Despite the five hour delay at Delhi Airport, we arrived in Kathmandu at a reasonable hour in the afternoon. By this point we were in desperate need of a comfy bed, and managed to haggle ourselves a taxi to a popular guesthouse in the tourist district, Thamel. We had barely untied our shoelaces before passing out for a couple of hours...

After some rest we found a restaurant serving traditional Nepali food, with a variety of cultural dance demonstrations to entertain us while we ate. The vegetarian set menu consisted of rice, lentil soup, boiled spinach and curried vegetables, collectively named Dahl Bhaat. Apparently this is just about the Nepali sole diet, and if we end up volunteering somewhere 'Dahl Bhaat' will probably be all we eat for a long time.. it's a good thing it's tasty!

Two valuable resources that are often taken for granted back home are electricity and petrol. It didn't take long to notice Nepal's desperate struggle with both of these. Although the traffic was busy, it wasn't bad for a capital city. A taxi driver mentioned that it was usually worse, but a bit of dodgy politics and corruption in regards to petrol imported from India meant that supply was not up to demand and therefore very expensive, forcing many vehicles off the roads.

Even worse than this was the situation with electricity. Despite Nepal's enormous potential for hydropower, very little is produced, and of that most is exported to India. The result, again, is that supply is not up to the demand of a growing city. To prevent circuit overload, the accepted strategy is to rotate the supply of electricity to different parts of Kathmandu at different times of day. For us this meant we got to use the torch a bit more, and could only have a mildly warm shower between 9 and 11 at night, after the electricity had been on for a couple of hours and the system lifted below freezing. It can't be good for development when a capital city only has power for eight hours a day!

We hadn't done a lot of research and weren't mentally prepared for the cold temperatures in Nepal at this time of year. Central heating is pretty rare, so we spent the nights huddled around a fire with other chilled backpackers. The locals proved amazingly good at shrugging their shoulders and rolling with the punches, and are some of the most relaxed and friendly we've encountered. One of the guys running our guesthouse summed it up with an acronym; NEPAL: Never Ending Peace And Love! He followed this with a slightly less positive acronym; INDIA: I'll Never Do It Again. Considering we plan to head into India after Nepal, we're hoping that one isn't quite as accurate!

We came to Nepal to volunteer, and as soon as we mentioned this to anybody, locals and travelers alike, they usually had a contact, or at least an opinion, of an organisation to go with. It seemed that finding a project to volunteer with wouldn't be a problem. The challenge was finding one with good intentions, that genuinely needed help, suited our abilities and interests and would be bearable for a period of about six weeks..

Our guidebook had a few good suggestions and we visited the office of a really good local NGO called the Kathmandu Environmental Education Project (KEEP). They were really helpful and offered to line us up teaching English to school kids in a rural village. Keeping this in mind, we were hoping to do something other than teaching English and decided to check out another lead. We had heard of a few volunteers working with a Tibetan refugee camp near Pokhara. This sounded at least worth a look so we've packed up and jumped on a bus heading west. If all fails we will probably fall back on the English teaching with KEEP. Either way we're sure to learn a lot and have a pretty amazing experience. Wish us luck!