December 11 – 21, 2016

Every bolt on my bike. Every muscle in my body. Every bike handling skill in my repertoire. Every bit of mental tenacity and fortitude. Battle tested. Time and again. Day in, day out. What are you made of and how deep are you willing to go. This is what I asked myself, repeatedly. I asked for more of Nepal, in its purest form, and this is what I got. An opportunity to explore this beautiful part of the country and delve deeper into myself.

The road, once nicely manicured, in an instant deteriorated into a series of make shift land slide crossings that were never cleared, only compacted and driven over, resembling humps on a camel, in some cases 6 feet tall. This was the good road and only eerily foreshadowed what lay ahead. The buzz of Kathmandu seems like a lifetime ago. I am alone with only my thoughts and a small population of people in an occasional village along this rough and rural landscape of eastern Nepal. The route is known as the Midland Hills Highway, however take caution with whatever you thought you knew of the word “highway”. This is literally the worst stretch of road and the most challenging cycling of my life. At one end of the spectrum it is ankle deep, soul sucking chalk that bonds to anything wet, forming instant paste. That is the drivetrain of my cycle, the sweat of my body and clothes, and the interior fiber of my lungs. At the opposite end of the spectrum, on mountain sides that receive no sun, the dirt turns to liquid cement that will never dry. Plant your foot in it while you’re dragging your bike through and it will suck your shoe off. Eastern Nepal is primitive, raw, and it is captivating.

Initially, the road danced along the river, so close I felt as if I could scoop up a glassful as I pedaled by, flowing effortlessly. Before I could enjoy a drink, the road would spike up so steep, causing me to aspirate. This happened repeatedly, seemingly without purpose. The route plotted from Kathmandu to the border crossing into India is about 450 miles. My rough math put me comfortably at 9-10 days, and I couldn’t have been more naïve.

There are villages, if you could call them that, speckled along the way. They are no more than a couple huts selling the same mix of Red Bull, packaged noodles, and chips.  Nothing disposable.  I arrived at my first stop, a place known as Ghurmi. It is at best a rough and dusty truck stop at the junction of 3 roads. There were 3 hotel options, all equally grim. The room, only slightly larger than the bed, was essentially a box, sometimes with a window, if you got one of the nice ones. To get to that room however, you had to pass through another guest room, not a hallway, where someone likely would be sleeping. The bed was simply a raised wooden platform. I desperately searched for another option. The road that I was traveling on was dug into a hill side, however there was a small patch of tiered ground behind the police station used for farming. Seeing the dejected and war torn look about me, the officers allowed me to camp there for the evening. My roommates consisted of 7 Nepali police, a dozen goats, 4 cows, and a handful of chickens and dogs.  The dal bhat was bottomless like always and once again my voracious appetite was a spectacle of amusement. I even found a way to temporarily rinse my body of the day’s paste from a continual spigot in an open field. There’s something refreshing and primitive in that.This was the rawness that I was desiring.  It’s  good thing that I didn’t know that this would be my easiest and most comfortable day for the next week.

Keeping with form, the following day descended sharply, once again down to the river, then drifted away and abruptly spiked up for the next 6 hours and 6,000 vertical feet to the hill side village of Helisi. This would be the last pavement I would see for 7 days. Every day subsequent would be a test of my physical and mental stamina with only the smiles from the local villagers and the raw beauty of the country side to urge me over each hill. The undulating road, made up of chalk and mud and at most 1 car width wide was etched into the side of the mountain. The conditions were so coarse that line selection became a game. Choose the wrong line on the road and my bike may get swallowed up in a sand pit or perhaps knee high mud troughs. Honestly I’m not sure which is worse.  Some of the mud and sand were rideable, but I could never really tell until I was already in it. Even the downhill sections required pedaling. There was simply no reprieve. When the road did go back up, which seemed constant, it did so at almost criminally, absurdly, and nonsensically steep pitches causing me frequently to get off and push.  It would do this relentlessly up to a seemingly arbitrary point then without cause would dive back down, forcing me to once again claw my way back up. When the dirt would become compacted and the pitch would lessen just a couple degrees, although still a gruesome endeavor, it was like a direct injection of adrenaline was shot into my legs, allowing me to seemingly without effort scoot my way of the next hill, to the smiles and perplexed looks of local villagers. Fortunately this always seemed to occur just at the point when my soul was most crushed and I was drifting off into a dark abyss. “Whoa, Superman!” yelled one local teenage boy just after I had crested another one of those absurdly steep pitches. If only he had seen me 2 minutes prior in my abyss.

At 3pm, in a dead calm afternoon, on the eve of a full moon, I crested the summit of a mountain pass, just under 9,000 ft, the highest pass of the route. It was the kind of calm where you could literally hear your own heart beating, and nothing else.  On the other side was a simple guest house, run by a husband and wife and their 2 year old son. To be fair, the 2 year old didn’t do much in the way of running the guest house, but he was adorable and the made the experience memorable. Guest house seems like a stretch.  It was almost a home stay. The structure was a combination of concrete and corrugated steel. The kitchen consisted of a fire pit that was used to make the tea and dal bhat. At nearly 9,000 feet in mid December, I hopelessly wanted to stay in the kitchen for warmth but was driven out by the poor ventilation of smoke that burned my eyes and lungs. Somehow, it did not affect them. After the glowing sunset that lit the valley orange, the full moon replaced it and continued the illumination. My room was again a concrete box directly above the kitchen, with newspaper lining the walls, possibly for moisture absorption or maybe just for light reading. The floor was dirt and on it 2 raised wooden platforms with horse blankets, which could be used for padding or warmth, but not both. Before dinner, there were 3 local Nepali men who had driven their motor bikes up to the pass for the day. We shared some laughs and drinks before they embarked on their journey back down to their village. The desperately beckoned me to visit tomorrow on my way down, which I untruthfully said that I would.

Sometimes a missed turn is a good thing and getting lost is not a waste of time. Randomness. It is a fallacy that has been proven to me time and again. The next morning as the sun was cresting the valley to the east, I departed down the battered mountain road. After 20 minutes I looked at my map to gauge my progress only to discover that I had missed a turn, somewhere, even though I never saw a junction. I cussed at myself because my options were to climb back up several miles of sloppy road that I just fumbled down, or take this other “detour” several miles out of the way before joining back to my prescribed route. Down I went.

Breakfast in Nepal for the most part consists of black tea with milk. It is very difficult to find anyone eating actual food. Fortunately, at about 9 a.m. I spotted a small place, that wasn’t in any sort of village that I could determine, where a few people were cooking chick peas with curry. I was immediately greeted by an older man in his late 50’s and 3 women ranging from 18 – 32, whom I later learned were his daughters.   While fueling up on curry and milk tea, a man in his 30’s walked in behind me. “You came!. So nice to see you!” It was the man from the night prior whom I had falsely promised to stop and see. Life. There is no random. After an hour of laughs and a full belly, I attempted to leave, without success, and was persuaded to stay with the family that night. Normally, I would have politely passed, as this is not the first time I have received a similar offer. However, this serendipitous event seemed too compelling to simply let pass by. I took a wrong turn and ended up in the right place. I spent the day with one of the daughters who is a teacher in the local school. She invited me to come to her class. We hiked up the dense green hillside, through a canopy of trees, for 30 minutes through a maze of carefully placed rocks, crossing streams, and arrived at her school. It is a 2 story, white washed concrete building with dirt floors, similar to most of the other permanent structures that I have seen in the region. Although the outside air was warm, inside there was a distinct chill from the concrete. The desks, supplies, and text books were basic, to be sure. All of the children were dressed in the standard blue top and were enthusiastic to learn. There were about 200 students that attend from ages 5 -18. I was at one point invited up to the front of a teenage chemistry class. Fortunately, I had some recollection of the periodic table. The smiles and laughter from the children, of all ages, just by me simply being there is something I will never forget.  I hope that I made even a sliver of the impact on their lives that they made on mine.

Staying with a local family in their home was truly an amazing opportunity that was not in the guide book or part of any tour group. Their home, which also consisted of their modest store front, was built into a hill side. They had an open air dining room with 3 plastic tables and chairs that overlooked the valley. In the back yard were several orange trees that I was continuously given fruit from. My room was downstairs, through a trap door in the floor, beneath the dining room, with a beam that I continually seemed to smash my head on. The walls were again a mix of concrete and corrugated steel with a raised wooden platform for a bed. I used the blanket as padding and my sleeping bag for warmth. There was no window in my room but when the door was open, I had views of the valley below. As the sun was setting, I went on a local village walk with 2 of the sisters, through more footpaths carefully tacked into the hillside, visiting with neighbors, and always exchanging smiles and laughs. After the walk, the uncle, a man who stood barely 5 feet tall, and 15 years my senior, continually prodded me to go running on the paths with him until I finally acquiesced. He was wearing flip flops and nimbly danced down the stone steps like a man 1/3 his age, laughing and leaving me fumbling in his wake. There was again a wood fire to cook meals and after dal bhat, everyone was in bed by 630pm. The 2 older sisters slept in same bed for warmth as the temps dipped into the high 30’s F. Before bed, I attempted to bring my bike inside but I was assured that there was no chance for anything to happen to it. In the morning, my bike and all my belongings were in the same place I left them.This entire family adopted me as their own and I felt completely comfortable with them. They would have let me stay forever, and perhaps they wanted that. Here, time truly stands still. I have no idea what day of the week or month it is and that’s fine. Breathe. Be present with this gift. This opportunity only served to solidify my perspective and experience in Nepal. There is true kindness here. They invited a complete stranger into their home, fed me, and gave me a place to sleep, with no underlying motives or expectations. They had nothing to gain. No fear. No hate. Only love. It is just their way.  Every day in our lives, we’re so used to giving a knee jerk, thoughtless, “no”.   Always say yes.

A few days later, I met up with a Swiss cyclist couple whom I met in Kathmandu, and with a full and heavy heart, we cycled the final remaining days together through Nepal to the India border.