Hi everyone. I think we're finally catching up with our blog entries now that we're on our own and have the days to ourselves so here is the Kathmandu update...

We were in Kathmandu for two nights, arriving here mid-afternoon on the Thursday after a rather treachorous and little bit scary mountain bus journey (Andrea and Nige, you will be pleased to know that I managed to stay calm and not shout "oh my god, the road's going to collapse!" as I did when going up Mount Thadie!). How it can possibly be safe to drive so fast up winding mountain roads, overtaking on bends which are accompanied by 1000ft sheer drops though, I will never know!

Anyway, we made it to kathmandu safe and sound and it is literally full of westerners who have come here to trek in the Himalayas, many of them looking as though they have just stepped out of the North Face catalogue. There was a lot of, "yah, we've just done ‪‎the Anapurna circuit" or "yah, we did base camp last year". It made us roll our eyes at first but now we're a bit gutted we didn't schedule in any time to do the base camp trek... maybe next year.... Kathmandu is lovely, though - much more relaxed than Delhi

We got up at 5 the next morning for our Everest flight which was due to take off at 6 but didn't actually leave until 10.30. We couldn't land at base camp (I don't think they actually let people anymore) so we just flew around it - it was pretty amazing to see "the top of the world" up close. In the afternoon we went to The Great Stupa of Boudhanath which is one of the largest Buddhist stupas in the world. We had to walk around the bottom of it in a clockwise direction together with loads of Buddhist monks and people who were praying to Buddha by stopping every 4 steps to touch their foreheads to the ground and then lie down. We then went to Swayambunath, the "Monkey Temple", on the banks of the Bagmati river which flows into the River Ganges in India. Because of this, they had a couple of burning ghats here as well so we were lucky enough to see even more burning bodies - I think I've seen enough now though, thank you very much. A nice sight here was of course the monkeys - there were literally hundreds of them just walking around the temple. Stuart got his first touch of a cricket ball since we've been away as well when he asked some Nepalese kids playing on a bit of waste land if he could have a bowl. The poor kids were gutted they'd let him join in though as he bowled the batsman out (somehow - obviously a flook going by his track record this summer!) and we left them arguing over whether the "out" actually counted or not.

We then had our last night out with the team in a restaurant/bar where we all got to sign our names on a giant foot and pin it to the roof to hang there in Kathmandu forever! We were obviously up for a pretty big night but unfortunately, getting a drink after midnight isn't that easy in Nepal and Chandra wouldn't let us go out looking for one as it's apparently not that safe for us white folk to be out in the dark on our own.

And that was that. Our time in Nepal was over and we left the safety of our group for Singapore after breakfast the next morning....

Will post again soon. Hope everyone's OK.

x