Ever since we started planning our RTW trip and more specifically, the Nepal-part of it, we have dreamed of doing the elephant safari in the royal Chitwan national park. Things don't always go as you plan them though, and luckily so, since the trip we ended up taking turned out to be quite wonderful, and even though it is impossible to compare without doing both, I can hardly see how this could have been in any way worse. As we were looking for places to stay at...

After the hectic Kathmandu (where we just returned to today), it was so nice and peaceful after we arrived in Pokhara. Our hotel, the family owned North Face Inn, was real comfortable and welcoming. We spent six nights in there. In Pokhara the definitely best experience was the bicycle ride up to Sarangkot, which Tuomas described in an earlier blog text. Other than that we spent the days in Pokhara by walking around quite a lot. One day we walked up to another hi...

We spent the last three nights in Lumbini, the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, better known as Buddha. The town was quite small and there wasn't much to see outside of the large temple complex that houses The Maya Devi Temple among several other ones. Maya Devi Temple is the main attraction as it covers the stone recognized to be the exact spot where the prince was born. The temple is surprisingly crude, especially from the inside, where large steel beams suppo...

"Hello sir, how are you? Where you going?" These lines were those of a little boy, one of many who have learned English from the same book of "things to say when a couple of paler than paper foreigners crosses your path" (in truth they speak very good English here). The path on which we were crossing was a one from Damside Pokhara to the World Peace Pagoda on the western side of the lake. It started just as any of these encounters, a child comes to say hello a...

It seems almost pointless to visit Pokhara without going to the mountains. The entire city is filled with travel agencies that advertise different trekking adventures, or white water rafting, or canyoning, or paragliding, or most likely all of the above. Sadly, all of these activities cost a whole bunch. Since this is only the first country of our seven month RTW-trip, we can't go around spending all of our money here. So we opted for cheaper options. One of the ...