I will try and get up to date with the blogs, as there are a few pictures to upload.
In Nepal, the Dashain festival is the most important festival of the year, where people often travel home to villages from Kathmandu. The festival is also called Vijayadashami in India.
More information is on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijayadashami
It is equivalent to christmas in the Christian calander, and everyone has leave during that time.
One of the staff, Bodhraj invited me to his family home at Butwal, to see Dashain with his family, and to also see Lumbini, the birthplace of Gautama Buddha.
Butwal is approximately 240kms west of Kathmandu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butwal
The roads in Nepal are rarely straight, they often have landslides, and the roads are of varying conditions. Even though it is only 240km in a straight line, the trip took about 8 hours.
Most people in Nepal do not have cars. A large population of people in Kathmandu have motorcycles. So for people to travel back to their home villages, they often take the bus. Note that the population of Nepal is approximately 30 million, living in about the size of Victoria. A significant portion of that population is in Kathmandu. So if lots of people are travelling home for Dashain, it will be traffic chaos. Quite similar to what you would see on the Monash Freeway people leaving during Christmas or Easter. However, the traffic is a little more chaotic in Nepal, with buses frequently passing on the wrong side of the road, on blind corners. The main warning everyone uses in Nepal is the horn. I have been tempted to use ear plugs for this.
The first image is of everyone queuing for bus tickets. If people fail to purchase tickets by phone, or by the network of people they know, they have to queue for the tickets, and it looked like mayhem.
We went to the bus park, where there were to many buses to count.
There is also a practice of the buses picking up passengers on the side of the road. As the seats are taken, the people sit on the roof, or in the aisle. The passengers pay cash, which the bus conductor takes. So it is often in his best interest to crowd the bus. So it isn't unusual to see people sitting on the roofs. Normally I wouldn't recommend this, but I have had to do it on the return bus trip.
Now with that many people leaving Kathmandu, there was of course traffic jams. You would often see 2 buses trying to drive next to each other on a single lane road, with another bus passing on the opposite side of the road. They would be blasting their horn to stop the oncoming traffic.
You do get used to it.
