Riding on top of buses.

So much has happened since my last post that I don't even know where to start. This morning, Anthony, Jamey, Cara, and I left our first Nepalese farm. The farm, which we were at for 8 days, was located on top of a mountain outside of Pokhara. 10 days ago we packed up our gear, bode farewell to Pokhara, and spent a good hour riding, fully loaded, up a mountain only to find out we were on the wrong mountain. We turned around, spent another two nights in Pokhara and then set off again for the farm. The farm, we were told, was located only a few kilometers outside of Pokhara but was about 6 km up a mountain. The first kilometer was a steep incline up a paved road. The other 5 km were up a steep unpaved, nearly un-bikable road. The dirt was too loose to bike on and there were lots of medium sized rocks in the road to bring the bikes to a complete stop if you did happen to get a stretch of bikable road. All in all, our ride up the mountain was 2 hours of hell. A few days later, Jamey, Cara, and I decided to ride the mountain without our gear and it took 30 seconds of biking for me to start cursing the road. We road downhill for maybe 15 minutes, which left my arms completely red from all the vibrations of the bike going over rocks. On the way back up, village kids started chasing me, which is fairly common and annoying. I thought I would try and out bike them and instead ended up dramatically falling off my bike and smashing my elbow when I hit another rock that unexpectedly brought my bike to a complete stop. I felt like a real rock star when two 12 year-old boys pulled my bike off me, wiped the dust off my butt, and pushed my bike while I gasped at how much my elbow hurt. I had a dead-arm for a good 2 minutes, which allowed me to think about how horrible it would be to have a broken bone on top of a mountain. Then I realized that I barely had a scratch to prove I fell. I am completely fine -- I just couldn't sleep on it that night.
When we arrived on the farm, we found out that the farmer had no idea we were coming. Although we had been told the farmer was expecting us, the coordinator for WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, the organization that we're volunteering through) failed to mention to the farmer that 4 Americans would be arriving. The number of volunteers on the farm went from 6 to 10. Two days later another American showed up unexpectedly bringing the final count of volunteers to 11 (7 of which were Americans).

Our days at the farm were great. It is coffee harvesting time, so spent our time harvesting beans, hulling them, and washing them. When we weren't working, we could be found drinking coffee (or tea in my case), sitting on the mountain side enjoying the view, playing with the baby goats, raiding one of three stores for cookies or chips, or washing ourselves at a roadside spring (there was no running water on the farm).

Our hosts, Surya and Amma were amazing. Amma fed us two huge and delicious meals a day one around 10 am and one around 6 or 7pm. Both meals consisted of rice (and lots of it) with dal (lentil soup) on top of it and a side of one of two vegetables (usually cauliflower and potatoes) and a dab of amazing chutney that consisted of tomato and roasted sesame seeds. Seconds were always pushed on us and I definitely needed to rest more then once after eating.

Today we left the farm. Since the road was so treacherous, we decided to take the one bus down the mountain to the main road. At 9am, we loaded our bikes on top of the bus, put our bags inside, and waved everyone at the farm good-bye from (drum roll please...) the top of the bus. Jamey, Cara, and I rode the bus like any true Nepalese person would (seriously, sometimes buses are packed full inside with about 20 people sitting up top and these are buses riding the main highway!) and let me tell you, I liked the road much more from the bus than I did from the bike. We felt like we were riding a roller coaster ride that was maybe less safe... We figured that should the bus roll off the mountain on our way down, it would be safer to be catapulted off the bus from the top, as opposed to being tumbled down the mountain inside the bus. We got to the bottom safely and, as it now looks, will not be taking any buses in the near future.

We are now on our way to Royal Chitwan Park. Until then!