I was supposed to be in Raxaul, on the Indian side of the Nepalese border, at eight o’clock in the morning. There had been difficulties from the get-go. The Mithila Express, the direct train from Kolkata, had been fully booked until Muzaffarpur. I booked a bus to the latter city and the express to the frontier. A little fiddly, perhaps, but the timing was perfect: the bus would arrive several hours before the train did.
What I hadn’t considered was that the bus might leave Kolkata two hours late, stop for half an hour on the edge of the city after leaving someone behind at the bus stand, and fall even further behind as it bounced and meandered its way north through the night. I was still new to India at the time, and hadn’t yet come to regard schedules as expressions of well-meaning but essentially meaningless idealism, utterly disconnected from reality.
Not that it particularly mattered by the time we arrived in Muzaffarpur. I hadn’t missed the train at all. The Mithila Express had been cancelled.
It took four and a half hours for another bus from Muzaffarpur to cover the hundred kilometres to Raxaul. By the time I managed to cross the border into Nepal, I’d missed my chance to catch a day bus, or even a jeep, to Kathmandu. I would be spending a second night on a bus and forfeiting yet another in bed.
I waited in the office of the New Angel bus company in Birgunj, the border town on the Nepalese side. Exposed wires dangled from the office walls, garlanding portraits of Hindu gods so dusty it was difficult to tell whether one was looking at Ganesh or Shiva or someone else. Which one them gets about on a tiger?
From the moment the bus failed to leave Kolkata on time, I had been trying to keep an open mind. I would optimistically alter the schedule: “So long as we’re in Mazzafarpur by six.” “I think we’ll be in Raxaul by midday.” “I only need to hit Birgunj by three.”
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He meant it as an apology but also, I suspect, as a pre-emptive rebuke. Don’t complain. This is the way things are here. This is India.
He was right to do so, but needn’t have worried: years of low-rent travel with half-cocked companies have inured me against the colonial instinct to denounce and demand, to insist upon one’s own high standards, as has seeing other travellers give in so spectacularly to such instincts of their own. Of course, I can turn on the indignation when necessary. I tried to here not more than an hour ago, talking brusquely to fandangle a ride to the capital. But my heart wasn’t in it, and everyone could tell.
The other reason for keeping my head was that this was precisely what I’d come here to see: what works, what doesn’t, how such countries operate. I could have flown, but how sterile, how elliptical. I could also avoid street food and refuse to use squat toilets, but then I might as well have stayed at home. World-class inefficiency is certainly burdensome, but to avoid it would be to embrace only partial impressions. I don’t leave books half-read.
And so spent the night on another bus, caked in dust from the open windows, slightly worried about my inability to stop shivering. We arrived in Kathmandu at nine in the morning, three hours later than we were promised. Wherever you go, there you are, about fifteen hours later than you planned.
I stepped off the bus and into the mud and got roundly and predictably fleeced by my taxi driver. Kathmandu isn’t as elevated as you might think. I didn’t need to acclimatise to the altitude, and I’d already acclimatised to everything else. I’d done that in India. This was Nepal.
An edited version of this article appeared in the September 2018 issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller.
