The green eye of the yellow God...(2)

We crossed the bridge into Birgang, Nepal, and boarded a bus with a wooden body, which was travelling to Kathmandu. The scenery was very different to India with lots of green vegetation and with mountains all around. At times we were above clouds on small mountain tracks thousands of feet up it. When we met another bus coming in the opposite direction we had to pull into a little lay by cut out from the rocks, and the drivers, who were all Sikhs, would greet each other and chat for a few minutes and then hug each other before proceeding on the wall of death. Their behaviour wasn’t surprising due to the narrowness and state of these dirt tracks and sometimes when we descended below cloud you could see buses that hadn’t finished their journey and had fallen down the mountains. Some were lodged half way down and stuck in trees and stumps that were sticking out of the mountainside. This journey wasn’t for the faint hearted and the bus should have carried a government health warning.Suddenly a huge shower of torrential rain started and the driver pulled over. All of a sudden about fifteen passengers with their luggage climbed down from the roof and squeezed into the already crammed bus, leaving me plastered to the window for the next five hours. I’ll probably have to be poured out of the bus by the time we get to Kathmandu.
After many hours we descended into the valley of Kathmandu and I knew we were close to our target. Just as well as my breathing had almost stopped and very soon I would probably need a life support machine, or at least the kiss of life.