Now I had a broken tooth and a broken motorcycle.
So I got on my motorcycle early and headed off to Katmandu in search of a dentist. A tooth broken in half should have been extremely painful, but my tooth wasn't sore, due, I believe, to a root canal years earlier. What complicated things was that I couldn’t stay in Nepal much longer as my visa was running out.
Well, the sun was getting higher and higher, and I was riding less and less in the shadows. The Enfield 350 is an air-cooled bike. It was getting warmer and warmer. I was blissfully enjoying the ride, worried about my tooth, and definitely not thinking about the bike.
It should have been no surprise to me when the motorcycle came to a complete skidding stop. I was in the middle of nowhere. I had no idea what to do.
I put it up on the kickstand, squatted at the side of the road, and began to stare at the bike. I don’t know how long I was sitting there motionless, when a man appeared from somewhere and squatted next to me. We both stared at the bike. Pretty soon there was a whole crowd.
Eventually, a truck came by and one of my crowd members ran out to signal it to stop. They talked to the drivers and began negotiating for me. We settled on a price and tied the motorcycle to the back of the truck, and off we went to Katmandu. I rode in the back, and everything was fine, until we got about a mile out of Katmandu.
Some British engineers explained to me the next day, that all the huge potholes in the road were a result of a corrupt local contractor. These potholes were causing my bike to be hammered and thrown against the back of the truck something furious. Now my bike needed more repairs.
When we got to the outskirts of the city, my truck drivers stopped and indicated they were now going somewhere else. I had to push the bike across the city in the middle of the night.
An hour later, I finally found a hotel and fell asleep. Now I had a broken tooth and a broken motorcycle.
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