On 14 July, after driving for two days over 1,200 km from Kathmandu to Dhaka in a VW Beetle, editor of Himal South Asian magazine Kanak Mani Dixit and his team were greeted by 100 disabled men, women and children at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed (CRP) in Dhaka (see pic). "I have two missions-to raise awareness about spinal injury in Bangladesh and in my country where a lot of people, mostly poor, suffer from it. Second, to tell people that driving from Kathmandu to Dhaka isn't all that difficult," Dixit was quoted as saying in Bangladesh's The Daily Star.

Dixit drove to Dhaka to raise funds for the Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre in Jorpati. He has already raised Rs 800,000 of the Rs 1.2 million the centre needs for a year. Opened by Edmund Hillary on 7 April, the centre draws on the experience of the 20-year-old CRP in Bangladesh. Dixit survived a serious spinal injury in a 60 m fall in Lamjung in 2000. (See "Standing up to spinal injury", #91.)