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2003-10-05 - Pokhara (Dasain) (Day 172)

Today is the year's major day of celebration for the Nepalese called Dasain with everyone dressed in their very best outfits, almost all red, with the distinctive glop of rice, sindur (a red powder), and yogurt made into a red blob and pasted to their foreheads. Everyone was out going somewhere with most of the shops closed and the roadways filled with people returning to their villages. It seemed that everyone was going somewhere to visit friends and relatives and the atmosphere was very festive.

I rode out into the back roads of the Pokhara Valley passing a small temple of the outskirts of Pokhara covered in erotic woodcarvings. These are also on other temples and do come as a surprise since the overall atmosphere of the culture is so conservative. I was amused to find the temple with carvings that went beyond typical male-female relations which one could assume the carvings were there to encourage people to have more sex and thus more babies building the population but also included a carvings of a single man masturbating, two men, and even a woman and a dog. Risqué stuff for such a mild country.

In the afternoon, I drove out toward Baglung and on the way saw something I have been months to see happen. I was traveling along at 60 km/hr when the motorcycle I was preparing to pass suddenly veers to the right and then goes all the way over with the bike and driver somersaulting on the ground, the bike flipping over the driver and both sliding down the road in a spray of parts and sparks from the bike. As the speed was fast, they both slid a long ways finally coming to a stop at the side of the road. I quickly parked and got off running over to the man, a Nepali man in his 40's. He was badly torn up with all of his clothes shredded with blood starting to soak through. His shoe had come off when he went down leaving his foot a bloody pulp where it had scraped across the asphalt with hunks of flesh hanging off his toes. His face was very bloody as it had scraped across the asphalt, knees, and arms equally banged up. The poor man was in shock from the fall and just lying shaking on the road. When it was clear nothing was broken, I got him off the road, using his helmet got water from the nearby stream, and washed out his wounds, all the while he was in a fog. The Enfield comes with a First Aid kit which is a bit scary but of course very practical and that fortunately had bandages and gauze in sealed plastic that I could do a rough field dressing on the wounds. A couple of other Nepali men on motorcycles stopped and took the poor man to the hospital.

It was only then that I could see what had made him fall; a few hundred meters up the road another bike must have just gone over the embankment when we passed and the driver of that bike was just getting up with the help of another couple of people who had stopped. The man must have turned to look and gone too far with the bike slipping and going down just as I was about to pass leaving me with the horrible vision of the bike and man sliding on the road just in front of my own bike. Having gone down too many times already, I'm still paranoid of too much break pressure on "The Beast" so fortunately I didn't lock the breaks or I'd likely have gone down as well sending my bike after and probably on top of that unfortunate driver.

With the simple insanity of most of the drivers in India and to a lesser extent Nepal, I have been waiting for the accidents to come, though this was the first I had seen. I have been amazed that overall, the Indians had seemed blessed with so many guardian angles but for these two bikes at least, the odds had caught up with them.

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