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Note from Jonah: This is the continuation of a photo series from the Great Himalayan Mountain Range. The photos document a journey by car, foot, boat, plane and elephant from Tibet to Nepal.

The Nepalese.

Yep. You read that right. I am suggesting the Nepalese have the strongest necks in the world. I haven’t been everywhere yet, and I’ve seen a lot of people use their heads as tool to carry things, but what you see in these pictures just looks painful to me.

Its one thing to balance some fruit on your head. Maybe even carry some water. However, its a completely different thing to strap a bookshelf to your forehead and jam the weight of the furniture into your neck and than walk around a crowded city.

I can’t say I’m an expert in bones, joints or anything else related to biology — but this just seems unhealthy. Yet, this is normal in Nepal. It even seemed it was the preferred method of carrying things as people were doing it to cary anything and everything. Often times, the things they were carrying were bigger than them, themselves.

And this is how I’ve come to my conclusion that this method must bread an army of super-necked people, capable of holding five times their own weight, only with the muscles of their neck.

Now picture yourself carrying an enormous bag of, say, rice. Strap it to your forehead and begin to walk through a small street. Now, add a chaotic traffic pattern, a sea of endless horns, various animals walking through the same street — and now, fill half of that space with trash. It can’t be easy to navigate the chaos that is the third world, while doing this.

But as Jack Kerouac says, the road is life — and your baggage comes along.

Road Trip on the Himalayan Shelf: If you’re just joining now, here’s what you’ve missed:

1. Road trip on the Himalayan Shelf
2. Lhasa: City of Sunlight, City in the Sky
3. In Tibet, People’s Liberation Army (mostly) out of site, but not out of mind
4. Attn: Crayola — a new color for you — Tibetan Blue
5. Tibetan Cloudscapes
6. Tibetan Prayer Flags Littering Roof of the World
7. Should you pay for photos? The ethics of travel photography
8. 29 Minutes and 15 Seconds on Mount Everest
9. Desertification stretching from Inner Mongolia to Tibet
10. ‘The journey not the arrival matters’
11. Namaste and welcome to Nepal
12. Kathmandu: The greatest place on earth to get lost
13. Kathmandu: Full of mystery, culture, history — and trash
14. ‘A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles’
15. Who has the strongest necks in the world?
16. Hey hey, they’re some monkeys
17. After the Himalayan: The Terai
18. Watch where you step: Chitwan National Park
19. At the end of the road: Pokhara
20. Final Destination 8 (in 3D): The luckiest travelers in the world
21. Tibet to Nepal: ‘The Journey Not the Arrival Matters’