Held Hostage in Kathmandu

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So after getting back from Everest we tried to get our China/Tibet visa, not that hard but since we didn't want to pay the extra US$100 or so each it took forever, hense the held hostage title.

For the first few days we primarily slept, we were surprisingly tired. Then the Kathmandu mountain film festival was on and since the tickets were Rs30 (70cents) for each movie, we watched a lot of movies, some cool and some not so cool. But saw a great movie about the New Zealand falcon, which was set just out of Dunedin which made both of us pretty home sick. Also watched a few mountain climbing and ski descents as well as rockclimbing and movies about everest, most of which made Katherine want to go climbing and me realise that i'm quite happy treking as i don't want to lose my nose to frost bite.

Becasue of all the climbing in the movies, we thought that we would go to the climbing wall in Kathmandu. After a 30min bike ride through the middle of Kathmandu we arrived, realitively unscaved and spend most of the day climbing until Katherine couldn't move her arm and i was so buggered that i could hardly get a metre off the ground, but it was a pretty cool wall, outside in the sun, with some random nepali guys that really showed us up.

From here we were supposed to spend a few days in Kakani in the national park about 20km from Kathmandu but i managed to get sick, i think it was all the bakery food that we had been pigging out on, so unfortunately I spent the next couple of days chilling out in the bathroom while Katherine got bored!!!

From here we thought that since we hadn't been on our bikes properly for almost 3 months we should at least take them for a spin before we left for tibet. We'd heard that the Nagarjun Forest Park 3km from kathmandu was wicked for riding and rock climbing and since noone would hire us ropes without a guide, we went riding. We turned up early in the morning and surprisingly were told that no we couldn't go in because we were two girls and needed a male chaperon, we were both alittle dumb founded about this but appartently a couple of tourists were killed FIVE years ago and the park is still considered dangerous. Luckly for us we found a couple of guys that were going climbing and pretended to join them and the army dudes let us in. They then left us and we continued riding to the top where there was a cool little temple and a lovely Tibetian/Australian family that fed us chocolate and chips and they thought that we were nuts for riding up the hill. From here we took the very unused path back down the hill which was pretty fun down hill riding until we came to the army check point, were the guards were pretty surprised to see us and consequently came and had a chat with their fingers on the trigger, we were very polite!!! But made it through without being shoot at!!!! It was a pretty uneventful ride back to town except for Katherine taking on a couple of buses and being yelled at by the bus boy again.

Then Kathmandu went into strike mode and everything shut down, like everything, the only places open were hotels. So being noisey tourists Katherine and i took our bikes for a spin through Kathmandu, we were the only vehicles on the road, along with thousands of people just walking around because there was nothing else to do. But it was fun riding with no traffic or pollution, the riot police did look at us oddly but we didn't venture to close cause their sticks look like they would hurt.

But off to Tibet tomorrow, have to leave at 3.30am becasue the strikes start at 6am and we need to be well and truely gone by then, rumour is we will be getting a police escort, we'll see.

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