OK, so there's a couple of places on this trip that I'm really excited to visit. One area is the Buddhist nations along the Himalayas, in our case Nepal and Bhutan. I've never been there before and have always been fascinated by the culture. It's an area of mystery, high mountains, lost lands and happy people who are quite content to lead the same lives as they did 500 years ago. So, despite the jet-lag and lack of sleep, it was with great excitement that we set off for Kathmandu.
After an early start, we arrived in Kathmandu mid afternoon and immediately set off on a tour. BTW, this is a common theme with these trips where they take you on a tour while your luggage goes to the hotel. It's a practical idea but it's sometimes, after a long flight, you're not quite in the mood. So it takes something spectacular to get your attention. In the case of Katmandu, arriving there is like arriving in a typical Indian destination. There's a striking similarity of airport chaos, seathing humanity, grid-locked traffic and slums mixed up with shiny new apartments. Our plan was to visit the city of Bhaktapur, an ancient city that hasn't changed since the 17th century. The guide was proud of the the fact that we would be traveling on their brand new highway that would reduce the travel time from 4 hours to 10 minutes! He wasn't far off. On arrival at Bhaktapur we were confronted with the kind of architecture I had imagined for this part of the World.
It is a spectacular city and a far cry from the hustle and bustle of the regular city streets. Being there it was easy to imagine it being populated by everything from 17th century Buddhist monks to 1960's Hippies smoking hashish to aspiring mountaineers on their way to Everest, a mere few hundred miles away.
I had arrived!
Exhausted, we returned to our hotel for a traditional Nepalese dinner (good curries) and crashed.