The great thing about Nepal is that you are really able to
make the country just whatever you would like it to be; from the thrills and
spills of the white water rafting and paragliding through to a place to relax
by a lake with a drink and get away from it all for a while.
The thing that you maybe don’t realise when you go on
“holiday” for so long, is just how much it takes out of you (physically and
mentally) not staying in the same place all of the time. It’s in that sense
that travelling can start to feel like an occupation when you have been on the
road for 14 weeks.
Vicky: "You are listening to me and not watching the football are you Dan?"
Dan: "....erm yeah...I thought he was offside too..."
That’s why in Pokhara we decided it was time that we
explored the easier side of life for a while, before returning to Kathmandu to
continue our wonderful journey into the unknown. Having already stayed in
Pokhara (as you can read in the last entry), we knew that this was the ideal
opportunity to get that little bit extra time to finish enjoying the city we
had adored previously. Making our way to the hotel district, we found ourselves
an ideal candidate in The Hotel Boardwalk (having viewed several places that
appealed to our eyes, but not our budget!) and booked ourselves in for 5
nights.
I was great not feeling the pressure to get anything “done”
, and we enjoyed several lazy breakfasts in the room with items bought from the
local bakers. The weather was often far from brilliant, but that’s what you
sign up for when you come in monsoon season. In fact the weather I enjoyed
watching most were the full scale monsoon storms with some fairly impressive
thunder and lightning! One night the road running past the restaurant in which
we were eating was just like a 3-4 inch deep rapids section, within only half
an hour of the rain starting!
Taking a relaxing stroll by the lake
Vicky enjoyed a massage at one of the local “Seeing Hands”
clinics, which are a brilliant opportunity for young blind people to learn
skills in the physiotherapy industry, as well as providing them with employment
prospects in a world in which they would otherwise be neglected by society. In
Nepal 3 in every 100 people are born or become blind due to disease and
malnutrition, and so it is excellent that a charity like this is doing such
excellent work here. Their website can be found at http://www.seeinghandsnepal.org/
We spent several lazy evenings having dinner and drinks in
local restaurants, if possible overlooking the lake. The food is pretty
reasonable in price although a little more expensive than in Kathmandu where it
is very cheap (in the right places).
On the final day in Pokhara we finally were given our first
chance to glimpse the Anna Purna mountain range, which had up until now been
hidden by the dense monsoon clouds that hang in the sky during this season.
They were a pretty spectacular sight, and the clouds that did remain only
served to further highlight the snow-capped peaks against the crisp blue sky.
Finally the mountains appear from behind the clouds for a second time as evening sets in
Our time done in Pokhara for a second time, we booked our
seats on a tourist bus to Kathmandu and made our 8 hour journey back to the
capital. It did not take us long to remember why we had been so quick to take a
dislike to Kathmandu previously, but I have to say that it did grow on me
slightly during our second stint.
There is one main thing that Kathmandu is good for and that
is shopping, and a good dose of retail therapy was in order for us before we
left. Gifts for both ourselves and others were on the menu, and having sent all
of our camping equipment to Australia to “save weight” in our bags, we promptly
filled all of that space with shopping. Err….maybe time for another parcel to
be sent home!
Vicky gets some Henna work done on the streets of Kathmandu
Various members of the group were starting to return from
their various destinations during the two week break, and a lot of thought was
starting to go into our impending journey into China.
During this point special mention should go to our pub quiz
team “Quiz-akka-bussi” made up of Vicky, myself, a Scot named Douglass and an
Irish girl named Nieve (who we had met in the bar beforehand) who achieved 3rd
place out of 8 in the quiz. Thank god there were so many questions on football!
One of the local tea shops in the city
In a turn for the worse however, the day before we were due
to leave Nepal I again came down with a severe stomach bug much akin to the one
I suffered with in India. The day before the flight I was completely bed (and
toilet) ridden, but with a good deal of Imodium and anti-nausea tablets
ingested I was able to board the bus and make my way to the airport along with
the rest of the group.
I’ll leave this entry at the point that I was sat on the
floor in the line for security checks with my head in a sick bag, and you’ll
have to read on into the China entry to find out how things went!
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