Please excuse me if I don't use the Queen's english exclusively throughout this entry, I'm under time constraints and I'm sure there are very few people who wish to read a overly long winded account of what is a essentially just a pleasant stroll through some mountain country.
A brief prologue for those of you who may not know, I'm travelling with two mates, Tim Porter (Australian) and Patrick Moloney (American unfortunately), both who I met through Cromwell college and we're doing a relatively extended tour through Nepal, Tibet and India for a little over 3 months.
Like any stay in Nepal, our journey started in Kathmandu. After being let through customs with a breezy and dismissive wave of the hand (assumingly because I looked trustworthy), we headed through the ghetto of outer Kathmandu until we hit the tourist haven of Thamel and our "embassy" that is the Kathmandu guest house, the oldest and most famous budget hotel in Nepal. Awesome place, beautiful outdoor eating areas and gardens, hot showers, BBC on the tele and more importantly, and something we grew to appreciate even more once we started trekking, western porcelain toilets with lo and behold, toilet paper supplied (double ply!!).
Kathmandu guest house gardens...
The streets and sidewalks of Thamel are one and the same and are equally shared by four wheel drives, flintstone style taxis (i.e. you can see the road through the rusted out floors), rickshaws, street peddlers, tour group operaters, snake charmers with frickin huge sacks of snakes, and cute little kids who try to impress you about their fantastic knowledge of the world's capital cities and then string you along with some heartbreaking story about their dying sister who needs some milk and would you kindly provide just a few hundred rupees so she has something to drink on her deathbed. Yeah right, as if I'm going to give any money to some 7 year old who doesn't even know that Mogadishu is the capital of Somalia. Get an education fool, then you can buy your own bloody milk.
You can pretty much buy anything fake in Thamel, like any asian market there are copious amounts of dvds, cds, sunglasses, t-shirts etc but buggers me who in Nepal, as a budding entreprenuer, thinks to his or her self "I think there's a real vacancy in the trekking gear market" and opens up the gazillionth store on any single street that sells North Face, Alpine Lowe and Mountain Hardware ripoffs. Pretty good stuff actually so if any of you out there are after some cheap reasonable quality adventure gear, let me know and I can tell you how to get to Kathmandu.
More Kathmandu guest house, awesome food
Anyways after a few days of dodging speeding vehicles of all types and giving the big don't argue to all sorts of persistent Nepalis with their various agendas, you really do get the urge to get some peace out in the mountainous country. After booking our Tibetan tour with arguably the dodgiest tour operator in the region (by the smell of the place, I think the office used to be a public toilet, maybe still is) and picking up all the essentials for a 15 day hike (i.e. down vest, yak fleece hat, cricket bat) we booked our flights to the Lukla, the starting point of our Everest BC trek with yet another confidence inspiring airline, Sita airways ("yes it crashed last week, but nobody died...yet"), and prepared to leave our comfortable surroundings of the Guesthouse.
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