#2: [31-May-17]

18-Dec-2010 -- I visited the confluence from Birgunj on my mountain bike. To get to Birgunj I had a 6hr ride from Tansen where I had been staying. I found a hotel, put my bike back together and headed off!

The first part of the journey was through the middle of town - dusty with lots of traffic! Then along a reasonably major road towards Kalaiya which was a little less busy but still noisy and dusty.

After a little while I turned south of the main road onto what looked like a track on the satellite images - it turned out to be a one lane tractor track through villages and fields. At last - no more traffic!

The track wandered along for a while till I hit the road heading south from Kalaiya - I turned right and rode along to the middle of a village when I turned off again down a small path between the houses - much to the surprise of the locals.

The confluence was a few hundred meters along another tractor track and off in a field. There were a few people along the road who asked what I was doing.

They started calling out to me that I was going the wrong way when I turned off the track and started riding along the top of the bank between two fields! My Nepali is terrible and while their English was better, I couldn't explain why I had ridden into the middle of a field and stopped to take photos. I had a hard time explaining it to people in English so with the language barrier there was no hope!

It took a little while for the GPS to settle down so I was standing in the paddy field for quite a while. While I stood there more and more people turned up, till there were 15 or so people watching me.

The confluence is near the edge of a field in a farming area. It is all very flat and looks like it would be irrigated in the wet season.

I took some photos - the locals didn't want me to take a photo of them - and headed back to Birgunj the same way, making it there just after dark.

The first photo was taken looking north - they then go around clockwise back to north as east/south/west. The last photo was taken on the way back under a lovely big tree where I stopped for something to eat.