Rachel breaks the hotel toilet, bathes in hot springs and sees the New Year in with a man obsessed....

---

We were leaving Jomson in jeeps....sorry, A jeep. 15 of us. Use your imagination. Somebody else had in only ordering one jeep. No volunteers to ride on top? Funny that. On untarmacadamed (sp?) roads, but before we left I decided to put a little business in the way of the town's plumbers. More details of this on request. I'm a bit embarrassed.

Fantastic not walking after the wind, dust, stone tortures of the day before and my mind turned to the porters (stop it Rachel) of the night before. They had a hundred songs to sing to us, but when they asked us for one, all we could come up with was Auld Lang Syne. Yawn. I mean, come on. One of the world's dullest songs and that was all we could think of?!!!!! Strengthened my resolution to get on with the ukelele when I get back. 'Build Me Up Buttercup' would restored their faith in British culture I'm sure.


We arrived in hot sweaty Tatopani. I had a clothing crisis. 2 pairs of repellent and rightly condemned trekking trousers, my jeans, sanctified for the journey home, some also fairly repellent linen trousers which had to be washed. It was time to go shopping! And now I am the proud owner of some bright turquoise very baggy, drawstring at the knee, traveller hippy trousers. Cool (as in airy), practical, and with the added benefit that I could never get lost in them (they are very very bright). Florence said when she saw me in them that 'I could wear anything' (the word ANYTHING being crucial here I feel). Don't care. I am a hippy traveller chick. Ridiculous is not a word I care to consort with. Or chic apparently.

A bit later we all piled down to the hot springs. And they were. Bloody hot. I had to get out after 5 minutes as I nearly passed out from the boiling sulphurour fumes. Decided to head back and have a shower.

Bit of a disaster when I got back though. Wet swimming things had made trousers wet and as I stood in the shower (read toilet with spigot) and looked down, I realise my entire stomach to thighs was bright green. And no amount of Imperial Leather foamburst was going to shift it. A heavy sigh and a silent prayer of thankfulness that this had happened AFTER hot springs rather than before. As an interesting addition my toenails have gone bright yellow.

Laer we met for dinner. I was feeling a bit off colour by this time. M nose and lips were in a right state. Every time I smiled, I bled, great hafts of skin were hanging off my nose and to make my matters worse said nose had decided to run copiously from one nostril only. Even though it was Nepali New Years Eve (2066) I was going to get an early night....

.....until Denmark's craziest resident turned up with a bottle of whisky and beers to bribe us to be his friends!. Me, Brian, Chhatra and Mr Denmark stayed up til 4am. This guy was very odd. He was 37, incredibly fit and a maths teacher. We had a brief but interesting discussion about quantum theory (seriously we did, I love it) and then he started talking about his trek. He has one porter for his gear and another for his nuts and chocolate. He was obsessed by nuts and chocolate. When he climbed Mount Kinabalu in Borneo (that I did 4 years ago) the tales of the rat infested huts held more horror for him because of the danger that the rats might eat his nuts and chocolate. (you have to start saying 'nuts and chocolate' in a danish voice for this to make sense). He had no time for relationships or anything apart from sport and 'nuts and chocolate' (well sport, but I'm sensing but I'm sensing 'nuts and chocolate' too). Anyway, sat under the stars, listening to the rushing river, drank beer and went to bed, FAR TOO LATE.

For a man with so much nuts and chocolate we didn't get any....

---