Another day on the road

Only a day has elapsed since Luke's last post but since this is likely our last chance to use the internet for a few weeks I figured I'd take it.  After last night's horrible news about the permits, we were feeling a bit down, but this morning we stopped in the town of Butwal for internet to dowload maps of the new lake region.  Looking at the maps and satellite imagery of the lakes really pumped us up again (for those of you who don't know a good map can always pull me out of a funk).  This is one of the finest localities in Nepal with dozens of lakes ripe for coring.  I hadn't included it previously because of its remoteness and the time required to get there.  Essentially, in order to do this cluster of lakes we would have had to forgo almost all the rest of Nepal.  Now that we can't really go anywhere else in Nepal due to permitting,  betting it all on this region south of Jumla sounds more reasonable. 

Anyway, we set out into the blazing heat of the lowlands for the third time with high hopes.   The morning and afternoon slipped by as we all suffered silently in the heat then in mid afternoon there was a loud pop as the windshield shattered.  I think the window was probably under a lot of stress from the 44 C heat and a rock kicked up from a passing truck pushed it over the edge.  We came to an abrupt but smooth stop and carefully exited the vehicle so that the glass wouldn't fall down on us.  The first words from our guides were something along the lines of "windshield can only be fixed in Kathmandu".  They then proceeded to calmly bust out the window with one of my trekking poles and cleaned up the front seats.  During this time I was in utter despair.  Going back to Kathmandu would eat up too much time and we couldn't reach the lake cluster near Jumla which was our last hope to salvage the research.  After we had all the glass cleaned up, I asked our guides what we would do next and they didn't seem to understand my confusion.  We had gone over the plan at lunch, had I forgotten it?  They repeated it again for me before I realized we were just going to continue on without a windshield.  The last two hours of the drive were surprisingly pleasant.  It turns out that since you can't ever go faster than about 25 mph in Nepal, shielding passengers from wind isn't required.  Tomorrow will be the real test when we head out on to the dusty mountain roads.  I'm planning on wearing goggles.  It is going to be awesome.   Our driver said something about rigging up a tarp in case it rains.  I really hope the monsoon doesn't start early this year...