Today the itinerary was a bus ride to Marpha or Jomsom but as the main group arrive in Jomsom tomorrow morning we decided to get the bus all the way there. We had a leisurely start to the day with breakfast. We were at the bus stop at 8am and eventually caught a bus at 10am for the 55k trip on very unmade roads. It was an adventurous and painful journey. The buses are all Nepali size which meant that I hit my head on the luggage rack each time we went over a bump and Menai was jabbed in her side by the arm rest. As the road is single track there has a lot of reversing and juggling as buses passed each other. As I was on the window seat I had the joy of seeing the valley bottom inches away from the side of the bus each time this happened. After about an hour there was a sudden gust of wind and I saw a hay bale sized boulder land about 6 feet in front of the bus. A bit of a commotion but we edged round it but what if we had been a few seconds earlier. There were wonderful views of Daulagiri and the Annapurnas around every bend which took our minds of the road plagued by landslides. Our next hold up was a truck that had a broken steering mechanism. This was fixed by a team effort in 30 minutes so we could go again.
Unfortunately another landslide further up the road had blocked the road for 3 hours meaning we had to wait until at least 50 vehicles. After about three hours on the bus the scenery changed from a deep sided tree lined canyon to more open country and a wide river bed which became our track for a while which was actually less bumpy than the road.
We then had lovely fields of barley and apple orchards in the area around Marpha. After 5 hours on the bus we got to a very dusty Jomsom and a clean hotel. We had tea/coffee and chocolate brownies for a late lunch followed by a walk around the sights of the town.
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