Living on the Edge

• The bus station will be rather chaotic. A lot of people yelling out the destination for their bus, and you have to find the right booth for buying the ticket for your destination. There may very well be one booth for each destination. Go back and forth until you're sure about where you're going, and ask someone in the line in front of you how much THEY expect to pay for this trip. Chances are they will try to make you pay a bit extra if you look a bit foreignish. The tickets are dirt cheap, and may seem dirt cheap even if you pay way more than you should.

• Don't worry about bringing food, even for long distances. Every now and then there'll be people selling things jumping onto the bus and rush through the bus with their goods, and jump off again a bit later, without the bus ever stopping. These salesmen, who most often are saleschildren, are especially eager to sell things to tourists.

• In addition to the snacks that are being sold on the bus, the bus driver will stop every few hours at some roadside shack which serves rather bad food. Most often the driver will be related to the people running the place. Try to get an idea of when you'll arrive at your destination, so that you can save your meals for your destination instead, in case the driver stops at a food-place just a few minutes before you arrive at your destination. The food is NOT free, even though a plate of rice will be thrown down in front of you if you sit down inside the food place. Second, third, fourth and so on helpings are included in the price, though. It is very cheap, filling food, but it can not be said to be particularly good or hygienic.

• Sitting inside is not necessarily the way to go. I did, in the beginning, but when I decided to give my seat to some old lady that seemed to need it more than me, the bus stopped. Maybe the driver felt bad about having me standing in his bus. After all, I probably paid as much for my trip as the rest of the passengers altogether. So I was offered to sit on the roof. I was rather sceptical about it, but decided to give it a go. I soon found there are several advantages to be gained from being on top:

  • You get to sit on your luggage. This means you know where your luggage is all the time, and you're also fairly sure that things won't disappear from it. In addition, your luggage probably makes a softer seat than the seats inside the bus.
  • The view from up there is splendid. As you travel through the country there will be mountains and ricefields everywhere, and the best place to see them from is definitely the roof.
  • I imagine sitting on the roof can save your life. The price to pay for the wonderful views are the steep cliffs next to the road. Sitting on the roof, you can all the time keep in mind that "If the bus goes off the road at THAT side, I can jump off on THIS side", etc. During my stay in Nepal I read about several major accidents with 40-50 deaths in 20-30 seat buses.

  It's not all fun, though. Wear clothes you don't have to worry about ever getting clean again, as the dust is pretty intense up there. Also, be sure to hold onto the bus all the time. The Nepalis don't know how to build roads, so they pay the Indians to build roads for them. Sadly, the Indians don't know how to build roads either, so the roads get very, very bumpy. And they disappear once a year, in the rain season. Anyway, the buses do between 30 and 40 kilometers per hour on average, and this combined with the bumpy roads results in a lot of "turbulence". Your travel insurance probably doesn't cover "sitting on top of a bus".

• Travelling by night may seem like a good idea. But it isn't. For one, missing the views along the road would be stupid. But more important, it is not very safe. The roads are every bit as narrow and on-the-edge-of-a-cliff at night as during the day. Also, the bus drivers seem to have this belief that using the lights on the bus is not good, because that will kill the batteries. I tried telling my driver that there is this magical little thing in the engine which charges the battery when the car is in motion, but noone believed that. Anyway, what did they need the light for? I asked what he'd do if he met another bus in the middle of the night, and the road was very narrow and it was impossible to tell which side of the road he was driving on. Oh, if we meet a car, THEN we turn on the lights. Ah. But you can't see the other car if neither of you have your lights on? He still couldn't see the problem. So I gave up, and slept, hoping I would wake up next morning.

• Be prepared for an interesting mix of people, animals, goods, noise and a lack of fresh air. Sitting on a bus, you will soon realize there IS a reason we develop small hairs in our noses. I blew my nose after a lengthy busride, and the stuff that came out was basically black. Having a stuffed nose is not necessarily a bad thing, though, as the smell on the bus fairly quick develops into something quite undefinable.