The bus ride

---

Knowing it could be weeks before we would again indulge in a little alcoholic fun and games, we spent our last night in Kathmandu at the bar, drinking Long Island Iced Teas that tasted more like rum and Cokes, and watching the Women's Croatian Climbing Team dancing and celebrating their recent summiting of Cho Oyu, an 8,000-meter peak. It was fun to watch their sun-burned faces smiling on the dance floor, their Sherpas around them jumping up and down jubilantly, but I would soon regret having one too many...

We stumbled back to our hotel, Claire and I holding each other up on the way, and woke up the hotel owners so they could unlock the front door and let us in. Then, seemingly a few short minutes after I fell asleep sitting up to avoid the spins, it was morning and time to dash off to the bus station.

The bus bounced out of town, stopping and starting abruptly as it wound through the traffic. The air was filled with clouds of exhaust from the other buses and several large, foul trucks spitting out streams of stinking diesel fumes. Before the bus had made it out of the city, I was carsick.

I spent six hours fighting back the nausea as the bus navigated switchback after switchback, overtaking slower buses and trucks, and passing a total of four head-on accidents involving buses. The whole time, one song kept playing over and over. The one song, about three hours long, seemed to only have one line, repeated over and over. Claire thought it sounded like "It's gotta be a large one," followed by a little chorus of "ja, ja, ja, ja, jaaaa." Over and over and over and over and over and over...

Thankfully, due to improvements in the road, we arrived in the town of Besi Sahar an hour or two before we had expected, taking a room near the bus station which cost us all of 80 cents US each. Since I was covered in grime from having sat next to the window the whole trip -- my face and shirt were blackened by the exhaust fumes -- I hit the shower first. When I got out, already feeling the carsickness starting to melt away, I began brushing my hair and absent-mindedly glanced out the window.

The clouds shifted, and there it was, looming high above us where the sky should have been -- a Himalayan mountain. All three of us got very excited, crowding in front of the small window, Claire and I clicking away on our cameras. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, the clouds shifted again, and it was gone.

---

Photos

Bus crash
One of the bus crashes we passed on the way to Besi Sahar

First mountain view
It doesn't do it justice, but there is our first view, from the hotel in Besi Sahar