Patna To Pokhara - Land Borders 1

 Always cross using a land border, is what I say and try to do. You are certain to have an adventure. I was planning to travel from Patna, capital of Bihar state in India to Pokhara in Nepal. 

I landed in Patna airport, picked up my bag and headed out to get a taxi to my hotel. There was not a single taxi to be found. There were no auto-rickshaws either. Most airports in India have a prepaid taxi counter, but there were none in Patna airport. Every single passenger who had come on my flight had a car waiting for them, either a pre arranged taxi or their own car with a driver. Everyone left and pretty soon I was the only person in the airport. I started walking and headed out of the airport. I reached the main road and waited there for some transport. After about ten minutes, I got a cycle rickshaw and he agreed to take me to my hotel. While we were going, we got stopped at one place by a man carrying a stick. The cycle rickshaw driver took out some money and gave it to the man. We were then allowed to proceed further. "What's going on?", I asked him. He said that there is a mafia that operates in Patna, and to proceed from one "zone" to another, they had to "pay" a tax. He said that approximately 80% of their earnings are lost to the "tax" collectors. We were then stopped by three other "tax" collectors before we reached the hotel and each time he had to pay money. I paid an extra ₹100 ($1.20) to the driver. He thanked me profusely.

After spending a few days exploring Patna, Rajgir and Nalanda, I decided to move. I was planning to reach Nepal using the Raxaul-Birganj border. It is not as popular as the Gorakhpur-Sunauli border further west but it was closer to Pokhara. I found out that there is a bus from Patna to Raxaul at 6am. I checked out of my hotel at 5am and got a cycle rickshaw. Patna and Bihar state are the most under developed areas of India and even auto rickshaws were few. The main form of public transport was cycle rickshaws. There are four bus stations in Patna but the driver knew from where the Raxaul bus left. The bus station was a giant, flat mud and dirt field. My cycle rickshaw driver dodged past honking buses, throngs of people and cattle. He then stopped. "How do you know that the bus to Raxaul will come here?", I said. He confidently said that the bus to Raxaul will start from that exact point in the giant dirt field. I got off, paid him and waited. After about twenty minutes, a bus came and stopped there. "Does the bus go to Raxaul?", I asked the driver. He said, "Yes". I was one of the first to get in to the bus and I got myself a window seat, not too far back. It started filling up and a young European nun wearing a habit came and sat next to me. She was from Scotland and was on her way back to her church after her annual vacation in Scotland. She asked me, "Where are you headed to?". I said, "Raxaul". "Is that what he (the driver) told you?", she asked. I said, "Are you saying that this bus will not go to Raxaul?". "Well, if he said that it will go to Raxaul, then it will", she said. 

The bus was full, beyond capacity. There were people standing in the aisle, sitting on the floor and there were plenty of people sitting on the roof of the bus. Around 10am, the driver took out a bottle of what appeared to be whisky and started drinking from it. I told the nun that the driver was drinking. She said that was common and there was nothing that I could do about it. She said that if I complained, the driver would stop the bus and ask me to get off. The weather was hot and the single bottle of water that I was carrying was getting over. The bus stopped in a village and there was a hand operated ground water pump by the side of the road. Several people got off the bus and started filling up their bottles. As I started to get up, the nun said, "All the ground water in the area is typhoid infected". I told her, "I am  vaccinated". She said, "Good luck!". I reluctantly decided not to fill up that water. She said, "You won't die. Just have a few drops of water, whenever you are desperate". The nun got off a few hours later. The driver stopped the bus right in front of the church for her. The nun said, "Bye. I hope you reach Raxaul". The driver kept steadily drinking whisky. Around 3pm the driver stopped the bus and said, "That's it. I am going to sleep". He switched off the engine, spread a newspaper sheet on the floor, lay down and curled up. I was in Motihari and still had some 60 km to go to reach Raxaul. 

I asked a tea vendor,  "Are there any buses to Raxaul?". He said, "There are a couple of buses which will come by but they will be full. You will have to ride on the roof of the bus". "Or", he said, "You can stay in a hotel for the night and catch the morning 8am train to Raxaul". I would reach Raxaul by 10am. I decided to check in to a hotel instead of riding on the roof of a bus. There was only one hotel in Motihari. The hotel owner said that the room for the night would be ₹180 ($2.25). The room was clean and there was a powerful hot shower. And they had cold beer! What more do you need? I asked the hotel owner, " What is Motihari famous for?". He said that George Orwell was born in Motihari in 1903. I asked him, "Can I see the house where George Orwell used to live?".  He said that I could. I finished my beer and set out to find George Orwell's house. Nobody seemed to know about it. None of the cycle rickshaw drivers had even heard of George Orwell. But Motihari is a very small town and I finally found the place. It was a small, abandoned nondescript house. I opened the gate and walked in. There was nobody there. The house was completely in ruins. I wandered around inside the dilapidated house. It was a three room house and I wondered which room was George Orwell's room. There was a small ruined warehouse next to the house. It was the opium warehouse. George Orwell's father was a British civil servant responsible for shipping opium from Motihari to China. Motihari apparently had a large population of British opium traders in those days. The Bihar government has apparently decided now to restore the house and open an Orwell Museum*.

The next morning I reached Motihari railway station by 7:30am. The train arrived around 8am. The train was full. People were hanging outside from the doors and the roof was also packed with people. I found one coach which was almost empty. It was the reserved coach. I had an ordinary unreserved ticket but I climbed in and took a seat. The ticket checker came by after about half an hour and said, "You are not allowed to sit in this coach". I said, " I am not allowed to sit on the roof also". He smiled at my answer and allowed me to continue sitting. It was a blissful two hours on the train, with fresh, cool air blowing through the open windows and the train passing through green paddy fields. From Raxaul station I took a cycle rickshaw to go through the border to Nepal. There was a land bridge that separated India and Nepal. The rickshaw driver cycled through at a blistering speed and shouted to me, "Give me ₹5 (7 cents)! Quick!". I hurriedly searched my pockets and gave him the money. As we raced past an Indian immigration officer, the rickshaw driver thrust the money into his hands. Now we were approaching the Nepalese border and the driver again shouted, "Give me money! Quick!". I said, "Five rupees?". He said,  "No. He is Nepali, just give me ₹2 (3 cents)". We raced past the Nepalese immigration officer and he handed him two rupees. It was a nice little racket being run by the immigration officers, charging each person crossing the border. I had reached Nepal.

The rickshaw driver took me to the office of a bus operator in Birganj and dumped me there. I bought a bus ticket to Pokhara, the bus was at 5pm in the evening. I kept my bag in the waiting room of the bus booking office and went out to explore. Birganj was the antithesis of pretty and quaint. It was dirty, dusty, there was filthy water stagnating everywhere and the roads were unpaved. The ground was black with leaking oil from the trucks and the place looked threatening with gangs of people standing in the street corners and staring at me. I felt that I had reached the end of the world. There was a cart selling food to truck drivers. I had my lunch there - dal, bhat and tarkaari (lentils, rice and vegetables). Little did I realise that this was what I was going to eat most of the time in Nepal. I went back to my waiting room and the bus operator said, "Why do you want to go to Pokhara? Why don't you go to Kathmandu?". I maintained that I was going to Pokhara and not Kathmandu. During the next few hours, he repeatedly tried to convince me to go to Kathmandu instead. I stuck to my plan of going to Pokhara. The bus came promptly at 5pm. The driver drove for about half a kilometre and stopped at a street corner. The bus stood there for four hours. They were trying to get passengers to go to Pokhara. No wonder he had been trying to get me to go to Kathmandu instead. That bus must have been fuller. Finally my bus was half full and they decided to move at 9pm. There was nobody sitting next to me. So I removed my bag from the rack above and kept it on the seat next to me, as I was worried of theft during the night. A man sitting behind me objected to it and said, "Bags should not be kept on the seats". I ignored him. He complained to the ticket conductor, who came and said, "If you want to keep your bag on a seat, you have to buy one more ticket!". I put my bag back on the rack above and went to sleep.

When I woke up it was 2am. The bus had stopped in a village. It was pitch dark and there was one single light bulb hanging from a tree and glowing. Under that light bulb was a pool table. Four people were playing pool at 2am in the night in that village! Around 6am the bus came to a stop and the ticket conductor shouted, "Last stop!". I had reached Pokhara. I and my bag had made it safely. It had taken me exactly 48 hours to travel from Patna to Pokhara, a distance of 450 km. 

I took a Maruti Suzuki taxi to my hotel. The hotel receptionist explained all the rules to me, everything seemed to be self service. She then climbed three floors up and led me to my room on the terrace. I opened the door to the terrace. Right in front of me was a spectacular, unobstructed view of snow clad Mt. Annapurna. I knew that I was going to stay there for some time. 

Paul Theroux says, "Travel is glamorous only in retrospect"**. That was what this journey was!

References:

* "George Orwell’s Birthplace in Motihari to Turn Museum" by Amlan Home Chowdhury, in The Citizen, 16th December 2018.

** "Paul Theroux, Restless Writer of the Rails" by Paul Hendrickson, in the Washington Post, 20th September 1979.