The Moutain Kingdom

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At last we arrived in a place that makes sense, Nepal is everything we wished India was like (although we are reserving judgement on the south of India). The place has less people, less noise, less dirt and a much more relaxed atmosphere and is much more organised in terms of infrastructure.

We have spent the last few days in Pokhara which is prettier and calmer that Kathmandu, we are within a few minutes walk of the beautiful lake and can just see the mountains from the hotel if the sky is clear.

We hve just come back from a wee baby 2 day trek up to Ghandruk. Now if you go and look on a map you will think that it is not very far, but when you look at the elevation map we still climbed up 1000m in a day and back down the next. For a city boy like me that is quite enough. I kept on seeing visions of giant death slides, reverse bungeys and escalators to ease climbing and descending.

We stayed in a simple guest house and in the morning , although we didn't have super extreme close ups of the mountains we did see them in all their snow capped glory. Hopefully some of the pictures will inspire enough.

I have also learnt to eat the Nepali way when climbing mountains. They eat Dal Baht which is lentil soup and rice. If you order it you will see it also comes with spinach curry, spicy radish, and veg or meat

curry. The other thing about it is that as long as you are still hungry it keeps coming, a little bit more rice, little more dal, more curry

sir etc. We saw people on the way up pecking at this and that, forget about it, eat Dal Baht.

Well it is back to Kathmandu tomorrow and then to Bombay the day after. I know it will be chaos there but the sweet sound of Goa is driving me on.

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