Halfway to town we were flagged down by a policeman who said there had been an accident up the road and he wanted a lift. We took him to where a bus was parked, a kid was sitting on a motorbike and there was glass all over the road. Thankfully, it didn’t look as though anyone was hurt. The policeman thanked us for the ride and we motored on.
We left the jeep in Hetauda, two hours south of Kathmandu. It was a scruffy place, not like the well cared-for villages we’d passed through. Rubbish littered the streets, and it was crammed with rickshaws and tuk-tuks. The guy who owned the jeep told us it might cost a bit to get to Kathmandu because there was a fuel shortage: India supplied diesel and petrol and lately the bills hadn’t been paid so they’d stopped delivering.
With that in mind we hunted down some kind of taxi: private hire cabs were supposed to be very common here. In the middle of town we found a bunch of drivers hanging round some fairly modern cars. We plumped for a Suzuki - the driver was a young guy with a bit of a swagger. There was a strange, twirly thing fixed on the roof, about the size of my hand - it looked like a miniature jet engine. Some kind of turbo, clearly.
We hadn’t even made it out of town before we were caught up in a disturbance. The roads converged on a square where a bus was stopped. A swathe of kids was swarming all over it. It was a real ruckus; vehicles lined up with a couple of policemen trying to deal with them, crowds of children shouting and gesticulating. Winding down the window we tried to see what all the fuss was about.
A schoolboy came over and I asked him what was happening. ‘It’s a demonstration,’ he said. ‘We have no books and we’ve had enough.’
A demonstration by schoolchildren who weren’t able to get a proper education: how cool was that? We told the boy we hoped they got the books and soon; they certainly deserved them.
In late afternoon we stopped at a place where a sign indicated ‘The Beach, The Trail, The Bridge, The Village and the Banyan Tree’. The bridge was made of cable and wood and spanned the river to a jungle trail beyond. Downstream we could see the freshwater beach with a tented encampment on the banks. We didn’t see any banyan trees but we took a look at the village, a gathering of stone houses built on cobbled lanes where streams trickled from the mountain. It reminded me of the kind of place they’d build in Disneyland: a mass of colours and overhanging gables, all steps and ladders leading to open balconies and upstairs walkways.
We met an English girl called Nikki who was staying there for a week. She told us she’d been watching a Nepali film on TV, waiting for the rain to subside, when she looked up and saw us. That’s Charley Boorman, she said to herself. I wonder what he’s doing here.
Nikki had been an outdoor pursuits instructor in England before training as a teacher. Now she lived in Bangkok where she taught in an international school. She wished us all the best for the rest of the journey and we moved on.
An hour or so later we stopped at an overlook 1,460 metres above sea level. From there we could see Kathmandu, a great scattering of buildings that sprawled across the basin.
‘Not bad,’ Russ said. ‘Ten thousand miles by any means we could find and we’re arriving the exact day we promised UNICEF.’
The next morning, 26 May, we met up with Wendy Zych - an old friend from UNICEF. Wendy took us across town to the health centre, from where we would take vaccines for TB, measles and diphtheria to remote villages in the mountains. We’ve worked with UNICEF for a long time now and, given the philosophy of the expedition, we thought it would be interesting to find out how the vaccines were transported. UNICEF calls it the ‘cold chain’, where vaccines manufactured in India are transported on dry ice to the different regional offices in Nepal. In total over three million children are being inoculated on an ongoing basis. The country is split into districts with as many as 600,000 children in each. Once the vaccines have reached the regional office, they are stored at a temperature of between two and eight degrees before being divided into the requisite quantities each area needs. Today we were going to accompany one district health officer on his journey into the mountains; by bus, van and finally on foot.
We had to take the frozen ice packs out of the freezer and leave them at room temperature for twenty minutes before we could pack the vaccine. When they were ready we lined a large metal box with the packs and placed the vials in the middle. With more ice packs covering them the box was ready. I grabbed one handle and the district health officer the other and together we set off, walking a couple of kilometres through the tight, twisty streets of the capital to a bus stop. We had an hour and a half on local transport because, like all UNICEF projects, the vaccination programme had to be sustainable and public transport was part of it. It was a normal rickety old bus where we paid our fare like everyone else, passengers stepping over the box of vaccine stowed on the floor.
‘What these guys do is heroic,’ I said to Russ as we hung on to the overhead rail.
‘Life saving,’ he agreed. ‘The vaccinators walk for three or four days to get to people in the really remote areas.’
We jumped off in very green, very rugged country, where rice fields cut swirling patterns in terraces picked out by banks of red earth. The town itself clung to the hillside, the shops and houses built in tiers on the far side of a wooden-railed bridge that spanned the river below. It was stunning country with mind-boggling views and I took a moment to soak it up before we carried the box of vaccine to the health post, a tiny building with a tin roof, tucked away in a dusty street littered with landslip rubble. We decanted the contents into fridges powered by a rack of batteries that were fed by mains electricity, with solar panels as back-up.
Separating various bottles into a smaller cool box, we were due to hop in a van and drive as far as the road would take us before walking the rest of the way. But even before we got going, the road was blocked by three massive trucks.
We asked the district officer what was going on.
‘The drivers are on strike,’ he explained. ‘The road is bad; it’s just dirt cut from the mountain. Buses and trucks travel it all the time and when it rains it’s very, very dangerous. The side slips away and the drop is straight down. Just the other day a truck fell over the edge and the driver was killed.’
‘And that’s the road we’re taking?’
The district officer nodded.
At last we wormed our way out of town, climbing narrow, twisty, crumbling clay roads littered with fallen rocks. An hour or so later the driver pulled over and we continued on foot. The path was steep and gnarly, the world falling away below us. It was hard on the calves and very hot. We climbed through trees and deeper woodland before coming out once more to peaks that were just visible through the low-lying cloud.
We finally made it to a village; a few women were already at the health post with their babies, waiting for the next vaccination course for measles and TB or the diphtheria, tetanus and hepatitis B combination.
The community health worker told us that the take-up rate was just about a hundred per cent. Since the programme had begun, people had realised its importance very quickly, especially mothers. Now just about every child in the country was vaccinated free of charge. I watched while a couple of babies were inoculated: sweet little doe-eyed tots wearing checked coats and little caps; they just about bawled the place down.
It really helped to sum up why we’re involved. On these expeditions we’re lucky enough to see how the money people donate is being spent and we’re able to highlight how important it is that the money keeps coming. It’s easy to forget that UNICEF doesn’t receive a penny from the United Nations; they have to generate all their income themselves. It is always a privilege to see the UNICEF teams in action, working in such harmony with local people.
Back in the van we had to climb through thick forest to get to the village of Chaubas where we would be spending the night. The pitted, boulder-strewn road was as bad as any I’ve ever ridden, a real teeth rattler. We were bounced so hard we were almost off the seats most of the time. To compound matters it started to rain heavily and the road turned to mush. It rained a lot here; the dirt was already deeply rutted and those ruts quickly filled with water. The van was only two-wheel drive and we slithered along with a truck and public bus backed up behind us.
Pretty soon the rain became torrential, an unbelievable downpour; the whole forest running with water. Ahead we could see a bend where great troughs were beginning to overflow. The driver clearly knew what the road was like in these conditions because he slowed to a stop and we sat there with the engine idling trying to work out if we could make it through the next section. I jumped down to check the depth of the water and see how loose the mud was. It was deep and loose. I could see how high the centre ridge was too, and looking at the van there was every possibility the thing would beach. The only chance we had was to lighten the load. The others piled out and we stood in the rain while the driver took the bend with the offside wheels in the rut and the near side on the ridge of earth in the middle. He almost made it; steaming round it looked as though he would but then the wheels spun and the thing slithered to a halt. We all got behind and pushed. The wheels churned but didn’t grip, showering us in mud and puddle water before they finally got some purchase and the van inched forward. Soaked to the bone, we climbed in and shivered our way to where the trek would begin.
It was another uphill hike, carrying the precious vaccines along a boulder-battered path; stepping over fallen trees and old branches and constantly avoiding furrows filled with red clay and rainwater. The height of Nepal was staggering: all around us now there were the most wonderful views. We could hear birds and cicadas; we saw scattered rice paddies and single dwellings; larger settlements where tin-roofed stone houses seemed to gather together among the trees.
At Chaubas a couple of dozen women had gathered outside the children’s club, a gorgeous stone building with a roof that was part tin and part earth, to wait for us. They’d been waiting a while because after the episode in the forest, we were later than we’d intended. The women were all wearing similar red saris and they welcomed us with handmade garlands of flowers and a dot of paint for our foreheads.
It was humbling. All we’d done was carry the drugs from the capital; these women ensured the well-being of every child in the region. They made sure young mothers were aware of the vaccination programme and kept tabs on who was being inoculated and when; they were totally in charge of their own programme. UNICEF always advocates community empowerment; their aim is to ensure that the health worker educates the people to take responsibility for the future of their own community.
We had about fifteen children to immunise in the morning and that night we were due to sleep on the floor in the health post. The women wouldn’t hear of it and instead they took us into the homes of a couple of different villagers. Russ and I stayed with the young mother of ten-year-old Bheena Bandari and her younger brother Parvan Kurran whom Russ nicknamed ‘Cheeky’. The kids gave up their rooms and went to sleep with an aunt while we laid our sleeping bags on the rough planks they used for beds.
I wasn’t sleeping well. The miles we were covering, the constant changes in transport, the different bed every night . . . none of it was conducive to good sleep. Tonight, for some reason, my watch alarm kept going off. I hadn’t set it, but it went off three times and on the third I flicked on a torch and saw it was set to go off another three times. I couldn’t understand it. I hadn’t touched the watch, it was really bizarre.
In the morning I woke up with a monumental headache. I think it was partly the altitude and partly dehydration. We were above the clouds here with savage peaks like sharks’ teeth marking the horizon. I could smell breakfast cooking on an open fire in the kitchen. There was no power; last night our room had been lit by candles and the only light in the kitchen now was from the intermittent shafts of sunlight that breached the wooden walls.
At the clinic we helped inoculate the fifteen children. They greeted us with flowers and so many of them wanted to paint a red spot on my face that the colour ran down my cheeks. The inoculation programme had only been going for six years and the women told us that before then they had no forum for discussion, no common goal around which they could congregate. Immunising their children had not only given them hope for a healthier future but an opportunity to discuss issues that concerned them all. Now they had taken control of their children’s health as well as their education. They kept a profile of the entire community: there was a record of how many men there were, how many women; how many children were in school; how many had been vaccinated with what and when, and it was updated almost every day.
It was really inspiring to see the ‘cold chain’ at work. It was tiring, though; we’d been full-on for ten thousand miles and I was looking forward to a little down time tomorrow.
That’s if there’d be any.
We had no idea before we arrived, but 28 May was going to be an historic moment in Nepalese history. Deepak told us that tomorrow there was to be a meeting of what he called the ‘constitutional assembly’, which would decide whether to abolish the royal family. Deepak reckoned there was a 50/50 chance of trouble. Having ruled for two hundred and fifty years, he thought the monarchy wouldn’t take kindly to being abolished.
He explained that ten years ago the Maoists set out to replace the royal family with a communist republic. In 2001 the King and Queen and most of their family were murdered, allegedly by their son Dipendra, who then shot himself. That was the official line but Deepak said there were all kinds of conspiracy theories. The new King, Gyanendra, was the murdered King’s brother and his first act was to get rid of what had been a royal parliamentary political system; a sort of halfway house to try to placate the communists. The army was loyal to him but the Maoists had their army and the fighting was intense. Finally, in 2005, the Maoists agreed to a ceasefire if the King would reinstate parliament, which he did. They of course immediately voted to cut the powers he’d given himself and tomorrow they were voting whether to get rid of the monarchy altogether.