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Continue editing photos and videos for both Dipak and Facebook.

It’s so dry and fusty in Kathmandu. I wish it would rain to clear the air.

Did very little today, just recovering from all of this bus trips.

The whole day is spent on the bus. We go the same way as I went when I visited Lunbini, then beyond. What a journey. We arrive at the Mahendranagar bus park around 4pm. Curiously there are no taxis but electric golf buggies and horse drawn carriages. We take the electric cart to krishna’s home. We eventually get there around 5pm and meet everyone. I’m do tired and go to bed without having dinner.

We pack up and after some breakfast Krishna takes me quickly on his bike to one of the border marker pillars that signals the border between India and Nepal. I want a photo.
We get an electric golf buggy taxi into town and a bus to Kolaphur. We arrive around 8pm and walk to the nearest hotel for the night. Dipak meets a man from a local bee association who will take us around tomorrow.

I pack up my stuff and organise to leave things in storage, and pay my bill. Dipak picks me up around 1pm and we go to his house to pack his things into my bay. I meet Dipak’s mother and his cousins who are staying in the Kathmandu for schooling. We then walk out to the road to catch the bus that will take us all the way to the western border. Krishna is a botanist and will be assisting Dipak on this trip. And it’s his family who we will be visiting when we get to Mahendranagar on the border. Krishna is catching the bus at the bus park so he is already on the bus when we board. It’s a comfortable bus with leg room and AC. It’s 3.30pm. The trip is going well until about 7pm the bus stops. And there we sit for four hours! It’s that bloody stupid road block for the road maintenance again. Unbelievable! 

We start the day with a bike ride into a market area and start walking. We’re visiting a community forest with one of Krishna’s uncles. He is a guardian of the forest and he’s taking us to a special tree within the forest that is host to many colonies of native honey bees. The community forest was established by the local people to manage the harvesting of a popular timber tree. They realized that if they kept harvesting this tree at the rate they were, there would be none left. So they took matters into their own hands. It’s a great initiative by the people themselves. There is no government here being so far from Kathmandu.

Our walk starts with a brief stop at a huge Bombax cieber tree. These beautiful trees are everywhere and they are huge. I know then we’ll because they are my favorite tree back in Australia. There is a colony of native bees in this tree so Dipak is very interested. The walk continues for about two kilometers into the forest. It’s hot and dry but. We eventually come to a tall tree on the side of an escarpment and it it are about 60 different colonies of bees. It’s amazing! Dipak is very excited. These bees are bigger than the European honey bee and are untamed, aggressive. They are very high up so it’s unlikely we are under and threat from them. We photograph and take measurements, and collect dead or dying bees from the ground.

There are supposed to be leopards in this forest, which I’m excited by but of course we don’t see any. They are rare and this is the wrong time of the day anyway. We do see some monkeys.

We walk back to the village a different way that takes us along the Makhale River. It’s a wise shallow river that doesn’t have much water in it. India has famed it further up and taken the water for its own hydro power, which it the sells to Nepal, despite the water coming from Nepal! There is an old bridge there built by the British during their occupation of India but it’s only capable of light traffic now because of weakness in its structure. This is the border. 

There are wetlands here. There is plent of water underground so the communities have plenty of good quality water for drinking and irrigation. It’s easily accessible being seven meters underground.

We drop down into the village for lunch at a cafe run by one of krishna’s cousins. On the bikes again, this time to have a look at the longest suspension bridge in Southern Asia. It spans the Makhale River and was built by the Swiss. It’s spectacular and is designed for bikes and walker onlys, not vehicles. It’s very impressive. We witnessed a bike carrying two people and two goats.  It’s getting late but Krishna wants to take us to see some Asian elephants. These elephants are kept for doing work in the forests and carry tourists around when there are some. Elephants are special animals. They are being looked after by a bunch of young guys who are their trainers and drivers.

We spent a hellish hot night in a Kohalpur hotel. It’s so hot here. Like Mahendranagar, we are subject to the desert winds of northern India. I’m constantly drinking water. A man from a bee association in this region met us first thing. Krishna is going back to Kathmandu for a family wedding and start classes again so it’s Dipak and I going out to day under the guidance of the bee association. We catch a bus and walk for about four kilometers across paddocks to a house with hives built into the walls. It’s Dipak and I, and a man from the local bee association who is our guide. Poor Krishna. He’s 29 and it’s expected in Hindu culture for men to be married by 30. He’s 26 but the pressure is mounting for him to find a bride. And finding a bride means someone who is culturally appropriate and satisfies both parents. If he can’t, then his family will probably find one for him. And he is balding, which he thinks will make him less attractive to women. He’s confused as to where this balding comes from because his father and brothers all have strong hair. He asks me what disease is doing this. I explain its genetics and not a disease, and that my situation is identical.

We get to the house after a hot dry walk across the flat, searing landscape. There are animals being tended by children in the open space. The house has two holes in its clay walls that are access points to cavities deliberately built into the design. Yes they deliberately build their houses to accommodate bees. These spaces are included in the wall with exit holes. We climb up into the attic and each cavity has a wooden hatch to allow access to the hives. The idea is to create an attractive environment and the bees will come. And they do. But in this case one hive is the Asian honey bee and the other is occupied by stingless honey bees. The farmer would prefer the Asian honey bee because it’s bigger and produces mor honey. It’s an interesting way to keep bees. We walk back to the road and bus into town to visit the hospital. It’s a spectacular building that is also a medical teaching school. We’re here because there are many colonies of bees making their home on the underside of cement window shades. These are large native honey bees, Apis dorsata, which are yet to be domesticated. And they are aggressive. People have learnt how to rob the hives in the wild.

Back to the hotel we pack up and catch a bus to a bus exchange place. But on the way we are guided to another place where stingless bees are being kept. From here we leave our bee-association guide and bus to meet a friend of Dipak. His name is Ishwori and he is a professor of statistics at Tribhuvan University. He arrives and we find a bus to Sandhikharka. This turns out to possibly being the worst bus trip of my life. We leave the flats to get up into the hills. It’s slow and the old bus is packed. The road is rough. We get to Sandhikharka around 9.30pm and stumble around near the bus park looking for a hotel. We find one and it’s dinner and bed. Tomorrow we start early to catch a jeep bus to Ishwori’s home.

We decide to have a rest day today and stay another night here. Balkrishna and his wife are so generous and happy to have us here. Balkrishna is 57 and just recently retired from being headmaster at one of the schools here. They have a beautiful home and barn with goats and ox. 

Balkrishna takes us for a walk around the village. We visit a few houses with hives. The landscape here is typically mountainous and we are high up. It’s pleasantly cool and of course the views are immense. It’s home for lunch then another short walk in the afternoon. We meet three of Balkrisna’s brothers who live here in the village. He has five brothers and had three sisters. One has passed away. I get nice photos of brothers with their mother. There are long sessions of Nepalese speak and they apologies to me for that. I don’t care. I fell comfortable being there listening to them despite not understanding a word there are saying.

We had planned to catch a jeep bus back to Sandhikharka to then bus overnight to Kathmandu. So I had left my backpack there, to pick up again on our way through. But now we think it would be nice to go via Pokhara. This means getting my back pack delivered to here via the jeep bus. Dipak and Balkrishna work hard on the phone to contact the relevant people for this to happen. It doesn’t look good and we won’t know if we’ve succeeded into midnight. Yes the jeep bus gets here at midnight.

Did my back pack arrive? We get up early because we have to catch s bus to take us to Tansen. Then another to Pokahara. Dipak jokes that my bag didn’t arrive and I partly believe him. I didn’t think our ambitious plan to get my backpack here would work. But it did. It was here. I find out later that Balkrishna had got up in the middle of the night to walk 30 minutes to meet the jeep bus and carry my 18kg bag back to the house. This is an extremely generous thing for him to do. But this is typical of my treatment by Nepalese families where ever I go. I’m embarrassed by their generosity.

We pack and meet our bus at 7.15am. Balkrishna invites me to come back and stay for a few weeks and teach English. That’s a great idea.

The bus eventually gets us to Tansen. The terrain here shapes the roads into constant bends and u-turns, making a seemingly small distance into a multi hour trip. The constant bracing your body against the turns is tiring. And the nerve tingling experience of trsvelling on narrow roads on the sides of steep mountain ranges adds to the exhaustion. It’s stressful to the unpracticed. Anyway we arrive safely and it’s a credit to the driver and the bus. These roads are extremely hard on the vehicles.

The sim today is to get to Pokhara in enough time to find a hotel and look around. Seems straight forward. We walk around town for a look before trying to find a bus to Pokhara. It’s confusing but Dipak finds the right spot to wait for a bus. It arrived and is crowded of course. We eventually find a seat. It’s 125 km to Pokhara from here. Easy! Five and a half hours later, after dark, we arrive in Pokhara! The terrain was incredibly mountainous and the road threw us around like no other road I’ve experienced in Nepal. How disappointing to arrive after dark. There is no point in getting a hotel beside the lake. We find one near the bus park. We do get to have a shower though, first for many days. For dinner is Dahl Bart and a few welcome beers.

The aim today is simply to get to Kathmandu. Dipak and I walk and bus into the lake area of Pokhara for a quick look. We check out the bus parks for the best ride to Kathmandu. There are a confusing array of bus parks and buses here as there are in every Nepalese city. The bus parks are where you go to catch a bus but which bus park is going to have the bus you want? And if you know what you are doing you can hail one down from the road. We try to get an air conditioned tourist bus but they’re booked out. So we catch a bus back to hotel and another bus park for non-tourist buses. Dipak struggles to find the right bus and of course I’m no help at all. We eventually find one and settle in. These non tourist buses are designed for Nepalese. Leg room is cruely small for me and the seats are narrow. The ceiling is low. We find the best seat for me. The trip goes well and we reach Kathmandu by 4pm. We walk to Dipaks home and unload his stuff from my backpack. He then takes me back to Hotel Lily on his bike. I’m so tired!