October 13, 2010
Happy birthday to Sonia and Raffa.
This morning I woke up again at 4.45 to take the 6am bus from Tansen to Janakpur. A lovely chai tea (it’s made with boiling milk, no water, with some tea leaves and a lot of sugar, something we are not used at all in Italy) at the bus station, before we leave. Unfortunately they hadn’t started cooking their lovely things they fry for breakfast. At 6.45 I could see the first food stalls, but we were on the bus and we didn’t stop for 3 hours.
It was nice to see the country waiking up. At 5.30 there were quite a few people around. I believe in Italy too there are people who go to work this early, but it’s different because here you can see people walking on the street, while in Italy everyone drives.
Following is a gallery of images taken during the long trip, mainly from the top of the bus.
Driving towards the valley you could see the morning mist and I thought of San Martino, an Italian poem that I only know by heart because of a song by Fiorello.
I had promised myself I wouldn’t have gone up a bus anymore, because I might loose all my hair (every time I get off the bus it has a huge amount of knots), but from Naayangarh the bus that I had to take was so full that I had to go up. We were pretty squeezed there too. I arrived in Janakpur at 7pm, quite tired. Tanja went to Kathmandu, where she is taking a flight to Hong Kong.
Janakpur, finally
I’m in a little muslim restaurant near my hotel. I order rice with chicken but instead I got Dal Bhat. They offered me a glass of tap water, yellow. I had to refuse.
12 hours in this part of Nepal (South East) and I have already received two marriage proposals. They find me attractive because I have fair skin. And I am actually quite tanned at the moment. Face creams have a solar protection of 90+. Some are whitening.
I can tell we are getting close to India, it’s not the Nepal I’ve known so far. The trip is getting more and more interesting.
