Kilt in the Himalyas

[tom_s]

I have recently returned to the UK from a period mixing working and holidaying in India and Nepal. I took one of my Welsh kilts, with waistcoat, doublet and bow tie, to wear at a formal function to celebrate New Year but then found I was being asked to wear the kilt more informally on subsequent days. In tourist spots, such as Darjeeling, wearing a kilt caused many heads to turn with many requests for me to stop an pose for a photo – or gave rise to the quiet comment ‘Scottish man?’

As the kilt is quite heavy, I often travelled wearing it to cut down the weight of the luggage. On one occasion I had to get from Darjeeling across the Himalayas to Kathmandu and found that the quickest way was to cross the border down on the Plains then take a scheduled domestic flight in a small plane within Nepal.

I hired a taxi in the nearby city of Siliguri to take me to the Nepalese border. This dropped me at the Indian border post for the few formalities and I then had to walk across the bridge to the Nepali side. Having been told the two border posts were about 100 yards apart, it was a bit disconcerting to find I had to carry the luggage for the actual distance of about one kilometer. The Nepali office was reasonably efficient and issued a visa on the spot in about 20 minutes. I then found two other people to share a taxi to the nearby (10 km) airfield for the flight to Kathmandu. However, the terminal building (a large hut with a squat toilet round the back) was almost closed and it transpired that there had been no flights for the previous four days because of ‘fog’ – although a ‘light mist’ which did not even obscure the sunshine would have been a better description. The one official on duty suggested that all the prospective passengers should come back the next day and try their luck with the passengers officially booked on the flight that day.

One of my fellow travellers in the taxi was an Australian woman who had tried to fly out on each of the previous four days; at this moment she gave up trying to get to Kathmandu and decided to cross back into India. The other fellow traveler (a German) and the eccentric Brit decided to press on and find a bus.

We returned to the border town only to find that all the buses from there to Kathmandu departed at the same time for an overnight journey – and we had just missed them all. So we hired another taxi to chase the buses until we caught up with one. After a journey of about one hour on the bus, along a reasonable tarmac road, it turned off onto a dirt road to avoid the bridge which had been washed away in the 2008 monsoon (the floods from which also put many Bihar villages under water in India). This bridge had been the only connection from eastern Nepal to the rest of the country so we had to drive along a long, rough and crumbling diversion of about 45 miles along the dirt road, scarcely wide enough for the bus, to a temporary ferry over the still turbulent river. Fortunately the ferry was giving priority to buses; some of the trucks had been waiting two or three days to cross. The ferry was actually more like a raft, just long enough for the bus, and was winched across the river on chains. The bus passengers were advised to stand on the raft, outside the bus, ‘just in case’. As we got to the other side darkness began to fall (the ferry did not operate a night) and we returned down the dirt road on the other side of the river until we met a police post barrier which had blocked the road. It transpired that there was some insurgency in the area and we had to wait at this darkened outpost, with other vehicles, for about two hours until the police declared the road ahead to be safe. So we drove on through the night and finally arrived in Kathmasdu at 11 am the next day – 21 hours after leaving the border and with only short breaks for the single driver. The flight should have taken 40 minutes.

A guest house had been found for me in Kathmandu by the person I was to meet there and I hoped it was still reserved as I was, by now, almost a day late. It had not been possible to make contact with them since there were regular power cuts in most of Nepal (usually power was available for 4 hours on and 8 hours off) and the phone connections were erratic from the few places where the bus stopped. The guest house was over 300 years old and had recently been renovated. The doorways and ceilings were all very low and the rooms were furnished with traditional style beds, tables and chairs with no legs. The rooms opened out onto a courtyard with a carpeted, covered area to take meals sitting cross-legged and eating with just the right hand.

Again, many good comments were made about wearing ‘traditional dress’ by both local people and tourists to the overawing heritage sites situated in the centres of Kathmandu and the neighbouring towns of Patan and Bhaktapur. It was only at the latter place, when exploring the poorer back streets away from the main tourist routes, that I had any adverse comments. These came from uneducated people who saw ‘a man (and a foreign man at that) wearing a dress’ because they were not aware of the Celtic traditions thousands of kilometres away on the other side of the World. When trying to explain, in broken English, the context in terms of Nepalis or Indians from the Plains who wear lunghis or sarongs, this was dismissed as those people not being from the Bhaktapur area either.

Nevertheless, I would still recommend wearing a kilt around most parts of the World (depending on the weather) as it is a great introduction in starting conversations with local people and other travellers.

[Mipi]

Interesting journey. Traveling in Himalaya is always challenging.

Any photos?

[werewolves]

Interesting journey. Traveling in Himalaya is always challenging.

Any photos?

^^^
Ditto

[McFarkus]

You had quite an adventure!

[tom_s]

Sorry, there are no photos. I rarely travel with a camera these days and I've not recived any copies of pictures where I was stopped and asked topose. A pity. Tom

[McClef]

Must have been a great adventure getting close to "the roof of the World."

[cessna152towser]

Fabulously interesting story, sounds like a magnificent though challenging experience, thanks for sharing your traveller's tales here.

[Highlander31]

Great story. Sounds like an adventure to remember.

[Freelander Sporrano]

Welcome To Xmarks Tom. You'll have to take Trefor or Alex with you next time they have cameras

[gilmore]

A not unusual story of traveling in the sub-continent. They say it takes at least three days to travel in India: one day to buy the ticket(s) and prepare, one day to travel, and one day to recover.