A Great Culture

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After saying good bye to Diana and before I started the Mt Everest hike I had around a week to have a look around Nepal.. (Also always ask for an upgrade, they let me have first class from somewhere in the Middle East to Kathmandu)

I had a few nights in Kathmandu with a day trip to Patan which is well worth the effort! The city there has great buildings and is much less busy than Kathmandu which is very nice to see. One thing on Kathmandu that sticks in my mind is that at 6 or 7pm each night the power goes out for the whole city! What is with that? The capital city of a country and during the whole night there is no power for anyone which just makes more noise around the place with thousands of generators ticking over. Kathmandu for me was not to exciting, just a big city with plenty of hiking shops and to see the true Nepal I first headed to Pokhara which is North West on a lake there.

A small city surrounded by mountains and it is here I got my first views of the Himalayers in the distance. It was good to ave a couple of nights here relaxing, there was very few other tourists because of the season I was there which is nice and it has a very relaxed feel this city.

From here I went to Royal Chitwan NP to hopfully see some wildlife and maybe a tiger but the chances of this were slim to none. It is the sort of town where elephants are walking around with all sorts of birds flying around. I got to help bath the elephants which was good fun and having them through me into the river then trying to scambel back onto. Also I did a elephant jungle walk though the forest and we got to see some rhino, deer of some sort, monkeys flying the trees hundreds of birds but of course no Tiger.

Transport in Nepal is what is expected really, very slow! It seemed worse here than in India but mainly because of the terrain and takes forever to get anywhere. If a car, bike, bus or what ever transport they are using brakes down on the road it causes big problems and they dont use the best machines to get around so it happens all the time! BSo give youeself a few extra hours to get from one place to another. It they say 2 hours it will be 4 normally.

But the people are really nice out of Kathmandu and I would love to go back there and head further North West where there is even less people. I think it would be amazing to go and see some of the remote places in the world now.

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