A couple more snippets from life in Nepal....

Pokhara has a stadium. It consists of a grass football pitch with a dirt running track around the outside and a couple of concrete terraces. The running track is packed with a certain red soil that is chokeingly dusty in dry weather, while in the rain it turns into a mud bath that very effectively stains any clothes you are wearing an attractive shade of brown – this same soil is used to paint many traditional Nepali houses. Despite its drawbacks, it is close to our house and I try to use the track every week or so for training.

Often it is really busy. One of the most popular career choices here is to get into the Gurhka regiments of the British or Indian army, but they have very tough physical entrance requirements and competition is stiff, so any given morning or evening - from before dawn to after dark - there might be 50 lads on the track, either running on their own or with one of several training schools.

It is free to use, there don't seem to be any rules, and no-one monitors what is going on on the track – with the result that it is often chaotic. Every other running track I have ever seen is run anti-clockwise, but here people turn up, and set off in whatever direction takes their fancy – groups and individuals, some walking, some jogging, some doing intervals weaving in, out and around each other, somehow avoiding collisions.

One evening it was getting dark, and after narrowly avoiding a couple of collisions, I asked one of the 'coaches' why people were running the wrong way around the track. 'But that is the way they like to run' he replied, and it dawned on me that of course most of these kids had never seen an athletics meeting, but they just liked to run, and after all how could there be a right or wrong way to run round in circles?? 'Do people not realise how dangerous it is?' I asked. 'Este ho' was his reply – that is how it is. He then called to a couple of other coaches and they all set their grounps running in the same direction, creating some kind of consensus.

The next week it was back to normal.

There is a lot of road building going on at the moment, with a lot of tarmac being laid. Some of this is a combination of repair work to roads that were damaged during the last monsoon plus some new roads being paved during the dry season before they get damaged in next years monsoon. But most of the work seems to involve filling in holes caused by general wear and tear – the layer of tarmac they put down here is so thin, and I guess the foundations are not good enough, that they start they start flaking and holes appear again within a couple of months.

Almost all of the work of preparing and laying tarmac is done by hand, mostly by people who come up from the Terai in the south of Nepal. Stones are broken and chipped by hand, piles of gravel are shoveled onto big metal trays held over a big fire where they are heated before tar is poured on and it is mixed, again by hand. It is then dragged off the fire and carried by wheelbarrow to where it is needed. If they are lucky there might be a compactor to flatten the mix into shape.

You can see - and smell - where these road gangs are working from the fires. Incredibly, the fuel they use is mostly old car tyres which burn with clouds of thick black smoke. The people working the fires have no protection, apart from a scarf wound around their faces and the effect on their health, not to mention the environment, must be horrendous.