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Published: September 15th 2009
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After a couple of days in the crazy Kathmandu, it was time to head out to the mountains so we could breath a little easier again! The city is just filled with dust and smog and with a cold not the nicest place to be. I had heard terrible stories about the driving and roads in Nepal, so being a nervous passenger in a car anyway I was feeling quite anxious. When I found out that Nargarkot was only 30km away and took 2 hours to get to, I felt slightly better as we would be doing around 15km an hour!
It had taken us about half an hour to get out of the city through the huge maze of cars and lorries, a few minutes later we had our first crash, it was very minor, two bus’ next to each other refused to give way so they just crashed into each others sides but it did mean the car behind had smashed into the back of us. There was no major damage but the drivers argued with the police in the middle of the highway for about 20 minutes blocking all other traffic. Finally we carried on to the halfway point where we had to change bus, we eventually found the right one and an old man inside told us we could sit on the roof to see the view. So we clambered up the ladder on the back along with several really old men and woman and dodged the low lying electric lines as we weaved our way through the paddy fields up to Nargakot at over 2000 metres.
After finding somewhere to stay, we headed back to town to watch the sunset, we could here music so we followed the sound to see what was going on. There was a big gathering of people and we thought it must be a wedding, there was a live band and lots of dancing, we stood and watched for a while but it wasn’t long before the man in charge was over with us asking for money, we gave him a couple of pounds (which is quite a lot out here!) but he wasn’t happy, he wanted $1000 so instead of giving him the money, Aaron went down and joined in the dancing. Then it was an early night before our 5.30am start the next day.
It was still dark but the moon was quite bright when we started our 4km walk up hill through the military base where we had heard we could watch the sunrise over the Himalayas. It was a little nerve racking walking past the soldiers with their guns in the dark and it seemed to take forever to reach the top but when we finally got up to the top we could see the whole way around us and all across the horizon was the silhouette of the Himalayas. When the sun came up it was so bright it lit up the side of all the mountains, it was amazing, it felt like we were so high but the mountains in front of us were 3-4 times higher than we were.
Instead of getting the bus back down the winding road we decided to walk back down the road and through some of the tracks, it was a beautiful walk and at the end we got a little lost, but in the middle of nowhere we came across a tiny little school. The children all came out to say hello and to ask for a pen but I only had four with me, by the time I had found them from my bag the kids had surrounded me, so I threw them in the air and there was a huge scramble to grab them. After leaving them with all of our pens and sweets we said goodbye and headed back to the smelly madness of Kathmandu.
Sarah x x
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