Parking our 3 ton trucks full of sand within site of the village – just across the valley on an adjacent hillside – we seemed so very, very close. But this was where the muddy mountain road stopped – it had always been done by hand from here.
It was the end of a long, long, long journey. 18 months since the kernel of an idea had begun to take some form in our heads, here we were riding our raw materials to their end game. 12 tons of sand, 170 50kg bags of cement, steel, stone, logs, wood, nails, and paint were all making their last ever journey.
After 19 hours on the a pot holed mud road through some of the world’s most spectacular scenery, we’d covered little more than 300 kilometres. But what the hell, you couldn’t beat the view. Then, suddenly, up ahead, the road simply stopped.
Dhawa, our hillside village was within site! But the excitement was short lived. To get there on foot we’d have to go down the mountain, across the valley and up the other side again. Not a big deal with a day pack and a lunch box, but something else entirely with a 50KG sack of grit. It would take 500 tough man journeys of many hours each to get all our materials home. Hmmm… That won’t be cheap, we thought.
The idea didn’t take long to come. Can’t we just… build more road?
It seemed a ludicrous suggestion, but this was Asia. And didn’t we remember enterprising locals happilly accepting our 900cc motorcycle onto a 6 ft dug out canoe? It was one thing that had long ago taught us always to ask.
“Oh surely Mr Justin”, came the familiarly can do reply, “We can rebuild the road. Unfortunately it washed away down the mountainside in heavy rain just after we built it ..and we couldn’t borrow the digger again. But I hear they are building a road in an adjacent village. They must have a digger we can borrow. Let’s go and see if we can”
Some things in Nepal can be deathdefyingly frustrating – meetings that last 3 days instead of 30 minutes, filling out a form to get another form so you can apply for a permit – which, you guessed it, is just a form. But other things are so beautifully simple they make Europe feel like the dark ages. Of course we could start building a 500 metre road through a mountain pass at 4 oclock on Friday evening. Within 2 hours two massive diggers had already begun shifting mountains of earth, cutting a path for our trucks.
And there was no time to lose. This kind of road wouldn’t last a rain storm, and any civil engineer worth their salt would have simply forbidden our heavily laden trucks from going anywhere near it.. Our drivers, however, didn’t bat an eyelid. They’d seen far far worse.
We still didn’t fancy killing any drivers to pursue our dreams so the solution was to have one digger in front and one to the side – so the trucks could only fall INTO the hillside – so long as the heavens didn’t open in the next 12 hours. That was about as long as we reckoned it would take to get that last 500 metres. Time to get the coffee flask out.
Two diggers, all ten of us with spades and picks, ropes, planks and stones to pry wheels free and get the trucks through the freshly milled earth, day becoming night, Chai arriving still hot from out of nowehere to warm us through the night. Singing and chanting through the blackness piereced only by the blinding headlights, we pulled the huge beasts up the muddy mountain and felt like Fitzcaraldo. Our only regret when we reached the village, exhausted but ecstatic, was not having a huge cigar, and an Aria to smoke it along to..