We Got To Get Out of This Place – Part 2

We were very tired. But we got up three hours later and were ready for the day. When your adrenaline rises up to the day you can do it. Ours did.

The lad driving was a bit of a pillock, which you don’t want when you’re relying on him as the difference between safety and danger. We were off at around 4am.

The night was dark and we bounced over rough ground, which rose up many thousands of feet over the course of three hours. An amazing climb, which me and Killer had done on foot. Now we had done it on wheels. At the summit there was a tea house where we rested.

The pillock hadn’t noticed a punctured front tyre, and he ignored any advice on how to change it. Resulting in a two and a half hour wait for the next jeep driver to show him how to do it. Back on the road.

We were hearing ominous stories of avalanches and floods throughout Nepal. As we approached Salieri it was clear that we didn’t have many options.

Nir said we should walk for a couple of days and then get a bus to Jiri. We were dropped at a tea house in the village and we decided to stay there overnight. We were tired and we understood that the main road to Kathmandu was flooded, blocked with mud and closed by a huge landslide. Tomorrow morning might shed some light on the situation. We found a snooker hall and loafed around. Trying to pot something, anything. It’s not fair. The table’s too long.

We slept well and woke ready for action. Amit had slipped away into the night. A nice man. Our friend. But Nir was still here to keep us safe.

Our third jeep ride. And this driver was an idiot. We debated where to go. Jiri was out, if for no other reason than Nir was beginning to get on our tits going on about Jiri. We saw footage of flooding and mudslides blocking the main Kathmandu road near Ranechap airport. We thought that if we got as far as we could by jeep then we could climb over landslides and wade through mud to reach our next jeep. I was just a kid of 70 with a crazy dream of freedom. There was a road running north from Ranechap back towards the mountains,which curved westwards and then south westwards into Kathmandu. Blocked for weeks they reckoned.

Our options were reducing so we set off southwards, aiming for Ranechap. Maybe we could get a helicopter there. The locals said we wouldn’t get very far down the road before we would come to a halt. Staying put was not an option.

We trundled down the road, and the forecast rain had gone and run away. The scariest parts for us were where newly sprung rivers flooded down narrow valleys. These valleys were usually bridged by cobbled roads with the stream channelling down through a pipe. These were now raging torrents that we prayed our jeep would pile through and not be dragged sideways down the valley. Sounds dramatic but it was.

Our first landslide test was half an hour into our journey. The mountainside had peeled away, taking the road with it. There was a muddy single track, just wide enough for a jeep. We waited for various vehicles slipping and sliding down the trail towards us. Then it was our turn. Idiot boy revved like Max Verstappen and gunned the jeep forward, determined not to spin the wheels in the mud and slide back down. He was good at this. We made it through the mud to where the road re-emerged.

The next two hours were spent dodging smaller landslides and moving further down towards Ranechap. In one village we came up against a police roadblock. They were waving cars through, until it got to ours. They waved us back. There was a mother of all landslides a way down the valley. One car that had tried to make it through had turned around and they showed us photos of the blockage. Massive. An American woman had been climbing over landslides, slipped and was now in hospital.

But the main reason we got turned around was because our jeep had a white number plate and it shouldn’t be driving on this road on a Sunday. That road is for green number plates. I kid you not.

Nir was straight into it. We must go back to Salieri, three hours drive back north, walk two days and get a bus to Jiri. The police were not letting us through.

I walked down to the policemen and asked the apparent boss man if we could walk down to the landslide. He agreed, so I went back up to the car and Dan and I started to offload our rucksacks. Nir meanwhile was conniving with a group of locals. He wouldn’t answer when we asked him questions so we told him that we were walking now.

After half an hour of ducking and wrangling he reluctantly got us decanted into another jeep, sporting green number plates, with another group of passengers.

Dodging landslides again.

It’s hot at lower altitudes in Nepal and the streams across the road were beginning to lessen. They were drying up.

It turned out to be good that we didn’t walk. It was an hour and a half before we hit the big landslide.

It didn’t cover a great distance, but the road was buggered. We could walk it, but we’re in the mountains and there were no available jeeps waiting for trade on the other side. A life saver was the arrival of a JCB! Just one lad in a mechanical digger in the full heat of the day. But he set about, slowly and surely, digging a new road through the boulders.

Dan wandered down to the landslide, sat on a rock and watched the digger. I spotted more boulders falling from above him and screamed for him to get out of the way. He disdainfully looked around then carried on with his digger watch.

Nearly three hours passsed. We weren’t going back.

Dan and me myself I crossed the valley and talked to drivers coming the other way, towards us. The situation sounded very bad. All roads to Kathmandu were blocked, and some would take weeks to clear. Ranechap airport was shut and there were no helicopters. We were driving into a dead end.

Ooh er missus!