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Published: October 13th 2018
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I've been thinking about going to Nepal for donkey's years and somehow I never got around to doing just that.
Fooling around in South East Asia, making brewery shares go up and a bit of scuba diving and after that the merry go round in the Americas.
Too little time for fun or maybe there's a time for everything and that is now.
We, yes we because for once I'm not going on my own, my oldest son Raul and two other blokes.
Raul and I have ridden around the Alps a couple of times and it's worked out really well.
The other two guys are unknown entities to us, we've met them briefly one time so we'll see how it works out.
Stefan, an OAP like me, is the instigator of this little trip and according to others that know him a bit on the low side of cash flow so he tends to choose cheap rather than nice hotels.
Well if there's an alternative to living like a pauper I'm taking it, shabby hotels are a thing of the past.
Kjell the other bloke is one, who like us, signed up
for this trip out of the blue just like us.
Thankfully we're not joined at the hip bone.
Anyway this is going to be fun, new roads and new sights every day and it won't be flat, the mighty Himalayas will be around us the whole time-.
The day of departure arrived and off we went to adventures not yet lived and just some plain enjoyment of being there.
We arrived in Istanbul and were asked if we would consider delaying our departure for 24 hours and getting 600 Euros in compensation plus a free night in Istanbul, so why not and we saved a trip for two girls who would otherwise have missed a connecting flight to somewhere close to Mount Everest, two damsels in distress got on their way and we spent one evening and half a day wandering around in Istanbul,
Istanbul is a big , very busy place, with quite a lot of sights and of course good food, the Turks know how to cook.
The next morning, rather worse for wear we arrived in Kathmandu, Kath is dirty, polluted and crowded and filled wil westerners in hiking boot and
zillions of very friendly and nice Nepalese.
We had some breakfast and some hours of snoozing and then went to get Sim cards and meet up with our fellow travellers.
So a bit of a walkabout and some beers and the dinner and then the bedbugs were absent and we slept like babies.
Breakfast and the of to collect our almost new Royal Enfields, hahaha.
Not new but we did manage to do about 120 km or so on some very and then I mean very congested and very dusty roads, I think that half my lung capacity is just gone, the filled like the bags in a hoover.
The traffic is horrendous and no rules apply, well I did not expect anything else, the last 40 km when we'd left the main road were great, just some lorries and motorbikes and no billowing clouds of diesel fumes covering you in a black cloud.
The nature's lovely and the hills that we see now will be laughing stock compared to what is to come, Annapurna is just around the corner, well quite a few corners, but she's there waiting for us,
Now we're
in Gorkha a little town in the middle of, nowhere!
We went back down to the highway, the only way, stopping in the next village looking for an ATM, my experience with ATMs in Nepal is not very good.
The first day it ate my card without so much as a hick up, I did get it back.
We stop in Pokhara to get permits to go up to the area around Annapurna called Mustang.
Pokhara has the touristy part called Lakeview with loads of hotels and restaurants and the ever present sellers of souvenirs and also a lot of shops selling trekking gear.
We end up having one beer too many, but what the heck, we're on holiday , not some AA meeting.
So the next morning after a slightly drawn out start up process we go up and into the mountains, it's very beautiful as the road get worse beyond belief, water mud and rocks every where, so it's a matter of just slogging it, average speed is something like 10-15 km/ hour as we battle forwards. There's an incredible amount of bull dust that we fill our lungs with, dust everywhere,
our black riding gear is more grey than black.
Lots of land slides and enormous pot holes, but we're having fun, according to our illustrious leader we cant ride that fast and enjoy nature at the same time, what a load of bollocks, he's mor of a nuisance than a guide.
Having started to late we're just reaching a village when the sun disappears beyond the peaks and the valley gets pitch dark.
We check into some kind of hotelish dump with bathrooms on other floors and a key for the hot shower,
Kjell and our beloved leader had found a better place down the road so we grab our tooth brushes and set out to find more lodgings.
We left our luggage and stuff as we couldn't check out and also would not schlep our stuff down to the other room, there are blessings being withe uptight and comparatively rich.
500 Rupees more or less would not kill us.
We meet for dinner and beer and are soon off to bed, bone tired, you have to be 100 % alert or you end up as road kill, after all traffic rules are
for sissies, are they not.
At least in Nepal
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