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Day 12 Arunkhola to Gorusinge & Day 13 Gorusinge to Lamahi

Here we are in the town of Lamahi – to call it a town is perhaps stretching it a bit but it is at least marked on the map; only the second town we have been through today that is big enough to be marked. Despite this road being the main East/West highway through Nepal, most of the towns are pretty small and offer neither food nor accommodation. It has been another couple of days of heat and sweat. In fact that is my overriding memory of our time since Kathmandu – SWEAT! Yuk. The sun when it shines is blazing hot and despite our layers of sunscreen, we have both been a bit pink at the end of the day (despite having built up a bit of protection over the last couple of months). Even without sun, often the air is still and damp so as soon as we start to ride we break out in droplets of sweat everywhere. At night there is no relief, partly because it is still warm, partly because we are sleeping with the doors and windows closed to avoid mossies and partly because the wonderful ceiling fans that would keep us cool only work when there is electricity – and that is pretty random! Yesterday evening we arrived in a place called Gorusinge where we hoped to stay the night. The first place we enquired about accommodation (with a massive sign outside saying Hotel) was in fact not a hotel and they looked at us like we were mad. The next place we went was more promising; they wanted to clean the room before showing it to us! I am not sure that the place we stayed the night before in Arunkhola had ever been cleaned so this looked like a good sign. The room was in fact ok (Mum, you wouldn’t be caught dead in it!), had its own bathroom (which smelt of poos and wees as they all seem to), a shower (cold only but that is just what we want!) and a ceiling fan PLUS what was described as air conditioning – a massive air cooler thingee that seemed to just be a giant ‘fan in a box’. The downside being that the room was at the front of the house, was brick and had baked in the sun all day causing the bricks to heat up and the room temp to soar. It was kind of like I imagine the inside of a pizza oven would be if you tried to sleep in one. Never mind at least we had the fans, or so we thought…

One thing we are just getting used to is the electricity outages that occur sometimes randomly and sometimes planned. We had just had a lovely cold shower when the electricity went out. With no fan in our room we started to cook like a meat lovers with BBQ sauce. We headed out to the next door house that also seemed to function as a restaurant, with an open front, to sit in the cooler temperature and have some dinner. We asked the 10yr old boy, who was helping in the restaurant, when the electricity might be back on and he got on the phone (a strange contraption in a wooden box) and called someone, maybe the electricity company, and found out that the electricity would be back on at 9pm – about and hour and a half outage. God knows how a country can survive and develop with unplanned, regular electricity outages.  Especially when it is so hot that the only way to be comfortable is to sit under a fan. Once we eventually went back to our room to go to sleep, electricity back on and both fans blasting we thought we had it sorted. Just as we were nodding off, the whir of the fans stopped again and we started to sweat, AGAIN! The only thing we could do was open the doors, hunker under the mossie nets and hope the fans would come back on, which they eventually did. Today when we stopped for lunch we found a nice restaurant (surprise, surprise) and were just commenting how it was almost like rural China, finding a small, clean place to eat that actually looked like a restaurant. They had Dahl Bhat on the menu, a nice cool room to sit in away from the heat of the sun and a FAN whirling overhead. We thought we could settle in for a nice lunch, cool off and relax for an hour. Then the electricity went off. No fan so no longer nice and cool and the flies and mossies start to gather round. Que for us to get back on our bikes and get moving. One thing we are finding much tougher here in Nepal is the heat, with nowhere to get relief, cool down and relax. Nowhere has AC. Fans don’t work as soon as the electricity goes off, sitting outside in skimpy clothing is a no go because of the mossies and you really can only spend so long in a cold shower getting all pruney and wrinkly– especially when it smells like a toilet. Today when we were riding up and over our last (hopefully!!) climb of the trip, a solid hour and a half of climbing, we were watching the grey clouds build above us, swirling round the top of the hills, and hoping they would burst open and bucket heavy rain on us. No such luck. The only rain that passed us today was when we had got off the bikes at our present accommodation (with fan, still going and managing to stay cool enough to sit and write this). Never have we both wished for rain as much as we do on the bikes here – where is the bloody monsoon when you need it!

So other than the sweat and the heat and the gripes about electricity, the past couple of days have been more of the same beautiful views of rice paddies on one side, mountains on the other and the frequent site of an elegant Nepali woman in a gorgeous brightly coloured sarai, wandering along beside the road or in the paddocks, herding cattle – makes me feel a little inelegantly attired to say the least!

We even managed a swim in the river today, floating in the rapids and managed to spot some monkeys clambering in the trees above us.

We are back to being the only westerners in the ‘hood and everyone, especially the young boys, likes to yell their best English at us. E.g. 6 or 7 yr old boy, hands on knees, giving it his all yelling at Phil as he went past “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”, the young chap who yelled out to me “Hello I love you” and the most common, from all kids is “Bye Bye” (no “hello” – we wonder if they are trying to tell us something?). Sometimes it is hard even to pick where the voice is coming from and today I turned round to see a tiny wee cha standing on a tin roof, arm waving madly in the air yelling “bye bye, bye bye”. The on-road interviews that were so frequent in China are back. Yesterday Phil had two scooter riders slowed down for a chat as we cycled along (no one wanted to chat to me) and the questions were a bit different from China too – no “how much was your bike” but still lots of “where are you going” and a new favourite “Is she your sister?”. We are also back to people taking photos of us on their mobile phones as we go by, though we can’t complain given we are also taking lots of photos of them! We are getting better at finding restaurants and knowing what to look out for. People seem to think we want to eat salad or something complicated and we have to tell them we want to eat Nepali food, Dahl Bhat. This is usually readily available now we know where and who to ask. The piggies from China, tucking into ice creams at every possible occasion, have been replaced by lean mean (sweaty!) cycling machines, surviving on rice, dahl, vege curry and pickles. Though we did have a delicious brekky of Banana and warm roti bread. Oh, and the gallons of Fanta, Sprite and Coke (and water – about 5L each a day) we are still consuming.

STATS:

Day 12 Arunkhola to Gorusinge dist: 112. Avg 19km/hr time 5 hrs 52 mins

Day 13 Gorusinge to Lamahi Dist: 78km avg 17.9km/hr time 4 hrs 19 mins