Nepal

I spent just over two weeks in Nepal. Travelling around has been so easy so other than talking to Sarah about where I should go and what I should do (Sarah is living there for one year) I hadn't researched much about the county at all. I'd completely forgotten that I would need to get a visa at the airport and turned up with no money so had to be let out of the airport through customs to use the ATM - good thing there was one just outside - and then come back in to get my visa and go through customs again. As soon as I got out of the airport people came up to me and were offering me taxi rides. I had no idea weather it would be safe to go with them so in the end I booked a room and a taxi to get there from a desk at the airport. These are the things it might have been handy to think about before I arrived! Anyway it all was fine in the end and I got to my hotel without any further problems. The first thing that stuck me as soon as I arrived in the country was how friendly the people there are. In my first few days there I met so many amazing people. You walk down the street and everyone you pass says hello to you. It would be nice if the rest of the world was like that too.
The streets are crazy. In the other Asian countries I've been to the vehicles all avoid you but in Nepal if you don't get out of the way you get hit. The streets are so narrow and there are pedestrians and vehicles everywhere. There is hardly room to move out of the way of the traffic and I saw people being knocked into on more than one occasion.
Thamel, the backpackers area of Kathmandu was so cool. There were loads of shops selling everything you could need to do with trekking. Lots of shops selling cheap music and in between, all sorts of shops selling really pretty crafty things like lanterns, hand made papers and almost anything you could possibly want made out of felt and wool. I only stayed in Thamel one night and then got a bus to Pokhara which is a beautiful little town on the edge of a lake with stunning views of the Himalayas. The bus journey was only supposed to take 6 hours but people were protesting in the roads - something I found to be very common in Nepal - and the journey ended up taking about 11 hours instead. When I was in Pokhara I went paragliding. It was very scary knowing that you had to run off the edge of a hill but the wind took us up in the air before we reached the edge and it was fantastic. The views were so beautiful with the lake and town beneath us and the snow covered Himalayas in the distance. Buzzards flew so close to us that we could almost touch them. I was able to take the control rope things for a while and before we went down to land we did some airobatics. We span round and round so fast that I had absolutely no idea which way up we were and when we stopped we were considerably closer to the ground than when we started.
I went back and stayed in Kathmandu in Sarah's apartment until Christmas day. Her home was lovely but so cold in the mornings and evenings as there wasn't any heating. You could lie in bed under her lovely warm duvet and put your arm out for a matter of seconds to get a drink or something and in that short amount of time your hand and arm would freeze! The day times were quite warm but all the same I was very glad of my warmer clothes I'd purchased in Bangkok on my way over and for the amazingly warm woolen coat and hat I'd bought Pokhara.
John joined us for almost two weeks and Anthony was there for most of the time too. Poor John was left stranded at the airport after I'd thought the flight he was on was 6 hours delayed. I never thought that there would be more than one flight arriving at the same time in such a tiny airport, but there was. We went to the airport to meet him and waited and waited and everyone on the flight came out and he didn't. We were able to walk through customs and where you get your visas without anyone questioning us (great security!) and only then discovered that there were two flights and that he would have been on the other one that arrived about 4 hours earlier. He was fine though and got himself to a hotel until we found him.
We celebrated Christmas on Christmas eve. In the morning we went a temple which overlooked the city. I was invited into a shop that sold singing bowls and was given a demonstration of how they worked. You can either hit them with a stick thing or rub it around their rim and they make a really beautiful sound. On this occasion I was sat down, then a bowl was placed on my knees and hit, then one on one hand and hit, then one on my other hand and hit and then finally one over my head which was also hit (and not softly). I felt like I was in a bell. The bloke said they were used to heal both physical and mental problems and kept hitting all the bowls and then asked me if I felt different. I have to say I didn't but when we were leaving the temple I did get a pain in my knee and ankle. We all went out for a meal at a lovely restaurant then went to a carol service and even had mince pies and gifts in the evening. On Christmas day we travelled south to the Chitwan national park where we stayed on an island in the middle of the jungle. We stayed in little cabins which only had electricity for two hours in the evening and hot water for one. The food there was brilliant with eat as much as you can for breakfast, lunch and dinner! There were five elephants living in the camp on the island so we got to do a lot of elephant riding. We learnt how to hold on to their ears and stand on their trunk which they would lift up so we could climb over their head and on to their backs. We rode them through the jungle in search of rhinos and tigers. We only ever saw a tigers foot print but did see a few rhinos which on the elephants backs we could get really close to. The elephants trunks are so strong with thousands of muscles in them. We would be going along a path in the jungle and our driver would see a rhino or hear a call to say that someone else had seen one and he'd tell the elephant to go through the densest bit of jungle and it would just plough through moving everything out of the way with it's trunk as it went. You had to be careful not to get smacked in the face by the branches it had moved! The elephants and their drivers seemed to have such a good relationship and the elephants understood what ever their drivers said to them and would do what ever they were asked. On one of the days we were there we went 'grass cutting'. This involved having an elephant each and riding them bare backed through the jungle. Once we'd got to where we were going our drivers jumped off. Mine stuck his little axe thing into a tree and hopped off the elephants back and up the tree leaving me alone on elle. Our elephants just wondered around pulling down branches with their trunks and eating. Elephants are always eating! Our drivers chopped down branches to take back for the elephants to eat which were then piled onto our elephants backs and we had to climb up on top of them. It was a lot comfier with the branches on their backs as elephants aren't the comfiest of animals to sit on. We then walked on to a place where our drivers chopped down lots grass which was also placed on the elephants backs.
Back in Kathmandu we visited some other temples. One we went to just by chance. John and I were planning to rent a bike and go north to near the Himalayas but because of yet more protests in the roads it took us so long to get to where we were to hire the bike from that it wasn't worth it. There are little trolley cars that take people around the city. We weren't sure how they worked or where they went but thought we'd try and get on one anyway. We managed to stop one and jumped in and it turned out that on it's way to it's destination (not sure where that was) it was going past the oldest Hindu temple in Kathmandu so that's where we went. We saw where poorer people were burnt next to the river and for this bit we were with a guide who rather disconcertingly stopped to tell us about it all in a place where the ashes from the burning bodies fell onto us. We then saw where the richer people were burned and watch and old man's ceremony. People were sifting through the ashes and remains in the river trying to find anything of value. In all the temples we went to there were loads and loads of monkeys. They weren't afraid of people and once we saw one walk over a boy who was leaning over a wall in the monkeys path.
A couple of times we went back to the restaurant that we had Christmas eve lunch in as on a friday night it did the most amazing eat as much as you can bbq. There were so many different salads, there were kebabs (vegi ones too) and momos (Tibetan dumplings), little pancake things and fritters and all sorts of bread and that was just for starters! You were kind of full by then but there were also three different main course dishes and then a whole massive table full of puddings. It truly was amazing and for the equivalent of about 5 pounds it was a bargain!
Nepal is a country not to be missed!

Brief Update

Since I last wrote here I travelled down to North Thailand where I spent a week in Chiang Mai, Thailands 2nd largest city. I went on a two day trek through the jungle which included riding elephants who had an endless need for bananas, bamboo rafting and a night in a little village in the hills where we were cooked delicious foods and sung to around a fire by children who seemed to appear from nowhere. I successfully did the trek in flip flops because on the morning we set off I discovered my trainers had disappeared. I also had a go at quad biking and white water rafting both of which were amazing fun. I visited lovely night markets and temples and went to a couple of Thai boxing matches which weren't as horrid as expected and were even quite funny at times when the boxers were blindfolded! From Chiang Mai I travelled down to Bangkok on an over night bus. I stayed there one night in a guesthouse that was right next to where a student festival was taking place. This meant I got to see some really good Thai rock bands playing on the side of the road right outside my window. The following day I got a flight to Nepal where I spent Christmas with Sarah (my sister), her boyfriend Anthony and John. I flew back to Thailand on New Years day and went south to another full moon party on Ko Phangan, then across to an island on the west coast called Ko Lanta and then on to Krabi in the south west of Thailand for a couple of days before flying to Singapore. Krabi is beautiful and supposed to be one of the best places in the world to climb. I climbed rocks that were right next to the sea with stunning views from the top over the beaches, palm trees and the ocean. We stayed in a little bungalow on a hill with a bathroom with no roof. The people above us could see in, and we could see into the peoples bathroom below us. Nice place! I had a brilliant time in Singapore. I went to lots of food courts and looked around the huge airconditioned shopping center's - lovely when it's so hot and humid outside. I went swimming in the middle of a torrential rain storm and went to a really pretty park. I stayed with Mark, one of Sarah's friends who showed me around and took me out on his bike. We went up to the top of a massive hill that overlooked Singapore and the island Sentosa. We went to the opening of a bar on Sentosa where I bumped into a couple of people I'd met in Laos - quite strange! Then I flew from Singapore to Perth, Australia.