Entertainment
High-way of change
Every semester break, I try and return home to my beloved Jumla. Only that getting to Jumla is no easy feat. One of the most remote and traditionally inaccessible reaches of the country, Jumla, you might say is one of Nepal’s final frontiers.Utsav Thapa
Every semester break, I try and return home to my beloved Jumla. Only that getting to Jumla is no easy feat. One of the most remote and traditionally inaccessible reaches of the country, Jumla, you might say is one of Nepal’s final frontiers.
Getting to my hometown in Jumla usually is a topsy-turvy affair. My preferred route consists of taking an overnight bus from Kathmandu to Nepalgunj, and then to fly from there to Jumla on a plane. Sounds easy enough; but the tickets for the flight do not come cheap and even when you are able to secure a ticket, limited flights and ever-changing weather can quickly result in your plans going south.
So this time around, I decided to take a bus directly from Kathmandu to Jumla, via Surkhet, Dailekh and Kalikot. I’ve always been a big fan of bus rides as they tend to be a journey not just physically but also of the mind. At 34 hours long, the bus ride would traverse 800 kilometres, piercing through all the three geographic terrains of the country—the hills, the Tarai and the mountains. The more I thought about it, the more enticing the prospect became.
On the journey itself, I was seated at the very front of the bus, gossiping with the driver, the conductor and other fellow passengers. At one point, the young conductor said, “On these roads, we have to move ahead measuring inches.” I looked around and knew exactly what he meant. Riding on the Karnali Highway is adventurous as it is dangerous. Peppered with sharp hairpin bends, this one-lane highway at times is barely enough for a large passenger bus to maneuver a way forward—the road is really about the inches and seconds. You look out the window and the sheer fall to the valleys below are sure to give you the goosebumps. The Karnali Highway can oftentimes mean a gamble with life and death and in many ways the word “High-way” perfectly sums it up—located so high on the hills, sometimes you wonder if you are flying rather than rolling on!
Despite the dangerous roads, the passengers on the bus I was on seemed calm and happy, jovial even. Speaking in the vernacular Khas-Nepali, the passengers were locals, business persons and hoteliers making their way back to their respective homes and businesses. Often you’d hear talk about how the Karnali Highway had changed so many lives in the region. Over the centuries, the region’s remoteness and the lack of accessible roads meant that “development” never truly arrived in Karnali until very recently. The decade-long Maoist insurgency took a heavy toll as well. But since the Karnali Highway came into operation, lives of those who populate the region have been on the upswing. The highway has brought with it possibilities that never existed before—farming equipment, medicine, businesses and even a trickle of tourists. Karnali’s residents can now make the trip to urban clusters for jobs; they can send their children to good schools. This is particularly evident when talking to the elderly—never had they imagined that a wondrous piece of machinery like a bus would rumble through their neighbourhoods, much less drop them off at their very doorsteps. For many, getting to bigger towns in Nepalgunj used to be a distant dream, getting to Kathmandu pure fantasy. Yet, here I was, hitching ride straight from the Capital to my hometown. These drivers braving their machines through treacherous terrains were not just making a living driving their vehicles, they are actually rolling the wheels of change; and the people of Karnali, needless to say, remain forever indebted.
Karnali had always been isolated from the rest of Nepal and the lives of its people are hard. But once touched by the highway, their lives are slowly changing. My most recent ride on the Karnali Highway was not just a bus ride home; it seemed like a big eraser chipping away at centuries of backwardness—it represented past hardships, present buoyancy and the bright future ahead. Because if one ramshackle highway can change so much, what new changes lie ahead?
Thapa is studying at IoE , Pulchowk