Kathmandu – Pokhara 29th May 2006

I heard Dessie shuffling around the room, so I asked him what time it was. It was 05:15, so I told him that I’d ride with him to Pokhara. I was up and dressed in two minutes – no point having a shower as we’d be covered in all types of crap by the time we reach our destination, and we had a cup of tea and were on the road at 06:00.

It took us a good forty minutes to get out of the city (the checkpoint at the top of the valley) and from there the ride was really good. Dessie likes to plod along on the bike, so I went ahead and enjoyed the twists and turns and pulled over every so often to let Dessie catch up. We made good time and had plenty of stops along the way for chai and food (Dal Bhat). I was looking forward to stopping at one of the fish places I passed on the way up, but I was leading at this stage and missed the stop! But we ended up having Dal Bhat in Mugling which was nice. As we entered Pokhara we came across a big demonstration by the Maoists, I’ve no idea what they were demonstrating about, but it was a pain in the arse as we had to make a detour. I checked back into my old guesthouse, which was handy, as they were storing most of my luggage and I jumped in a lovely hot shower and washed the early morning off my body.

Dessie asked me if I want to go to Chitwan, which is the National Park down near the Indian border. He’s been going to a small village near there for the last six years and he raves about the place. We decided the next day and arranged to meet up at Raju’s for 11:00. I had some bits and pieces to do in the afternoon and I especially wanted to get some photo’s developed. I took some photo’s of the people in a chai shack today as they have a young baby and they didn’t have any photo’s of him. So I took several photos of each of the family with the baby and then took a group photo. I was going to be passing there again on the way to Chitwan, so it would have been nice to give them a copy of the photos. I couldn’t burn them to CD though as my CD player isn’t working at the moment, so I had to copy them to my USB flash memory stick. It took me nearly two hours and several miles until I found a photo shop in the main town that could print them out for me.

I rode by Raju’s garage on the way back from collecting the photos and it was just after 18:00. He waved to me and asked me in for a beer, and it would have been rude not to. We sat outside and had a couple of beers and as I was sitting there I got tantalising glimpses of the distant mountains. They have been more or less covered in clouds since I got here, but slowly they were being revealed to me. I got a glimpse of the snow covered mountaintop, but I wasn’t sure if it was just cloud. And over the course of the next hour, the mountain range was slowly revealed. Then the setting sun hit the peaks and they turned a lovely pinky orange. I got a couple of photos but I’m not sure how good they’ll turn out. As we were sitting there, Wolf turned up from Kathmandu. He told me he had the best ever ride in looking at the mountains and the sunset.

I went back to my guesthouse to park my bike up then watched a crappy movie in one of the local restaurant / bars and had a couple of games of pool with some Nepalese that I got to know.