After all, the trip wasn't that bad because of the splendid views - we began by the familiar mountain landscape, with beautiful deep valleys with turbulent rivers and then suddenly we found us in large plains. The major part of the passengers were in a package tour to Chitwan. We discovered this when we saw that very few persons paid for their lunch. We had lunch in a dusty and ugly town near the indian border. I remember having the feeling that the other side of the border shouldn't be much different. I thought that because of the general aspect of the town and the landscape - I usually associate India with large plains, crowded towns with lots of confusion on the street, colourful signs, walls painted colourfully with naive draws and signs and so on - this town had all of it.

I noticed that we passed some permanent road blocks, where the driver had to show a lot of documents. I guess that those places work us internal frontiers between some administractive divisions.

In the bus we knew a nepali youngster who claimed to be an university student. He studied laws and computers (quite an odd course...). He was acompaining 3 smiling japanese who he claimed to be his friends. They had been in the hotel run by his family and now they were going to "his brother's" hotel. He invited us to come also. We had strong suspictions about all his talk, most probably he was simply a "long distance" tout, but we ended up accepting the invitation - after all, why not risking?

When we arrived at the main bus stop near Chitwan, it was already dusk and one had to take a jeep to any of the inns near the park. We guessed that the risk of being swindled by one of the touts waiting for the bus wasn't smaller, so we went with the 2 japanese boys and girl and Vixnu (that was his name). The trip was a little "night jungle drive" in a jeep that had to be pushed to its engine started working. We crossed one or two rivers full of mosquitoes - after all maybe those pills with that horrible taste that we had been taking for preventing malaria weren't such a bad idea.

I don't remember exactly what Vixnu had told us about the stay and whether he was offering a just lodgement or also a 3 days package. For what we would discover the following days, these packages are the standard offer of every lodge. When one asked the prices, they immediately gave the "2 or 3 days" price. This included accomodation for 2 or 3 nights, every meal for 3 days, jeep transportation from and to the bus stop, an elephant ride, a walk inside the jungle, a canoe ride on the Rapti river, a bird watching session and a session of ethnographic dances. There were some (little) variations, like the elephant ride being inside or outside the limits of the park. There weren't great differences in the prices either. I guess that there should be fancier inns with higher prices, but we didn't find more than 50% variations in prices in the area where we stayed. I don't remember which were the exact prices, but I have the idea they were something like US $60-$90, maybe a little more in some more poor places.

There was a little mess with us and the owner because of the price. We had seen offers of packages in Kathmandu for less than US $90 that included a raft and the bus tickets, which this he was offering didn't, so we found that he was asking a price ($60, I think) a little too high. He finally agreed on paying the bus to Kathmandu and I think he cut something on the price also. The next day we verified that the price was reasonable, but we couldn't help being suspicious that night after an alucinating bus trip during the whole day, all those Vixnu fibs and specially the ways of "his brother".

The place was basic but alright. They shouldn't have been operating long, there was construction going on still and everything looked a bit provisory. The room where we eated, for instance, was a rather small one with no contact with any other division. They ave us a room with attached bath. Sometimes there wasn't running water, although we were guaranteed to have running hot water. This was furnished in a big bucket :-). The beds and windows in the rooms had mosquitoe nets, which seemed very useful, considering the quantity of mosquitoes in the area.

We had some interesting conversations during the meals, specially with the owner. He was an intereresting man, who liked a good conversation. He must have had some education and had his own very pertinent opinions on various issues, like religious tolerance, development, moral codes and others. He claimed to be a brahmin. I say "claimed" because I can't help suspecting that part of those who said to be brahmin were lying. The fact that people from the "highest" caste can be or at least look very poor is a little bit confusing to me. Brahmin is the "priests" caste, the more "intelectual" caste, if I understood the whole thing well. Nevertheless, traditionally the "real", "earth", political power is held not by them, but by the following caste, the Kshtryas, the "warriors" and/or the business people. The king of Nepal is Kshtrya so were the ancient Rana rulers were. This Rana's period is another fascinating thing of the country - for more a century (more than 150 years, I think), Nepal was an absolute monarchy with a king with very limited power; the power was held by prime-ministers that were allways of the Rana family.

Back to the owner of the logde, I must note that in spite of being an interesting person, he wasn't exactly a very nice person, sometimes his ways were a little rough. We had also the feelin that he wasn't completely honest - not that he was exactely a crook, but the way he hesitated on the price of the "package", namely if it would include the bus ticket to Kathmandu, didn't help much the opinion we formed about him.

We and the japanese were the only guests. They were two boys and a girl. One of them was a waiter in a chiken fast food restaurant, another one was a student and she was a hair dresser. They didn't seem to care much about her. They had known the girl in Nepal, they weren't her friends from Japan. Their english was very limited, almost non existent in the case of the waiter. Nevertheless, we had good times together, specially at night - imagine 2 nepalis, 2 japanese and 2 portuguese, talking under the light of a petrol lamp, in a dark room in a house that looked more like a hut, in the middle of the jungle, with all those sounds one knows from the adventure films... There were several "levels of misundersting" - the owner talk was sometimes too intelectual to Vixnu, everybody had troubles with the english once in a while, each one of us with a different accent and some more or less great vocabulary faults. Part of the conversation had to be much helped with gestures, a language at which the japanese waiter was particularly skilled. For helping the party, we had rice liquour in one or two nights.

We hadn't much contact with the girl, she stayed very sick of the stomach during the whole stay, rarely leaving the room. She certainly had rough times, alone in a far away country, with serious language difficulties, constantly being harassed by Vixnu. I didn't get to know if there was any flirting between them or if Vixnu was just constantly trying his luck.