AidCamps International Arrival

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Leaving Gatwick at 9pm Friday evening, we flew via Dubai to Katmandu, arriving 6pm Saturday (1pm English time). Exhaustion was exacerbated by an interminable wait for visas by an allegedly work-to-rule team o bureaucrats pushing cash, passports and paper slips back and forth.

They mostly drive on the left in Nepal, with a free-for-all at junctions:vans, pushbikes, motorbikes and rickshaws criss-cross each other via the shortest route. I felt as if we were in a Keystone Cops movie and crossing the road is unnerving. Bikes carry panniers of bananas, yams and other exotic fruits, and overtaking is done blaring the horn and going for it. You are safe if you can leap the gutter and up the steps to the pavement where the sleeping dogs lie (in Katmandu, elsewhere they lie in the roads, and traffic steers round them).

We meet our fellow AidCampers - 17 of us including Roger, the co-ordinator, and retire to bed at the Hotel Lai Lai.

Sunday we drove to three temples,Pashpatinah, Boudhanath and Swoyambhunath.Two of these have monkeys scrabbling through bins and chasing each other along the mass of telephone wires. One monkey leapt from a pillar to the top of wrought iron gates and shook it furiously, making the two young men resting against them, leap to their feet in panic.

The temples were lovely, but we couldn't go in all of them. Boudhanath was hige, a circular edifice in the centre of town with the allseeing eye peering out under the roof. Swoyambunath was out of town, up high on a hill, which the bus, with its slipping clutch, nearly didn't make. Katmandu in its polluted haze was spread out around us. On a clear day you can see Everest, but not that day.

The street sellers were insistent and Toni succumbed to their wares leading to a rush on the rest of us, 'Your friend has just bought one like this, very pretty, I give you very good price'.

The demographic on this trip is unusual, if it wasn't for Zoe the mean age would be about 65. Aged 21 Zoe brings it down a little. She doesn't seem fazed by fining herself on a Saga tour, and helps us all with the technology.

Monday we drive south through the foothills of the Himalayas round tortuous hairpin bends through spectacular scenery, with terraced fields and forest-covered hillsides. It takes us six hours to make the journey - quicker than expected - because the Diwali holiday means there is less traffic. It's only about 160 kms, but a s Roger said, 'The roads, where they exist, aren't very good'. The driver, mindful of his suspension, creeps round potholes and over rock-encrusted dust.

We stopped for lunch overlooking a river, then carried on down to the valley before starrting another ascent up the next range of mountains (or hhills, as they call them here). Eventually we reach the flat plains to the south, and stop off at Slaghari to see the project site and meet some villagers, who greet us with garlands and tikka decoration on our cheeks and forehead,

Half an hour beyond this is where we are staying in Sauraha, a more prosperous looking village, where we stay in twinbedded wooden huts at the Chitwan Cottage Hotel.

The next day is again Diwali and we were invited to go for lunch at a family celebration in Delauly. There we have the full ritual. In threes we sit crosslegged and have aromatic oil sprinkled round us, scented water and marigold petals on out hair, then rainbow colours painted down our foreheads. The women are given scarves, the men Nepalese hats which perch ridiculously on the top of their heads, as the Nepalese are very slight, nothing like our bull-headed Englishmen. After a delicious lunch, again sitting cross-legged, most of us manage to get up on our own, with a minimum of groaning, and take to the truck (opensided with two long benches) to go to the meeting of the Rivers Rapti an Narayani. There is not much water now, but in the monsoon season it rages down changing the course of the river bed. There aare crocodiles there, but we saw nothing more exciting than a couple of tiny frogs, and rhino dung, which prevented us going further along the river bank into the jungle area where they live..

The weather is warm in the day, but chilly at night, and where we are now on the plains, it is a little humid, and as usual, I seem to have bought all the wrong clothes, which means i shall have to shop for more!

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