Into Nepal

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Our crossing from India to Nepal came at the end of a gruelling twelve hour bus journey and the start of the most important days in Nepal's Dasain festival. Whist we filled in our imergration forms the cheery Nepalese officials (a marked contrast from the surly Indian ones) explain the festival and advised that the country was almost at a stand still was everyone visited family. There would be no buses for a few days and all shops and banks would be shut.

Rather than spend days in a grubby border town waiting for a bus, we throw some money at the problem and took a taxi to the nearby town of Lumbini, the birth place of Buddha. Although everything was closed and the streets deserted and pitch black, we managed to find a candle lit doorway for a cheap guesthouse and got a well earned sleep.

Waking up in Lumbini was like waking up in a sauna and drying our selves after a cooling shower seemed pointless because we were covered in a film of sweat instantly. Walking out to Lumbini's Buddhist showed us that everything really had shutdown. Thankfully we found a single roadside restaurant selling curry and rice that would provide us with breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next few days.

The Buddhist complex itself consisted of an excavated temple dating back at least 2200 years, built on the exact site where Buddha was born. Huge trees provided welcome shade around the site and Tibetan prayer flags hung like colourful cobwebs. In celebration of this religious site many Buddhist nations had built modern temples and whist the sites well promoted master plan suggested buildings amongst ponds and waterways the reality was more of a building site.

We spent a few days exploring the area and once the shops opened and the buses started up again we left the hot and humid plans for the cooler highlands.

Our first stop was Tansen. This quiet Nepali town was extra quiet due to ongoing Dasain festivities and food was still hard to find but as we walked the cobbled streets and hunted out the many three roofed shrines in the cool sunshine we weren't thinking about food. A short walk out of town was a view point that gave stunning views of the plains to one side and great mountain vistas to the other.

From Tansen we went north to Pokhara, the trekking capital of Nepal. Coming from simpler places the tourist centre around Pokhara's lake came as a surprise. Shops full of fake North Face trekking and camping gear, stores selling private CD's and DVD's and restaurant after restaurant, all open with menus full of western food. Before bothering to look for somewhere to stay we had sat down in an 'Italian restaurant' to enjoy the huge, tasty pizza.

Pokhara was supposed to have an amazing mountain backdrop but due to unseasonal weather the peaks were covered in cloud. Everyday we would wake at six hoping to see the sunrise over the mountains but everyday it was overcast. Then just as we were thinking about moving on the heavens opened and it rained, hard, heavy rain for two days solid. People had told us that the monsoon this year had been light and they expected more rain to come. Seems they were right.

We did manage to walk around Pokhara's lake and catch a fleeting glimpse of the mountains at sunset when the tips were bathed in golden light, so it wasn't a complete wash out.

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