April 28

We bought our map, food, clothes, park permit (1000 rupees), and TIMS card (also a new law that started a month before- 1427 rupees-$20)
And we are off into the mountains! Ah the peace and quiet.

Some of the popular treks in Nepal are the Annapurna Circuit and Base Camp as well as Everest base camp, but we decided to do a less popular trek, the Tamang Heritage trek, which turned out to be great.

Our first stop was Gatlang where we stayed at a local village that was actually in the midst of a 5 day festival. There was a German guy and his guide staying at the village as well, but that was all in terms of foreigners. Nice :) It was great eating by headlamp light with the sounds of singing in the background. Unfortunately Enda wasn't feeling so good and had to lay low...



April 27

Yay! More buses!
.

This was the most painful bus ride I have ever experienced....My bum hurts just thinking about it. Since we were late buying our tickets, we had the back seats....Oi. People were sitting on bags of cement in the aisle, puking out the windows, and hanging on for dear life. The seats in front of us had handles to hang on to, but eventually their seats literally came to pieces and we had nothing to grab on to. It was rather frustrating to see the people in the front looking out the window with not a care in the world, while we were getting bumps and bruises in the back wondering if we were going to make it to Shyaphru Besi in one piece...

Lesson learned: buy tickets in advance.


P.S. We did make it in one piece.

April 26

So the visa we decided to get for Nepal was a 15 day visa which was 1400 Rupees (around $30) and our Indian one was 6 months re-entry which we organized in Korea. We discovered while we were in India that they just made a new law stating that if you leave the country you can't re-enter for at least 2 months regardless of the type of visa you have now. The problem with this is that we had a flight out of Calcutta and we would miss it if we went to Nepal and couldn't re-enter India.

So, like hundreds of other foreigners, we made our way to the Indian Embassy, filled out forms, read the new laws, and paid $10 for a re-entry visa into India (Even though we already have a multiple entry visa). Ugh. Bureaucracy. Money. Ugh.

This picture was taken on our way to the Embassy.



April 25

We had more drama with people lying to us, bringing us to the wrong hostel and then demanding that we pay the taxi driver even though they said they would pay. My oh my...

This picture is taken in Kathmandu.
Cycle-rickshaw with some shade. Nice :)


April 24

We finally made it to Nepal! Ah Himalayas here we come!!
This is a picture of the border crossing. You could actually just walk across the border without going through any type of immigration, but if you get caught while in the country, it could cost you dearly.



April 23

So it was a rather dramatic event organizing a bus to take us up to Sonauli (a border city between India and Nepal). We were planning on going through a tourist agency to make the trip into the Nepal painless and easy. But of course, it's India so nothing really goes as planned.

We signed up and paid through our hostel a few days prior to the tourist bus departure. The hostels that offer this get a commission off of us if we go through them, but all the money ends up at the one agency in town.

We paid 750 Rupees (about $15) that included a breakfast in Varanasi, the bus trip (about 10 hours), and a hostel at the border city. We thought that was a decent deal....hmm...

On the day we were planning on leaving, we made our way to the bus pick up point near the main agency by the train station, which is a ways outside the city centre. There we saw about 7 other backpackers waiting around as well. (Spanish, Canadian, Japanese, and Russian, most of whom could not speak English).

So we ate our "breakfast"(which turned out to be the worlds tiniest cup of chai tea and a sad looking egg sandwich) and were starting to get restless because the bus was supposed to leave around 9 a.m. and was running rather late. We checked out what was up and eventually discovered around 10 a.m. that we weren't going to leave because there weren't enough people to go on the bus! It wouldn't have been such a big problem if they would have told us before we bought the tickets that we need a minimum of 20 people before we could go, but they failed to mention that. I don't actually know when they were planning on telling us that we weren't going. I believe they were going to let us wait around until they found enough foreigners, and who knows when that would have been.

After we explain to the other foreigners what is going on, we ask for our money back and they tell us they can give us 50 rupees back ($1) and put us on the next government run bus, or we have to go back to where we initially bought our tickets and get the full refund there (even though they are the main H.Q and have money in their office which is a block away). The main problem with this is that most of the hostels are back in the centre and we all want to be on our way to Nepal a.s.a.p.

Well we argue for awhile and eventually we all get a full refund and head to the government bus station ourselves and organize our own bus. (This pic is taken while we were on the long journey north).

Ah the adventures of travelling. It can be tiresome but it definitely makes you get tough skin.