Road Trip, Nepal

Tania and I packed our belongings Saturday evening and bought sleeping bags, water, and breakfast bars for our trip north of Kathmandu toward the Rasuwa District. We were up and checked out of our hotel a little too early to have breakfast.

I count six people on top of the minivan.

We had hired a driver to take Tania, Belief (one of my adopted nephews) and his father, TN, and myself up to the village school. An old white Toyota Land Cruiser with an experienced driver that TN knew picked us up around 6 am. Even early in the morning the streets of Kathmandu were bustling and it took a long time to get out of the city. Eventually, we began our climb up out of the valley and soon it looked less like a mish mash of shops and houses and more like small villages and terraced fields.

On the road we saw many young children and I always wondered where the grown-ups were.

All kinds of work can be seen at the side of the road, farming of course, carpentry and human porters carrying heavy loads of anything you could imagine. Often, the only available water for a village is from a spigot that comes from the side of the mountain at the side of the road. Here a woman is washing her clothes.

Click to see the woman in the background washing clothes.
I was going to take another picture of a woman washing her clothes at a different spigot, but I got distracted by these cute kids.

TN, who is in the back, was able to convince the children to pose for me.

At about 10 am we stopped for some milk tea and a bathroom break where I took these photos. Most of the time it was too bumpy on the road for me to take pictures.

Many of the children whom we passed on the road ran toward the moving vehicles to sell red flowers that are both beautiful and believed to have medicinal value.

Finally, above the smog of the city we could see the beautiful Himalayas.

It took about 5 hours to drive to the path that led to the village school. From there we had to hike.

(All of the pictures are better when you click on them.)