Blogs from Nepal, Asia - page 13

Did paragliding with 'sunrise-paragliding' today. After getting our bags to yet another hostel (pushkar), we went to the paraglide company, that got us up the sarangkot mountain. My phone sadly didn't charge overnight, so I had no photocamera. Anything you see here is simons work :). We took off from the point that we reached in an earlier hike and I immediadiately felt a bit nauseated. Motion sickness. I could hold out for a while, as the pilot of our tandem flight navigated us in mostly straight lines,after the initials twists and turns to get a couple of hundred meters above the mountain. We had a beautiful view of the mountain, the places we hiked to, before, and the town of pokhara and fewa lake. It was especially interesting to see all the little sparkles reflect ... read more

The journey to the airport was super-quick - don't know where all the traffic had gone. In fact, we were too early to check-in but we were soon on board the 9.00 pm Qatar Airways flight from Amman to Doha, in Qatar, where we would transit. The plane was lovely, an A350 XWB, with loads of films, entertainment, seat space, wifi and proper cutlery! It put BA to shame. We landed in Doha about midnight and the 3.15 hour wait between flights soon passed as I chatted with a woman from Oxford with not much of interest to say and a young man from NE England who I guessed was in the military as he was taking the long way home to Newcastle from Afghanistan via Kuwait, Qatar and Manchester. He was funny and entertaining and ... read more

Tried to find some interesting places to go to, here, but it seems we exhausted them. Some interesting destinations that would cost us > 400 euros to reach would be rara lake in the west (multiple flights and a horse ride) Jomson (village, high in the mountains that you can reach by plane, when the wind is right), Bhutan (costs >250$/day), Tibet (hard to arrange, China) and india or china (weren't so interested) So instead, we opted for interesting local places: a hippie lodge for the night, canyoning the next day and paraglide the day after. The canyon turned out to be a bit of a letdown for its price. We paid 50$ for, what turned out to be a small scale abseil operation. We got their by taxi, walked the final bit (15-20m) and got ... read more

Today, I woke up at 4:45 (or rather, 1ish, couldn't really sleep after that) and got out at 5:00. The objective: dawn at poon hill, 3210m. There was a whole slew of people. Lighting was not a problem, but the hike was 400m up up up! The results? See for yourself :) ... read more

Todo: * climb the planned 800m from today * climb 550m we had not climbed yesterday * start with a 3500-step stairs (269 stories) Going 'alone' with the guide enabled me to go full speed. Some bragging is in order: * Normal time to climb the stairs: 2.5h * guide's record time to climb the stairs: 1.5h * our time (to where the guide measures): 45m * our time to the total end of the stairs: 1h And the rest of the way to ghorepani took us about 4.5h Check out the nice photos! Oh and what I find incredible is the Porters. Those are the people that will carry your backpack for you. Porters have a whole pack on their back, consisting of multiple backpacks, sacks, weekend bags and sometimes even coffers. Where most people ... read more