October 15th, 2019
Today we got to sleep in again before we packed our stuff for the motorbike trip (little did we know this would be our last good sleep until we returned back to Pokhara). The guy dropped off the bike at 10am but then changed the price we had agreed on the day before when we told him where we were going. I didn’t have an exact plan but thought we would start off by heading towards Lumbini which is the town where Buddha was born. The rental guy wanted more money since we planned to take the bike out of Pokhara valley. So, after much more negotiation we agreed on a new price and Brendan insisted he put a new front tire on the bike and change the oil. The tire that was on there was bald so I was glad Brendan made the guy change it.
All the cool kids here rent the Royal Enfield motorcycles but they are super expensive (like $40 a day). We settled for the piece of crap, worn-out scooter that I was hoping would be able to handle everywhere we wanted to go. We got it for just over $13 a day which is good but still more than double what we paid for scooters most everywhere else in Asia.
It was around 11:30am when we finally hit the road. Our destination was Lumbini but we planned to stop for the night in a town called Tansen to break up the drive. The road conditions are very poor in Nepal so every destination takes an extremely long time to get to. I’ve learned that no matter what mode of transportation you use (walking, bus, motorbike etc.) it is going to take you WAY longer than you ever expected. Tansen was only 77 miles away but it took us close to five hours to get there. The scooter didn’t even have foot pegs for me on the back so I had nowhere to rest my feet. The shocks were completely worn out so every bump in the road rattled my entire body. Five hours on the bike was more than enough for a day.
The drive was pretty, but it was hard to be very comfortable on the bike. Tansen turned out to be quite a busy town and a place I don’t think many tourists go. Our phones do not work in Nepal unless they are on WiFi so when we got there, we just walked around to different hotels until we found what we thought was the best deal. We got a room for just over $6 that seemed decent. Once we settled in, we realized how horrible the beds were as they felt as hard as sleeping on the wood floor. Also, the street noise pretty much kept us up all night. When the constant honking of horns finally died down, random dogs barked until the morning and the traffic picked up again.
We had walked around town to find dinner and it was kind of like being in a mini Kathmandu. Very busy but without the tourist stuff. There was no hope in finding a “good” looking restaurant as they were all these little hole-in-the wall types and looked extremely suspicious for not using proper sanitation measures. We ordered veggie soup hoping that would be the least likely thing we could get sick from.