In between Nepal and India

03.07.2008 to 04.07.2008

We did not manage to sleep at all on our last night inPokhara. The electricity went off and it was unbearably hot. At around 06:00 Ram took us to the bus station where we should have caught the 06:30 bus. Given our bus did not turn up we took the 07:30 one.

To our disappointment, during the trip we found out that our bus was not a tourist bus after all but a common bus. The difference is the following... a tourist bus makes no stops, apart from breakfast. lunch and dinner stops and it's nice and quiet. The price is obviously higher than that of a common bus. The latter stops everywhere along the way to pick people people with the help of two guys literally dangling on the entrance/exit of the bus. All kind of vendors come on the bus, including beggars, and no 'food' stops are done. To add insult to injury we had Hindi musical DVDs ongoing, which, beleive us, are wrist-slashing.

We stopped in Bhairawa for the nights, 4 kms away from the Indian border. We were asleep by six o'clock in the afternoon and only woke up the following morning. We hired a rickshaw to take us to the border and then to the bus station to catch the bus to Gorakphur. Believe it or not, as soon as we crossed the border, we could already feel we were in India once again!