Kathmandu, Nepal

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We enjoyed our visit to Kathmandu, Nepal. We stayed at the Blue Horizon hotel that was tucked away at the end of a closed street. We had read previously that the number of stray dogs around town had kept other guests awake at night. We did not have this problem. We were very comfortable and felt very safe at our hotel. We spent most of our time walking around town exploring and made a visit to Monkey Temple. While walking through the temple, a large monkey jumped on Mike and tried to steal his orange soda. It was a small game of tug-of-war. Mike won, of course. It was funny. Two were stalking Mike for his soda down some stairs and Sarah had to kick around him to keep them away. It was hilarious.



Around Dec 18th, a political figure of some importance to the Nepalese died under questionable circumstances. Everything got real odd fast. Every shop in Kathmandu closed their doors and the general population went on strike which includes all forms of transportation. Some web sites showed rioting in some parts of Kathmandu city. We had been fortunate enough to be able to stay in our very secure hotel. After talking about what was going on, we decided it was time to bug out of there and make our way south into India. It was Saturday when the strike started but reports had said that they were going to stop the strike in the later afternoon of Saturday and they were to resume starting Monday again. We figured that since the strike was off on Sunday, that would have been our best time to get out of Nepal. There was no guarantee that we would have been able to secure a bus ride to the Indian border with the single day window, so we paid an exorbiant amount ($160.00 USD) to have a private taxi drive us the 9 hour drive to the border town of Birganj, Nepal. Even with our private taxi traveling on sunday, some cities were still on strike and we had some resistance going into and leaving some cities. They had burning tires in the middle of the road entering and exiting the cities and large crowds preventing any vehicle from coming and going. We eventually found our way through all the mess and we finally crossed the border into Raxaul, India.

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