Nepal - October 2009

The border crossing from China/Tibet to Nepal would have to be the biggest contrast I have ever seen. The Chinese side is well Chinese - noisy, bureaucratic, soldiers, the food is dumplings - customs takes ages as they search your bags for god forbid pictures of the Dalai Lama!

Across the Friendship Bridge, the people are friendly, the colours bright the soldiers smiling, the food dahl.

Welcome to Nepal!

We had heard that Kathmandu was well a bit shit really, but after a couple of months of greasy Chinese food the Thamel area of Kathmandu rocked. We had felafel every day, pizza, mexican and best of all bakery goods! See ya China!

Ben intended to do a three week Annapurna Circuit trek near Pokhara as the scenery is meant to be spectacular. The more people we talked to though the more we heard that road construction near the Annapurna Circuit had destroyed much of the scenery. So he decided instead to join the three of us (myself, Laura and Danielle) on the Langtang Trek. We booked for 13 days and made er 7 (two of which were getting there and back). Unfortunately everyone but me caught some sort of bug (Guardia or the like) and tagged team being ill for the entire trek.

We decided to carry our own bags instead of using porters it was only a short trek and we didn't need much stuff. I know that many people say it supports the local economy by giving the porters jobs but I couldn't bring myself to make some dude carry my stuff! Our guide Suman was great - supportive when we ill (often carrying the sick person's bag) and informative about the trek itself. He also would run ahead to find us accommodation when we were buggered.

We ended up above 4,000m above sea level at Kyanjin Gompa and the pictures speak for themselves.

The glacier that Suman took Ben and I to see was some of the most spectacular scenery I have ever seen. Whilst there we saw a landslide and it made me again wonder why the hell 'man' insists on climbing such ridiculous mountains (Suman agreed). As you can see from this pic Ben and I were exhausted after spending an hour and a half clambering up a massive hill at 4,000m above sea level. Suman got to the top and smoked a cigarette!

The trek however was spectacular and given I didn't get sick very pleasant! I would definitely recommend Langtang National Park for all your trekking needs!

Lately people have been avoiding Nepal due to the Maoist uprising this seems the least of your problems however when you see the Nepalese roads - by the far the most dangerous thing in Nepal. Every time you jump on a bus (which always takes at least 5 hours to go anywhere) you see at least one bus/truck crash. And given you are often at the top of a 300m cliff with a driver trying to break land speed records it's not very comforting. On one particular trip we were caught in a traffic jam for some time at the front was a crane winching a bus up from the river many, many metres below!!

Nepal for us was very much the tourist trail, Kathmandu, trek, Pokhara, Chitwan National Park. Nothing to write about for Pokhara as we were simply sloths for a week staying in the best value accommodation of our trip at $7 a night (HarvestMoon Guest House).

At Chitwan we met up again with Laura and Danielle as well as Luke from London. In Nepal we always seemed to be a day behind Laura and Danielle so by the time we arrived somewhere that had accommodation and activities arranged for us - nice! In Chitwan it was a days walk in the national park searching for rhinos - we found red bugs and monkeys, but it was nice anyway!

There is elephant tourism in Chitwan something that Ben and I are do not usually condone as elephants in captivity doesn't sit well with us - we did however bathe with the elephants because lets face it when will we get to do that again (and yes that is two elephants shagging!)