Today has been a long day. So long that I won't be able to think up a clever theme other that "What I did today."

We woke up at 5:30 AM and went to meet our bus to Dumre at 6:30. The bus left at 7:00, and for the next 5 dry, dusty hours we bounced around on the bus. This provided us with our first glimpse of rural Nepal other than from the plane. Brad observed that the vegetation is identical to that of Hawaii. Lots of green, tropical plants, terraced hills everywhere.

At the first stop we bought some oranges (suntala), which are somewhat misnamed, since they are green. Back on the hot smoky bus. Second stop was lunch. We had a great lunch, called dal, even though there were no lentils in it. They called the meal aalu ro kerau (or something like it) which seems to mean potato with peas. They were more like garbanzos than anything else: yellow and crunchy. Not too much farther was Dumre.

We were considering taking a jeep or taxi over the stretch of dirt road to the first town. We asked around for a taxi along the road, but with no success. We were neither understood nor pampered as we had been elsewhere. So we found the trail and started walking. And it was good.

Not far from Dumre we were approached by a guy who said we could stay at his place. When we asked how far it was to his place, he said 5 hours. What better way to spend time after a 5 hour bus ride! We didn't immediately accept because there was a town only 3 hours away, and after all, it was our first day out.

He employed his best marketing techniques: he talked to us, answering all our dumb questions, taught us Nepali, and he bought us a grapefruit. It was larger than ours, but the skin was very thick. Pink insides, and a good taste, but the way to eat it is to peel a section and bend it back so that the little granules stand out. Eating it is more like eating a pomegranate than a grapefruit because the little pieces within a section spread apart easily. But enough about the grapefruits. He was playing us like a fish.

When we got to Turture (the 3-hour place) he didn't even pause. Then he began the long tease. We were all getting tired, and every time we asked him how long it would take, he would say 35 minutes. For the first 35 minute interval we believed him. But then I remembered his original 5 hour estimate, which meant that we had about an hour to go.

As you might have noticed, we were communicating very well with him. He said he spoke good English because his family ran a tourist hotel. When we got there it was true. His family had the largest hotel in the village. There were 6 guests staying there when we arrived, and there were three of us. To accommodate this crowd, they gave the three of us the family bed. I didn't see where they slept, but it must have been on the floor.

The "Hotel"

The family bed was basically a large board with a very thin pad on it. They did their cooking on a small stove outside the house. There was a table for eating right at the foot of the family bed, and an additional table outside for guests. The doors across the front of the house all opened, so the entire inside was exposed. The side opposite the bed was split by a wall basically built out of bottles of Coke and Fanta Orange. 7 rupees (35 cents) for a bottle of Coke. Dinner itself was only 12 rupees (60 cents), so you can see why they stocked so much Coke, expensive to them, but very cheap to us. There was no charge for staying there, just for the meal.

The family obviously supported themselves by the tourist trade. Within their village they had the only hotel sign, although we were offered a room at another place too. The key marketing advantage of their place was that the whole family spoke English. The little kids (there were a bunch of them and it wasn't clear which kids belonged to this family) spoke English very well. They gave Brad their address and they wrote it out with their flawless penmanship (kind of like mine).

Their village had a cleaning area with a faucet one house away, and there was a steady line of people cleaning themselves and their clothes at the spout. The water was plentiful and they basically left it running full blast most of the time.

In back of the house, through the rice patty was an outhouse, or charpi. It was basically a box with a hole in the bottom. It was dark when I used it, but Brad said that the contents were a seething mass of maggots.

Dinner was dal bhaat, or a variant thereof. It seems that there is a variety of dishes served with rice that go by this name. This one was very light on the vegetables. For dessert they served a beautiful papaya, but I didn't like the way the kids were cleaning the seeds with their fingers, so I skipped it. Breakfast was rice pudding (rice with sugar). Nepali don't eat breakfast, instead having a meal at 10:00, so this was for our benefit. And, of course, black tea (1 rupee) with every meal.

I should mention that that night was one of the worst I have spent, although I slept better than the others. There was a dog outside that barked for long stretches at a time throughout the night; there were 2 pigeons living inside the house that made strange noises fairly often; and the owners went to sleep after us and woke up before us (4 AM) and they weren't as quiet as they could have been.

A couple of interesting features of the house: There was a lot of corn hung to dry (behind the wall of Coke), and there were three large water containers against the back wall. The floor of the house is made of smooth clay. It seems to be a common Nepali technique to cover a surface (boards, mats) with wet clay, making it look nice, and feel smooth on the feet. It is a simple matter to add another layer if it gets scratched or dirty. They use this technique for both the insides and outsides of the houses.