Wet adventures in Himalaya: Rainroad to nowhere

Anyone who has ever was shipwrecked with a small boat in white water and seen all the equipment floating down the river knows that everyone at such moments terrible curses let over the lips. Everything is shit, fuck, dirt all at once. And everything is wet, in the middle of the rain, cold and the whole trip suddenly was an incredibly bad idea of some stupid idiots.

That is even worse when it happens in Nepal, in the middle of a tiny village in the middle of the jungle, with no real road, no internet and almost no telephone, while everyone already thinks after ten days of hiking they are about to take a bath and eat something real good food. Forget it!

Because on this morning, as the big hike should end with a relaxed bus ride back to the capital Kathmandu, a hurricane is approaching. It rains like a storm at the end of the world, water falls from the sky as if from a tap. A few mountains further on, this has consequences: A landslide brings down the flank of a hill, and the sliding masses spill over the road. The bus cannot get through, the pile of rubble is too high.

And in the village there is no other means of transport to get over the ten kilometres to the burglary site. It is a high Buddhist holiday, even against giant money bids there is no driver who is willing to leave his family behind for a few hours and drive the hiking group up to the place behind which the bus driver is waiting.

Only after hours does a truck owner take pity on them. After everyone pleads and points out the still falling rain from everywhere, he even finds a tarpaulin to put over the heads of his expensive passengers like a grave cloth. Then the hundred-year-old vehicle rumbles off, the travel group sits tightly packed on the loading area of the Nepalese truck, which is held together mainly by Buddhist paintings. Of course the temporary tarpaulin leaks, there is no room to move. One of the sherpas is driving in a car for the first time. He spits out the whole breakfast and is still green in the face afterwards.

But on this rainy morning, the museum-ripe truck is the only possibility to get over freshly excavated earth on the path, which is called "road" here, to where a bus is waiting, which is hardly less museum-ripe but at least equipped with seats. Faces are clenched in a fist and gallows humour reigns. But this is exactly how one recognizes those days when a holiday becomes an event that will be remembered forever. Because at some point the destination is reached, two kilometres on foot over a freshly broken off hill, everything is full of mud, everyone is soaking wet, the sky is crying because the hiking group is leaving the Langtang area. Even the bus is leaking and the hotel is still unheated.

But then finally the sleeping bag is dry again, somehow even the squeaking bus veteran hops to the finish. Shower. Real food. A Sherpa schnapps on top. And suddenly, within hours, a mysterious transformation takes place: the disaster becomes an experience, the catastrophe a great, brave adventure.

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