Kathmandu - Christmas and New Year

With the strike finally over, we were able to make our way to Kathmandu, so we oould spend Christmas and The New Year in the capital. We got a tourist bus (350 Nrps), which took us 6-7 hours and found a place to stay in Thamel, the tourist area of Kathmandu (Deutsch Guest House). The plan was to spend Christmas in Kathmandu, do the Langtang valley and be back just in time for New Year. However the plan was scrapped as we found out the next day that it took 8 hours for a bus to get there, which would mean we would not be back in time for the New Year and that’s just criminal. This meant we had lots of time to kill so we decided to treat ourselves by watching lots of movies on the T.V. and eating loads of snack food (for some reason, the western chocolate tasted nicer over here!). The good thing with being in a very tourist area was that there was a very good selection of western food, something that we missed in India, and it was pretty cheap, so that meant we just feasted for our days in Kathmandu.

With Danny coming to the mosque with me when it was Eid, I thought it would be fair if I come and have Christmas dinner with him (fair deal me thinks!). Aidy was with us (the guy who we met at Annapurna Base camp) and soon as he tucked in, he dropped all his Christmas dinner on his lap. He had no choice but to eat off his crotch while it was burning him and we were taking the necessary pics. I’m sure that’s going to be a Christmas he’ll never forget.

Nothing much happened for the Christmas week apart from we applied for our Chinese visa and went to the cinema to watch Avatar. We had to move guest houses too because there was no promised hot water. We complained for like 4 days and he was adamant that hot water was coming out of the top but it definitely was cold. We told him to either sort it or we’ll leave and he told us to leave, -some customer service that is. We stayed at Sacred Valley Inn, the same hotel as the one in Pokhara but they have a branch here. It was so much better than Deutsch Guest House and Bishnu was so helpful so I’d definitely recommend staying there.

We finally did get bored and on the 30th and 31st, we decided to see what Kathmandu offered us. We first visited the Durbar square, which is a square with loads of old temples and then Swayambhunath, which was a temple at the top of a big climb of steps. This is where we saw a big monkey fight and obviously Dan was there with the camera but stood behind me for some reason (Pussy). We were meant to see more temples but we were distracted by a game of football so we could show these Nepalis how to play football the English way. On New Years eve, we hired some proper mountain bikes and cycled to the outskirts of Kathmandu, which was a total of 40km and meant we had to weave in and out of Nepali traffic, which required a lot of skill. We wanted to go to Nagarkot, where you can see Mount Everest from but it was really foggy so we decided it wasn’t worth the cycle up.

We picked our visas up on the 30th and booked our flights to Chengdu (2nd Jan). This meant our trip to Nepal was finally ending but China was there to pick us up.

Kathmandu Photo Link:

http://www3.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=2341173011/a=2264773011_2264773011/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/