About noon the train arrives in this small town. A man at the station invites me to try his hotel, which he claims is clean and inexpensive.
It is OK so I rent a room with bath. I bathe; lay on the hotel roof in the sun for a while, and then I walk around the town to see what I can see.
There is nothing much to see and very little for sale in the shops. I buy a few small oranges to eat for dinner.
In the evening I re-read part of the only book I have, Solzhenitsin’s “The First Circle”, and then turn in early. In the middle of the night I am awakened by the noise of a party in the next room—laughter and singing. It sounds like so much fun I smile too.
Dawn. I am up and heading to the nearby border of Nepal in a horse-drawn cart. No kidding! -- not for a touristic lark but because there are no motorized taxis or busses!
In front of the Indian Customs House at the border the horse lies down in its harness and won’t get up. The angry driver jumps from the cart and beats it with a whip until the animal staggers to its feet and pulls us on across the border.
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