Dateline: Mungpoo, Darjeeling District, West Bengal, India; March 4, 2011—India! This is not exactly the country I would want to call my own. But it does hold its fascinations and it is here the Lord has sent me to do some work. And getting here was half the fun.

Yesterday, Thursday, March 3, I appeared back at the visa office of the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu for the almost final phase of the visa process. I turned in my paperwork, paid the 5,150 Nepalese rupees ($74) on top of the 300 rupees ($4) already paid, and was told to come back at 5PM.

After making my way back to my residence in Kathmandu, I busied myself in packing and preparing for the ordeal, for traveling in India is more an ordeal than an experience or an adventure, although there is always plenty of adventure. The trip might be reasonably compared to the bus ride I took a year and a half ago from Lusaka, Zambia, to Mafinga, Tanzania. Harrowing, to say the least. A man had been in Nepal at Scheer Memorial Hospital in Bunepa for treatment of a kidney infection and he was to accompany me to my destination in India for he was a student there. His is an interesting story.

His name is Tika and he was not a Christian before the following event. His son, a student at the school to which I have come to teach for three weeks, was a faithful Christian. He was a sincere and dedicated soul but his father showed little interest in his strange religion or his invisible God. As part of the course, the students went out on a camping trip down near a large river. Although told not to go into the water, the siren song of the cool flowing waters beckoned them to enjoy its needed refreshment. This boy and another student entered the water. It wasn’t deep, which was good, for the boy could not swim. As they splashed around, reveling in the respite from the noonday heat, the young man stepped into a deep hole. He went straight down. His companion plunged in after him, trying in the tenebrous depths to catch glimpse or grasp of him. Again and again he dove, wildly searching until at last, a touch of flesh. Hauling him to the surface and to the shore, he tried vainly to revive the unconscious and unbreathing boy. It was all in vain; the boy was dead.

After dealing with his great loss, the father, Tika, showed up at this school one day high in the mountains, and asked to take his son’s place. This was the man guiding me back to Mungpoo. But he could speak about as much English as I could Nepalese.

I was at the embassy by 4:15. The last bus for the border was due to depart at 6 PM so time was of the essence. By 4:50 a crowd of trekkers from around the world was waiting for visas at the mute and unyielding gate. It is a special breed that would undertake to trek through Nepal and India. As I scrutinized the motley crew, I saw very few who appeared to have any other purpose than to just fling themselves from hostel to hostel for a few months. Some had dreadlocks that would have made Bob Marley look like a Marine recruit. Others were dressed in native garb, swami beards, robes, sandals and a fine layer of dirt. They are serious about fitting in.

Five o’clock came, no passports, no visas, no officials. Then 5:05, then 5:10. Someone mentioned something about Indian time and well I knew about Indian time. My two other visits to the land of the Indus taught me that if a meeting was slated to begin at 7 PM, expect people to begin showing up by 8:30 PM. But I didn’t have an hour and a half to hang out at the embassy and I had to travel on Thursday or wait till Sunday as I won’t travel on the Sabbath unless absolutely necessary and unavoidable. Five-fifteen came and still no officials. At last the gates swung open and we swarmed in like so many bedbugs at a cheap motel.

By 5:20 I was in a taxi with Bajhu Ram speeding to the bus “station.” And no matter how squalid it may have been, erase from your fertile minds any experience you might have had in a Greyhound Bus station. That was luxury and perfect order compared with what I met in Kathmandu. The “bus station” consisted of the hopelessly confused confluence of two main roads teeming with busses, trucks, cars and people, people, people. Bhaju Ram and I were trying to find Tika and another boy who had my luggage. Busses, weighted down with freight on top, bulging with people inside, and belching blue exhaust outside, were stacked up two and three deep as vendors hawked their snacks and accessories to the already weary travelers. Busses were heading for all parts of India and beyond.

I was told to “stay” like an obedient dog while Bhaju Ram went in search of the other two. I was the only Westerner in sight that evening and thus became an opportunist magnet. I was offered unknown morsels to eat, assistance in carrying my backpack, invitations to board busses going wherever I wanted to go, and just curiosity seekers wondering what I was doing there looking like a minaret from the Tai Mahal; white and unmoving. Twice Bhaju brushed by, upset someone wasn’t following orders. It was after 6:30 when he found our party on the other road. All the “good” busses were gone. That means “better” and “best” were well on their way with happy and comfortably ensconced passengers enjoying their ride. I suspected we had now bad, worse and worst to look forward to, if we were to travel that night at all.

An apparently roving agent attached himself to our group and told us of a bus that would take us to the Indian border for 1300 rupees. That was for both of us and comes to about $18. We paid the fare and by 7 PM were sporadically making our way out of Kathmandu into the deepening night. I say “sporadically” for nothing here flows along. And to depart Kathmandu one has to climb out of the former lakebed. It was slow going. At one point the bus stopped for a man standing by the side of the road with a heavily laden cart. He began passing large sacks into the bus. These were the size of gunnysacks and were filled with small individual packets of roasted peanuts. About 40 sacks were stuffed in the aisles of our bus. It wasn’t long before passengers were digging into the sacks and passing around packets of peanuts. I was shocked at the abandon with which the whole bus seemed willing to steal some merchant’s wares.

Fourteen and a half hours later we were finally at the border. Now, I have been to many borders all over the world and this one is in a class all by itself. It deserves a Pulitzer Prize for Pandemonium. I exchanged dollars for Nepalese rupees at one place and then had to go to another to exchange Nepalese rupees for Indian rupees. Apparently you couldn’t buy Indian rupees with dollars in Nepal or Tika just didn’t understand my predicament. He proved that to be very true with the next event.

I told him, through arm and hand signals augmented with basic words and anxious expressions, that I needed to have my Nepal visa stamped before leaving the country and then have my Indian visa stamped as soon as we crossed the border. We found the Nepal visa station amidst the jumbled shops and quickly dispatched that visa. Tika then led me to a jeep which we were apparently going to take across the border.

The border crossing was a causeway and a bridge over a mostly dry river. It might have been about a kilometer cross and I was fully willing to walk but as not too many people were walking, I figured riding was acceptable. I again expressed to Tika my need to have my visa stamped. I took out my passport and made stamping motions on it and he nodded acknowledgement, I thought. Once the jeep was so full of people we had to inhale by turns, we started across no-mans land. Never have I seen such a mess. Every vehicle in India it seemed was trying to pass over the Nepal. Pedicabs, which are bicycle-powered rickshaws, vied for road space with large lorries, cars, bicycles laden with huge sacks of grain and pedestrians, as we entered India. We passed them all. We came to a police checkpoint and they didn’t cast one inquiring look into the jeep. We just drove on, and on, and on. Finally, when it seemed it was a bit far into a country to have a border visa office, I again showed Tike my passport and made a stamping motion. He merely nodded as if to say, “Yea, I’d like to beat my passport up too.” I was now an illegal in India.

Moretocome.

God bless,

Don