Coming home in a strange country

“Namaste, namaste, you two, come here!”
In the midst of a huge crowd of people that wants to cross the Chinese-Nepalese border, we’re standing with the bicycles between our legs. The borderline is marked by a steel gate that is sealed with a padlock the size of a fist. Before, behind and next to us about a hundred tradesmen push forward; colourful women carrying bags, baskets and babies, men in worn-out clothes who carry a seemingly heavy load on their skinny backs, screaming children with long streaks of snot and in the midst of all this two blond cyclists who look around in amazement.
“Hey, the two of you, come here, you can pass through.”
The frontier guard in his camouflage-uniform appears to be talking to us. Two of his colleagues clear a path in the gang and suddenly we are in front of the crowd of people and being led through the gate. In front of us is the immigration service, the last bump on the road to the promised land.

Kodari is the most disorderly border town we have come across in thirty-four countries. The village, it’s no more than that, is situated at the bottom of the steep hill that we descended from Zhangmu, left and right of the Bhote Kosi River. Traditionally it is the starting point of the ancient trade-caravans using the Trans-Himalayan route for their trade with Tibet and China. In the year 2006 the village still looks like it never made the fifties of the last century. After the Friendship Bridge, which spans the Bhote Kosi, the main means of transportation are human porters. Cars and trucks are hardly seen in the narrow and bumpy street that meanders down alongside dozens of oblique wooden dumps and stalls.

Quickly I conclude the immigration formalities in order to obtain the Nepalese visa and then we are in the promised land and within a couple of minutes fifty-seven years further in time. According to the Nepalese calendar at the moment it is the year 2063. The Bikram Sambat, as it is called, is established in 1769 AD and is based on the Hinduism in the era of the Indian ruler Bikramaditya. Suddenly we have become old people: Peter is one-hundred-and-three years and I am a year younger. And we’re still cycling.
Honesty commands us to mention that we also have become sixty-nine years younger. The matter is a bit complicated. In the Tibetan calendar it is the year 2132 now; so as a matter of fact I was one-hundred-and-seventy-one years old there and Peter one year older. And sometimes we indeed felt that old.

We cycle up the Arniko Highway, which connects Kodari in one-hundred-and-fourteen kilometres with Kathmandu. The highway here is no more than a dry mud road with a lot of stones, potholes and bumps. After fifteen kilometres we near the first stretch of asphalt and stop to celebrate this.
“Just checking whether it’s real or not,” Karin says. She gets off her bicycle and feels the smooth, hard tar material with her foot.
“And, approved?”
“Yes, it feels fantastic and I think it will be able to carry us.”
“Come on, let’s fly!”

Two kilometres later the asphalt stops again though and we bounce through the holes and over the uneven stones of a landslide area. This continues for some time: asphalt, rocks and mud, asphalt, stones and gravel, until eight kilometres further we reach the real asphalt road and start our flight through Nepal.
Around us the landscape is dazzling green in thousands of shades, and still it seems to become even greener. We can’t believe our eyes seeing the banana-trees, papaya, palms, bamboos and rice fields. Life increases with every metre; butterflies in all colours and sizes, snakes and frogs, bee nests, waterfalls, temples, stupas, washing people, greeting children, tooth-brushers and cheerfully painted trucks. After Tibet this is a delightful culture shock that completely overwhelms us. We take off the last warm clothes and after months I cycle in my Indian shalwar kameez again and Peter in a t-shirt, shorts and sandals. We feel quite naked.
During a break we listen to the chirping of crickets who sunbath to regulate the temperature in their cold blooded bodies. The male crickets, the ones producing the ear-splitting chirping, are excellent thermometers. The amount of chirps per second increases with the rise of the outside temperature; biologists have managed to record the relationship between these two factors and then sold their own thermometers. The formula is as follows: count the amount of chirps in fourteen seconds, add the number forty and you have the temperature in Fahrenheit. Extract thirty-two from this number, multiply it by five, divide the result by nine and you have the temperature in degrees Celsius.
We have decided to hold on to our thermometer for the time being, out of fear that crickets and pocket-calculators won’t be available everywhere.

We cycle alongside the magnificent Sun Kosi River and regularly pass places where dozens of people are working in the dry parts of the riverbed. Because of the growing urbanisation and improvement in infrastructure over the past ten years the demand for building materials has risen enormously in Nepal. These building materials, mainly sand and stones are taken from the riverbanks. One of the three most intensively excavated spots is the Sun Kosi River around the village of Dolalghat.
Thousands of Nepalese families -men, women and children- who have no other prospects to provide for their cost of living, work in this labour intensive sector that causes a lot of harm to the health of the workers. With very simple tools, like hammer, willow-baskets, sieve, and shovels and with their bare hands, the stones are cut, the sand sieved and the heavy loads carried. They live in self-erected tents and huts made of plastic and waste-wood next to the banks of the river.
We do have a lot of respect for the stonecutters; we already saw them in a number of African countries, India and now again in Nepal. The stonecutters, sometimes men but mostly women, sit on the ground the whole day, cut the rocky stones with a hammer into small pieces for road construction or the fabrication of concrete. Some of them sit in the shade; others have to endure the burning sun on their heads and backs the whole day. They work for ten to twelve hours a day and earn about a dollar for their efforts, barely enough to survive.

When we reach Dolalghat at night we have descended three-and-a-half-thousand metres in one-hundred kilometres, a record. We wonder how it would be to cycle this lap the other way around.
Dolalghat, a picturesque village amidst luxuriant green hills, is the lowest point of the Arniko Highway and is situated at the Sun Kosi River, from where numerous kayak and rafting companies let screaming tourists float down the wild churning river.
Looking for a place for the night we meet Babu Tamang, producer of knitwear and manager of an export company in Kathmandu.
“Where are you from?”
“The Netherlands.”
“By bicycle?”
“Yes, all the way.”
“You must be looking for a hotel.”
“Well, that would be nice.”
He takes us to hotel Fish Kitchen, the better of the two simple hotels the village possesses. The old-fashioned and slightly run-down house at the main road that has a view over the river is both restaurant and sleeping-accommodation. The room that is shown to Peter is no bigger than two by two-and-a-half metres including the bed and therefore too small to house our panniers and us. Babu Tamang acknowledges his doubts:
“Take my room; I don’t have as many things as you have.”
“We really appreciate your offer, but are you sure?”
“No problem, I don’t need a lot of space.”

A little while later we’re enjoying a meal and talk with him about his company, the economy of Nepal and our trip around the world.
“When you visit all those foreign countries, like in Africa, do you never get lost?”
“Honestly speaking we can’t get lost.”
“What? You can’t get lost, what madness is this?”
“No, serious, we can’t get lost on our journey.”
“But you don’t know the way everywhere, do you?”
“No, but we don’t have to.”
“I don’t understand a single word you are saying.”
I no longer hold him in confusion and explain how we choose our route during this trip.
“We plan the months to come based on the climate only, in order to avoid ending up in a monsoon or cold winter. For the rest we only depend on the length of the visa a country gives us.”
“But then you can still get lost?”
“Actually not, Babu. It doesn’t matter to us where we are going and where we will end up today or next week by bicycle, everything is all right. So if we take a wrong turn or we don’t know where we are anymore, in general we think that is fine as well and that way we visit places we would have never expected to see.”
“It is unbelievable, to hold such a philosophy. I have never heard of it before!”
“It provides us with almost absolute freedom,” Peter tells Babu, “and that is the most wonderful thing I have ever experienced in my life.”
“But cycling seems to be so hard, surely on those bad roads!”
“Well, sometimes it is hard, but that doesn’t take away the freedom. I am going to tell you something else: cycling is the verb of freedom.”
Babu looks at Peter and shakes his head:
“You are a strange couple, but fascinating.”