A quick word: Took a seven hour ride in a sumo (basically a jeep) to Hetauda in the south of Nepal. Then another three hour sumo ride across the Nepal to India border.Very easy already to see how girls can be trafficked from Nepal to India. They don't stop you if you look Nepali because Nepal and India have an open border - you don't need to get a VISA to go back and forth from one country to another. Our driver wouldn't even stop despite half the people in the jeep yelling at him because he thought we were all Nepali, so we had to take a rickshaw back to the border and get my passport stamped - oh, and the VISA worked - yay! Oh, then we hopped into a sumo for another hour or so from the border to a train station in India.
India is beautiful. I don't know what I expected, but it's gorgeous. A friend just left to motorbike from KTM down through India. I thought he was crazy, but now I see the appeal. I got to experience maybe the next best, which was the train! I was dreading it a little...okay, a lot! As everyone I talked to, asked incredulously why I wasn't flying. We aren't flying because the INGO funding our trip wants to keep its costs down, understandably. However, the train was AWESOME. We took over a little section of the car (as per our reservations, which no one else apparently had), and had plenty of room. The heat wasn't even a problem as long as you come to terms with just being sweaty 24/7 (but KTM summers already prepared me for that), because they had fans going the whole time and the windows open as we cruised through the countryside. Oh, and the greatest thing is that it was really clean...as any place would be if you just throw all the waste (including human waste) right out of the train as it goes.
India is made up of a ton of farmland. Again, I probably should have known this, but I didn't really expect it. It seemed to me a mix between the flat American Midwest mixed with the lifestyle and farming techniques (with a bit better technology perhaps) of the farmers on the hillsides of Nepal. And seeing the farms brought a whole new understanding of Vandana Shiva's Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Read it if you haven't!
Well, that wasn't as quick as I'd anticipated, but now we are in Delhi for the day to meet with a few NGOs and go shopping with a former HimRights employee who just started working for an Indian NGO here.
India is beautiful. I don't know what I expected, but it's gorgeous. A friend just left to motorbike from KTM down through India. I thought he was crazy, but now I see the appeal. I got to experience maybe the next best, which was the train! I was dreading it a little...okay, a lot! As everyone I talked to, asked incredulously why I wasn't flying. We aren't flying because the INGO funding our trip wants to keep its costs down, understandably. However, the train was AWESOME. We took over a little section of the car (as per our reservations, which no one else apparently had), and had plenty of room. The heat wasn't even a problem as long as you come to terms with just being sweaty 24/7 (but KTM summers already prepared me for that), because they had fans going the whole time and the windows open as we cruised through the countryside. Oh, and the greatest thing is that it was really clean...as any place would be if you just throw all the waste (including human waste) right out of the train as it goes.
India is made up of a ton of farmland. Again, I probably should have known this, but I didn't really expect it. It seemed to me a mix between the flat American Midwest mixed with the lifestyle and farming techniques (with a bit better technology perhaps) of the farmers on the hillsides of Nepal. And seeing the farms brought a whole new understanding of Vandana Shiva's Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Read it if you haven't!
Well, that wasn't as quick as I'd anticipated, but now we are in Delhi for the day to meet with a few NGOs and go shopping with a former HimRights employee who just started working for an Indian NGO here.
