Six hundred kilometres for a cup of tea

Nepal is roughly eight hundred kilometres from one end to the other and about two hundred across at the widest. On a map that is nothing. On a motorbike it is a country that will not end. We rode most of the length of it east, four of us, to look at tea.

That is not a joke and it is also not really the reason. The reason is that four people who all own bikes will eventually need a destination far enough away to justify the bikes, and Ilam is about as far as you can get while still being at home.

The middle part

Long rides in Nepal are made of temperature. You leave Kathmandu cold, you drop into the Terai and it is suddenly hot and flat and the road goes straight for longer than a road in this country has any business going straight, and you sweat through everything. Then in the last few hours you climb again and all of that cools on you at once. By Ilam we were in beanies and neck warmers and the mist was coming through the headlights.

Somewhere in the middle you cross the Sunkoshi on a steel truss bridge with a small white sign that gives the length in metres, and it is the kind of infrastructure nobody photographs. We stopped and photographed it, because after that many hours anything that is not more road is an event.

Four bikes changes a ride. You develop a formation without discussing it. Somebody is always slightly ahead and somebody is always the one who needs fuel first, and every stop takes twenty minutes longer than one person alone would take, and none of that matters because the alternative is doing it by yourself. Most of what I remember of the middle of that ride is not scenery. It is four bikes parked in a line on a shoulder somewhere and everybody standing around not saying much.

Kanyam

And then the tea. The hills around Kanyam and Fikkal are planted in rows that follow the contour, and from a distance the effect is of a landscape that has been combed. It is very green and very orderly in a country that is mostly neither, and in the early morning the mist sits in the rows and does not lift until the sun gets high.

Nepal has been growing tea here since 1863, when the first estate went in at Ilam. The mist is not incidental to it — the cloud cover and the altitude, somewhere between about 1,200 and 1,800 metres, are the whole reason the leaf is any good. It is the same weather system that makes Darjeeling, which is directly over the ridge and considerably more famous for it.

We stood in the cold in a field of tea and drank tea, which is exactly the sort of blunt symmetry a long ride rewards you with. Then we rode six hundred kilometres home.