The Himalayas had just kicked me off their back, and I was in Pokhara with my motorcycle. Pokhara is a town where travelers don’t look each other in the eye and you can book an Everest expedition from a sandwich board. News was breaking of the approaching monsoon. I was staying in Priya’s lodging: a short walk from the main pedestrian tourism section, where outside her turquoise iron gate, my motorcycle was parked in the alley. While shoveling steamy momos into my mouth from a grocery bag on the sidewalk, Priya came out to see me.
“Let’s keep our eye on the ball here, Craig. You aren’t going anywhere this week.”
Looking up from my bagged lunch, I saw her cropped black hair standing above me and her arms were folded.
“Don’t even try it.”
“Come on, didn’t I show you this,” she pointed to the weather app on her cellphone where seven days of uninhibited rain fall was predicted across Nepal, “This monsoon is going to rain for one week straight and destroy the roads, you idiot.”
“I only have one week left” I said, while standing up and putting the finishing touches on my packing routine: laying my daypack flat and bungeeing it over the top.
“You don’t understand that there are landslides. How are you going to get back to your son when you don’t have a road to drive over.”
She was right. What the hell did I know about monsoons, landslides, and anything about traversing Nepal on my dirt bike. Her face scrunched, flaring out her nostrils as she attempted to beam the point home telepathically. The guesthouse was a humble place, the kind of place that I always dream about writing in for a week straight, she had cheap, good momos on standby all hours of the day and night and plush sofa cushions to lay across nearby space heaters. Her personality was much better than the drier men proprietors who are were so serious. I pulled out a picture of my son sitting in his favorite “Cozy Wagen” pushcart.
“I’ll swing back by on my way home. Keep this for me.”
“You’re a moron,” she placed her hands on my handlebars, grunted, and then said, “Why?”
“Because it’s away from the tourist track. It’s got peace, quiet, cabanas on a lake.”
“Do you think those cabanas are going to be there after seven days of rain?”
“I want to see the real Nepal, not this hokey tourist town.”
Her eyebrows got big, “You’re scared to stop moving for two seconds...” She disappeared into the guesthouse and came back out holding two ponchos: one grey and one yellow, “But I can tell you won’t list to me, take these.”
I packed them away and said my thanks.
“Who do you think you are? It’s 500 rupees a piece.” she snapped her fingers and opened her palm, “Pathetic tourist...”
My scheduled route was for three days to Rara along the flat corridor in southern Nepal, which took me through the Chitwan Jungle, where various national parks housing: one-horned rhinoceros, sloth bears, and wild elephants would be easy-paved driving, and then, up into the northwestern section of Himalayan foothills where Rara sat on the doorstep of snow-capped peaks. Hopefully, I could outrun the storm as it emulsified in the southern and eastern regions of Nepal while I went west, and then, as I returned it would have rained itself out. The mountains provide layers of protection from storm clouds and my schedule allowed for one day of misfortune during the voyage with three days driving the opposite direction, this was all the time I had to catch my flight out from Kathmandu.
There were no road closures at first, the drive started out along the Trishuli River Gorge Road, where very double, wide, freshly painted, with passing lanes, and all, river canyon road made motorcycle riding enjoyable. Tilting, swinging, and leaning like something out of a television commercial amongst tropical banyon and cheery fruit covered steep hillsides, I kept playing my cool guy James Dean music as I dipped in and out of turns. But, by the time I reached the basin, in Barahtpur, where the river spilled into the Kans grass covered plains: I pulled off to the road to fit my grey poncho over my luggage and then, five hundred meters down the road, fitted my yellow poncho over me because the rain was beginning.
There was a fruit shop on the corner of the road with rain spattering on the tin roof. I shuffled in and banged my helmet on the roof.
“Do you think I can beat the storm if I head west?” I asked as I purchased a banana from the proprietor who was doing math equations with her daughter.
She stared, took my money, and shook her head.
The monsoon was a portal. Rain fogged my glasses and sopped into my underwear. The wind was mechanically inserting rain drops under my visor and occasionally there would be a hill with pepples on the side of the road and then on the flats, puddles became the main enemy. Savage dogs roamed the streets and the cities felt like ghost towns.
I started dreaming about beaches, of being dry, of how good the sun would feel on my skin, while gripping into the handlebars and swearing around potholes.
The first road closure on my path to Rara came at the hills outside Nepalgunj. My schedule was tight without the monsoon and so I had to reach Nepalgunj by that nightfall, just past the large Shiva graffiti, were there was a landslide. Squeezing into my breaks, Id rolled up to these monstrous boulders, the size of minicoopers and refrigerators, with rubble surrounding, blocking the road. I dismounted my bike and started peaking around the rocks for a way through, wondering if there was a path I could drive the dirt bike over the top.
The rain was absolutely hollowing, hissing in my ear, and that’s when an orange helmet popped between the rocks and then a man’s face with a mustache popped their head into sight.
I couldn’t understand a word this guy was saying as he shouted at me in Napelese.
“What?”, I used to wear at high school football practice, as he based his axe and gave the international sign for move back.
Bam, he struck the rock with his axe.
Nothing happened.
The rain was coming in sideways, belting my obliques, and so I went back to look to see what he was doing and clack the axe struck again.
He shook his head and held up his radio and said something in napelese, again with the number two on her fingers
“What, two what?”
“Two”,
“Two minutes, hours, days?” I didn’t have days…
Some rubble spilled on the ground near my bike, which caused me to reflect on my surroundings. As it would turn out, landslides don’t happen in safe positions, they happen in very dangerous positions. Suddenly, I was very aware of the several hundred foot cliff to my left, while peeking over the ledge, there was a sizable drop of jungle thorns, limps, free fall, broken bones and, perhaps, an abrubt hault in a stream below, and there was also a fifty foot ledge above me hanging with rocks. I wrecked my brain for what to do, drive back and get into warmth or wait this “two” whatever’s out in the rain.
A pickup truck had pulled up behind me and the driver rolled down his passenger side window and yelled:
“Get in, loser”
Normally, I wouldn’t get into a car with stranger, but I was cold, wet, and I needed to know what “two” was to get to Rara.
The driver looked about twenty-five, his cheeks bounced when he spoke, and he had a wicked affixation with 2000’s music. When I stepped into his car Chingy, “Right Thur.” was playing.
“You need to be careful out there”, he said pointing above my head.
His car had been stripped of certain coverings and I was sitting on a woven sack.
“Where are you from, brother?” He asked, which, by the way, I always associate with suspicious behavior. It ignites my anxieties because it seems like an important piece of information when in the midst of a scam or robbery, so I started conducting a visual investigation of this man’s cap.
“When will they clear this?” I asked, looking around the car to see if I could deduce what whether or not he was a serial killer. There was a Buddha with a holla skirt on the dashboard.
“Where are you headed?”
“Rara”
“Do you own a business?”
“Me?”
“Do you own a business?”
“No.” shaking my head, which seemed like another pertinent piece of information for a robbery-homocide, as I became increasingly aware of the amount of money I had on my person, but I didn’t see any weap—
“You seem stressed out, man. You must own a business. I’m a business owner, myself.” And he unsheathed a khurkuri knife from the driver side door, next to him. I jumped at the door handle as I saw the silver blade, “Chill out—I’m a farmer, do you want to hold it?”
He gave me the knife. My heart was racing and the bleak visual surroundings weren’t doing me any favours as the window glass was fogging up but with the knife I figured I had a little bit of power.
“I have tension like you. Always heading to the next market. I need to sell as much produce as possible but sometimes these landslides are good. They slow you down, brother. You like Chingy?”
“I…I love Chingy”
He turned the volume up to his radio.
“Why are you headed to Rara?”
“I want to see as much of the country as possible and Rara seemed like a good place to go.”
“There are plenty of good places to go but that is way out there.”
“When are they going to clear this?”
“I live on the highway near Rara. If you need a place to stay, call me.” He motioned for my cellphone, which I still didn’t completely trust him, but I hate being impolite in these situations, so while holding the knife, I dug into my cellphone out of my pocket and handed it to him.
“Rogan”
“Craig”
“Just be careful on these roads, they’re slick. Two hours tops and they will be through.”
Eventually, a backhoe would arrive and clear the road as the backed-up traffic would dart between the boulders and begin driving through the misty haze, and then, that first night, I couldn’t get dry. I laid all my clothes out around the room so the ceiling fan would have a direct hit on drying out my gear. I laid flat on the bed in my long John’s praying for the rain to stop and faded into a dream where a pair of gnashing jaws chased me around the streets. When they finally got a hold of me, I felt the teeth latch into my collarbone and I was swallowed through a gruesome esophagus covered in boils and burns, only to find at the bottom—my wife was shaking her finger at me.
The next day, again it was in the final stretches. Soaked to my edges where my muscle tissues connect to bones, I was almost to my destination of Surkhet on the map, and another landslide on the road causing me to wonder if I could make it around the boulders. Fearing that this was bigger and that because I was further out from the construction crews, the orange vest brigade signaled for me to slow down, and this time a women in a red sari underneath the road crew jersey.
The further I got from Kathmandu, Pokhara, the worse the feeling in my stomach got. It was obvious to me the roads were deteriating the further from the industrial heart of the country became. The orange vest crews were more sparsely spread out, every challenge presented a bigger obstacle because it took longer to fix and the threat of any stranding, for example, between two landslides, became bigger because the drive home to get to the airport was longer. In effect, the further from Pokhara, Priya, the picture of my son, and the airport, the more amplified any mistake would become. It took longer to salvage and recover. I was painfully aware of this while waiting at this boulder, I kept running through timelines in my head, repeating hours of driving and town names under my breathe.
A motorcyclists appeared next to me: he was in a blue poncho with a scooter, he leaned over, like I had a window.
“You want a short cut?” he says, “I know another way. You’ll be fine.”
Feeling nervous about my timelines, I decided to follow him. Fifty feet back, we crawl up the hillside on mostly steady road where there were no active landslides, and then, it broke into an almost mudslide on the other side. For one hour, we moved at a snail’s pace, I could still see the main road, where there were back up cars and then pure smooth asphalt, while we drove over this thick depressing mix of mud and exposure. I’m talking mud that could stop a rocket ship. My boot touched it and it made this squirting, pimply-popping sound. The kind of sound that send shivers down my spine and I knew if I fell, I was never getting back up.
My guide was a whizz at cutting through the quagmire. Digging his handlebars this way and that. Sliding into the mud like a professional, whereas, I was clunky rider spilling all over the place, dropping my feet into the filth, only to pull them out, hammer the gas to speed up, and then swerve again, like Bambi on ice skates.
My neck jerked, torso convulsed, and I kept thinking it couldn’t last forever but it did. This went on for ages until one bad stream crossing with a soupy discharge from the hillside.
Bam - cheek smashed on the ground.
Mud was everywhere. I had no choice but to yell, “fuck you” into the abyss.
Where do I go, I asked, seeing jungle trees, mud, and no signposts in either direction.
There were no tears in my jeans—I picked up my bike.
Checked to make sure it was still running okay.
There was just that excruciating mental damage. That I wanted to quit. That Rara, in all its glory, might now happen. I wanted off the mountain, off the bike, out of Nepal. To be held in the warm cozy arms of my wife and to play hide and seak with my son, indoors. The rain was through the tendons and bone, it had achieved the metaphysical realm of my spirit. I was soggy, damp, even in my belief.
“Fuck!” I yelled again, over the cliffs.
My friend had disappeared, leaving me in the muddy sanctuary all by myself which I was furious with the fact no one was here to help me and delighted no one could see my pain.
Eventually, as I was trying to find lodging. I was listening to the sad violin suite of Max Rictor, I pushed the bike through the gnarliest mud patches and avoided downed limps. I didn’t see any active landslides.
Again, eventually, I made it to Surkhet. Checked into a hotel and attempted to wash my jeans in a sink and then dry them out under a ceiling fan, both entirely fruitless, but a magical thing happened.
It all stopped.
The rain seized.
That morning, on the second night of my drive, my plan had worked in Surkhet. I woke up in the morning and saw light patches of grey, where sun could almost break through and when I looked at the potholes in the street filled with water there were no droplets. Like a kid on summer break, I dashed out of the hotel with my helmet in hand, almost forgetting to pay. The storm was fading in the west and the row of mountains I’d traversed to get, here, had done their duty and blocked the rain clouds.
For ten miles, I clicked my heels on the back of the bike, thinking about the joyous story I would write about my very successful rampage to western Nepal and to Rara, and how this dirt bike would be my stead until the end of time because it could conquer any mountain environment.
I got over a hillside pass and down the other side, wedging myself through canyon carved roads, and then I encountered Tilipi stream.
There was a row of twenty parked rickshaws and scooters. Five people standing in an embankment, and then the stream.
Now, a monstrous river.
Monsoon water has to go somewhere, and on the third day, when I needed to reach Rara—today— fjording was the obstacle. The skies were clear, my knuckles were warming up. Two women were washing clothes in the stream. I started to calculate the depth, volume, and speed I would need to achieve to bash through. ‘I’m a white water rafter, a river man, nah, a river rat, I can do this’ as I allowed optimism to stave off the gut-wrenching sadness of not making it to Rara. I looked around for boulders to throw in, tried to convince bystanders to help me create a land bridge—Rara felt so close, there had to be a way through. Just then a minibus came by, it paused, reversed, and then bashed it’s way through, sending a tidal blow of river water in such volume that I knew:
It was deep.
So freakin’-much water splashed from the grill, I may as well have crossed an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Dropping to my knees, I started punching the ground and calling the sky gods assholes. I mean, I had thought the worst was over, that the rain had passed, I’d gotten far enough west to shorten the storm but the monsoon was more than rain. It’s now in the rivers.
There just had to be another way—there always is.
I remembered my friend, Rohan, from the pickup truck. He was from Baratbir, which was back over the last hill.
I texted, he invited me over, and I was parking alongside his blue house in no time. Inside, it had a pink hallway and carefully presented silverware in the kitchen. His wife had cooked up a nice meal of Thali: rice and pickled vegetables. After his kids went to bed, we spoke about my plan.
“You look stressed out.”
“Give me the back way,’ I said, “there’s got to be a back way.”
“To Rara? You mean other than the Tsisi River?” The only other way is backwards for two days and around near the Dolpo Mountain Range.”
“I don’t have a couple days. I barely have this night.”
“Then you aren’t making it to Rara.”
“Mate, I’ve got to make it to Rara”
“What is so important about Rara?”
“Isn’t there some local route that when this river floods they take a muddy path, something?”
“You aren’t taking the local path.”
“Why not, I’ve done it before, just yesterday.”
“Because, you idiot, its not safe, more landslides there, you’ll get pinned down on a route that isn’t supervised.”
“Give it to me, please.”
“Why is Rara so important?”
“Because it’s all I’ve got left of this trip.”
“Why is it so important?”
“I can’t do the mountain climbing stuff.”
“Why not. It’s safer there.”
“Because”
“Because why?”
“Because” I noticed the pictures of his kids on the wall, “Because, my life is so boring at home. With the diapers and the blocks, I just, I just need this to feel alive again. I just need to reach Rara because there are no responsibilities in Rara. I need this.”
He looked at me for the first time like we were not equals. Like, I was pathetic and he pitied me for chasing this dream of reaching a location based on a belief that this place made me young or a man or whatever stupid unachievable idea I’d placed on Rara.
“You need to get it in your head; you aren’t making it to Rara. Go smoke some peyote in Mexico. Do you ever follow mountain climbing? Do you know how many of them die young because they need that next peak. What you need to be worried about is making it home to your family. If you don’t have enough time to wait, you may not have enough time to make it back to your flight.”
I hadn’t considered the way back would be slow.
“You think the monsoon is just rain and that it’s over. I haven’t heard much news about the road back to Pokhara and Kathmandu. And that’s not a good thing. No news is bad news brother. It means nobody is driving through delivering it. You forgot to pay attention to your retreat.”
Suddenly, I counted my fingers and I had four days to catch flight home and I didn’t know if the roads were still standing behind me.
“Get some rest and leave early, you have a long day ahead of you. Backwards.”
He chucked a pillow at me.
He was right. Making it home was the most important thing, for all the diaper wetting and twinkle twinkle rock stars, and the admitted days where I struggle to even be a father, they were still the most important thing in this universe to me, they were still my family.
Rohan directed me toward the biggest, safest roads in the morning, the problem being, however, that Pokhara was in the mountains, in the heart of the country. There was no avoiding that: landslides would be bigger.
I dropped to the rhinoceros and tiger jungle territory, Chitwan National Forest, there was hope. One morning I was above the clouds looking at all the land I had to cross, and I said to myself that come hell or high water that I would make home on time. To my family, and for two days, it was easy. The flooded flats were draining and what was first day driving through a tin layer of water, drained, and for one day I was driving on flat land without landslides nor river crossings, nor any water at all.
At the Gas Station Interchange, there was a watering hole of vehciles. I dipped and darted next to huge lumpering long haul truck drivers. Painted purple and orange, with inspiring messages like, “Go big or go home” painted on the back, this trucks were all at a pit stop.
For five miles, rows side-by-side these truckers were lined up. I ducked under the side mirrors of a medium sized transportation vehicle and found an member of the Orange Vest Brigade, this time with a finely trimmed goatee and a third eye dot,
“What’s going on?”
“The road to Pokhara is about to open up.”
“It’s been closed?”
“No truckers could pass through for five days, it will open soon.”
If haven’t made this abundantly clear, steep mountains and water do not mix. It’s a dual threat proposition: Nepalese roads built into the steep slopes, sometimes vertical faces, take hits from river’s draining below and the land above becomes dislodged.
These roads take a pounding from each side.
But, this was my favorite road, double-wide, fresh and easy to lean.
At the pitstop of long haul truck drivers, tourist SUV’s and bikers were packed back to make it Pokhara before nightfall. I had to get in, and safetly, on my way to Kathmandu,
Queues for miles of trucks and at the front was a huge conglomeration of trucks. It was shoulder to shoulder traffic.
Engines started to fire up.
Brake likes lit up.
We were off: I hopped back on my motorcycle and hammered the gas as trucks started to pull back into the main roadway and after five minutes of driving I passed a police station, where a man with a wistle in his mouth still stood amazed at the firing line he’d just triggered. There were groups of orange vests running around
As I took my first bend, and could see a long line of truckers ahead of me, my jaw dropped as I saw a flash of road works tape and I veered back into my lane.
There was no way. Just no way, it was just here; the brilliant sprawling canyon road was here five days ago; it was fresh, it was new, joyous; I saw it. I drove over it. How could it be? The road had been gobbled up by the river. It looked like a titan from earth’s core was unleashed from the gates of hell and clawed one-hundred feet of asphalt downward, where I barely joined the row of truckers, the road looked like shredded paper, crumbling, into the ten-times, maybe twenty-times more volumous river raging beneath.
This was a major road. This wasn’t back country solemn; this was the main chair lift from the lodge. Kathmandu, the capital, was this way.
I became engaged in a battle for the road. After that stretch, I needed to still make it before nightfall to Pokhara or I was screwed, so I jumped into the passing lane, gassed it, as another motorcycle jumped out front and bashed me outside where again I could see down the gorge where there was no surviving this river, I looked ahead to the Koto bridge and the water was ten feet below the [The Dalles Bridge] I was a lunatic, this thing might take out a whole BRIDGE.
I saw a gully, so I decided to undercut the traffic and hammered the throttle , until a truck avoiding some obstacle swerved, I sounded my horn, and he moved back.
I gassed it and moved back to the main way, only to see another chunk missing of the road.
The land couldn’t take it: where there were cement bricks, pooff, into the river. One of the reasons I travel the world is to explore things I cannot even comprehend and that day, I got it. While passing those legions and fleets of truckers, gassing it, I was in awe at how Nepal functions as a country. It is in constant battle with tectonic plates crashing into each other and monsoon rains carving out the land. This is where earth happens! It takes shape in places like Nepal.
Finally, I am a changed man. When Priya offers me a shirt, I pay for it. asks if I want that stay an extra night before my flight — I accept. Write on the top deck, stay away from the dogs growling at me from neighboring porches.
Back in Kathmandu, the tourist hordes have arrived and I am glad I got to experience something fun.
