A tricky trip from Rishikesh, India to Pokhara, Nepal
Blog: 99 + 1 countries - 12 November 2009
By: merja
Folks, the one road in Eastern Terai is fine. Other than that, travelling from Rishikesh India to Pokhara Nepal is hellish. Here's a short version of what happened during the 40 hour killer trip.
1. I took a vikram (a shared ricksha) from High Bank, Rishikesh to Rishikesh proper. (20 rupees.)
2. I took another vikram which was supposed to take me to Haridwar. It didn't. Instead the driver dumped me off in some junction and hustled me into a third vikram. Changing vikrams I stepped in an open sewer. In the third vikram then, a cute guy sat on my poo soaked shoe. I refrained from notifying the guy about the unfortunate incident. These two vikrams cost me 100 rupees.
3. Finally in Haridwar, at 7 PM I hopped on a government night bus (215 rs) to Bambassa in which I managed to sleep for about an hour.
4. Usually one hopes to get out of a crappy bus as quickly as possible. Not this time. I arrived in Bambassa at 4 AM, which indeed is a sucky time arrive anywhere. Fortunately though I wasn't the only one heading to Nepal. The main strip (the only strip, I mean) was full of people waiting for the border to open. I sat at a small tea stall and like everyone else tried to keep warm by the fire. No other Wessies to be seen anywhere!
5. The border opens at 6 AM so I took a bicyclericksha (the driver in the pic) to the Indian side of the border and walked for about a kilometer to reach the Nepali side.
6. At the Nepali side the border officer was nowhere to be found. His sweet wife, who had just walked out of a shower (or whatever dip in the water) kindly handed me the visa application form. When his husband came back from his odd morning business I payed 40 US dollars and took another ricksha to Mahendranagar, the first town on the Nepali side of the border.
7. There's one bus from Mahendranagar to Pokhara a day. It left at 2.25 PM which meant that I had about eight hours to kill in Mahendranagar. Eight hours in Mahendranagar! There's nothing wrong with the town, for a border town it's perfectly all right. It's just that there's nothing to do there aside from watching one's toe nails grow...
8. ... And to buy a bus ticket to Pokhara (815 Nepali rupees). I got one of the last seats on the bus, so if you are headed for Pokhara from Mahendranagar get your ticket as soon as you get there. Otherwise you'll end up like me:
9. I got a seat in the drivers cabin, which I thought was fine until they piled seven men into the cabin. After three hours of driving I learned that the dudes were actually quite alright. But it was too late to cherish their company now as the smallest of the men was exchanged to a family of four. That's when it got really tight.
10. It was 16 painful hours from Mahendranagar to Pokhara, mainly in the dark. But hey. the road at least was fine.
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