Pokhara, Paragliding & Pashminas

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Hi everyone!

Well, we've done so much since the last entry that we've almost forgotten what we've been doing! We made it to Butwal okay (this time!!) as the strike luckily wasn't affecting the road from Pokhara. We went to Butwal to visit Phil's aunt and uncle who work at the Butwal Technical Institute (BTI), but unfortunately when we got off the bus we were surrounded by rickshaw drivers who apparently had never heard of BTI!!!! (Even though it was about 2 minutes away from where we were standing and Sa had noticed us passing it from the bus!!) They also pretended not to speak English. So in the end we navigated the rickshaw (our first) through a town we'd never seen before!! And we managed to find it okay. Anna and Allan's house is lovely and cool, and they have all mod cons, and also the most fantastic didi (housekeeper) called Dina, who makes the best chocolate cake and raisin cookies ever!!! And also an extremely good dal bhaat (National Nepali dish - our first nice one!!) and momos (Tibetan dumplings). We spent a couple of days in Butwal just looking around and investigating the town (and it's lovely shops) before getting the (local!!!) bus up to Tansen for a long weekend.

We stayed at the Mission Hospital Guesthouse (very lovely, good food and lots of nice people to talk to), from where we did a few walks to prepare ourselves for the upcoming trek!! We went on most of these with Daniela, a German girl who was staying at the guesthouse for a few weeks on a placement. We also met many of the doctors working at the hospital and managed to get a tour of the wards from an American called Omega, which was enlightening, seeing as neither of us have ever been round a hospital in England!! We walked up Sreenagar Hill on the first morning, which had lovely views (but unfortunately still none of those elusive Himalaya!), and then we visited a fair in the town in the afternoon (very similar to English fairs, where they sold candyfloss and icecream, although the rides looked somewhat more rickety than in England!!). The next day we did a 9 hour walk to a palace (???) called Ranighat on the banks of the Kali Gandaki River, which completely knackered us but had great views. It was supposed to be a round trip, but unfortunately when we asked a local lady whether we were going the right way she directed us the shortest way (not the tourist route) down an almost vertical (!!!) valley side - we were very glad to reach the bottom!!! That night was very eventful as we had a lizard in our room (anyone knowing either Phil or Sa will understand how well we coped with this!!). Much screaming and shouting ensued, until two nice people from the Guesthouse took pity on us, calmly picked up the lizard and took it outside. But lo and behold, the lizard made a return visit later on in the night and we had to wake Daniela up to come and re-remove it!!!

The last day we walked along the ridgeway from the town, where Sarah managed to get extremely sunburnt (scabs, burns, and peeling!!!) despite Phil not really getting tanned at all!! That evening we went out to Nanglos (no not Nandos), the one restaurant in Tansen, with some of the people from the guesthouse. We tried more Nepali food like pakoda (spicy vegetable cakes) and something beginning with "b" that we can't remember the name of (!!) with soya beans, garlic and ginger (and also more of the famous momos). That night we also had to move hotels as the guesthouse was full, so we changed to "Hotel The White Lake", which is probably the worst place we've stayed in so far, mainly due to the window of the shower having a pane of glass missing and it looking straight out onto a roof full of people!! (We were quick in the shower that night!!).

We returned to Butwal by local bus and visited the Children's Home that Anna and Allan are supporting for dinner that evening. The Home is lovely, set up like a family with 2 parents and 8 children, and they all seem to love living there. We had our second nice dal bhaat there too!!! The children are all really sweet and were really excited when Allan brought his laptop round to show them photos!! The next day we took a microbus to Bhairawa, where we were planning on catching another bus to Lumbini (the birthplace of the Buddha). Unfortunately when we reached Bhairawa, we were told by all the bus drivers that due to the strike there were no buses running to Lumbini and therefore we had to sit on the back of a rickshaw for 2 hours (most uncomfortable!!), although the pain was lessened by the plentiful supply of biscuits we'd had the foresight to bring with us (!!) and the nice scenery. Lumbini was very strange, as due to the strike the town was absolutely dead!!! All the shops were shut and it seemed all the hotels were too, but we tried the door of the one we wanted to stay in and it seemed luckily they were open, they just didn't want to advertise the fact!! The hotel was the strangest one we've been too (Sarah would say it was worse than the one in Tansen!). The man in charge acted as if he didn't want us to be there, and getting food for us was a real chore!!! He never smiled once, AND the food was TERRIBLE!!! We had no choice what we ate, we had to eat what the family had, which would have been fine if it was nice!! The site of Lumbini itself was really interesting though. We saw the stone marking the exact spot where Buddha was born (although how they can be sure of this I don't know), and lots of monks meditating under a bodhi tree. The main temple was a bit of a disappointment from the outside though, and the Ashokan Pillar (supposed to have been made by the Emperor Ashoka in the 2nd century BC) looked more like a chimney pot from the Industrial Revolution!!!! There were loads of fantastic monasteries on the site too, where each country has obviously competed to build the most extravagant monastery with the most ornate decoration - fascinating to look at and they were all very welcoming. Finally we walked up to the Peace Pagoda, which was very picturesque, and then we grabbed a rickshaw back to Bhairawa. This rickshaw-wallah, however, obviously didn't know Bhairawa very well and managed to take a wrong turning, so again we managed to navigate a rickshaw around a town we'd never really been to before, with the help of the Lonely Planet (we're getting quite good at that!).

The last day in Butwal was spent just relaxing and going for a wander around the town - there's a great supermarket where you can buy loads of western things so we stocked up on supplies!!! The next day we had to be up very early to get the 7am bus to Pokhara, which gave us a shock when it started heading the wrong way towards India (although we soon turned off). We'd booked the Sacred Valley Inn in Pokhara, which is very clean and also had milk porridge for breakfast, so we're very happy there!! The last couple of days have just been spent relaxing, generally getting sorted for starting the trek on Wednesday (5th) and shopping (mainly for pashminas (of which Sarah now has three, one of which was a birthday present from Phil, and one of which was a birthday present from herself (a bargain though!)), scarfs (we both now have a few!!!) and Tibetan yak's wool blankets (very warm for the trek!!!). Last night we got roped into going for dinner with a very strange Australian man called Graham and an even stranger Dutch guy called Micky. We'd met them a couple of times in the street and got talking, and couldn't really refuse when they suggested dinner. However, when it came to actually meeting them, neither of us particularly wanted to spend an evening in their company. Therefore we decided to turn up late, then we thought we saw them coming along the road so we hid down an alleyway, then we thought they'd passed by so it was safe to come out, but then, who did we bump into, except Micky and Graham!!!!!! So we were forced to go for dinner!!!! Micky just kept complaining about the price of the food in the restaurant, whereas Graham moved around a lot when he spoke and wore a rather tight pair of shorts sitting opposite Sarah (the movements while he was speaking made these rather too revealing!!!).

Today, obviously, is Sarah's birthday, so to celebrate we decided to go paragliding, thinking it would be a high point of the trip. Take off and the first part were great fun, with amazing views (although not of the Himalaya still!!). However, towards the end of the flight (well actually after about the first 5 minutes for Phil) we both started feeling really sick!!!!! An unfortunate thing to happen!!! Apparently the thermals were very strong today due to a big thunderstorm yesterday when we were confined to our hotel room by the thunder, lightning, hail and heavy rain!!! Very dramatic!!! We're going for a nice meal tonight to celebrate (that's if we manage to eat anything lol!!!), and then we have to be up at 5am tomorrow to get the bus to the starting point for the Annapurna Circuit Trek. So we won't be in touch for around three weeks, but I'm sure we'll have some good photos and more stories to share when we get back.

Until next time...

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