What do you do when your road is gone?

No, this is not a question intended for your self-reflection. Nor to re-examine your life goals. Nor it is a lead into a depressing post about my lack of life goals. It’s simple, really, it’s a post about the road that is gone. There has been some serious construction going on close to our house. The dreaded road expansion. The thing about the road expansion in Kathmandu is that it is never-ending. Some roads have been dug up for expansion years ago, and still have not gotten their longed-for black-topping. It seems like the general decision is to dig up everything first and then black-top all the roads at once. It sounds logical, but in all honesty, it is not. It rains in Kathmandu three months a year. The rest of the time it’s sunny. And dry. And oh so dusty. Add the dug up roads to that and you got yourself a recipe for asthma attack.

That’s road work in Kathmandu for you. Take notice of layers and layers of plastic bags deep in the ground.

Anyhow, our neighbourhood was next on the road expansion list and one day bulldozers appeared out of nowhere and started digging up the side of the road. I do have to admit, they are working quite fast and before we knew it, the huge ditches were again filled up with fresh soil and pressed. Even though the side road that leads to our house was a bit damaged, we were excited about the prospect of having a new wide road. That was until we woke up one day, got in the car and drove out only to realize the road is gone. No side road any more. It leads into a ditch. What do you do when your road is gone, I ask you?

We have been using alternative routes to get out of our neighborhood, but even those seem to disappear and then reappear at unexpected times. One day it’s there, the next you drive straight into a ditch. It’s exciting to wake up each morning and wonder what kind of surprise waits for you out there that day. There’s always something new going on. And not only bad, mind you. Just today I noticed that the newly expanded road got white dividing line in the middle. It might sound like a totally usually and expected thing, but in Kathmandu most of the roads are not marked in that way. It makes it quite difficult to drive when you can’t really assess how much of the road belongs to you. So this came as a nice surprise.   I wish for more more surprises like that. Hopefully one morning I will wake up and the road in front of our house will be paved and connected. That will be an awesome day.