Catching Up - Good-Bye Nepal

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We had previously decided to leave Nepal and move on to India soon, so we had booked a flight or better we had booked two flights.

The first one brought us up to the mountains where we had a fantastic view of the Himalaya and of course of Mount Everest. To be honest - in the end these are just normal mountains as we know them in Switzerland. It is not possible to realise how high they are or how much higher than the Alps. Anyway the flight was fun and exciting.

After an hour we were back at the airport and waited for a few hours to catch another flight to Bhadrapur. This is in the very East of Nepal and close to the border crossing.

When we arrived at Bhadrapur we shared a Taxi with three others to Kakarbitta which is the border crossing where we went to the immigration offices of Nepal and India. We chartered another Taxi and went to a place called Siliguri in India. From there we tried to catch a shared Jeep to go up the mountains to Darjeeling. It was quite difficult to get a transport because they were starting to strike at 6pm but Marc managed to get us into a Jeep with seven adults and three kids. It was pretty uncomfortable as you can imagine.

The drive up there was a bit adventurous. The street becomes very narrow with hairpin curves and it is not always possible to cross. Luckily the cars have a horn which the drivers use regularly and which got on our nerves quite fast. After an hour or two, we had a flat tire which needed to be fixed. One person fixed it and ten people were watching :-) We moved on and got into a village where many people were standing on the street with sticks in their hands and shouting at the cars. This was a bit scary but luckily tourists were not their target. We had to go through two more checkpoints like that until we arrived in Darjeeling after four hours. We could not feel any body parts anymore because the ride was so uncomfortable. But at least we were up there :-)

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