What a night! Our hotel in Mau was as close to a prison as you can get. The most surprising thing apart from a relatively enjoyable evening meal was not waking up covered in bed bug bites. So needless to say, we made an early start towards the Nepalese border.
The plan was to hit the border mid-afternoon to give us enough time to locate a hotel in Nepal before dark. But as usual, the last leg on India’s roads proved to be testing and slow. By now we were expecting potholes, so just a hundred yards of smooth tarmac was a real treat. We eventually approached the border town of Sonauli which, if our journey across the country was a novel, this would be the tragic conclusion. It appeared to sum up all the negative aspects of India – dirt, pollution, poverty and despair. We even drove past a drunkard lying in the road virtually unconscious with trucks weaving around him. No-one seemed to even notice or care. If I were Nepalese coming to India in the hope of making a new life, Sonauli would make me turn 180 degrees and head back across the border. But this is the sad part – much of India is beautiful. We’ve visited communities and locations that are very moving in their purity and integrity. The country doesn’t deserve an advert like this.
But it was now fading behind us as darkness began to fall while we sorted out our Nepalese visas – being bitten to death by mozzies at the immigration office – a rundown brick house. Outside the office is an advertisement for Lumbhini, the birthplace of Buddha, where there is a Scared (sic) Garden. So on the spur of the moment we chose to head there and find a decent hotel for the night. With all our papers in order crawled along our first Nepalese highway sandwiched between trucks and pedal rickshaws. Thankfully our escape came just a kilometre or so further on and we travelled the hour’s journey to Lumbhini, pulling into a Nepalese standard 5-star hotel – probably the equivalent of a European 3-star – but after Mau a pile of hay under the stars would have been bliss.
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