Day 2: Where did the hills disappear?

The sunlight streaming into the room woke us up. Hosim, thaana Div and I were sharing a room… brimming with excitement we quickly got ready and went outside; we had plans to go to Lumbini…

Wait a minute! Where’d the hills go?? There were no hills as far as the eyes could see; Nepal is supposed to be hilly or the horizon was supposed to be dotted with snow capped mountains! But no, we were in Terai; the plains of Nepal… we had missed the transition from the hilly region to the plains in the dead of the night… so it came as a slight shock I suppose… the vegetation not so different from what we find in Maldives, I felt closer to home and felt more homesick than I had felt in ages!

To Lumbini we could not go, the Maoists were kind enough to declare a “Bandh”; a curfew, but still we went around in Rikshas (its the way to move around in Bhairava, i for one didn't see any taxis around!). Though we couldn’t go out of the city we thought it safe enough to move around in the city.

Our first stop was Bhim hospital; that’s where hosim’s dad worked ages ago, even before she was born… next stop being a sweet shop which is rumored to be famous all around Nepal, we just had to taste “peda”… Bhairava proved to be a very small place; every corner we turned we ran into IOMites… and that was fun…

Having nothing else to do, we went to the Bhairava Medical College to meet hosim’s friend who’s studying there… the campus was impressive; spacious… but I still say I like our campus better… coming back into the city centre we were shocked to see tires set on fire and protesting people in a place we’d left a couple hours ago so peaceful!

Towards evening the bandh was lifted and things returned back to normal… and we went for long walks around the city…