On Busses

Climbing through the prayer flags and curtains of luggage and garments adorning the ungainly stretch into a Nepali bus is as close to walking through the gates of Purgatory as most living people can get. As your feet leave the dusty parking lot, you hope and pray that you will survive the journey and disembark in a place you'd rather be, but that's a very long ways away on the far side of enough calamity to occupy a retirement home gossip circuit for a week. To the practical, rational, logical Western eye, nothing about the Nepali bus system should work. It could only work through something akin to the Improbability Drive, but even then, where Western newspapers run a “snow report” or “surf report” or “crop report,” the Nepali daily papers run the numbers of people killed in vehicular accidents, and at least once per grade the bus squeezes past a burnt-out wreck scavenged and pushed half-heartedly out of the lane. But that's getting ahead.

Nepali busses all leave at 7:00 sharp. If you are staying in a decent guesthouse, there will be great kerfuffle the night before: you must be ready at 6:30 to pay and ride to the bus station with the proprietor's brother. At 6:45, the proprietor will probably be finished clearing his nose and scratching his junk (with his right hand, which is the clean hand used in all transactions), and wave you toward a taxi, “Hundred rupees. Cheap for you, no?” (In Nepal, if you have whitish skin your blood runs with dollars and euros.) The typical westerner will be sweating by 6:55, wondering if they'll hold the bus, if the ticket—a carbon-copy slip paid for at the guest house without any cross-referencing or recording with the bus line—will even be valid, if there will be another bus.

At 7:05 the taxi driver will pull into what looks like a wreckage yard lined with hulks of shagged-out busses built as larger siblings if the early Vanagon generations. To-be-gaudy rigs line the lot like the reject room for Austin Powers auditions, slumped and slouched while coming off the bender that got them there in the first place. Nowhere is there a terminal, a ticket counter, a sign indicating a destination, a sign indicating a bathroom, just a crazy crosswork of cabs full of faces as confused as yours, a patchwork of touts selling syrup-water coffee or tea, fresh fruit juice or genuine knockoff souvenirs, and dudes with flat-billed caps turned sideways smoking and pulling their pants not quite far enough up. You'll pull up to one of these groups and the driver might say something through a window cracked just enough to let in the stench of diesel and open sewer but not the heavy scent of syrup coffee or—gasp--fresh air, to which one of the sideways-hat hombres will grunt and hint at a gesture with his cigarette. Or maybe the driver will just say, “Get out. This one,” and you will strive to remind yourself that the driver and the proprietor exchanged half a dozen words, so he must know where you're going.

Here's where it helps to have spent some time in developing places. It really is as close to entropy as it looks: there is a dirt lot full of hawkers and homeboys and lined with busses that were outdated—stylistically and structurally—by 1970, presumably driven by the homeboys, who presumably know where they're going and how to get there, while a steady flow of dinky little sub-micro taxi cabs brings ungainly people with glowing hair and skin and burnished clothes. Every once in a while there will be a wild eruption of facial hair, tye-dye, and trail grit. Someone will grab your bag and throw it to someone else who's sitting on top of one of these shagmobile busses. The person catching your bag, a solo or maybe one of two dudes, looks like the sort who would not be allowed inside the bus even if he wished to enter, and his role is to protect your luggage enroute. And you do not think about who watches the watchers. Newbies are easy to spot: they're waving their tickets and getting worked up about destinations and times and seat assignments. God help us if there's a connection somewhere—then the critical assurances that it is THIS bus and THIS driver and it's supposed to leave at THIS time and stop at THIS place become overwhelming.

My take is to confirm a city name with the guy schlepping my bag—just say the name, and if he nods, I'm set to climb on and stake out my seat. But no rush: the only force in the world that could get the 7:00 bus rolling before 7:30 would be me showing up at 7:02. Then it would leave on the dot. The key indicator is when a truckload of locals show up—no matter what time that happens to be, it means departure in 3 minutes, tops. And if the sewer stink has jarred some associative impulses, it's squeeze time. This is also where it helps to have some in-country time: it's easier not to gawp when you're looking for the toilet sign and see some dude watering the back fence. Or when you look again and see a lady in the same place, in the same position, hiking her skirt a bit and fortifying the same fencepost.

Driver and Coolie I in a bus

If you're lucky, the bus looks like a cheezy throwback exhibition in a museum of modern kitch—curtains, glitter, prayer flags, airbrushings, psycho vinyl colors, chrome splashed with the delicacy of a tsunami, and none of it kept up or cleaned, save through use, since it left the factory. If you are unlucky, the bus was fitted by a sadomasochist instead of shag artist, or the vehicle spent a while transporting livestock in conjunction with tourists.

I like to sit just behind the front axle because it makes for a smoother, forward ride without being so far forward I can see what's coming. The front area is walled off, presumably to protect the driver's concentration, but there's a padded flop spot over the transmission and a few seats for groupies, coolies, or those too old and infirm to stand once all the double-wide seats have three or four people. For some reason, the little old lady in traditional garb, who looks as though she's never been in a moving vehicle in her life, always gets shoved into one of the cab seats, where she faces a full-frontal onslaught of the approaching traffic, and where her noisy and copious wretching can have the most effect as it wafts and splatters down the entire length of the bus, igniting explosively sympathetic heaving with every whif and splat. Most likely, one of the coolies will keep occupied running up and down the aisle with little black baggies that people fill and toss out the window.

Each bus has a handful of coolies, among whom are the dudes riding the roof rack, and two, three, or four guys—generally either growing into roof rack levels of disrepute or already grown into an inclination toward reputability—to wrangle the interior. Sometimes they hang out in the cab on the transmission pad, sometimes they hang out of the door, sometimes they perch in the stairwell, and sometimes they're kept roving the aisles with the said barf bags. At every “stop” (i.e. when the bus slows down in each successive conglomeration of dwellings wide enough for the bus to pull onto the shoulder while two lorries pass in a flurry of motorcycles) the coolies step out and shout incoherently—maybe the route, maybe the destination, maybe the equivalent of a Hail Mary. If there are passengers to load, one coolie will grab the luggage and toss it aboard or atop the bus, and the other will bodily herd the poor sod with wide and wild eyes up the precipitous staircase that might possibly be moving as slowly as a saunter, although a jog is more likely. And as soon as the first coolie has one hand on a rail, the other slaps the side of the bus and hops onto the structural chromework.

At a time with no rational explanation, the bus will stop in a wide spot or town large enough to host a crossroads. The stop will last between five and fifty minutes, which might be announced in Nepali. Safer to stay within a quick grab of the bus.

If it's a wide spot in the road, well-trod trails will lead to an embankment from which both men and women stand and play waterfalls. It may be a place as civilized and developed as a small village, not quite big enough to be a crossroads. In this case, the dirt-ish road runs through half a dozen hovels slapped together from tin, cardboard, plywood, grass, or bamboo. If it's a ridgetop town, the street-facing windows will be on ground level, while the opposite windows are held up by poles stretching to a paddy three or four floors below. This is a lucky stop, too: who doesn't love peeing off the side of a cliff? Otherwise, you're just peeing on a road and in a town in the middle of a crowd of people very curious about foreign anatomy?

If the place is an actual crossroads, or a larger village in the flats, it will accommodate a three-sided shed full of ramshackle tables and cracked or caving in plastic stools. An embankment or pseudo-shade over semi-isolated holes in the ground will be out back, just past the kitchen. Running water comes straight from a dipper bucket. Don't bother looking for a sink or soap.

Most places have a traditional tandoori oven. One or two guys will be rolling out roti dough to cook by tossing on the wall of the barrel-like fire chamber. Most likely there will be a large aluminum vat of something that looks distressingly like something you just saw out back. Maybe there will be a chicken or portions thereof on an iron rod stuck down into the flaming pit. Perishables will be kept nearby—maybe in the same space as the oven, maybe just around a corner—stacked in open shelving along with firewood.

Just inside the back door, there'll be a service window manned by a stout guy whose paunch is covered with grease spots. For anyone brave enough, he will grab a compartmentalized tin plate a little larger than a steering wheel, use a soup bowl to scoop on rice from a pot the size of a laundry tub, and ladle out doses of the unmentionable-looking stuff from more large aluminum vats. Those who sat and dug into plates of lunch, dipping fingerfuls of rice in the glop carefully compartmentalized around the edge of the truck-size hubcap, appeared to enjoy it almost enough for me to overcome my natural reaction. But even after picking up a parasite and squirting myself down to a critical weight accompanied by continuous, gnawing hunger, the prospect of bouncing and winding around for an unknown stretch of hours on the bus overwhelmed the potential nourishment.

Due credit should be given to the coolies and drivers who regularly travel the overcrowded and underdeveloped roads. About the only way a Westerner could successfully—which is to say, drive from one town to the next without being the direct cause of any loss of life, structural damage, or greater-than-normal evasive maneuvers—navigate any distance on Nepali roads would be at the helm of an armored assault vehicle or in the anonymous midst of a convoy. Otherwise, the lack of direction, lack of organization, overabundance of slow-moving or speeding vehicles, omnipresence of livestock or farm carts, axle-eating potholes, or single-lane switchbacks up and down precipitous slopes would very likely provide a brief and terminal introduction to driving in Nepal and a solid goose to the daily death toll in the papers.

Typical town on a local bus route

Nepali roads, even in the best possible circumstances, make any stretch of steep and curvaceous road through the Alps look fairly tame and unexciting. As a buzzard soars, three villages might be within six kilometers of each other, but the middle one will be at the top of a ridge while the others are at the bottoms of adjacent valleys. And ridgelines in the Himalaya are not nice, gentle, rolling hills but sheer outcroppings scalable via ladders between narrow terraces of rice fields. A watermelon seed spit from a ridgetop village might stand a darn good chance of landing in the next village, especially if it has a bit of a tailwind, but a bus is going to take fifteen kilometers and forty minutes to switchback down the thousand-meter ridge. And instead of a nice, smooth, flat road through the valley villages and a nice, smooth, flat road across the ridgetop plateau with an occasional nexus at a village large enough to host a crossroads, the road must connect each and every village with its neighbor, so to cover ten kilometers of a buzzard glide, the bus will take a hundred-some kilometers over three switchback-sick hours.

Flat stretches of road are hardly any better. Rarely is the road what a Westerner would consider paved—there are patches of pavement, just like sunlight might dapple a forest floor. For the most part, the road consists of dirt packed around large stones, or more precisely, the swerving gaps between the said stones. And as the roads drop into the more populous flatlands and the density of development increases, so does the density of extra-vehicular traffic: herds of cows and goats, children on oversized bicycles, older kids standing around looking for something to do, adults squatting curbside looking for something to do, and the occasional gaggle of youths who snag the passing chrome lattice and hop a ride on top of the bus.

Okay, here I am, what now?

And then, no matter where you are, no matter where you're going, the bus will dump you. With luck, the bus will come to a complete stop at a crossroads, one of the coolies will lean over and say your destination and when you nod and confirm, he will grab your bag and lead you out of the bus (I saw this happen once, when a three-generation family of very large, very blond, very vocal family was disembarked at a connection for a popular tourist spot). More likely, the bus will slow down to a brisk walking pace while a coolie hauls your startled keister from the uncomfortable seat and shoves you down the walkway toward the briskly-passing dirt of... someplace.

Somehow, as you stand in pummeling sun in the midst of a ramshackle collection of lean-tos and hovels that harbor dozens of eyes staring at you, your solitary self, in your disoriented and bleary delivery, the cheesy chrome and waves of vomit roaring off across the Gangetic Plain become a link to familiarity and safety, a ticket back to the known world, and its disappearance in a cloud of rattling dust is almost as acute as the side-effects of a local diet.

Yet there you are, holding all your worldly goods, left to figure out what comes next and how.