a small taste of my travel adventures around this planet

The nice owner of my hostel in Darjeeling warned me: Take care when crossing the boarder in Siliguri, sometimes strange things happen there! Should have listened to him, but I was too lazy to travel down to Varanesi to cross into Nepal from there. So yeah indeed, strange things happened.

The spiv in the “office” on the boarder had hes feed on the table when his assistent brought me chai and we discussed about the price of the ticket to Kathmandu. He wanted to rip me off, I knew. But I didnt trust my feelings and 3 hours later we were sitting on a street in the middle of nowhere, an hour drive away from the border town where I bought the tickets, surrounded of Nepali kids laughing at us and with no bus coming. I was pissed off that I let this fucker rip me off, but sometimes u cant help it. I knew this ticket was worth a cow’s shit and no bus had reserved a seat for me. The Nepalis started to ask us if we like Maoists and I knew that things were getting worse.

When I finally managed to be on a bus to Kathmandu, I didnt gave a shit that the bus was so packed that there wasnt even space on the roof for the people who wanted to stop the bus from the roadside. Then the next strange thing happened. I realized that the crazy nepalise in the row behind me was transporting leeches. A lot of leeches. The hole corridor of the bus was packed with bowls full of a strange smelling liquid, just protected with a nylon. I got aware of the leeches when the bus drove in a sharp bend and the bowls fell over. Suddenly the hole floor was full of leeches swimming around and nepalis shouting at each other, everyone accusing the other for the mess, others trying to get away of the leeches sucking at their legs.  I putted on my earplugs and spent the last 7 hours of the busride sitting with my knees on my chest and trying not to throw up from the aweful smell the leeches were spraying. I should have listened to the nice guy in my Darjeeling guest house.

It’s loud, and it smells really fucking bad. Its kind of a mix between cow shit and rickshaw emissions, mixed with another 100 smells I havent even smelled in my life before. Its hot, I’m sweating like a pig, everyone talks to me but I dont understand a word when I walk through the packed streets. I dont know what to eat because all the thinks I see in the street-restaurants I’ve never seen before. The menus are in hindi, dont understand a single letter. I’m feeling tired of the 19hours journey from Bangkok over Dhaka to come here, but I couldnt sleep at night because the sleazy room I shared with the belgium Backpacker I met on Dhaka airport has mosquitos flying around and the people next door are watching stupid bollywood movies on full volume.Dont even want to watch what kind of creatures are living under my mattress.

Still, I love this place.  I think every Traveller will understand me. Its kind of the stuff we are searching for, something so completely different then home that we even forget that this other, “civilized” world even exists.

I got used to it pretty fast. After u get used to have diarrhoea for months without toilet paper and waking up every morning counting how many new mosquito bites u have u dont mind all the other stuff any more. I was eating Tali and Chana masala, I was adicted to that shit, so good! We traveled in 3th class train, encountering every kind of fucked up people like transvestite-prostitutes with 3days beards wearing Sari and asking u for sex for 10rupees. I used to say, If u travelled in India, nothing in the whole world can shock u any more.

We took the endless trainride from Suratthani down to Hat Yai and from there towards Penang, Malaysia. The border crossing was the easiest I ever had. As soon as we crossed the border, Malaysian students started to enter the train, ... [Continue reading this entry]