We might have meet a real life Bear Grills

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Geo: 26.6952, 89.2815

We stayed the night at Madari Hut
in a guest house, we took a room only for a shower and slept in the roof top
tent.

Whilst there a Brit and a
Nepalese arrived and, the Brit was filming a walking expedition starting in
Afghanistan and ending in Bhutan for the Discovery Channel. They also were in the same exit of Nepal convoy, so it would seem that when the show airs this footage may make it into the final edit.Lev (the Brit) had
a few good tails and the one about a car crash in Nepal was particularly scary.
Lisa brought the topic up of how dangerous some of the road were and Lev then
told the story of how during a filming scoping activity the vehicle they were
in suffered brake failure on a downhill section in upper Eastern Nepal…. Put
simply they all knew they were going to run off the road and then it happened.
A 150m drop over a cliff…. Scary stuff. Lev suffered a fractured upper right
arm the Nepalese chap damaged his back and the driver suffered 2 broken legs a
ruptured spleen. Some villagers heard the noise of the crash and went to
investigate, they arrived after dark and then went for help… long story short
Lev now has a rather large metal rod in his arm the driver is still in hospital
in India 6 months after the crash and the Nepalese guide (cant remember his
name sorry) is okay as well.

Evidently the show will be out in
Oz around March next year.

So having washed and got some
laundry done we headed out towards Shillong and decided to take the minor
roads. The country we travelled through was beautiful tropical jungle and it
was a great drive. However East India is not known for its tourist
infrastructure so at about 4:00pm we decided we had better take an even more
minor road and find a camp. Excellent plan, how some ever the track took us
through a soccer game and into villages that don't normally have Overlanders
drive through. We had just decided we should get back to the main road when we
passed what appeared to be a church, I said to Lisa.. why don't we see if we can
camp next to the church.. so we went in and a young priest called Robin said
sure why not… so we did. The Father came about afterwards and was more than
happy to have some Christian Overlanders take refuse in the church grounds.

We awoke after a great nights
sleep and headed off after the obligatory photographs. Evidently Meghalaya is
predominantly Christian… go figure… it almost feels like Goa in Southern India.

The day started off at an
elevation of 103 meters and ended up at 1700 meters, so we went from hot humid
tropical jungle to pine studded mountains where the air was cool and dry. It
was not all beautiful, apart from the road which was brand new and no traffic,
we started to notice logging activities then barren hills and towns which
looked like they are in the wild west. We had seen a lot of trucks carrying
coal then also noticed charcoal production. I guess the people have no real
choice and I guess it is complicated, however it was sad to see clear felling.

So after a days driving we have
stopped short of Shillong by about 20kms. Our cooking gas supply has run out
which is a little devastating, however earlier in the day we drained about 40
litres of the bad Nepal fuel that was in the rear tank. It was sad to do such a
negligent act of dumping it on the ground however we did not have too much
choice… so we picked a nice river and dumped it straight in…. haha no we did
not… we picked a quarry where the environment was already buggered. I salvaged
a couple of litres just in case we needed to use the Whisper Light fuel stove….
Good thinking 99. So tonight we cooked on the Whisper Light and for once did
not set fire to anything else… unlike my bench back at home.

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Photos

Darren and Lev
Google Levison Wood walking the Nile

Comments

[cousinbev]

Did you tell the priest you were Hindus? Tee hee!