Namaste Nepal En
Today is a beautiful sunny day, which highlights the lushness of the scenery. I am the only foreigner on the bus, despite the fact that this is a tourist route since the road links Pokhara to Sunauli in India. None of the tourists, though, makes the detour of a few kilometres from the main road to Tansen. This, after all, is for the good because it means that the town has remained unspoilt, with its authentic life, untouched by the all-destroying, all-corrupting tourism. The bus acts as the postal service and this does nothing to accelerate our average speed, which, I believe, is around thirty kilometres an hour. As soon as we arrive in the various villages the bus driver's assistant slings the blue postal sack, with all the correspondence in it, out of the bus window and catches the one thrown to him by the man waiting for us in the village.
After about three hours' travelling, I see the same driver's assistant arm himself with a stick. This stick is generally used to clear the road and make way for the bus when there are flocks or herds blocking the way. But this time the stick has quite a different use: along the road there are swarms of schoolchildren who clamber agilely up onto the roof of the bus to get a free ride to school, the school which, strangely, is out in the country some distance from the village. Leaning out of the rear door of the bus, the driver's assistant manages to take his stick to the children and stop them climbing onto the roof.
We get to Tansen in the late afternoon. The hotel recommended by 'Lonely Planet' is right on the square that doubles as a bus station. I go in: the receptionist is fast asleep. I try calling him, shaking him, but nothing succeeds in waking him. This is a phenomenon I've already come across several times in India: the sleep of these Indians is a kind of coma, from which it is extremely difficult to bring them back to a state of consciousness. I am about to give up and go to the other hotel recommended, which, though, is quite some distance from the village and also quite expensive, when a middle-aged woman, rather plump and quiet looking, arrives and pulls me inside again by the sleeve. She speaks not one word of English, but she goes to call the owner of a shoe shop under the hotel and, partly by words and partly by gestures, we manage to understand each other. They show me the room: it is one of the filthiest I've ever seen, and also noisy because of the buses which are right outside. I decide to stay anyway and never did I make a happier decision. In fact, I've spent some of the most enjoyable days of my stay in Nepal, in this very hotel. To start with, the plump lady and sleeping beauty, who, I've discovered, may be her nephew, owners of the hotel, turned out to be delightful people, so kind and friendly. Yes, there was a lot of dirt, but this is explained by the fact that is intended for the Nepalese and not for tourists, and Nepalese standards of cleanliness are what they are . . . . . For instance: the room next to mine was occupied by what surely was a honeymoon couple, who at night when the noise from the buses tended to die down, saw to it that I was kept awake by unmistakeable noises . . . . . What's more, they had brought with them, willy nilly, about fifteen family members, between the ages of ten and eighty, who were all camped in one room on the other side of the corridor. I think, however, that the privacy the separate rooms guaranteed the newly-weds was an exceptional circumstance in the life of a Nepalese . . . . . I was saying about cleanliness: well, I glimpsed the rooms occupied by these Nepalese and I can assure you the sight was disgusting. A layer of rubbish of all kinds [fruit peel and cores, rice, left overs of vegetables and sauces, ash and cigarette butts, waste paper, chewed betel with respective spittle . . .] covering the floor like a thick carpet. So it is quite understandable that even after this mountain of rubbish has been removed, the state of the rooms remains what it is. Not to mention the sheets . . .
In the evening when I went down into the restaurant, who should I find there but Ante Tokic, a twenty-three year old Croat who biked here from Croatia crossing Greece, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and India.
This Croat, almost two metres tall, is a naval engineer and has fled his country because of the war. I ask for news of Croatia, not having heard anything since leaving Italy, almost two months ago. He spoke to his brother last night and the news is tragic. The war rages and there are numerous dead, among which civilians, and including some of his friends and relatives. His brother is about to flee the country too, to seek his fortune in the United States where they are planning to meet up again. I can imagine the desperation of this and many other families that have been forced by the war to split up and disperse.
We spend three days together: the first day we go to Rani ghat, the second into the Shrinagar hills, and the third we spend visiting the missionary hospital and going around Tansen.