Driving Miss Daisy (NOT)

 

Our travels in Nepal involved taking the bus along some pretty hairy highways. Disney does not have a ride to simulate the roads we traveled from Kathmandu to Chitwan to Pokhara and back to Kathmandu (and I'm sure there are many worse than these main highways). We thought it was crazy in the city but country driving here is one long game of chicken. So you come up behind a slowmoving truck that is so loaded down you can't see around it climbing up a narrow road with an endless dropoff and there is a bicyclist on one side of the road and an ox cart on the other - do you pass since there is a blind turn coming up? Of course you do! You just hit the horn and charge ahead. (This happened over and over and we just got used to it... or turned numb). At one point on one of these insane 'leaps of faith', somebody's phone rings. Guess who? The driver takes the call as he's making this suicidal maneuver. How people on the prairies can have accidents when these folks somehow stay alive I don't know. Truck drivers around here are a different breed (almost like cowboys) and they also express their flair by 'dressing up' their trucks. Almost every truck was colourfully decorated and most also had tassles hanging from them.

And what's up with the horns?! A cacophany (my word for the day) of horns can be heard everywhere in this country. People hit the horn when they see somebody coming, when they come up behind somebody, when they are passing, when they are breathing (just about). From the middle of Kathmandu to the almost empty backroads of the Himalayas, there was never a moment when you wouldn't hear a horn somewhere. We just got used to it like the locals. The most amazing thing was how casually people would let a horn-blaring truck come up behind them and pass them by a whisker as they walked along the road without every glancing back at the approaching vehicle.

Another interesting sight is all the motorcycle drivers wearing helmets while their passengers (usually women and children) were not. Talk about a inverted case of 'women and children first'. With all the weaving in and out of traffic (Lanes? What lanes?), it is a miracle there aren't more collisions. We did see a few though and it made us cringe everytime a motorcycle would cut us off with a child sitting on the gas tank and/or hanging on to the back.

We also were constantly noticing how many different forms of transportation (and animals) there were on the road. If it moves, it was crossing the highway or pulling something along it. Driving may be a way of getting from one place to another but in this country it is so much more than that. If it's adventure and thrills you are looking for, you don't have to drive to find it, you just have to drive (and we can hardly wait to get behind the wheel again back home on our boring straight roads).