Driving Miss Dani

I love fieldwork. It may not seem that way from my blogs, but I love that each time I go I learn so much about Nepali culture and rural water supply systems, even if I have to endure some discomfort myself- actually getting to interact with communities is the main reason I wanted to come to Nepal.

So on Sunday I started on my way to my next site visit, this time to facilitate (with major assistance from Nepali speaking colleagues!) a community workshop on Water Safety Planning. Because I would be taking public transport in both directions, a one-day workshop meant two days travel either way- and that seemed to be where most of the quirkiness happened!

On the way to the bus, I noticed a power-line shaking overhead. I looked up to see a man standing on his second floor balcony whacking it with a cricket bat. I was too concerned with passing under the line quickly to ask my colleague what exactly the man was doing, but I’m going to assume it was some form of cleaning (or just extreme anger over load-shedding!), which probably happened on a daily basis- no wonder the electrical lines all need repairing!

On arriving at the bus park, we were informed that it would be half an hour until the next local bus to Gorkha, or we could take a microbus- these are generally Hi-Ace vans into which you can cram around 20 people. Even though I didn’t relish the thought of a four hour trip with my big Western bum in someone’s face, my main concern with this Micro was that the back window was plastic tarp; and it didn’t exactly look transparent- so despite the nagging of the Micro conductor, we decided to wait for the local bus, which seemed (to me at least) a little bit safer. Spot the hazard, Assess the risk, wait for the brightly coloured Tata truck with the broken seats (into which you can stuff 70 people if you also chuck some on the roof).

I don't think so Tim...jee

So we hopped on the local bus, and as we were chatting I could suddenly hear heaps and heaps of birds. It took me a few minutes to figure out that there was a box of one day old chickens sitting in the aisle next to us- it turns out 200 fit into a box (I don’t know how; not impressed from an animal-cruelty perspective!). Anyway, more and more boxes were loaded on until we were sharing the bus with 2200 one day old chola. That’s a lot of noisy chirping!

Well the chickens got a seat, even if the locals had to stand...

On arrival in Gorkha we started looking for somewhere to stay the night. I pointed out a couple of places which I thought would be ok, but was told they would be too expensive because they looked like ‘tourist hotels’ (still <$10 a night, but hey, I’m a local now), so eventually I was shown to my room in a ‘general hotel’… I had no windows, but I did have my own bathroom… where I was too scared to use the toilet, so made good use of the She-Wee, and where I didn’t shower because I was certain that taking off my clothes in that room would have resulted in me getting dirtier than I was too start with (plus we were at 1500m and there was only cold water; wet-wipe bath FTW!). But it was only for one night, so I curled up in a ball with two quilts and thought of how uncomfortable I will be in Australia when it’s 40 degrees, so this really wasn’t so bad…

The next morning, bright and early, we hopped on another local bus, this time bound for Arkhet. To my horror, a guy jumped on with two 30L buckets of dead fish. Gah!! Luckily he sat quite far from us, or I don’t think I would have survived the journey without vomiting…

Unluckily for them, the mother and daughter sitting directly in front of me didn’t fare so well. Every few minutes they would stick their head out of the window in front of me and vomit out the side. How pleasant. I tried to take my mind off it by admiring the amazing mountain views…

Is it cruel to point out that THIS IS MY WORKPLACE?!?!

One step up from Aussie wastewater ponds...

Once we passed Aroghat, the road started getting so bumpy that at one point something actually fell off the inside of the bus. Not sure exactly what it was, but it was a U-shaped piece of steel, and thank god it didn’t hit anybody because it would have HURT! An hour later, with my brain still rattling, we reached Arkhet and jumped off for some daal bhaat.

Om nom nom, bugs in my rice. For a while I pulled out all those that I could see, but eventually decided that they wouldn’t kill me; in fact, they’d be extra protein. So I poured my daal on and thought about other things…

We then got into our last mode of transport to the field site- a dodgy old 4WD jeep. I was in the front seat and the glove box kept banging into my legs- the driver apologised and said that was the only thing wrong with his jeep… I didn’t quite believe him since every few minutes we would stop and the kid who was standing on the step outside my door (and hanging on through the window) would grab a spanner and tighten the hub caps back on…

Along the way, the jeep picked up extra passengers and dropped off and picked up goods. At one place we stopped and the driver jumped out, not thinking about the fact that the car may have been in neutral, but the handbrake wasn’t on and we were on a hill… gah! Queue miniature freakout in my head!! I frantically looked for the handbrake, to no avail… I wasn’t particularly surprised. Anywho, after we’d only rolled a metre (but what seemed an eternity in my head) the driver laughed and jumped back in to put on the brake- it appears the handbrake was on the right hand side of the driver, how inconvenient. But hey, at least we didn’t end up in the river…

We arrived in Soti (our destination) a little after noon, where we met three of our colleagues who had just come down THE HILL to meet us. They had been conducting detailed surveys on the sites, but we were holding the workshop at the bottom of the hill; I’m 99% certain this was because my boss didn’t want to put me through the drama of the climb unnecessarily (much easier for 30 Nepali locals to come down the hill than one clumsy white girl to climb up!). My boss took great joy in telling our new workmate how last time I had been ‘weeping’ on my way down THE HILL- I pointed out that there was no sobbing, just tears running down my face… and I thought I was going to die, OK?

We spent the afternoon relaxing (or in my case, recovering from the fear and brain-rattling of the journey) and sat down for afternoon snacks. As I sat down to my beaten rice (AKA Rice Bubbles), my boss told me to make sure I sieved it because there would be tiny rocks in there that I didn’t want to eat… I must be acclimatised, because this didn’t seem too strange to me really. Earlier that afternoon I had seen a cow standing on a tarp of drying lentils, so I figured some rocks was better than cow dung- will try not to think about that every time I eat daal from now on…

As we ate, my boss decided to tell me something that just made me laugh at the crazy difference between being a water engineer in Australia as compared to here- the day before, at the water source for one of the villages I’m working with, the was a tiger hanging out and eyeing-off the team. I checked that there wasn’t a language barrier here (did he mean leopard or mountain cat? … Because obviously I would be much more capable of taking on one of those…), but he insisted that it was a tiger like they have in Chitwan. Awesome. After Christmas I have to go inspect these sources- I may need to update my risk assessment…