"You ver ze most German non-German I have ezer met". The touching last words from the big German Til from my Mumbai-Kathmandu tour group as I bade my farewell to them last weekend in Kathmandu (I kid you not, he actually said that to me without any prompting). The tour truck was continuing on back in to India on its loop around the country, I meanwhile was joining up with the group for the next trip I was booked on 'Nepal Adventure' with a company called Intrepid. These tours have a slightly less rougher edge than the overlanding trucks with more stuff organised for you and a smaller group (in this case 11). The group seems good and we've had fun having been together for almost a week now. The most amusing character is (again) a German. 'Christina' is always first up in the morning, lives almost exclusively off cheese and bread, and looks unerringly like former FA Cup winner and current Fulham boss Laurie Sanchez:

http://fotball.adressa.no/multimedia/archive/00055/Laurie_Sanchez_55307d.jpg

After the last blog I stayed in Kathmandu a few days longer and continued my food and coffee binge with a vengeance. Before joining up with the Intrepid group, I decided to do another day's mountain biking by way of a bit of trekking training. This second outing was a much more serious undertaking. We rode out of Kathmandu city up a steady incline into the hills, with the incline theme continuing for a further 3 and a half hours! The guide took us up one of the highest hills in the area and it was hard going to get to the top to say the least. The fat scottish couples from the last biking day were replaced this time by a couple of machine like germans (both in appearance and nature) and a dutch guy who runs expeditions for a living and has summited Everest twice! This cropped up in conversation when I asked him what the highest altitude he had experienced (so quite high then). As you can imagine the result of this was far less rests but the views were excellent and the descent was good while it lasted.

The first day with the new tour group was spent on a city tour of Kathmandu including a few Buddhist stupas and the monkey temple. The Lonely Planet guide book (referred to as "The Book" by backpackers) seemed quite adamant that the monkeys at the temple did tricks for the visitors and slid down the banisters. Visions of monkeys dressed in human clothing, smoking cigars, wearing baseball hats, and juggling balls etc got me highly excited, but needless to say I got disappointed on all counts. The monkeys were not as numerous as I had hoped, no baseball caps to be seen, and the best you could get out of them was an extremely disconcerting hiss when you got too close.

The next day we left the city to go on a 3 day trek around the Kathmandu valley, a warm up for the 5 day trek we do at higher altitude later in the trip in the Annapurna region out in the west of the country. There was no opportunity to ease ourselves in to a bit of walking as we trekked up a dirty great hill pretty much all day to a teahouse hotel. The following two days were a little easier (flatter) and the two hotels we stopped at had absolutely stunning views of sections of the Himalayan range. The end point for the trek was Bhaktapur which is a town an hour or so from Kathmandu with a medieval type feel and narrow streets. I was pleasantly surprised by the news from Israel a few days before and this motivated me and a couple of the other guys in the group to get up and watch the England v Croatia game despite our 6 am departure time the next morning. The match kicked off at 1.45 am Nepal time and as you can imagine when we were 2-0 down by 1.59 am we were a room of very unhappy campers. I thought our defence were horrible.

After Bhaktapur we headed west of Kathmandu to do a couple of days white water rafting on the Trisuli river. We had 3 or so very cold hours of rafting (my fingers went illuminus white) on the first afternoon and then we camped overnight on a beach before continuing on for another half day the following morning. Overall it was good but reasonably tame with only one class 4 rapid, 6 or 7 class 3's, and I managed to stay in the boat for the duration. This was just as well as it turns out as my new roomie (also aged 27, from the UK, and called Chris. I wonder why they stuck us together?) came out on one occasion and ended up get churned around underwater for about 40 seconds in a rapid even before seeing any light to indicate which way was up!

After rafting we continued further west and stayed in a really nice little town called Bandipur. Aside from a great little hotel, climbing the hill adjacent to the town has to be one of the highlights of the trip so far as the views from the top at sunset were outrageously good. Although it was a fair ascent, I arrived at the top (about 1000m) with a nose bleed; the extra 4,500m higher I'll be at Everest base camp in two weeks time is perhaps a little worrying!

Our current location is Pokhara, Nepal's second city, the scene of yet more stunning Himalayan vistas, and the launching pad for the popular trekking area around the Annapurna region. Tomorrow we head out on a fully supported 5 day trek. We'll have an army of sherpas, guides, assistant guides etc to carry all our stuff, all the tents, and cook the food as we'll be under canvas and hopefully well away from the well trodden walking routes. Apparently there will be 27 guys supporting the 11 of us trekking!

Right I'm off to rest up before we go walking more hills again tomorrow, admire more mountains, and amuse the locals by wandering round in my 'topi'. It's come of something of a relief to finally visit a country on this trip where there is some form of traditional head garb worn by the local men that I can purchase!

I might update the blog again at the end of next week after the trek, and by which time I may well have tried my hand at paragliding.