No breakfast for us this morning, up at 6:30 packing our bags to catch the bus back to Kathmandu. We did however stop by the German bakery to buy some snacks for the journey. As I was purchasing the Danish pattie, cheese and chocolate croissants I noticed a roach or beetle walking over some of the produce, oh well what else can you expect.
We biked around to what we thought was the bus park and waited patiently eating some of the baking. It was nearing 7:30 and the bus guy yesterday told us to be there by 7:00, but there was no sign of our bus only passing local government blue and white buses. I asked a passerby where the bus park was and he said “down there, must go quickly”, so off we went and sure enough we just got there with enough time to get the bikes on the roof, tie them down, and away we went. Ollie and I initial had the back right hand side to ourselves whilst two Asian girls had the other side, luckily they got off after only a few hours and then I had the whole back row to myself as Ollie move forward a row.
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| Ollie's attempt at drinking from his bottle left him pretty wet, due to the bumpy road. |
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| Our last view of the Annapuranas. |
The bus ride was hot, noisy and extremely rough, but it did allow one to get a good grasp of rural Nepal, without having to sweat and pant as if you were on a bike. The bus stopped at the bottom of our detour hill before Dumre for breakfast. We had some Sprite, as I was still avoiding coke due to my binge a few days earlier. We again nearly missed our bus as they said they would give us 40 minutes, but seemed to roll away after 30minutes.
Shortly after we were in a traffic jam outside Mugling. This was due to only 1 vehicle being allowed on the suspension bridge at a time. Once through that we drove on until 1pm where the bus stopped for lunch 67km away from Kathmandu. We only bought some biscuits and Sprite as we thought we could have lunch once back in Kathmandu. An hour later we were stuck in gridlock at the bottom of the hill that leads into Kathmandu valley. About 3 hours later we were finally over the hill but traffic was barely moving. So we got our bits together, explained to the driver that we getting off, even though he wasn’t going stop more than he had too, ok by us. Next halt we got out, I climb up on the roof and began untying the bikes and dry bags. I passed the bikes down to Ollie as he ran along next to the bus.
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| The long chain of traffic slowly creeping up the hill |
With bikes down, lights on, we were on our way weaving the evening traffic. This made for some exciting riding in the heavy chaotic traffic with both our lights fading to blue dots. We had to watch out for monster potholes and vehicles coming from all directions. We stuck together in our dual player video game of dodging allsorts with only 1 life remaining.
Surprisingly or simply just our awesome navigation skills got us back to Thamel quickly, only once back in Thamel did we back track ourselves only once and with simplest ease we found our Hotel as Ollie simply saw it as we rode by heading in the general direction of it.
We checked in, dropped of our gear and like our ancestors from millennia ago went in search of food. The ‘Cozy Restaurant’ was our choice of the evening, with burgers and momos and double banana lassi. The lassis were amazing still thinking about them now, maybe for breakfast I’ll have one or two.
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