So even though I'm not the biggest fan of Kathmandu, I'd decided to stick around longer than planned as I wanted to be in the capital for a big upcoming festival - Holi!

What can I say? What an awesome festival! It is quite literally a riot of colour and water! And it seems tourists get particular attention. Holi is a Hindu religious festival to celebrate the coming of spring, which is symbolised by random strangers rubbing bright spring coloured dust in your face and hair or generally flinging it around. The water is generally in the form of water bombs from little kids, which can actually be quite refreshing, or from bigger 'kids' with supersoakers- not so refreshing. However it's the buckets that really get you from innocent looking windows as you walk through the impossibly narrow streets. They can range from a little cups to huge 5 litre buckets, which I had the pleasure of experiencing as a direct hit on the head. For a moment or two I thought I may possibly drown, but when I once again started to breath air rather than water I saw it as a good thing as it had washed off all my powder meaning I was a blank canvas once again ready for more decoration!

We'd formed a bit of a crew, Pablo (Argentina) Chiara & Holly (USA) and Ashmir (India) as we figured there'd be safety in numbers- fools just meant we were a bigger target for the colours. But it was useful when we got to Durbar square the centre of all the celebrations. They had music and DJs on throughout the day creating a great party atmosphere. So we got right amongst it in the crowd, however as with so many things in India & Nepal it was completely male dominated, so after a while the male 'attention' got a bit too much so Pablo & Ashmir had to escort us out of the crowd and watch from the sidelines :( We escaped the madness for a while to go to a little hole in the wall place the girls had discovered for lunch. It was really cheap and the owner was lovely and promised to try to find us some bhang (special drink drunk at Holi festival essentially alcohol mixed with cannabis) if we came back for dinner. So all fed we headed back to the festivities, but it all finished up by 4/5pm. It was crazy how quickly normality resumed; on exactly the same spot one hour ago you'd have been pelted with water bombs, women were now laying out their vegetables to sell on the now multi coloured pavement.

On the way home to decolour myself I stumbled across a Holi after party in the Funky Buddha bar opposite my guesthouse. Before it had seemed a quiet little restaurant bar, but now its garden had been transformed into a DC10 terrace style party with everyone in UV colours, tops off and proper techno! Unfortunately they didn't have a generator so when the electricity cut it finished up. So after showering in the dark I really had no idea if the colour had come off, so was pleasantly surprised when I met up with the rest of the crew to discover I was actually white again with only a few pink streaks in my hair as a souvenir of Holi. The owner hadn't been able to secure any bhang but instead kept the bottles of millet whiskey coming. After the third bottle we decided it was time to go. After soaking up some of the alcohol we decided to undo our work and set off on an interesting pub crawl; starting in a VIP cocktail bar; which upon checking the prices decided wasn't for us, then a place for all the gangster Nepalis (looked a little like a rapper and hoe party) where they DJ'd by You Tube. We eventually settled on a rooftop shisha bar with a cover band and topped off a pretty amazing day!