Blogs from Nepal, Asia - page 12

October 14th - Gorakshep - Dia 115 Today we crossed our first of three 5000+meter passes. Kunma La Pass reaching an elevation of 5536 meters is the highest of the three. It was a long day with a lot of elevation gain. I was really proud of our pace. We kept a steady pace with minimal rests, taking over everyone that had started a few hours earlier then us. ? After passing the crowds we were venturing alone through the beautiful barren alpine terrain. The best part of the pass was having the huge mountain range which has Nuptse (7864m!) and Lhotse (8516m!) immediately on our right hand side. Being so close to such big mountains is incredible. Hopefully one lucky day I can climb any one of them. There are too many! Another cool feeling ... read more

The last day. Nothing planned. We tried to sleep in a little, despite the bell-ringing, that happens every day from 6:00 onward. It's to announce oneself to the hindu gods when entering a shrine. Took some time to properly stash our bags for the way back. Had breakfast, printed tickets, went out to buy the last few things we wanted .In my case, without much luck: The things I wanted most were: some new/extra packing cubes, a sleeping mask and maybe one well-fitting goretex / fishermanspants. No luck on any of those. Shop in, shop out. They're all the same here. There's your prototype 'the north fake' trekking shop, with all kinds of trekking clothes and accessoires. A hemp shop, with mostly backpacks. A Nepali/festival-kind of clothing store and shops for fabrics (yak, cashmere, pashima).rinse, repeat. ... read more

After three nights at the Newa we relocated to our next (original) hotel. We'd had a wander around previously to see what it looked like but we couldn't find it in the rabbit warren of streets. This time we stumbled across it almost by accident as we killed time waiting for our luggage to be collected from the Newa. What started out as a walk turned into a complete relocation as our new hotel-keepers insisted we stay, even though we had a dog from the Newa who had 'adopted' Steve in tow as it had decided to join us on our walk. We felt we had not said a proper goodbye to Prem but decided not to go back as he would have had hundreds of questions for us about our new lodgings. You may have ... read more

October 6th - Kunming - Dia 107 Needing to catch a flight from Kunming to Kathmandu the 7th I traveled a lot today. All the fast trains were sold out and weirdly my slow night train reservation got cancelled on the last minute. So I was left to take a bus ? Not the most memorable time. Today I literally traveled from 7:30am all the way to 11:30pm. Traveling really tests your patience. Especially in the buses of China which are not made for medium sized people, their is not a lot of space to get comfortable. Finally made it to the bus station of Kunming at 11:30pm. I had hoped to catch the cheap metro train to my Hostel but got unlucky since the metro train was  closed for the night. The buses were also ... read more

We went to the airport early (6:20), to go to Kathmandu and have a full day there. I write this post 15m after we were supposed to be in the air (7:55) and boarding has not even started. ... We were just invited to go trough security check. Nice and easy. Just roll your bag trough a scanner, walk trough a gate, ignore the beeping and answer two security questions: 'do you smoke?', 'do you have a knife?'. Feeling very secure about the fact that all our fellow pessengers are non-smokers, we proceed to wait at the gate. It's 8:24 and no yeti airplane in sight. Interesting is the low-tech standards here. To show flight info, someone with a remote turned on a smart TV somewhere and started chrome on it. Then used a mouse that ... read more