We explored the very small confines of Bandipur town a little more and headed back to the restaurant of last night for a spot of breakfast, some internet access and to see if they had Matt's eternally elusive missing hat. Thankfully they did because so many hours had gone in to finding the darn thing in the first place. They had obviously had some fun trying it on because it had been adjusted to fit a smaller smaller head than Matt's.
We walked to the corner to get the bus but even though one turned up soon after, he woud not let us on and told us to wait for the next one. We went back to the restaurant to wait in the shade outside and the waiter told us to make ourselves comfortable and use the internet until the next bus came. Eventually they let us on the first bus anyway but there was no roof-rack for a return adventure. Luckily we managed to get a seat though because after the bus was crammed full, people just hung off the side all the way down. I could see their muscles bulge as they rounded corners hanging over the umpteen hundred metre drop and watched them tiring as the journey went on. They were hanging on over the top of other people and kept having to change arms to shake out the cramp. After the pain of hanging on the the vertical bar INSIDE the bus on the way up to Bandipur, I really felt for their ordeal. Some just couldn't take it any more and dropped off on safe parts of the road.
In the town of Dumre we did the rounds of the cash machines but none of them woud give us any money. The more people cram on a bus, the more money they make and we had been collared by one of the boys working on the bus to Kathmandu. They wanted us on the bus so much that they accepted the 400 rupees we had (instead on the 700 actual fare), crammed us on the back seat (for a change!) and set off to Kathmandu. One of the downsides of being a foreigner is that you can never be nippy or knowledgeabe enough to grab a seat that doesn't jar every bone in your body.
In may ways the back seat wasn't so bad because there was absolutely no leg-room and so at least Matt got some space for his knees in the aisle. The downside was the tiniest little old lady who was huddled up in the seat next to me. She took up hardly any space at all but spent the whole journey vomiting out of the window and hacking up phlegm into a carrier bag for the length of the journey.
On the other side of Matt was a young woman with a baby on her knee and a sleeping toddler next to the window. Some time later a guy got on the bus and started to insist that the toddler moved, despite there being a seat just a few seats in front of us on the bus. He was getting really irate that they would not all move to the one spare seat but the woman clearly could not have held both kids on her lap. Lots of people were objecting but he was determined. He started trying to climb over Matt by putting his foot on Matt's knee but we shoved it off. Eventually, he went and told the bus-boy who came and insisted, obviously because of some crazy Nepalese caste reasons, that everybody moved. The toddler ended up on the knee of the guy in front off us while the woman next to him holding the baby and the git of a guy curled himself up over 2 seats and slept.
At the next rest stop we reached a new low. There was a shop and a fruit stall there but we only had enough money for water. We were pretty hungry and so asked at the fruit stall to find out how much a kilo of oranges were. We did not have enough for a full kilo and tried to get half a kilo but the bloke refused. I went back and tried again a few minutes later when there was a girl on the stall and she clearly felt sorry for me and agreed to take what money we had. We felt very shoddy pretty much begging for cut-price fruit from the Nepalese.
Overall, despite the puking lady, the arrogant bloke, the back-seat place and the lack of funds, it was one of the better journeys we'd had, and was only 2 hours longer than the estimated time of 6 hours.
Unfortunately, when we arrived at Kathmandu bus station, it turned out not to be the one we were expecting to arrive at. We did manage to get money out but we couldn't work out how to get to the hostel. We tried calling our hostel using the phone of a guy who was trying to get us to stay at another hostel but I could barely hear the lady. All I could work out was that it was fine for us to go a day early and that there was a bus available to her hostel.
We asked around but seemed to go in circles for quite a while, and although people kept pointing us to the stop for the bus which would take us to the other bus station, we still couldn't work out which bus we needed to get or get a straight answer from anyone on the buses. Most people could not understand us when we told them that we wanted to go to 'Patan', no matter how we pronounced it, but when we showed it to them, they said 'Ah, Patan!' in exactly the same way we'd started by saying it. Eventually we gave up and got a taxi. We were glad that we did because the traffic was crazy busy and all the buses looked very full.
The taxi driver wasn't even sure where to go and had to keep calling the hostel. He seemed to be getting pretty exasperated by the time we got there. This was confirmed when he took the note we gave him and refused to give us any change. We were just pleased to be there and so didn't argue too much.
Thankfully, Sirita was waiting by the door of Sanu's House for us to arrive, bearing a big smile. Because we had arrived a day earlier than expected, she only had a smaller room but busied herself adding an extra 'mattress' to the floor (layers of blankets) and explained that she had a bigger room for us in the morning.
She insisted that we rest up for a few minutes and then come downstairs if we wanted to join everyone for dinner. The kitchen had sounded bustling when we had signed in and Surita was so welcoming that we did. Dinner was fantastic and everyone just sat around in a big circle on the kitchen floor, helping themselves to the endless bowls of food and chatting about their day. Diego had spent the day being driven in circles about his visa for India, a few people had been to work at local hospitals and charities, Katrin had been to a job interview and David, Paula and Forrester had spent the day at a monk's birthday party being stuffed full of huge plates of food and listening to speeches they didn't understand.
We went to bed pretty happy that we'd perservered and made it to Sanu's House.
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