and I was counting down to the final hour and a half, when again the bus came to a halt, but this time, behind several other stopped buses. Turns out another truck had broken down, but this time there was no way around it. So after some discussion, we decided that we should set off on foot, a two hour walk to the closest town, and just begin our trek a day early. We had met some people while we waited; some Italian speaking Swiss - Lorenzo and Stefano, then Chris and Debbie, an English guy and Aussie girl, whom we would spend alot of time with over the next few weeks. So we started off as a group and got to know each other, hoping we would make it to Dhunchee before the setting of the sun.

A mere 2 miles from the town and we heard the unmistakable roar of a bus behind us and we cheered joyously! We were to be whisked away for the final bit. So we got on and arrived shortly in Dhunchee, where I hoped we would disembark and spend the rapidly approaching evening. But our driver wanted to continue on so on we went. Little did we know that the WORST driving situations yet were upon us, and with dark coming. The road shrank to one and a quarter lanes, and our driver kept passing the slower trucks we had come upon. Scary enough. Then dark fell and he did not turn on his headlights. Can any of you comprehend this situation? FULL dark, NO electricity, no street lights, narrow rocky dirt road bending and climbing along the side of a Himalayan mountain and the fool didn't turn on his lights until the absolute last visible second!! My heart was in my throat. I looked over at Jessica, who was smart enough to just close her eyes and not watch our tires poking off the edge of the mountain. I felt a small relief when the headlights brightened our way, until we came to a hairpin turn with a BRIDGE OVER A 3000 FOOT DROP, just before which we were required to make a three-point turn to even approach it. My stomch hurt now and my head began to pound. Then black dark and the stomach twisting hair pin turns began. A series of 12 or 15 in a row, no relief. Do I need to tell you that there were no guardrails? I'm not a smart girl sometimes because I couldn't help but look with great anxiety out the windows to see just how close we were cutting it. Very. I actually began to plan my funeral, or at least pretend I could plan it. Visualizing the last few seconds of plunging helplessly to our gruesome deaths! I was hoping my parents would be able to contact all my friends so they could come see the gnarled, charred remains of my body, should they ever find it. Okay, so I'm morbid, but I truly thought we were going off, several times. Then a man began to sing what sounded to me like a kind of prayer , and I felt a little comforted. At least everyone's scared as hell and it wasn't me just being a total drama queen.

Somehow, we were granted a miracle and were delivered, physically unscathed, although this will surely spend eternity in my memory, to the Lhasa Hotel where we fell gratefully out of this hunk of metal and into our thin foam beds, where we slept the sleep of the utterly exhausted. It was then that I vowed that I would walk back to Kathmandu and never EVER step into a bus in Nepal again!! (A vow I would break about 3 weeks later, but it was a totally different situation. I was only jumping willingly off a bridge this time, with a bungee cord attached firmly to my ankles... But hey - that's different! and I'll tell you that story later.)

I came to find out that Jessica took the whole thing in stride, having been in situations like this before during her childhood in Puerto Rico. So no big whoop to her, but to me -very big whoop. No more buses! This time I mean it. For now...