Hey,

We have both been taking it easy in Kathmandu over the past week and can't believe we still have 7 days left here. We have been doing lots of eating and drinking beer/wine and putting all the weight we lost back on! Every restaurant seems to do really good food but we don't know if it's just because we have been living off rice, noodles and mo mo's for the past month!

We have done a little shopping... pirate DVD's galore here all for 1 pound... and done a bit of sightseeing. One day we decided to take a walk to Durbar Square which put me in a very bad mood trying to dodge cars, motorbikes, people and the tooting of vehicles in your ears becomes very frustrating. Also to walk around in flip flops becomes a challenge in itself as you try to avoid the locals constantly spitting on the ground. How am I going to survive in India I wonder??! Poor AJ has had to put up with me moaning whenever we venture out for a walk, but has discovered that breaking the walk up with a trip to a pub helps muchly! Beer is an excellent way to make any bad experience bearable I have discovered! Anyway, Kathmandu Durbar Square is home to the Kumari - a real living goddess. She is a young girl who lives in a building in Durbar Square and is somewhere between the ages of 4 and puberty. She must meet 32 physical requirements ranging from eye colour, shape of her teeth to the sound of her voice. The Kumari's reign ends with her first period or any serious accidental blood loss. She then becomes a normal mortal and the search begins for a new Kumari... interesting!

Kathmandu experiences power cuts all the time which is interesting... especially whilst sitting in a restaurant enjoying a nice meal and the lights go out only for you to be left in candlelight... (very romantic) that's until the generator kicks in and all the majority of the power comes back.

We went to a place called the Garden of Dreams which provided us with some tranquility away from the sound of horns, people and spitting (seriously the euccchhh noise of bringing the gunge up from the back of the throat starts to grate on me). Another day, we went for a walk around the Thamel area and discovered a dead dog, not the first one I must say that I have seen during this trip, but the first one I have had to walk past and the smell was awful.

Our hotel is a good getaway for some peace as well most of the time. Noisy at night, but ok during the day. Apparently it is THE hotel that Rob Hall (trek guide for Everest) and his team stayed in from the book "Into Thin Air" about Mt. Everest. If you haven't read it, it's worth a read. There are many pictures of him around the hotel standing with the people that trekked Everest with him his last time (he died whilst taking people up Everest).

Yesterday, we hired our own tour guide to take us to a few recommended sightseeing places. The first stop was Dakshinkali for a bit of a shocking start at the temple. Dedicated to a bloodthirsty Hindu goddess, the shrine receives animal sacrifices as offerings every Tuesday and Saturday. As yesterday was Saturday it was very busy with people queuing with goats or chickens to give as an offering to the goddess. Little did the chickens and goats know what was coming! Before entering the temple, there were lots of stalls selling goats, chickens, or for the "vegetarians", coconuts which you could buy as an offering. People then queue for miles with this offering and take it to the temple where it is sacrificed or killed. We didn't get to go into the temple as non-Hindu people aren't allowed, but we certainly saw the animals before and after! After an animal is sacrificed it is taken to a "butcher" who chops it up then cooks it for the people to eat... lots of food all round! I thought trying to walk in flip flops was bad enough in Kathmandu, but here there was blood everywhere! We received a blessing from a priest and were given a "third eye" or Hindu dot on our foreheads which means good luck.

Next it was onto Patan Durbar Square where the Royal Palace was once. Not as exciting as Dakshinkali but interesting to see all the temples and the palace.

We then headed to Pashputinath Temple which is situated on the banks of the Bagmatic River, whose waters offer the same guarantee of release from rebirth as the Ganges river in India. It is Nepals most important Hindu cremation site and cremations take place here most of the time. It is also listed as a World Heritage Site. When we visited, several cremations were taking place on the banks of the river. Our guide told us how Hindu's believe that through cremation, the body is reincarnated. I felt a little sick taking photos of dead bodies lying by the grieving family! Our guide also mentioned that the men get their hair shaved off if their mum or grandmother dies, and also all females are cremated with their nose studs still in, therefore you will find children or men searching the river during cremations for any jewels which they can sell for money! This didn't make me feel so bad for taking photos as this is worse I think! The place was surrounded by Holy Men on pilgrimage. We learnt that they spend much of their day smoking a lot of marijuana apparently to ease any sexual frustration they have!

Our last stop for the day was Bodhnath, the largest stupa in Nepal. We visited a monastery and were greeted by some friendly monks who insisted on taking my camera off me to take lots of pictures of Buddha. We then sat down, received a blessing from the monks then he proceeded to ask me many questions about myself. These monks may well have been exiled out of Tibet as Bodhnath is where you can find many Tibetan monks.

Tomorrow we are going on a mountain flight around Mt Everest. In the meantime, we will probably do more shopping, eating and drinking. We don't have a clue what we are going to do for another 7 days, but by sitting in pubs and restaurants we have stumbled across some light entertainment to see us through, including watching a cockroach try to cross the road (it got squished in the end), amazed at how the mothers put black eyeliner around their babies eyes to guard them from evil apparently, watching the chaos of the traffic and people from rooftop cafes and going to watch live bands. Oh another entertaining activity is putting in our laundry and guessing what will be missing this time... AJ has lost 4 pairs of socks to the laundry monster so far in Kathmandu!

Anyway, I have uploaded some photos and bear in mind there are some of animal sacrifices and dead people at the cremation site.

Lee-Ann and AJ