The descent into Hell

Last night we touched down safely in Dhaka and then, finally Kathmandu. Hooray! So now I can say I've been to Bangladesh. We didn't actually leave the plane which I was disappointed about for about 30 seconds. I glanced briefly out the window at the Bangladeshi Airlines planes and thanked God we weren't on one of those. Then I entered the zone. The one where the several nights of little sleep finally catch up and you don't care where you are you want the bloody lights turned off and you want to go to sleep. The best I could do was wrap a blanket around my head, switch the channel of my inflight entertainment to all 80s and, to Ultravox and Culture Club, I think I managed something like sleep. I must have slept a bit, or the sound of Boy George's voice must have drowned it out because I missed the screaming child who refused to be strapped into its seat, its mother too reluctant to force the issue and all the flight attendants insisting that she do so or she'd have to leave the plane.

Someone must have done somthing to the child because we eventually took off and, after an hour, landed in Kathmandu.

We emerged from the plane, into the dark and a haze which made all the lights soft, walked down the steps and across the tarmac to the lowset, brown building nearby: the Tribhuvan International Airport terminal. It was just after 10pm.

There is not actually anything in this building that is little more than a big shed. There are a couple of round tables on the left where you can fill out your paper-work if you haven't done so already and on the right are the check-points for immigration. On the far wall is a window for currency exchange where the guy rings the bell not to say 'next', but to get the attention of whomever might be standing nearby, just in case they haven't noticed him.

We lined up at the queue marked "Without Visa". Standing in line I noticed something. It was almost whisper quiet. No music, no announcement, just the murmur of the people queuing and the officials checking them through. The process was surprisingly swift and easy and the guy at the first deck, a blob of red tikka stuck to his forehead, was even quite friendly. Past the next guy and the next guy and we were officially in Nepal. Baggage collection was also easy. The fact that the bags actually made it at all impressed me. We then descended the escalator, waved off the taxi guys and straight away spotted the Projects Abroad sign.

We dodged the uniformed guy with the Kalashnikov ( well it was a big gun whatever it was) and were met by someone with a name none of us can remember. He lead us across the stretch of dirt that is the carpark, past lots of old beat up looking vans to…a beat up looking van. As he opened the back to load our luggage a man materialised and started trying to ‘help’. He waved him off and we said ‘No thank you’ and I grabbed the bag he was attempting to help us with. He held up both hands and said, ‘No money, I just help’. We said ‘no’ and our guy chased him off.

Once in the van (there was a girl sitting in the front passenger seat. A friend of our guy) our guy started patting his pockets and looking around at the ground. Oh. Neville, Christpher and Daniel had to get out again and thankfully the keys were found.

And so we set off through a place so utterly filthy and diabolical it was hard to believe it was real. The dirt carpark lead onto the main road, also dirt and very rough. We passed piles of rubbish where people and dogs foraged together and managed to not run over the numerous people wandering in the middle of the road. We flashed past a cow sitting looking bored by the side of the road. The air pollution was terrible and at one point I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to breathe it at all. This was when our driver, who was also being a bit of a tour guide (Did you know we have very tall mountains here? The tallest even!) said, ‘You see those lights over on the right there? And the smoke?’ And he explained that this was where they cremated their bodies (24/7 apparently). So it wasn’t so much what I was trying to breathe but who.

The streets became narrower and narrower. So narrow, in fact, that I couldn’t quite believe he was going to get the van into them. He told us that they make up their own road rules here, which seem to consist of driving as fast as you like, usually on the left, and when you come to a stop for whatever reason you beep the horn. At one point we stopped at what looked like a dirty garage door to drop off the driver’s friend at her house. Opposite, someone was foraging through a pile of garbage. And on we went.

I saw a dog sleeping soundly on a wide door step and then noticed the small filthy body curled up next to it, the two of them sleeping back to back for what little warmth and comfort it gave them.

And then we pulled up on an angle in an impossibly narrow laneway and realised we’d arrived at the hotel. No computer check-in here. Once we were sorted for rooms and the paper-work done our driver said good night, that he was now going to ‘house’ and off he went in the van. Another guy fetched us two bottles of water each and then helped us up the stairs—to the fourth floor—and showed us to our rooms. This done we said ‘thanks’ but he still hung around. After a few more thank yous Neville finally twigged and handed him a tip. He pretended to be surprised and vanished.

The rooms here are small and really basic, but very clean and each have their own bathroom. There is hot water but best to have your shower in the afternoon when the solar pipes on the roof have had a chance to heat the water. Even then you'll be lucky.

Dan and Tom were pretty freaked out by now. Two countries in 48 hours is hard enough, but when the last one looks like a nightmare, that’s really pushing it. Dan sat on the edge of our bed staring at his toothbrush, after we’d warned him to use only the bottled water to clean his teeth and on the verge of tears, expressed his feelings in the only language he knows: "It’s just so gay!" We reassured him that it was a bit of a shock but that he’d soon get used to it and we were here, etc, etc, and so he went to bed. And so did we, to a blaring covers band playing the standard cover band set consisting of: ‘Summer of ‘69’ and the compulsory ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’.

And then I woke up having the nearest thing to a panic attack I’ve ever experienced. It was awful. I felt terrified. I felt guilty. We’d made a huge mistake bringing our kids here. They weren’t safe. It was too stressful for them. Bringing them to a third world country was surely an extreme way to stop them whinging about their lives. What the fuck were we thinking?

So I took the other half of my sleeping pill and went back to sleep.

What I think had woken me up was the throbbing, window rattling noise somewhere below our room. And when, the next morning,  the power flickered off and on and the noise stopped, I realised it was the bloody generator which clicks on and off automatically when the main power drops out—about four hours a day. And it’s throbbing away now, at quarter to 7, so I hope that means it will be off all night.

Things did look better in the morning as we hoped they would. At breakfast, provided by the hotel as part of the whole volunteering deal, I was looking out the window and between two metal awnings saw in the distance a fat, hairy monkey climb off the roof of a building and down it’s side like it had somewhere it had to be. It was watched on buy another animal which none of us could identify. It was either an enormous white cat or a very strange dog. Either that or someone had a white tiger on their roof.

And that, so far, is Kathmandu.