Head Count: ?

The Skinny: Pulling into cities like Janakpur on a motorbike is like, well, can it be compared? People are everywhere and so are their chickens, ducks, cows, goats, children, wives, husbands, cats, dogs, and water buffalo. Some of them are riding in bicycle rickshaws that take up almost all of the 3-metre-wide street, but most are just wandering down the middle of it very very slowly. It was approximately one million degrees celcius in the shade and in turn, we stayed only one night in Janakpur.

What Thar Be: There is a holy lake in the center of Janakpur, and the town is known to Hindus as the bithplace of Sita, Rama's wife. The Janakpur Women's Development Center is on the outskirts of town.

Digs: Hotel Rama: by the Mills Area chowk in the northern part of town. We paid 300R for 2 big rooms with very necessary ceiling fans and clean bathrooms. The circle drive out front is not visible from the street (good for bikes.)

Vittles: The Rooftop Restaurant; near the lake at the center of town. Very good food for reasonable prices and styley styrofoam carvings glued onto the walls in the upstairs dining room.

Hooch Factor: 90R for a 22oz'er at a restaurant, 65R at the store.

Navigability: Kind of a pain. Much activity on the narrow, dirt streets and lots of noise and dust to complicate matters.

Sliding In and Out: The drive from Hile to Janakpur starts out windy and then flattens along the well-kept Mahendra Highway. The smaller, 19 kilometre, one lane road south to Janakpur is paved and very busy with foot traffic, animals, and rickshaws.