Nepal - Hello from Nepal

It's been a long time since I updated this blog!! I'll take a minute now before I go to bed to write about about the past couple of days in Nepal!

We arrived in Kathmandu after a long long flight from Birmingham. It flight was full of children. I never saw (or heard) so many babies on an airplane before. Luckily the one that sat on its mothers lap next to me was pretty quiet. We transferred in Dubai. We had about five hours there so we took a nap. Luckily I woke up and checked the departures board because our flight wasn't on there..we were in the wrong terminal. Ooops. We found our next flight and while it seemed to be in the Ryan air of the middle east, it was pretty comfortable and I slept the full four hour flight!!

So we arrived in Kathmandu in the evening. I read about not giving your bags to people at the airport as they ask for huge tips, but they tricked me :-P. I thought he was with the hotel bus guy...but he wasn't. So he got a £5 tip for carrying my bag like ten feet. Oh well, everything else is so cheap here it doesn't really matter.

I'm going to pause and say that my auto correct is doing a terrible job so if I miss any bad spelling mistakes, I'm sorry it's late!!

We met Ewa and Teresa at the Backyard hotel, poor Anthony carried my giant suitcase and his backpack up all five floors of stairs because I was too sad about the previous porter experience that I wouldn't let the hotel people take my bag up.  The room was nice and we went out for a walk and a bit of dinner. The food has been amazing!!! A lot of Indian, in my limited experience of both cuisines they seem really similar...but everything is cooked fresh, no microwaves!! Yum!!

The next day we hired a car ($60 for the whole day for four of us) and saw the main sights of Kathmandu. I can't remember them all now but I'll pop on a few pictures at the end. We made it back just in time to check in to the next hotel for the start of our tour with earthbound expeditions (purchased on Groupon!!). We had to stay in a different hotel because so many people bought the vouchers that there are 60 total people in our full group. Each group is split into 15 people per guide. Our group seems pretty nice so far. They don't all seem to be expert hikers...to be honest most look about the same capability as me so that makes me happy!!!

Oh I forgot..I don't know how I forgot this. Our first day out in Nepal at the first place the driver dropped us at I was just taking a picture of Teresa and Ewa and i felt a big plop on my head!! A big pigeon shit on me!!  OMG. It was green..like bright green...like spinach!!! It was in my hair AND on the mouth piece of my water bottle!!! Disgusting!! Anthony helped get most of it out, but OMG it was gross and I definitely washed my hair twice that night!! And I didn't drink my water and sanitized the mouth piece a lot after. Ick!!! Stupid pigeons!!

Anyways, we had orientation last night and then today the long bus trip to Pokhara where we start our hike tomorrow. We had another amazing dinner tonight. Oh we had quite the end to our bus journey. As soon as we arrived in town it started pouring. Proper thunder and lightening and torrential rain. The sides of the streets were like rivers by the time we got to the hotel. One of the other buses was already parked in front of the hotel so we were going to get out on the other side of the street, but the water was too deep...so we had to do lots of maneuvering to get around the other bus and do a uturn...then we got out and tried to check in but the hotel didn't have enough room for all of us...lol. our guide hadn't been told that the group had to split. Lots of people were already really upset because of the rain, then when we had to walk across the street to the other hotel they were really whiny, even though it had stopped raining by the time it was all figured out.

So hopefully they are prepared for rain on the trek, because if it rains there is gonna be a real adventure...

So we had a quick dinner then just repacked for the hike. So we just have our stuff for the next five days in Anthony's big backpack and then our days packs with rain gear and water ready to go. The rest will wait at the hotel for us to get after the hike. The sherpas will carry the big backpack for us each day...so that's good!! We even filter our own water!! We bought lots of fancy new gear. This is good practice for Australia when we will be carrying our own bags plus the tent and food across Tasmania!! 

Anyways, I think that's it. It's sleepy time now. We leave at 8:30 tomorrow and have probably a two hour drive before we start hiking. We only have 7km tomorrow but we go up 1,500 meters, so it should take about five hours. The guide said it's easy and we go super slow so fingers crossed its true!!

I won't have Wi-Fi until I finish the trek in five days I think...so I'll let you know how it went!!