We've had a pretty good start! Yesterday we went to Swayambhunath temple (monkey temple), which took us a while after our complete failure to navigate our way round Kathmandu and apparent inability to tell north from south and east from west! On the plus side, we completely got out of the touristy parts of the city and it was well worth the detour.

So the mountain of steps we arrived to did not look very appealing but we set off and made it to the top after making friends with a few monkey's on the way! The view was AMAZING and a good way to orientate ourselves.

On the way back we reacquainted ourselves with Durbar Square where they were doing a spot of painting and decorating . . . Graham was liberally sprayed with whitewash much to the amusement of the lad up a very tall ladder (on watching him we saw he was doing this to quite a few people and mostly young good looking girls so quite what he saw in Graham we're not entirely sure!) . . . Graham wanted me to tell everyone how hard he was and that he threw stones back and knocked him off his ladder - but everyone who knows Graham would know this would be stretching the truth!

This morning we got up at 5am for our much anticipated flight round Everest. Needless to say our taxi driver completely failed to get out of bed and arrived an hour late, though I'm pleased to say that we were present for the world-record breaking attempt at the speediest drive from Thamel to the airport - 7 minutes, completely destroying our previous effort by a whacking 13 minutes! I am pleased to report that there were no fatalities and only minor injuries (canine)!!!

The flight did not fail to disappoint - a clear morning, with the sun rising over the himalaya's - and our first sight of Everest - perfect! After our early start we spent the rest of the day being the proper back-packing bums that we now are and lazing about planning our future expeditions (we are after all proper explorers!) to Chitwan and into Tibet.