I spent most of the following few days asleep or travelling, so they were much less eventful than the rest of the trip and can be grouped together.
I woke up on Friday morning and stuffed all of my wet clothes back into my bag. Kopila said not to worry, it would be an easy day- we just had to walk down to the main road, catch a microbus, and then walk for an hour, without any hills. This did NOT seem like an easy day to me. Plus, there WERE hills- it’s just that they were at a 30 degree angle rather than 85.
On our way up we passed an ambulance going in the other direction, and found out later that it was an Aussie volunteer based in the town who had gotten food poisoning from eating meat and was being taken to Kathmandu for treatment. For lunch that day Kopila forced me to eat meat, but it wasn’t pleasant with me considering the ambulance the whole time!
Anyway, we got to Kopila’s Mother’s house and it was beautiful. It wasn’t only a 2 room house, but it looked over Gorkha, and there was a shorter walk to the toilet than in Thumi, so that sold me straight away. And no animal poo on the ground! Heaven! I was sick from exhaustion, so spent most of Friday and Saturday sleeping.
I met two new friends, 6 year old Sujal Aryal and 10 year old Shilu Aryal. These guys were great for practicing my Nepali with. Shilu insisted on plaiting and unplaiting my hair three times on the first day (only once on the second day), and Sujal showed off his English- he’s 6 and English is is his second language, but he was reading from my dictionary, and muttering the spelling of words like ‘icecream’ and ‘pineapple’ to himself from memory. Obviously I was super impressed!
I also met Kopila’s father and one of her half brothers. When Kopila was younger, her mother got sick and couldn’t cook and clean anymore- so her father went and married a younger woman and moved in with her instead so that she could look after him. Kopila has 3 sisters, which means that her mother lives alone and has no one to look after her (because she has no sons or daughters in law). This led to a very interesting discussion between Kopila and I about the status of women in Nepal, something which I’ve been reading a lot about here. Kopila wanted to stay an extra day to help her mother out. Even though I was going out of my mind with boredom, I could see her point given the situation.
Anyway, Kopila’s half-brother is about my age, and loves Justin Bieber. I was most unimpressed when he decided to play that ‘Baby’ song on his phone- since I had no laptop or iPhone with me, I had no other music for 3 days to get it out of my head- not happy!!
Because of load-shedding, it was pitch black by 7pm each night, which meant going to bed to listen to radio soaps. It probably would have been very culturally relevant if I spoke Nepali! But instead it just made me feel like I was in post-war Europe… occassionally there were also spiders in my bed, so I wasn't particularly comfortable with the sleeping arrangements! There was also this picture from a magazine on the wall. I feel like I should know who it is, it looks like a 90s boy band I probably had a thing for... extra points for anyone who figures it out!
On Sunday, we finally started making our way back to Bharatpur. This involved an hour walk back to the main road (it had been raining, so again lots of slipping and falling on my part), and a 4 hour local bus ride followed by a city busride. So in total, getting home from the villages involved a 2 hour hike, 2 hour jeep ride, 5 hour bus ride (+ walk), another 4 hour bus ride, and a 15 minute city bus ride. Now THAT made me appreciate infrastructure and vehicle ownership!
On returning home the best news was that Kahloo almost peed himself with excitement, but more importantly- I still had my walking stick!!!
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