Today was my last day volunteering at the hospital. I'm fine with that though because I feel that I've exhausted what I can learn from this experience. Again not too much happened today. Dr. X spent much of the morning quizzing us on random facts and also asked us some relevant medical questions. It was just us U of T students in there today though, and since we've really only studied normal anatomy and physiology up until now, it was hard for any of us to answer his questions. He must have thought we were pretty dumb, but at U of T we learn all pathology in 2nd year. Now that we got back from our trek, I wanted to spend the last four days starting up another project I was supposed to be working on, ... read more

Happy Canada Day! Unfortunately, we're not in Canada to celebrate our nation's birthday. This morning Elysia spent the morning at the hospital and came back to spend the afternoon with Mike. Today our friend Katie was leaving to continue on her travels, so we said goodbye to her at breakfast. Then Elysia spent the rest of the morning at the hospital learning more about medicine in Nepal. There wasn't anything too exciting today. She just stuck around the outpatient clinic and made funny faces to make the children laugh when they cried. The one interesting patient was a little baby in the ICU. This is a sad story though, because the baby a few days earlier had been on a ventilator, which is very bad news in Nepal. Being on a ventilator is expensive for the ... read more

Today we woke up in Pokhara, with nothing major on our schedule, so we were able to sleep in! We met for breakfast at 7, and then began to explore Pokhara a bit. The first thing we did was to visit the Devi's Falls. This waterfall is in a fast moving river in a narrow canyon, that goes underground and through a series of caves after the falls. The falls is named after a lady (Ms. Davis) who was bathing in the river up stream from the falls with her husband. She lost her footing and was swept away by the river. She was killed in the falls, so they named them after her. Having heard this story, we were sure to keep our distance from the falls! Visiting Davis Falls at this time of year ... read more

Today was a very long of hiking. We woke up at 4am in Ghorepani and we were supposed to hike up to Poon Hill to see the sunrise. Rather, that is more the itinerary for trips not in June, July or August. During these monsoon months, it's fairly unlikely that you will get a view from the top, so sunrise is not so much the priority as waiting for the rain to cease and the clouds to go away are. So at 4am there was a torrential downpour of a kind I've never seen or heard before, so we delayed our start a bit later. In fact this heavy rain had been going on since 4pm yesterday. I always figured it just couldn't rain this hard forever, and there can't possibly be that much rain in ... read more

Today we woke up at 5:30 and got ready to set off from Pokhara on a tea house trek in the Annapurna mountains. The Annapurna mountains are a branch of the Himalayas. We were disappointed yesterday that it was too cloudy to see any of the snow-capped mountains around Pokhara. Today our guide, Devman (Dave), knocked on our door about at 6:30am to tell us to come to the rooftop to see the mountains. Although not perfectly clear, we could see some of the high snow capped peaks of the Himalayas from there. It was so cool — they are just so high and very impressive. Makes me sad that we weren't here in October when you can see them all! In any case, we'll take some view instead of none. After breakfast at the hotel, ... read more