The Big Push North

So after the Tiger experience we were basically ready to head north to get the Crow into Nepal and to see the Himalayas. With still a considerable distance to cover we aimed initially for Varanasi - which proved to be quite wierd.



Varanasi is one of the most holy places for Hindu's, its on the river Ganges and is where they make a pilgramage to bathe and also have many funerals there. The initially wierd thing is that they would choose to bathe in what is a truly disgustingly polluted river - but it gets more odd. We visited the river in the evening and got talking to a local kid who quite impressively was fluent in English, Japanese, French and Spanish - he was clearly after tips but we decided to let him show us around a bit - particularly after he announced that no-one would mess with us if we were with him "I'm a 24 hour superpower!". He asked if we wanted to see the "burning of the bodies", we were a little unsure but decided to have a look - imagining a sort of stone built temple thing for the funeral ceremonies, but no, they simply light bonfires on the side of the river - quickly we found ourselves stood in the middle of a load of fires, Fyvie noted "Oh look there's a foot hanging out". The worst bit was when they explained that priests, babies and leppars cannot be burnt, they are simply put in the river with weights attached. "The rope rots after a couple of days and the bodies float to the surface",
"what happens then?"
"Oh the dogs eat them"
Well of course, what an obviously perfect solution.

Couldn't take photos obviously but this is a google image one so you get the gist.



Upon leaving Varanasi Matt noted that his watch he'd bought for the trip had been stolen from its position on the Crows dashboard - "I'm fuming, I've let my guard down for one night, never again!"

The following day was a severe pain in the dick. We had our first real navigation problem - with no obvious road signs or proper map we relied on the locals for advice, what we began to realise was that even if they have absolutley no idea where the place you've asked for is, they will still gesture excitedly that you are definitely going the right way and that you should just keep going. We spent six hours progressing a massive 30km in the direction we actually wanted. One highlight was that during this cockup we did inadvertantly get to the end of a road and have to cross a massive dry river bed, through quite deep sand. Half way across the crows gear selector lever decided to stop working, much to our amusement, after some fiddling from Fyvie we found our way across and intercepted the massive bypass that we should have been on all along.







To cap the day off we arrived late in a shitty town that had three hotels, two refused to house westerners, the one that would accept us was presumably because no self respecting Indian would stay there. We rounded the day off with a dinner of Jam sandwiches.



The next day we woke early full of anticipation, the Nepal border was within reach. An intially good drive with a little bit of getting lost, cruising around asking for the Nepal border - saw us eventually make it at around lunchtime. After being greeted with a mile long queue of trucks,the initially intimidating process actually worked out ok - just lots of asking, queueing and getting things stamped - for Matt and Fyvie anyway - I just chilled in the crow 'to look after it'. And so we made it - into Nepal!! 4000km after we started.



After chatting on the border it became clear that the road to Kathmandu was a bit boring and that Kathmandu was just a dirty city - we therefore rapidly changed plans and went further north for the 'romantic' mountain pass to Pokhara. The people of Nepal were impossibly even more friendly than in India - literally everyone shouting and waving at us, kids running after the crow (often catching it up). Within the first twenty mins a few guys on motorbikes started talking to us, they asked us if we wanted to go swimming in this place they new - we caught them up later and they showed us to a completely isolated waterfall and lagoon - all to ourselves.



After the swim we kept pressing north into the mountains and started to gain some serious height - spending the night in Tansen, ridiculous scenery all round, Crow eating up the steep climbs (although oil light flickering). We realised that part of the reason everyone was stood on the streets to wave at us was because in this most peaceful, quiet and tranquil of places the Crows ridiculous diesel rattle could be heard for miles around, I think they were waiting for some sort of invading tank when the Crow cruised up.







The next day was spent cruising up to Pokhara, again the most beautiful scenery, very hard to capture in photos, with the snowy himalayan caps peeking in and out of the cloud.






After a morning messing around in a boat on a freshwater lake at the foot of the mountains I had to leave my fellow rickshaw drivers and head for home. They plan on another week or so to venture south east back into India to sell the Crow, I am writing this from home and miss it big time already, very happy with succeeding to get the crow to the Himalayas and also with easily winning the facial hair contest. (Matt will argue, but the beard is easily better than his Freddie Mercury attempt).

Ships

- A cheap shot here Meer Cat, but I'll leave it be for all to see (click on the 4th picture down in this post and decide yourselves, I think you will see an almost vintage handlebar number and a poor attempt at a 'beard' from the Meer Cat), the handlebar is fully established and going down a storm!