Back from the hills

Our 10 day trek from Pokhara to the Annapurna Base Camp and back was incredible - trying to write my diary each night, it was a joke trying to come up with new adjectives to describe the views :) We spent 7 days walking up to the base camp, and then only 3 days to race back down. On the way, we saw terraced hillsides stretching into the valleys, snow-capped peaks towering at the valley heads, glaciers fringed with thick icicles, clouds rolling up from below us, prayer flags billowing in the wind. A real feast for the senses. And perhaps most surprisingly, walking all day every day for 10 days doesn't really make your legs hurt that much - each morning, you just set off again.

I've posted a bunch of photos on fatcat showing a taster of the gazillions that I'll eventually post once I don't have to pay by the minute :)

Just enjoying the sun here in Pokhara at the moment, and going out everynight with people we met while we were trekking. Lots of "trip admin" to take care of, including the teething problems with getting Fabian Towers rented - we do now actually have tennants in the place, but apparently there's a few niggly maintenance issues to get sorted (despite the extensive DIY labouring we put in). Ho well - the main thing is that the necessity of owning a flat in London while we move to Australia has become a workable reality.

Kathmandu

It's such a difference being here versus being anywhere in Northern India - it's quiet, low-hassle, clearer air, and the people are quite simply much nicer. It's wonderful to be here. On top of that, we're in the Himalaya, which I don't think anyone could possibly complain about. From a rooftop cafe here you can see the surrounding mountains of the Kathmandu valley, and beyond them you can see snow-capped peaks! Lovely - they're not even sprinkle-of-snow-on-top type peaks, they're glacier-snowfield-technically-difficult-ice-climbing-at-altitude type peaks :)

Just finished reading Chris Bonnington's account of the first ascent of the south face of Annapurna in 1970 - and tomorrow we're flying to Pokhara, and from there will be walking right in his footsteps on our way up to the base camp his expedition established. I am *very* excited.

To top it off, we spent the last couple of days at Chitwan National Park, where we were lucky enough to see a Rhino in the wild, very close, from our seat on the back of an elephant. Wow.

Varanasi

We're finding that Varanasi is much more chilled out than the other places we've been in India on this trip - I think that's mainly because we're spending most of our time inside the old city, where the alleyways are too narrow for rickshaws, and so we're not having constant hassle from the rickshaw wallahs on top of the usual cries from stallholders as us walking dollar signs pass them by. It's also helping to be doing a 2 hour yoga session each morning. We've stumbled across an excellent teacher, the real deal, and he's a lovely warm-hearted person too. He also has a laugh that sounds like a cross between Basil Brush and Sid James, and oh he loves to laugh. In fact, in our first lesson, he had us lying on our backs pretending to ride a bicycle and laughing out loud.

The city is stretched along the western bank of the River Ganges, and the riverbank itself is built up into concrete steps, called Ghats, all along the city side. It would be an interesting excercise to spend a day just watching what goes on along the ghats - but you'd have to be invisible (or Indian!) to avoid the constant hassles.

Anyway - we'll be heading off to Nepal in the next couple of days. Hopefully we'll spend a few days in Chitwan national park, and some more days trekking in the Annapurnas.