13th Day in Pokhara

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We had a sleep in this morning and didn't have breakfast until 8am. Woah!! We also decided just a couple of days ago that we were not going to go back to Kathmandu to get our transit visa for India. What does this mean for us? It means a probable 18 hour wait in the transit lounge at Delhi airport on our way home! So why not go back to Kathmandu? We would spend a day getting there, a day waiting for our visa and hanging around Kathmandu and then a day travelling back to Pokhara where we start our 4 day trek!! We decided it just wasn't worth wasting 3 days just to get a hotel room for a few hours in Delhi. And the reward for that? We took a day off to see some of Pokhara and today we were off to the Peace Pagoda!! We headed down to Lake Phewa to catch the boat across the lake to where we would begin our 45 minute up-hill walk. As we arrived at the lake we met some people who were just coming back and they mentioned that today was the 10th anniversary of the Peace Pagoda and it was really busy. Not to worry - always holds promise for an exciting atmosphere. The trip across the lake was amazingly serene and peaceful and oh so relaxing. What a nice change from our busy days. The 40 minute walk up-hill was not quite so relaxing but well worth the effort. Mind you, our relaxed attitude meant that we didn't get on the boat until 11am and didn't make it up the hill until just after 12pm - a time when you can almost guarantee the Himalayas will be screened by cloud cover. And Yep - they were. We did, however, get an occasional peak at those awesome mountains. Hopefully we'll get some clear days on the trek.

We then had lunch at our favourite restaurant (Mamma Mia's) where they serve pancakes with banana and hot chocolate - Yum! The rest of the day was spent mostly just pottering around doing a bit of souvenir shopping and buying supplies (chocolate and cookies, mostly!)

In the late afternoon Jan showed Pashupati how to use some of the programmes on the new computer that Tony and Trish had brought with them.

After dinner I wanted to look through my photos. Sadly, when I went to look at them, my camera told me there were no photos!!! We'd had trouble with viruses several times already both from the computer at HEHQ and from the internet cafe. Since the last time I had tried to do anything with my camera was at the internet cafe I instantly new that my memory card had a virus. Poor Jan!! I knew I wasn't going to sleep that night so we were off to the internet cafe to try and recover my photos with a disc recovery programme that we'd been given earlier. Two and a half hours later, I finally had a copy of all of my photos saved to a DVD! THANK GOODNESS! Because my camera had already been broken a couple of times and was only just holding together we had only used my camera at the Home where we were working and not be worried about breaking it. I had ALL of the photos of the children and all the hard work they had done during the time we'd been there. I would have been totally devasted to have lost them. I love Jan but sometimes I have good reason to love him even more!!! I went to bed feeling a lot less stressed. It was a pity we were so late to bed knowing we had to be up and in a taxi by 6am!!!

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Photos

View of the Hindu Temple
This Hindu Temple sits on an Island in Lake Phewa

The Peace Pagoda - Buddhist Temple
Arrived as the masses were receiving their Dal bhat