Adventures Gallivanting Through the Mountains in the Back of a White SUV

After being deathly ill with the flu for the past week, I awoke at 6:00 am on Sunday, August 4^th and decided that against most people’s advice, I was going to Dolakha for my four day field visit with Tanya anyway. I climbed into the back of the white Toyota Land Cruiser with Tanya, our driver Man Kumari and Bina, the MEDEP employee responsible for Dolakha who was accompanying us, and we set off for the mountains.

The drive to Charikot – the district headquarters of Dolakha, 136 km from Kathmandu – takes  about five hours due to the fact that most of the roads look like this:

Hhahaha, just kidding. This is actually a very nice road. It’s paved. And a lot straighter than most of the single lane “highways” we traversed as we slowly wove our way up the steep mountain slopes to what is understandably known as the roof of the world. Even from where we were at approximately 3,000 meters, the physical presence of the snow capped Himalayas is truly awe inspiring. Even though it’s monsoon season, the clouds cleared enough on that first day for us to see the real mountains, towering above us, so close I felt like we were tiptoeing at the feet of giants. 

If there are two things to be said about this drive, they are that: 1) the views were absolutely incredible. Everywhere I looked I saw stunning, lush green valleys with waterfalls springing out of the sides of mountains. And 2) wow was it ever terrifying at moments!

Sometimes we were scared for others...like all the times we passed tourist buses flying around the sharp corners of the steep mountain passes, crammed full of people with young men and a few goats bumping along on the roof (if only it were a joke). At other times we were definitely scared for ourselves. At one point on Day 1 we came to a roadblock where a tourist bus had broken down on a diagonal across the narrow dirt road. Cars were back up on either side of it. I could visibly see the driveshaft broken off of the front axle and lying on the ground under the bus, so it was clear that the bus wasn't going to be moving any time soon. We waited for about five minutes, watching young men peering under the bus and running around trying to figure out what to do before our driver muttered something in Nepali, sparked the engine back up and pull around the other waiting cars, towards the bus. It was clear that she intended to try and get around it. On the side away from the mountain; the one that dropped off. My side.

As Man Kumari approached the bus, I looked at my phone and wondered if I had enough time to text my mom and ask her to tell everyone I love them if I go down. Then, in that moment when I felt my side of the vehicle get slightly lighter as it literally teetered on the edge of a cliff, I decided that I didn't. But hey, it wouldn't be Nepal if I didn't seriously consider the fact that it might be the last day of my life at least three times a week.

Tanya spent a good portion of that first day with her eyes closed when something exceptionally sketchy or dangerous was happening. We joked that I would get her a sleeping mask and just pull it over her eyes when I saw danger approaching so as to keep her calm.

“Damn it. I should have written letters to my loved ones to give you, just in case.”

I looked at her incredulously. “What makes you think I’m going to survive?!?!” That gave us a good, hearty laugh, one of oh so many over those four days in Dolakha. It’s funny how nerves and intense panic can manifest themselves sometimes, isn't it? Personally, I think laughing about our extremely diminished level of personal safety was the best way to go. If you have to laugh or cry, I think it’s always better to laugh.

It would be impossible for me to relay everything that happened, because it was just far too much. We met so many people and visited countless enterprises over those four days, but I will expand on some of the highlights. The first day was a MEDEP day. We criss-crossed the district that Sunday, visiting fabric processing, bag making, weaving and photography micro-enterprises, among others. In typical Nepali style, we were welcomed warmly everywhere we went with garlands of flowers and scarves. While I understood that this is simply a Nepali custom for greeting honoured guests, in some ways it made me feel like we were being accorded too much importance. Not that I consider myself to be unimportant, but I developed a heightened awareness of the potential expectations our visit might be creating for what we were going to be able to do for these people. I made an effort to manage those expectations through the interactions we were able to have, by stressing that we were here to gather information and get ideas about the potential intersections between micro-enterprise and disaster risk management. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know how clear that was, as communication barriers were one of the main challenges we faced on that trip. Thinking about it still brings me some concern. I suppose the only thing I can really do to put my mind at ease is to take what we learned in Dolakha and turn it into something real, something useful.

Tanya and Bina after being welcomed at Dhaka fabric weaving enterprise training site

By 6:00 pm on the first day we had made it to Singoti, our resting place for the night, and checked into our “hotel”. To be perfectly honest, we had been preparing for the worst, so it was a slight step up from that. I was just thankful that the place wasn't hanging over the edge of a cliff, held up by a few timber beams, as was the case with a number of other roadside hotels we had passed throughout the day. Despite that, the beds felt like they were sacks stuffed with straw, barely covering a wooden plank, the provided bed cover was a dirty old kid’s fleece blanket, there were a couple small lizards scurrying around the walls of our room, the entire town was utterly devoid of internet, or even cell phone reception, and when I sat down on the common room couch to get some work done I noticed goat droppings beside me. But man...was it ever cheap!!! They served us dinner (dhal bhat, obviously!), breakfast the next morning and lunch (dhal bhat...what we ate nearly every meal for four days) and it came to under $20 including the room for the two of us. Nevertheless, I can’t say it will be top of my vacation hot spots.

Day 2 in Dolakha was disaster day, and our schedule’s focused shifted from visiting MEDEP projects to Disaster Risk Management projects, partners and a disaster site. Over breakfast Bina went over the schedule with us, and suggested a last minute change.

Bina – “The road is not good to Sorung Khola. If we go there we will have to walk two and a half hours in and two and half hours back. WE will get back late and stay here again. Instead we go to Lapilang. We only have to walk 15 minutes in and 15 minutes back. Then we stay in Charikot tonight.”

Tanya and I stared at her blankly. The one place Tanya’s team told us we HAD to visit was this Sorung Khola project where farmers had been supported to cultivate Cardamom and Broom Grass as a small enterprise because they were exceptionally good at preserving soil integrity and preventing landslides. This last minute change wasn't going to fly.

Bronwyn – “I’m not sure if that will be possible. We were told we really had to see Sorung Khola,” I started diplomatically; as much as it pained me to condemn Tanya and me to another night in the luxury hotel of Singoti.

Bina – “It’s same. We can go to Lapilang. They have Cardamom and Broom Grass.” This seemed like something didn't add up. After a few more minutes of strained conversation it became apparent that there were three locations of this particular project. Tanya and I wondered: if it was so much easier to get to the Lapilang location why hadn't we been told to go there in the first place. We decided it was safest to get guidance from home base on the change, so we asked to use the hotel’s landline and called Tanya’s supervisor. He confirmed that it was fine to change our itinerary, especially if it was more accessible and would get us back to our hotel before dark. In the end, good luck was on our side, because as we drove towards Lapilang later in the day Bina received a call reporting that there had been a landslide in Sorung Khola earlier in the day. And so Nepal delivered us, once again, from another near miss.

Before we made that trip though, our first order of the day was to visit the Local Disaster Risk Management Committee at the site of a large landslide that had killed a family of four a mere 15 days earlier in the nearby village of Marbu. When we went to get into the car, we realized that we had accumulated quite the entourage. It seemed everyone from ECARDS (the local disaster risk management project partners) was interested in going to see this landslide site.  So it ended up being Man Kumari driving, two men squished together in the passenger seat, Tanya, Bina, myself and Bimal (the ECARDS project lead) in the back seat, and another man crammed into the hatch back with all our luggage.

The road to Marbu was by far the worst we drove on the entire trip. There was just barely enough room for the Land Cruiser along what should have been the hard-packed dirt road, but had instead been transformed into a ragged, mud slick with the monsoon rains. We bumped along in our overloaded vehicle, so close to the edge that, had the car stopped, it would have been impossible to step out of the left side without falling two to three hundred feet directly into the gorge of the raging Singoti river below.

Tanya and I had broken out, periodically, into our nervous laughter again as we avoid contemplating what seemed to be our imminent death.

“Are you afraid?” Bimal inquired from the other side of the back seat. The side not staring directly down into the gorge.

“Uhhh....welll....just a little nervous...” He nodded understandingly.

“Yes. This is my first time coming here by car. I am also a little afraid.”

Wait...what?

“How do you normally come here?” I asked, looking at him incredulously.

“I walk.”

“Really? How far is it?”

“12 kilometres.”

TWELVE KILOMETERS!!!!!

It became immediately apparent why we had so many people crammed into the vehicle, this was their only opportunity to visit this community without walking a half marathon. It also immediately brought two fundamental questions to my mind: 1) If the locals don’t find it safe to travel here by car, why the hell are we doing it?” and 2) How does the community get access to the basic essentials of life? 

Singoti Hospital

One of these questions had been answered, in a way, before we even began the treacherous journey to Marbu. As we pulled off of the main road we passed a young man rushing down the road, carrying an uncomfortable looking older woman, piggy back style, flanked by two other women.

“He is taking her to hospital,” Bina answered our unasked question. Similarly, the following day, as we stopped for tea in a small mountaintop village we saw a woman lying on the ground with a crowd gathered around her.

“Is everything okay? Does someone need help?” I asked Bina.

“Oh yes,” she replied breezily as we watched four men hoist her up on a makeshift stretcher, made of dense cloth pulled tightly over thick branches, and jog off down the road, bouncing her along. “She just had baby. They’re taking her back up the mountain to her home now.”

“WHAT?” I was unable to hide my shock. “Where is the baby?”

“Green blanket.” When we turned back to look we saw the young woman running after them with the green bundle clutched in her arms.

When I was a teenager I used to think that I lived in a remote area, deprived of the essentials city dwellers took for granted because the Huntsville Place Mall only had one good clothing store in its tiny mall. Thing like ambulances, hospitals, police and road safety seemed so fundamental their existence was never questioned. Can you imagine carrying someone 12 kilometers on your back, through mud, up and down hills and across rivers when they urgently needed to get to a hospital? How about being carried 12 kilometers when you are critically ill or injured? Can you conceive of giving birth to a baby and then being jolted around by the unsynchronized running of four men up a mountain? This is the reality of everyday life for 75% of Nepal’s population, who live in rural communities, so remote that access to the basic essentials of everyday life is a luxury at best, and impossible in some cases. To me, there is nothing that can more clearly illustrate the challenges associated with providing services and delivering development programs to the people of Nepal than that man carrying that woman to the hospital.  

But back to the landslide for now. Perhaps unsurprisingly (considering I am writing this) we did, in fact, make it to the site of the landslide. In fact, we drove straight across its deadly path and into the tiny community. Looking up at the towering track of earth and rocks, cut sharply across the otherwise lush, green mountainside on our right and down the same track into the river below on our left, knowing that we were driving on the graves of an entire family was not an experience I can put words to. Yet, despite the freshness of their loss, only 15 days earlier, the people still came out to welcome us, to talk to us, to show us what had happened, and what they had done in the aftermath. The Local Disaster Risk Management Committee (LDRMC), established with the support of CDRMP, took us up the hill to a vantage point where we could survey the full run of the landslide, in all its enormity. They explained that one home had been wiped out completely, and that eight others in the area had been evacuated.

Bimal - “The Committee has a small fund for evacuation and relocation, and from that they were able to provide 2000 rupees for each home that was evacuated and 5000 for the home that was destroyed.” That’s about $20 and $50 respectively.

Bronwyn – “How much does it cost to build a new house?”

Bimal – “About 100,000 rupees.”

Bronwyn – “And the house that was destroyed? Where does that 5000 rupees go?”

Bimal – “Hmm, yes, they are trying to decide what to do with that money now. There is one, 15 year old daughter who was not there because she was away studying. There is no high school near here. They are hoping to make an education fund for her because there is no one to pay for her school now.”

Bronwyn – “Who is taking care of her now? Is she with other family?”

Bimal – “No. There is no one else.”

So what does a 15 year old, in Nepal, with no family and nothing but $50 to support her do? What would a 15 year old in Canada do? My guess: just find some way to survive. As is probably all too obvious: this is not a very forgiving climate to do that in.

The Committee also filled us in on their plans to blast a massive boulder, perched precariously in the mud some 500-600 meters above us. They explained, though it was not necessary to do so, that if they don't bring it down, it could fall on its own at any moment. As I peered up the steep slope I noticed several little blue dots bobbing across the mud, and soon realized they were school children in uniform. Upon closer inspection of the surrounding area I realized the hill was dotted with people everywhere.

Bronwyn – “Who are all the people up on the hill?”

Bimal – “They are members of this community.”

Bronwyn – “I thought they were evacuated after the landslide.”

Bimal – “They were evacuated, but they come back every day. The only thing they don’t do here is sleep. So really, they are here most of the time.”

Bronwyn – “Why? Isn't it dangerous.”

Bimal – “Yes, but this is their land. These are their crops. They don’t have any other choice.”

The truth is, they brought us here because this is a good example. This is a case where the LDRMC was already established, and responded as it was intended to. Marbu is a success story.  Sometimes in development, the gap between project “success” and meeting needs still looks and awful lot like a canyon.

When we had made our way back down the hill to talk to the broader community a young woman made her way down from working the crops with a baby in a bassinet suspended behind her by a thick strap across her forehead and another small child in tow. I decided that this little girl would be the first recipient of one of my bears that I had tucked away in my bag in the back of the land cruiser. When we had finished talking to the LDRMC and other members of the community, I asked Man Kumari to open the car quickly before we left and retrieved Osito, a red bear with a Mexican flag on his chest. To be perfectly honest, Susilla seemed quite sceptical of both me and Osito. The adults surrounding her smiled and cooed, appearing delighted with the gift. They encouraged her and laughed as she shyly hid her face when I held the bear out to her. I left Osito with Susilla’s mother who began animating him to play with the infant in her arms. As we drove away everyone from the community smiled and waved to us, but Susilla remained looking dubious. I could only hope that eventually she would warm to Osito.

Later that same day, after some hiking and a few skechy bridge crossings we made it to the Cardamom and Broom Grass plantations of Lapilang. From the cooperative meeting space we hiked upstream and back viewing the crops for an hour and a half. For the first hour Tanya was enchanted, proclaiming that it was the most beautiful place she had seen in Nepal yet. Ten minutes later she realized we were both covered in leeches when she felt the tell tale pinch around her ankle and had to start ripping them off as they advanced up her pants and boots. I rolled up my pant leg to find I was too late and my right sock was already soaked in blood.

“Okay, this is sick. Let’s get the hell out of here,” she proclaimed in a hushed tone to me.

“Shall we see more?” Our guide, a local soil conservation officer, inquired innocently. We just stared at him, wide eyed like: Stoooop it! This was entirely justified because every plant we had seen was...the exact same.

“I think that’s enough. We can go back now.”

“Hmmm,” He cast his eyes downward and looked disappointed, but begrudgingly led us back.

Upon returning to the meeting space we sat down with all the cooperative members to discuss what kind of demand they had for their crops, what their future goals for expansion of business were and how effective the plants had been at maintaining the soil quality. Here too there was one woman with a small child at her side. Deciding that I was on a bear giveaway roll, when we had finished our conversation and were preparing to leave I slide down the bench towards the young boy and his mother and pulled Fuzz out of my bag. Once again, while his mother smiled, he met the sudden appearance of a stranger holding a bear out to him with the same hesitance as Susilla and buried his face in his mother’s side. The our soil conservation officer friend, who apparently had suddenly decided we were in a rush tried to speed up the process by taking the little boy’s hands and forcibly making him take Fuzz from my outstretched hands. This, of course, prompted an immediate outburst of screams and sobs. So yeah...basically the exact reaction I was going for! I sheepishly backed away slowly, apologizing.

Once outside and on our way back to the vehicle I said somewhat disappointedly to Bina: “The kids really don’t seem to like the bears.”

“No, no, they like.” She tried to reassure me. I gave her the same sceptical look the children had greeted me with. “It’s just that they have never imagined that such a thing could exist.”  That was a factor I had never considered. Needless to say, I decided to re-examine my bear giveaway strategy before scaring any more Nepali children for life, and turned my focus back to work.

That night we stayed up working until 10:30 in the restaurant of our hotel in Charikot because our minds were so full and there seemed to be a true urgency. By day 3 we were getting tried. We met more entrepreneurs, ate more dhal bhat and spent the night in Jiri, the Everest Gateway – where the road stops and people who don’t want to fly to the Tenzing-Hillary airport start a 7 day trek up to it. By the end of that day all Tanya and I wanted to do was sleep for hours (after a few emotionally and physically draining days without really sleeping due to mattresses that I am fairly certain were made of straw and woodchips and enforced 4 or 5 am wake ups as a result of dog fights, tourist buses, roosters and general hotel hubbub), but alas that was no in the cards for us, as Bina had other plans. So instead we visited another MEDEP outlet, a large stupa, took a stroll around Jiri and then sat out on the deck of the hotel with the ladies snacking on local vegetables with chilli and some local alcohol. At this point, I just went with it, despite the fact that I had no idea how that massive cucumber was washed and I have been told time and again to NOT drink local roxi (liquor). If I had survived this long, what’s the worst that could happen?

Bina – “We are all going to have some local alcohol now. Just a little. We will all have little drink.”

Bronwyn - “Bina, have you ever had roxi before?”

Bina- “No, never!” she giggled. I became slightly concerned.

Bronwyn - “At all?”

Bina- “No. No beer. No wine. No roxi. First time!” She proclaimed happily, and down the hatch the questionable and strong green liquid went. Ahh crap, how is this going to turn out?

When all was said and done, we saw many linkages between poverty and disaster vulnerability that helped shape our ideas about our project. It was an incredibly valuable trip. However, I must admit that by the time the LONG trip home on that last day was finally over I was exhausted, sweaty, felt as though I was likely covered in a thin layer of urine (from all the disgusting toilets I had to use with the only hope of washing up being: fingers crossed there’s a stream nearby) and never wanted to see another plate of dhal bhat again in my life. When I woke up peacefully in my own bed the next morning I uttered a sentence I never thought I would: “Ahh, it’s so nice a quiet here in Kathmandu.” Perspective’s a funny thing, isn't it?