I hadn't slept well so we got up reasonably early and walked down to the restaurant where we had eaten dinner the previous night. They were quite friendly again. On the street they had a little woven steamer basket full of wonderful steamed buns. We ate several of those and some omelettes.

We had to carry our stuff up a couple of flights of stairs to the street. Several little kids watched as we loaded the bicycles. A couple of them even spoke some English. His cap had "San Francisco 49ers" written on it. I managed to explain to him that we came from San Francisco.

They were good kids, curious but respectful. They gave us a little distance and didn't tug on our bikes. Thankfully our last experience with children in Tibet was a good one. In fact, our whole experience in Zhangmu had been remarkably good, considering that it was just a muddy border town.

We coasted down the switchbacks past all the little shops and at least a dozen people yelling, "Change money?!" I was a little nervous about changing money with these unofficial street changers right in front of the border post. It used to be illegal. We were going to change at the Bank of China but the line was too long. We didn't want to wait long because we had heard about three-hour lines at the border. So we decided to change money on the Nepal side. Which was a big mistake.

The Chinese government had fairly recently built big, modern buildings at the border station. We passed under a huge tall gateway.

Getting out of the country was a bit anticlimactic after staying awake all night worrying about it. The border guards very matter-of-factly checked our passports and signed us through. The whole thing took no more than two minutes. Looking back I think the place most likely to have hassled us would have been the police checkpoint we passed on the way into Zhangmu the day before. The police, who take care of internal affairs, are more concerned about travel permits than the border guards are.

After the border post, the road crosses eight kilometers of no-man's-land between the China border post and the Nepal border post. Ben's notes couldn't have said it better: "...a steeper, shittier road than the stretch the day before." The 8km of downhill took us over an hour. Ben's notes also promised that we would reach pavement in Barabise, Nepal, just 40km or so further.

We forded several streams and trudged through a lot of mud. Some of the streams we must have crossed several times as the switchbacks kept going back and forth across them. At one place a creek had gouged a deep, muddy trough in the road. The big trucks couldn't make it through so they stopped at one side, hand carried the cargo across the mud and loaded it into a truck on the other side. Lots of laborers stood around helping or waiting to help. One guy offered to carry our bikes over, for a fee of course. Joan said "no" and was relieved when he left her alone after that.

The road was bad but pretty. We had some good views looking back up at Zhangmu and its buildings clinging to the mountain side looking like alpine ski lodges from a distance.

At the bottom of the hill we crossed a good solid concrete bridge over the Po Chu river then entered the Nepali border town called Kodari. After the bridge the road wasn't nearly as steep, muddy and difficult as it had been in no-man's-land.

Kodari is nothing more than a thin strip of shabby looking wooden buildings along the road. The checking post occupied one of these buildings. We almost passed it without noticing. We easily could have and no one would have stopped us.

I watched the bikes while Joan went inside to handle immigration procedures. A crowd formed around me, taking special interest in our bicycles. One young guy, maybe 20, spoke English pretty well and asked me things like how much my bicycle cost, where we had ridden so far, etc. He was pleasant and didn't even try to sell me anything. We already had a high opinion of Nepali people after meeting a couple of Sherpas in Tibet. I took this as another good sign. Hopefully we would meet many more people like him in Nepal.

Fortunately we had just beat a big crowd into immigration. We still hadi to wait about 15 minutes, but it took far longer for those just behind us.

Unfortunately, no one was yelling, "change money?" to us like they had been in Zhangmu. We were sort of waiting until we reached the actual center of town in Kodari to start looking for a bank. Then we realized that we had already passed Kodari. The town really wasn't much. They probably did have some place to change money, we just hadn't seen it. So for quite awhile we were stuck without a single rupee. We couldn't even buy a drink.

For the first few minutes of riding after immigration, I noticed the motorcycles drove strangely. Joan and I rode on the right side, as we had since Laos. But no matter how far we moved over to ourside of the road, several motorcyclists coming the other way tried to pass us on our right side. Finally it dawned on us: in Nepal they drive on the left side. (Joan: Nepal was the only country we entered without a guidebook, and we regretted it).

The weather was warm and sunny. The trees along the road were lush and smelled great. The road was not bad at all and we knew pavement was coming soon.

A few kilometers past immigration we reached a police checkpost. The police smiled a lot, took their time inspecting our passports, then filled our names and passport numbers in a big ledger. We would later learn that they sell lots of those big ledgers in Nepal.

We followed the raging Po Chu for a long time. It had been practically going down steps like a continuous waterfall since we had first seen the river well before Nyalam. Now it was gradually flattening out.

Ben had mentioned several huge landslides along the river here. One of landslides took them an hour to traverse. By the time we got there, just about a month after Ben, the road had been rebuilt right over the behemoth piles of rocks and mud.

When you look at the monstrous mountains towering above the river, the frequent streams cutting ravines in the mountains, and the raging river carrying away as much of the Himalayas as it can, it's amazing that they keep the road open at all.

We stopped at a wide spot in the road to eat of few cookies we had bought in Zhangmu and enjoy the view. A few minutes later a bus pulled off the road beside us.

I was astounded. I had never seen so many people on a bus. They were piled everywhere, especially on the roof. At least 50 guys must have been riding up there. Many of the men from the bus ran to the edge of the road to urinate. At the time I thought this was an unusual thing to see but soon learned that most of the public buses in Nepal are loaded the same way and they make frequent urination breaks. (Joan: before that day, I used to wonder, when reading one-paragraph stories about bus accidents in Asia, how 300 people could possibly die in a single bus accident).

When we got up to leave, my back wheel could hardly turn. I started investigating and realized that screw holding the top of the rear rack on the left side had sheared clean off. I had made the mistake of using an aluminum bolt. (Joan: it was my fault. I had encouraged Eric to buy these shiny blue bolts we saw back in Thailand, chiefly for their color. It didn't occur to me that they were aluminum). I tried but couldn't get the remnants of the bolt out of my bicycle's frame. So as best I could I tied the rack to the bike using rope. It seemed to be holding well enough but I was worried that the flexing would put too much stress on the welds and other bolts holding the rack onto the bike. One more reason to get to that paved road. (Cyclists: if you ever have this problem, we have since learned that the best way to tie your rack in place is with an old inner tube. The rubber is very strong).

Shortly before Barabise we met cycle tourist heading the other way. He was riding a nice mountain bike, carrying a bike courier's bag around his chest (with the pager still in place), and had a couple of face piercings - nose and lower lip. His name is Chris and he had been a bicycle courier in Philadelphia. We had a great time talking to him and met up with him several more times over the next couple weeks.

Then to our surprise, we noticed he had exactly the same rear panniers that we had. We got our panniers through the internet from a guy in Canada named Phil Brule who makes them in his basement (his company is called Brule Mountain Gear). Chris had found him the same way. Chris's new bags hadn't faded like ours so it was funny to see them together. Our bags have held up very very well and I highly recommend them.

We've met only a total of six other American bicycle tourists outside of north America (two guys from San Diego in Costa Rica; a man from Oregon in New Zealand; a couple from Texas in Bali; and Chris in Nepal) and three have had Brule Mountain Gear panniers. On the other hand, we haven't seen BMG panniers anywhere except on Americans' bicycles - not even on Canadians' bikes.

Next: Nepal and all we can eat!

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