After a few chais, I set off with my only conclusion being that I was going to get to the border, at which point the country I was deemed to spend the upcoming days in would announce itself.
I decided I had good fortune for my attempt when the first pharmacy I went to sold me valium. Then I bought a half kilo of oranges, a pack of India's largest selling biscuits, peanuts, dried chilli limes, and assumed, that under the best circumstances; I was going to be on a bus to Kathmandu for the next two or three days.
So it was a local bus to the border, where I stamped out of India, though free to stamp back in (the accessibilities of a multiple entry visa I no longer have). I told Nepali Immigration I didn't want a visa unless I could get a bus to Kathmandu, at which point they let me wander the Nepali side without one. Returning with a ticket and the assurance from a flow of departing buses, I offered the two green-and-white bills (USD) I had been hoarding since Canada in exchange for another pretty rectangle sticker in my passport. The fellow was reluctant to accept my bills for their wear, although in the end he turned away my tape in favour of his makeshift currency repair kit: thin white adhesive paper that he proceeded to dab over with permanent marker. Right.
Over lunch an Indian Christian from Kolkata assured me, after my inquiry as to whether or not the Kolkata Metro ran during the monsoon; that "we Indians aren't stupid, you know." Okay then - thanks for the business card. I'll be sure to call you next time I'm in Kolkata converting myself to Christianity while volunteering at the Mother Theresa Mission.
After lunch I went to formally introduce myself to the bus - make sure we were on good terms. To justify my uncertainty for what lied ahead, I introduced myself as a journalist; and explained that this bus ride was crucial to defending the security of my career. He seemed alright with it.
By the time we left, it was about two hours until sunset. The rolling plains that border the southern band of Nepal (a geographical - and opting to be political - region known as the Terai) were covered in Nepali police, their standard outfits an illogical blue camo. Two of the turtle shell shielded variety climbed onto the roof of our bus a few hours in, roughly around the time the bus boy came up and told me to close my window and curtain because "there's dangerous people out there." Right, valium then.
I woke up only once in the night to see a fleeting glimpse of the geographical sprawl of the Terai, something that in my dreamy haze I categorized as moonlit tundra.
Then it was morning. Suddenly we were stopped by a throttling riverside in the valley, being passed by an array of Goods Carrier trucks hauling petrol from India. This was the venue of our flawless fifteen-minute flat tire change, where I followed an array of biscuit wrappers on a urinary trail to a bush.
An hour later we were in the dust bowl of Kathmandu; the streets ribboned with hundred vehicle petrol line-ups.
We were in the capital in sixteen hours flat, an arrival directly coinciding with the morning that marked the end of the strike. The little belt of a Kingdom was once again receiving imports of Indian Oil, as paid for by a fixed reimbursement plan I was soon to learn of entitled "load-shedding."
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