A stowaway scurried out of my backpack this morning and tried to blend into a box in the corner of my bedroom. I had returned from a visit to Nalma, one of my research sites, a few days ago and was looking for my sandals. I immediately recognized the culprit as someone I had seen in the kitchen of my host family’s home in Nalma - a spider the size of the palm of my hand. Google tells me it might be a huntsman spider, but who really knows? She's disappeared into the crevices of my piles of things that are only semi-unpacked, so I haven't been able to get a good look.
Spiders are a fact of life, no matter where you are. What's more interesting to me is how Hunty (shall we call her) ended up in my bedroom in Kathmandu. Nalma is not the most difficult place to travel to and from, but it's not particularly accessible. From Kathmandu, you have to catch a micro (essentially a small bus with five rows of seats where about 20 people sit) to Besisahar, a hot and twisty and occasionally bumpy journey that takes about six hours. Then from Besisahar, you have to pile into a Bolero jeep to lumber slowly up the hillside to Nalma, two hours of disorienting switchbacks on a road that is incomprehensibly rugged.
This first trip to Nalma, before I met Hunty or found her in my bedroom, had a slew of little moments that are familiar in any kind of road travel in Nepal. (And in my opinion, if you want to understand contemporary Nepal, you have to know about road travel.) After paying more for the taxi ride from my friends’ apartment to the bus stand than what I paid for the six-hour journey to Besisahar (I am white, after all), I took my seat in the micro. It wasn’t the worst seat available, but it was in the back row – a big no-no for anyone who gets carsick. We rolled out of the Kathmandu valley fairly quickly, given that we started the journey before 6am. On our second stop of the ride where most people gulped down a plate of dal bhat, it was time to pay the fare for the ticket. The driver charged everyone the same price, but then asked me to pay more and, for good measure, slipped in a derogatory word for white people. While this is not unusual, it’s not particularly fun, especially given that my white skin does not make the journey any less bumpy or hot. I argued with the driver for a bit and a few passengers chimed in on my behalf. Finally I paid the higher price and sat back in my uncomfortable seat, casting disgruntled glances out the window.
As it turns out, it’s better not to fight with the driver. He didn’t bother to stop at our drop-off intersection in Besisahar, claiming that he “didn’t happen to remember” where we needed to disembark. We walked back a way to the ticket counter to get our seats on a jeep to Nalma, where we were promptly informed that the last bus just left and there would be no more for the day. We decided to sit and have a snack while my travel companion made some calls to see what options we might have. Someone in Nalma had died quite suddenly that day, and so there had been a rush of people back to the village, filling up all the seats.
The cafe was empty except for us and two old men. One had a walking stick and a limp arm; both were wearing the Nepali topi (hat) and the neatly pressed modest clothes of poor farmers. They each had a plate of momos and a Fanta, and you could see from the way they ate and the sparkles in their eyes that this meal was something special. After an hour of waiting and peeking at the sweet old men, we heard shouting in the street as a jeep barreled through. I thought someone had been hit. I found out later that it was a shout of urgency because of the death in the village, and I watched as fifteen people piled in the back of the vehicle to head up to Nalma. We decided to sit out on the sidewalk as we waited in uncertainty for another vehicle that may or may not come, driven by a man who may or may not answer his phone, on the wish that we might reach our final destination that day.
Flies meandered about. A dog, possibly pregnant, slept lazily and luxuriously on the concrete, smiling and stretching. One of the old men from the café scratched the dog’s face with the end of his walking stick. She smiled and stretched again. An hour went by. Then another. A woman walked past me on her way into the café. A few minutes later we were introduced – I was to be staying in her home in Nalma. We exchanged small niceties, but she seemed distracted and my Nepali is limited, so we fell silent.
Finally our jeep arrived, this one also barreling through the street and blasting its horn. I sat in the front, with two ladies squished between me and the driver. In the back was an old man holding a box full of baby chicks, a young woman carrying a box with an angry chicken and ogling her tall boyfriend, and my travel companion. We began the lumbering journey up the hillside, eventually leaving behind any visible settlements and all semblance of a paved road.
The higher we climbed, the closer the rumbling thunder became. With every flash of lightning, the two ladies squished beside me shrieked and covered their eyes. The old man with the box of chicks shouted “Hello?” into his phone repeatedly. Every few minutes we approached a particularly bad part of the road, and the lady next to the driver had to lift her legs out of the way so he could shift into the heartiest and sturdiest gear. When we finally reached Nalma, the rain began to pour and hail fell in fits and starts. We grabbed our things and scampered after Bauju, into the village toward her home.
Now imagine that journey in reverse: me packing my bag, carrying it to the jeep, bumping two hours down the hillside, waiting with my bag for the next micro, sweating in the back seat for seven hours back to Kathmandu, leaning on my bag for the twenty-minute taxi ride to my friends’ apartment, and then opening the bag three days later to find an eight-legged stowaway leaping out at me.
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