1985: Building roads with elephants and camels and water buffalo

These photos were all taken while traveling by car likely in late 1985 from Kathmandu to the Indian Border.

Elephants were used to pack down and to help pave roads at that time. Many men with hammers (without eye or ear protection and often without gloves) were breaking rocks with hammers to use as a base for the road. Then they would take their baskets of rocks and distribute them on the roads. then asphalt would be strewn on the rocks with shovels and sometimes elephants would pack that down. Then men would take large wooden rolling pins and add more asphalt to even the asphalt on top of the rocks. Then elephants would walk on top of that again. This appeared to be what was going on here. The Water buffalo picture was men walking down the hiway away from Kathmandu to other pastures. The lonely looking Camel was also used in the road building as well.

Coming from California except for the car  I was riding in towards India in we sort of felt like we were on a completely different planet with different rules entirely. And we were(in a sense).

Note: As you went from higher altitudes to lower altitudes you would see a DZO I think it was called which was a cross between Water Buffalo and a Yak. A Yak like it above about 6000 feet to 8000 feet in elevation whereas a water buffalo is more of a tropical animal down on the plains. So, they would interbreed a Yak and a water buffalo for the foothills of the Himalayas which got too cold for a water buffalo and was too hot for a Yak to live in usefully.

Here it is from Wikipedia:

Dzo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzo

A dzo (Tibetan མཛོ་ mdzo) is a hybrid of yak and domestic cattle. The word dzo technically refers to a male hybrid, while a female is known as a dzomo or zhom.