More Travel.

Training was over, such that it was, and we were setting off to our communities. First though, a 6am breakfast which finally seemed to do the work for Jess’ little problem. She disappeared just before we boarded the coaches and came back looking noticably lighter on her feet. Still, sitting next to her on the coach, I was slighly nervous.

4 hours of laughter later, my worries turned out to be unfounded, and we made it to our lunch break emergency stop free. I had a nice little taste of home, in the form of a chicken chow mein and Jess ordered vegetable momos. Her order didn’t arrive until 10 minutes after everyone else was done eating, and then it was too spicy for her to eat. I swear I didn’t mean for this entry to be all about Jess, but she’s so damn calamity prone.

As we travelled further from Kathmandu, the roads got worse… much, much worse. On this second leg of the journey I spent a lot of time listening to music off of the ancient mp3 player I’d brought (since we weren’t sure about the power situation in community, I thought something with a good battery life would be a good idea), but was rudely interupted by the sound of you know who’s screaming. Turns out, being in the aisle seat, I hadn’t noticed a massive ravine that had opened up beside us. Being afraid of heights myself I wasn’t exactly thrilled by this sight either. There were no safety barriers and the tarmac had given way to a narrow dirt track a while ago. With only room for one car at a time, the main fear was meeting someone coming the other way, and one of us having to reverse.

After what seemed like an extremely long time, we eventually made our final stop at a small town filled with smiling children coming home from school. We learned that our village was situated in the valley below and we would have to walk the rest of the way. A tractor had been organised to carry all of our luggage down, making the hike a whole lot less daunting, and once everything was loaded we set off.

‘Idyllic’ or ‘picturesque’ are the first words that come to mind to describe Archale. But even they don’t really seem to do it justice in my mind. Surrounded by trees, and set to the stunning backdrop of the Himalayas, the village was made up of ramshackle buildings clinging to whatever flat ground could be found on the hillside. Being so far isolated from the ‘main road’ we’d driven in on, an air of peace and quiet hung about the place, punctuated only by the occasional birdsong.

I was soon introduced to my host family who, as with all Nepali’s, were super smiley and welcoming, and shown to my home for the next couple of months. It was a traditional Nepali house sitting at the top of the village, and myself and Raj had been given the ground floor bedroom. However, the most important bit of information is that my host family were farmers, which in rural Nepal means that they owned goats.

So that’s how it came to be, that on my first night in community, I found myself looking at the stars, stroking a goat and drinking Nepalise chiya tea.