Nepal to India
Billy, Trish and I shipped the bikes to Kathmandu on Friday the 23rd March and flew on Monday the 26th. Tuesday was a public holiday so we had to wait until Wednesday to take the bikes out of the Nepal cargo bay. This involved standing around for 4 hours as we watched the cargo area fill up with mounds and mounds of junk that people were collecting. The forklift driver had no idea about how to place items orderly and we were dreading the moment the bikes came out, stacked three-high on the forklift. Fortunately he only decided to fit two on at once and they were safely driven out into the parking lot. By this time we’d had about 5 helpers. The helper, the brother of the helper, the friend of the brother of the helper, and the guy who was from exports that we were told we could trust, but his English skills were limited to the few words required for exporting items from the country, and we were dealing with imports… We got the bikes together and Billy organised the negotiations. He played hardball on the helper and his brother, halving the asking price. We still payed a decent amount of Baksheesh, but really a pittance if you convert it into Aussie dollars. It was so good to get the bikes out of the crates and back into rolling form.
The bikes coming out on their crates, seriously thought they’d try to fit three on there.
Billy, Damo and The Helper
the bike is back!!!
Two hurdles we had to overcome in Nepal were the Pakistan visas and the almost complete unavailability of petrol. We scored this great taxi driver, who took us all around Kathmandu for a couple of days and we picked up our visas and bought black market petrol off our taxi-driver guide. All good to go, we headed off west to Pokhara.
Is there a trick to it??
Buying from the local popcorn Wallah.
After staying in Pokhara for three days and deciding not to do the ABC walk (or coca-cola trek as they say), we headed off south I said farewell to Billy and Trish just before I hit the border to Uttar Pradesh, India. I think the border town of Sonauli was a good introduction to the craziness of India, with trucks lined up for 4km waiting to cross the border. I checked into a seedy guesthouse and put my head down to sleep and refresh before my border crossing the following morning.