Below are several days' worth of entries, saved up during our trip.
On Monday morning, having exhausted the possibilities of the town in the rain, including the joy of squat toilets, we were ready to begin our long drive back to the airport and to Kathmandu. Our original driver from a week before, Shiva, picked us up in the morning, telling us he would take us anywhere we wanted all day. His oldest son was with him. So we took a leisurely trip down the hillsides, stopping often to enjoy the tea gardens. At our first stop we scrambled up a tea hill to see the view. These are steep, muddy, and tricky, but quite doable if you can trace a path between the bushes. We came down and talked to the tea pickers. They told us they pick the new growth, the brighter leaves on the top of each plant. They make 7 rupees per kilogram, and pick 2-3 baskets per day. Our driver, who is a farmer in Damak, estimated that the baskets would hold 20-25 kg. each, so we figured they were making about $6/day, which isn’t much in the U.S. but is pretty decent in Nepal, if we did our math right.
Next we stopped at a German-owned tea factory that had a visitors’ viewing area. We were told the process takes 17 hours from the time the pickers bring the tea in till it is ready to ship. It is first dried, then rolled, then fermented, then graded and sorted, then dried again, then packed. Some of this was done with machines, but much by hand. Unfortunately, since we were viewing through plastic windows, most of the pictures didn’t come out. We had heard that cardamom was also grown in Ilam, so we asked about it. He showed us some plants, but said that there was a disease among the cardamom throughout the region that had begun to ruin all the plants. I later read that it had sent the price of cardamom sky high without benefiting the farmers.
We stopped again at the knob hill we had seen on the way up, and took the time to climb it and take in the view. Shiva told us couples come here to fall in love. It would be pretty easy.
As soon as we hit the boundary of Jhapa it was hot again. We rode along through the countryside seeing so many people. We stopped once again at the hotel in Damak for lunch, and then on and on and on—we must have seen thousands and thousands of people, plowing fields, raking hay into the street to dry, leading goats or cows along the road, riding bicycles while holding umbrellas against the sun, riding on tops of jeeps and buses, walking hand in hand, dickering in the market, sitting under trees, washing their hair or clothes, bicycling goods to the market, carrying baskets of rocks, digging holes, driving trucks that said “push horn” or “horn please” on the back, walking in a funeral procession, peddling a rickshaw, painting a rickshaw, sleeping on a rickshaw, pushing an ice cream cart, carrying small children. And that was just one small stretch of road in one very small country. Unfortunately, picture-taking out the taxi window proved too challenging; I could not capture this montage.
Biratnagar’s airport was like a bus station. You could walk to it down a one-lane road lined with tropical plants, the kind we think of as houseplants. I don’t think anyone looked at our identification, and the glance into our backpacks was cursory. We just walked out the door to the plane. It was refreshing. The landscape changed quickly from flatland to steep mountains as we approached Kathmandu. Quickly we were home.
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