Yesterday afternoon a bus fell off the road above our house in Manma. Only two mildly injured, the two drivers, no passengers on board as it turned out, and the rackety bulk lodged itself against a fortuitous house just bellow instead of bouncing a thousand meters down the valley.
In Western Europe, we would hardly recognise the road as such; a sinuous 4 metre strip of red dust, rock, lurching dips and holes, along impossible mountains and cliffs. Here, it’s a recent lifeline to the outside world.
It’s taken us 3 1/2 days to creep our way up the Karnali valley from Surket, along the edge of the mountain, about 40 miles as the crow flies and maybe three times that by road. We started by taxi jeep, but that had to turn back when a lorry with a broken axel blocked the road. We carried on in time-honoured local fashion, on foot for most of the journey, with porters for our excess baggage; grabbed a lift on an army jeep for a few miles; and foolishly ventured onto one of those buses for an interminable and truly terrifying 75 minutes, soaring above the clouds, 10cm away from a 1km drop down to the valley below.
On the 3rd day, we met a gaggle of people accompanying a stretcher. At first we thought it was carrying a corpse, but its apparently lifeless occupant turned out to be a woman with two broken legs from a mountain fall; she had been carried from a village 4hrs from Manma, and then a thousand feet down the mountain. Her party were aiming for one of these buses to grind and lurch for 9hrs to the nearest hospital in Nepalgunj.
You are 30 times more likely to die in a road incident in Nepal than in any developed country and yesterday’s bus accident reinforced our resolve to avoid riding on any mountain bus. But in rural areas, these buses also symbolise life, the only way to access healthcare, with no other way to reach a hospital.
More photos to follow...
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