Tibet is a beautiful place and very awe inspiring - but enought already!!! No more monks and no more monasteries were the cries of our hearts as we made our way to the airport today. It was onward to China, land of cheap oily and greasy food that could only make us fatter. Our destination for today was Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province. Sichuan is known for many things, but most importantly for extremely hot spicy food, giant pandas and super green scenery. We got to experience the beauty of the Sichuanese scenery first hand from 10000ft in the [View Full Entry]

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Day 4 in Tibet and it was another day of monasteries. However, this time, we were going to visit a really remote monastery, so the highlight was the views and spectacular scenery. We had to travel for about 2 hours to get to Ganden Monastery, which is located at the very top of a big mountain. On the way we saw some awesome sights, like a lake that was so still and so crystal clear that you could see a perfect reflection of the adjacent mountain. We also got to see farmers ploughing their fields with yaks. Yaks are really weird [View Full Entry]

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There are only two reasons to come to Tibet: to trek and to see all the temples and monasteries. If you've read our previous blogs you should know that trekking is not our forte and so we were stuck with option two. Today we headed off to see the Deprung Monastery - one of the older monasteries in Tibet, and the Jokhang Temple - in the city centre and one of the major pilgram destinations. Deprung Monastery is on the outskirts of Lhasa near the mountainside. Before the 'Cultural Revolution', over 10,000 monks used to live there. Now it houses 700. [View Full Entry]

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Thanks to the incredibly strict regulations of the Chinese government, the only way we could visit Tibet was by a guided tour. Today was day 1 of the 3 day tour and we would get to see two major attractions: Potala Palace, the home of the Dalai Lama, and Sera Monastery, hang-out of lots of monks. Potala Palace is an impressive 1000-room white and red building built on the side of one of the mountains in the middle of Lhasa. I think after the great wall, its the next most recognised image of China. The day started up with a very [View Full Entry]

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Ever seen the top of the tallest mountain in the world? Well neither have we but we got a good view of the side today. Today we flew to Tibet and the biggest highlight of this flight was flying past the famous Himalayas and in particular Mt Everest. Due to Kitty's paranoia at not being able to get a good window seat on our flight, we arrived at the airport 3 hours before departure. Surely we'd beat the crowds that morning right? Wrong. How incredibly wrong we were. Everybody wanted to see the stupid mountain and so we joined the thronging [View Full Entry]

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Day two in Chitwan and today promised crocodiles and baby elephants. The day started early with a morning canoe down a river apparently full of crocs. Thankfully most of them were still sleeping, so there was no chance of us getting eaten while paddling down the river. Our guide was a bit too bold and decided to take us a bit too close to the crocodile holes - holes dug into the bank of the river in which the crocs slept. We actually got within a meter of full sized sleeping crocs. We could see their heads and noses sticking out [View Full Entry]

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Today was a day where we would get to chase rhinos while riding an elephant. Exciting huh... well, that's what the travel brochure said anyway. Royal Chitwan National Park is a national park in the south of Nepal where the British Royals used to hunt the poor animals for fun. Today it's a major tourist attraction and conservation park which promises the traveller the chance to get close to exotic wildlife such as rhinos, sloth bears and even the occasional bengal tiger. Due to major delays on the road to Chitwan (due to the Maoist terrorists) we couldn't take the super [View Full Entry]

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Kitty has always been fascinated with walking although I've never actually seen him get off his behind and go bush walking. However, to satistfy his cravings, we agreed to go walking in the Kathmandu valley today. We headed up to Nagarkot, where we were supposed to get some great views of the Himalayas. Unfortunately, thanks to the mist and pollution, all we saw were shadows in the distance that we convinced ourselves were the Himalayas. We then started on our 4-hour trek, which was a MASSIVE trek for us (yes we know most other people in Nepal trek for 20 days). [View Full Entry]

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The plan for today was to see Bhaktapur, an old city about 13kms from Kathmandu. Since we weren't really planning to go trekking, the main things to see in Nepal were temples, so we mentally prepared ourselves to be templed-out for the whole day. Bhaktapur had the most ridiculously expensive entry fee - 750 rupees - which is huge compared to the standard 100 rupees at other places. So we were expecting something fairly extraordinary. What we got was some fairly old buildings and a lot of temples. There was one gross one which had two elephants doing stuff that elephants [View Full Entry]

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After 12 days in India, we were ready for a new country. Today it was time for Nepal, and in particular, the capital Kathmandu. We had seen a movie staring Kathmandu airport once before, and it had cows running around the airport, so we were sorely disappointed to find a rather modern looking bland airport awaiting us. The taxi ride to the hotel was interesting, giving a brief glimpse of various parts of Kathmandu. The most notable thing was that it was a lot cleaner than most of India. Considering that it's a much poorer country, this was rather surprising. You [View Full Entry]

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