To get to our starting point for our trek, I had to take a 10-hour bus ride from Kathmandu to Shivalaya. The bus looked like any other local bus, somewhat dirty, but not disgusting. A small cabin was in the front of the bus's colorful painted interior, with pairs of seats on each side of the aisle, all the way to the back seat which has six, where I was sitting.
The trip started badly, even before departing, when the driver had to drag a woman off the bus for begging. A man entered next, with a giant box containing a TV, it was bigger than the seat he purchased for it by half. This space may have been negligible if equally shared by all five of us in the back, but my neighbor to the right seemed to find a way to take up half of my seat as well as his own. I got a good workout by pushing him to the side, but whenever I relaxed, he was back into my seat, sleeping on my shoulder. Many such buses have music or films playing during the trip at ear-splitting volume. Ours was lucky enough to have both. The feature was a Nepali action/comedy that featured only laughably bad acting. We all watched the first 15 minutes about five times since the DVD player kept malfunctioning. They apparently had only one film on the bus and we were lucky to watch it two times through in its horrible entirety.
The first half was not too bad considering. It only took three hours before the horizontal bar down the middle of my seat killed all feeling in my butt. After our lunch stop though, the trip became much worse. The road was steadily more and more bumpy. I tried to read, but the shaking confined me to one word per minute. It took much concentration to piece the sentences together and eventually I gave up.j
Our driver was terrible, flooring the gas when the road was clear, only to floor the brakes with each oncoming car or sharp curve. I found that if I planted my knees in to the hard metal seat in front of me, the impact of the bumps weren't as bad. Most drivers try to learn the skill of avoiding potholes and finding the smoothest speeds and routes over the bumps, but our's forgot he wasn't driving a jeep. One jolt was so strong, every single person on the bus flew up and smashed their heads on the ceiling; a few were tossed into the aisle. I hit my head so hard, it hurt for days.
A kilometer passed Jiri, we came up on the earlier bus, stuck with a flat and no spare. We stopped for only the second time at this point, in ten hours total of driving. Like a true gentleman, the ticker collector offered to take the bulk of the other bus's passengers. About half of the seats contained at least two people, stacked on top of each other. The aisle was completely full. The rest sat on the top, my highest count was 29. There was so much weight on the bus, some had to temporarily walk along the bus so I could round a tight curve. The masses on top made the bus so top-heavy, it actually rocked back and forth down the road. There were a couple of bumps where we all had to synchronize our leaning to keep it from tipping.
By this point, it was night, which made things a bit better, at least I couldn't see how high each of the embankments we narrowly avoided toppling over were. Despite the cold, most felt the need to open their windows for the dusty trip. The inside of the cab looked like a smoker's lounge. My sunglasses were caked with dust; I was looking like a miner. The last two hours, I did my best not to scream, "Please, let me off!" as we rocked down the mountain road, constantly being pushed by my neighbor. Though we were told it would only ten hours, it ended up taking thirteen of the worst hours of my life. Everyone exited in quiet understanding that we only narrowly arrived alive. The guest houses in Shivalaya made a lot of money that night from alcohol sales.
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