Ways I'd rather travel than Nepali bus

Walking, Cycling, Motorcycling, Crawling over cacti.

The root cause of my problem is that I don't fit. I'm taller than the average Nepali, or at least when they made the buses. My knees either press into the seat in front or refuse to fit at an angle in the narrow seat, resulting in what is after enough hours a stress position. Even short distances as the crow flies are threefold when wound around the mountains, and the hairpins keep the average speed down. To stop people going anywhere too quickly in Nepal, buses stop frequently, for long times, without any obvious reason. I'm used to lunch and dinner stops, but there are other stops where the bus "Oh just stops here for an hour". "Why". "Just stops here". The police help in this matter, holding the buses here and there. Usually the reason given is "checking", but only once on a comparatively short stop did that checking even involve a cursory look over the bus and its contents. Combined with a night sleeping stop, where the driver gets off the bus for 2 hours sleep leaving the bus in the middle of nowhere, this sort of thing can quickly turn a 9 hour journey into 14. Then there is the music, played loud, especially if you have the misfortune to be near the working speaker. It's normal here to play music all night long, the words DVD Video coach, cause a pang of terror in me. People clearly like to listen to music when they sleep, because during the 2 hour break, someone puts a Hindi/Nepali track on their phone: on repeat 1, and leaves it to play for an hour. I get off the bus and consider sleeping on the road for a bit. In the daytime I can see that the route really is amazing. If it wasn't the worst bus I have yet encountered I'd have slept more soundly not knowing the sheer drops beyond the edge of the road.