Blogs from Nepal, Asia - page 17

Current status? Very busy sitting on our balcony overlooking the river as flowers slowly drift past in the current, sun shining, birds chirping. As the taxi driver told us proudly, multiple times on the way - it is quite pretty here. We arrived yesterday after an 18 minute flight from Kathmandu, yes officially announced as 18 mimutes and arranged a canoe ride with a short walk for the afternoon... after lunch of course. This area offers elephant rides and so as we lunched elephants, mingled with cars and horse carts sauntered up and down the streets. Quite lovely afternoon drifting along the river as the guide worked hard to earn his money frequently pointing out fish and birds, yet barely reacting when we saw a crocodile or elephant. We spent about ten minutes watching some birds ... read more

We woke up to what felt like Christmas morning in our little tea house. The whole village and surrounding mountains were covered in snow and the snow was still coming down. We all rushed out to see a whole new landscape and then wondered why Tommy hadn’t followed... As it turned out the house cat had given birth to kittens in Tommy’s bed that night!! They still had their eyes closed and were cuddled up in Tommy’s bed feeding and snuggling with their mum, super cute! Our host sparked up the log burner and we sat and chilled with him listening to music, drinking tea and eating apple pancakes waiting for the weather to pick up. Once the sky had started to clear the sun soon started to melt on the roads and we made our ... read more

We were up earlier than the other group (we shall call them Team B) and set off to a higher altitude. A few of us were nervous as to how our bodies would react as most of the group hadn’t been above 3000m before. Most of the day we spent walking along the jeep track so it wasn’t the most interesting of hikes but the views of the Annapurna’s were still a sight to behold. Once we did get onto the trekking trail we passed more small villages and also an apple orchard. We weren’t expecting to be reminiscing about our NZ jobs in Nepal but that just demonstrates the change in climate on the way up into the mountains. We walked up and up through some beautiful pine forests decorated in the multicolour prayer flags ... read more

We had plans for an early start but the rains hadn’t quite cleared so we started trekking from Tal at 7:30 bellies full of apple pancakes. We headed out of Tal into a fresh morning watching the skies clear and the snowy peaks glistening. We were all feeling full of energy and arrived in Dharapani to refuel and replenish our supply. On the way into the village we had spotted a mega high suspension bridge across a huge canyon with a river at the bottom and on speaking to the shop owner found out we could do the bridge loop in 1hr 30. Jaap and us were immediately keen and feeling fresh enough to add the extra onto our day and the others were also quick to agree. Jaap and us went at a continuous steady ... read more

Tommy didn’t wake us (despite being up for 30 minutes) and so we had a very frantic rush getting our stuff together and hailed a cab thinking we’d miss the bus. We paid our bus fare and ended up being the lucky ones and actually got a seat for our journey! The ride was pretty standard - hot, stuffy and extremely overcrowded. Other trekkers were sat in the aisle and piled bags on top of them. We arrived in Besi Sahar, got some money out, gobbled down some awesome chapattis and bumped into a crew from our bus who wanted to go to the same place. So we agreed to share a Jeep to our starting point, Syanje. This we time we did draw the short straw and ended up piled in the back with the ... read more