Political unrest and an exciting trip to the airport

Cows drive on the left in Nepal

I have just spent a week in Lahan which lies on the terai, the hot plains near India. On Monday I finished my work on the research project, and had a flight booked the following day from the small airport of Biratnagar, to Kathmandu for the start of my holiday. It was an eventful commute.

The morning I was due to leave we heard there was a banda - a strike - which meant we should expect possible delays on the road. During a national banda - the word means ‘closed’ - offices, schools, shops and restaurants are supposed to be shut; public and private ground transport is not allowed to run, although planes are exempt; and all non-emergency vehicles are not supposed to be on the roads, although there seemed to be as much traffic as ever. Since my team had heard about the strike, the hospital car with the branding and the flashing lights atop was brought out for my journey, and I set off with my driver, Raja. I had been slightly delayed due to finding a freshly fallen coconut on the way to the doctors' canteen where I needed to settle my bill for the week (only £10 for 17 delicious meals). I asked the cook, Gan, to open the fruit for me so I could drink it, and by the time he had chopped into it with a machete, written out my receipt and found some change, I was a little late leaving.

The road to Biratnagar and beyond runs fairly straight all the way along the country, and my section was no different, apart from a right turn over the Koshi River which breaks the Nepali-Indian border. I could see the border crossing, temptingly close, and a large ‘Welcome to India’ banner overhead. This was the closest I had ever been to India, and I wondered what would happen if I asked Raja to stop the car just so I could have a look, or put a small toe over. But we drove on through the roadside villages lined with mango trees, past sleeping cows, trotting goats, and the flat, hazy farmland of the terai.

Soon we came to an unexpected police check, where an officer curtly ordered us to a halt. Raja leaned out of the window and said that we were headed to the airport; I didn’t comprehend the words but I understood enough from the policeman’s abrupt wave to know that we were to turn off the road. I asked Raja what had happened; apparently there was a problem on the road ahead, but he didn’t know what.

We turned right onto a paved farm lane. For the diminutive size of the road, there was a lot of traffic, from rickshaws to public buses and large lorries. Raja hadn’t been this way before, so I directed him towards the small airport using Google maps. Following my directions, he turned the car in an eastwards zigzig route through rectangular allotments. We were 4km from the airport when he ignored my directions and took a tiny grass track instead of the left turn I had instructed. ‘It’s this way’, I pointed towards the lane I had intended, where there was a traffic jam of buses and other vehicles. He shook his head and we bumped along the grassy track behind an open-backed van and a tractor-trailer. 'Are you sure, Raja?’ I asked him. 'This is an interesting way to get to the airport’, I remarked, smiling at the oddity of our journey, but Raja frowned, shook his head, and said, 'No. Danger.’ He seemed nervous.

The way to the airport

They were political activists, he said, who were stopping the vehicles on the road we had turned off. Politically-motivated strikes are common in Nepal, and there is a fair amount of civil unrest. There have been 23 changes of prime minister in the last 24 years. The current ruling party, the Nepal Communist Party, formed from the Maoist party after their own insurgency and decade-long civil war, has great plans to invest in large infrastructure projects such as hydropower, international airports, and further transportation. There is talk of plans for railways and waterways; even a tunnel under the hills from Kathmandu to the terai. Meanwhile, there is a shortage of investment in agriculture and other local economies. There is much earthquake damage in Nepal, with heavy losses, both infrastructural and human. Two years after the 2015 disaster around 70% of families who lost their homes in the most severely-affected areas were still living in temporary shelter, and 66% of these hadn’t yet received any governmental financial support. Political bickering, mismanagement of aid funds, and a supreme lack of public accountability have all obstructed recovery.

There is much poverty here. The people don’t seem to receive a lot for their income taxes; although there is free access to healthcare, the services are not great; from secondary school level upwards attendance is neither free nor mandatory, leading to high levels of dropouts. The national literacy rate is 63%, which doesn’t seem as low as it could be (in the 1950s it was just 5% due to an elitist, monarchic society) until you consider that only one in two Nepali women can read and write. The GDP per capita is $835 - only just higher than Haiti’s - and although staples such as tea or daal bhat (lentil rice) are cheap enough, living costs can be high and around 80% of the population live in rural areas where income potential is lower. In 2018 the government raised the minimum monthly wage by 38% to 13,450 rupees (450 rupees a day) - the workers’ demand had been a minimum of 16,000 rupees. But even this sharp increase doesn’t stop home-owners employing a house-keeper or a maid for 100 rupees a day, or nothing if she is given food and lodging. One hundred rupees (about a dollar) might buy two plates of vegetarian daal bhat, or three 45 minute bus journeys, or not quite a litre of fuel.

Thus the government's tunnel vision - these large infrastructural plans - is not especially popular.

Raja and I in our hospital jeep continued bumping over the grass, at one point veering sideways up a sharp slope to regain the track we had left to swerve around a large coach. Such intercity vehicles were not made for these agricultural manoeuvres. However, a few more turns and we regained the tarmacked main road, pulling into the airport carpark a cool ten minutes ahead of my planned arrival time.

I don’t believe we were at much risk, although I don’t know what would have happened if we had been stopped, and Raja had been tense and was keen to return quickly to the hospital. We were certainly in no more danger than driving on these maddening roads in the first place, where the traffic law is not only to give way to larger vehicles but also to intentionally cut off smaller ones. My Lonely Planet joylessly tells me that I am 30 times more likely to die in a road accident here than in a developed country, which reminded me of a similar warning by my travel clinic nurse before I went to Ethiopia: I have a higher chance, in a low- or middle-income country, of dying in a car crash than by rabies or typhoid. But what can I do about that? I have to travel about somehow.

On the flight to Kathmandu I gazed out of the window as the tiny propeller place jolted and creaked. In stark contrast to the delight of my recent long-haul flight, I considered how ludicrous it was to be flung through empty space in what was no more than a large winged milk carton, in a country with a deplorable air safety record. Should the spinning propeller suddenly detach itself from the wing, I wondered gloomily, would it be flung away from me into the sky like a lethal upright frisbee, or would it tear through the delicate fuselage and my window, slicing me and the plane in half? For some reason I found myself catastrophising more than usual about who I would phone in the event of an imminent plane crash, and what I would have time to say, until we rose above the haze and, all my grim thoughts forgotten, I saw a great sharp peak slicing through the soft clouds, and another one, light and dark, exquisite and deadly. There she was: Everest, and her massif.

This beautiful, irresistible country.

The Himalaya

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More on Nepal:
The dusty dogs of Kathmandu - on my arrival into Nepal
The endless quest for a birthday beverage - I try to order a drink in Lahan, with mixed success
The tiger who took a taxi - on my first day in Kathmandu
Political unrest and an exciting trip to the airport - my journey to a regional airport amidst civil unrest
The road to Bandipur - is not as straightforward as it seems
Boiled alive in Bandipur - I visit a silkworm farm and discover the violent origins of the Silk Road
My elephant friends - I meet some unpleasant humans and some very important elephants