We spent such a long time in Pokhara doing nothing after the ABC trek, that I can't resist reviewing Pokhara's restaurants. I worked on this project for a long time... and luckily I plan another trek to get rid of the extra calories :-) This post maybe not so interesting for my regular readers but maybe useful for some future visitors to Nepal! (Just so you have an idea of the prices: 70 rps ~ USD) 1) Bistro Caroline Expensive but worth it. The décor is lovely, and a lot more spacious than a classic French restaurant (maybe because real estate [View Full Entry]

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After 5 weeks away from my epilator, there wasn't much choice left, I had to throw my legs at the mercy of a local wax-man. Waxing is done here in multi-service barbershops, all offering all sorts of hair cuts, shampooing, shaving, waxing and also massages. Even though it took quite a long time to prepare the wax, it was unfortunately a low quality wax or maybe the wax-man wasn't very experienced. Whatever it was, my hair wasn't impressed from this hot sticky brown liquid, and it stayed firmly attached to my legs. And then a solution was found: a pincer. And [View Full Entry]

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In the first part I told you how we reached the place with the misleading name Himalayan hotel at 2870m. The next morning we started really early, because the clouds like to crawl up the river and start pouring rain rather early. In our 4th day we climbed over 1250m. The path wasn't too steep, which meant it was very long... Nothing comes easy here. As we reached the Machapuchre base camp (3700m) the canyon of the river we followed opened up and we started to understand what we were going to see - the snowy peaks all around us, it [View Full Entry]

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Early on Saturday morning we got up, picked up our hired porter, had our last breakfast in the city, and took a taxi to the village named Naya Pul. After a beautiful ride of about an hour the car stopped, and I couldn't really get it that from now we were going to rely on our feet only for an unknown period of 8-10 days. Our porter, Puran, was a good one, speaking ok English. We later discovered that he was a licensed guide, the president of the guides union in Pokhara, and even arranged group tours sometimes, and we were [View Full Entry]

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I spent the days in Kathmandu mostly in leisure, not doing much, just enjoying the place. I did go one day to Patan, a neighboring town. There's not much to tell about, except that the pictures don't do just to it, due to the strong light. The royal square was really beautiful. You might wonder why a town like this, 5 kms from the capital has a royal square (and palace) - well it used to be a separate kingdom once upon a time. On Thursday we flew in to Pokhara, but the stories about it will wait for some time [View Full Entry]

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The avid readers of my blog probably remember that I spent Passover in Sydney and went to celebrate the "lele seder" in habad. You might also remember it wasn't a big fun, except for meeting so many friends I made in New Zealand. Nevertheless, everybody was talking about celebrating Rosh Hashana (New Year's Day) with habad in Kathmandu. People came here from all over Asia. There were more than 1000 people. So we just had to... it wasn't as bad, we even had fun... We sang, even one Passover song ("Echad me yodea") only because it's a fun song. The Gefiltefish [View Full Entry]

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(I warn in advance - this post is not for the faint-hearted!) In one of the mornings we woke up really early, something like 6:30, and went to Pashupatinath temple. It's an important Hindu temple and maybe it's beautiful inside - I can't tell because only Hindus are allowed in. But the Bagmati river bank right next is the city's "crematorium". It's not a building or anything like that. There are 6 square "altars" (well they look like that) on the river bed and around them stairs going down. There is no "hevra kadisha" or a company responsible for the cremation. [View Full Entry]

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We arrived to Kathmandu on Saturday afternoon. We checked in some hotel and went walking around a bit. Our eyes opened wide, we got so excited. It just looked like heaven! well, maybe it only looks like that after coming from India, I can't say, but that's how I felt. Lots of shops of course, nice stuff (I almost didn't buy anything in India and here I did and will do more :-), and also pubs with music, restaurants that look decent. The streets are cleaner than in India. The people are nicer, I think. In a few days in Kathmandu [View Full Entry]

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Yes, most of Delhi is pretty ugly. But here and there, if you close your eyes to the ugliness around, there are some lovely places. And even inside the real Delhi, there are some interesting places to explore and experience. We took a guided tour, mainly to save the hustle of finding our way around. The big Hindu temple of Lakshmi Narayan (or something like that) was big... and it had some beauty. Unfortunately we couldn't take pictures inside, so I can only share with you a bit of the external look. It's strange that there are some separate halls, but [View Full Entry]

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Before I came to India I decided that no matter what, even if I hate it enough to run away after one day, there’s one place I won’t miss: The Taj Mahal. The day came, we took an organized tour, woke up before 6AM to get on the way (200km, this time only 4 hours because the roads are good :-), and went to visit Agra, the city of Taj. The first site we visited was Sikandra - the tomb of Akbar, one of the emperors of this part of India in the past (in the Mughal period, if you really [View Full Entry]

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