Last Days

So, following our trek we still had one week left to spend in this beautiful mountain kingdom. So let me introduce to a sport I like to call "Extreme uphill mountain bike pushing." Just incase someone tries to catch you out I should warn you that it can also be known as just "mountain biking in Nepal" and it is a bad idea. I know this because we decided to spend a few days of our last week chilling out in a small village called Astam where Purna (who had organised our trek) and his 2 brothers was building a small eco-village on some of his Father's land where they grew up. We decided to try and cycle there, Dave beinga keen biker and us thinking it would be fun and give us a bit more independence round the village. We quickly realised that this was no Cambridge, taking 3.5 hours to complete Purna's alleged 1 hour ride!

The village was a stunning spot though, at the top of a hill in between Pokhara and Annapurna the views of the mountains were fantastic. The building on the right in this picture is where we slept and just outside there was a hammock where I spent many happy hours reading, staring at mountains and generally chilling out :) The shack in the foreground was the kitchen since the building of the eco-village was not quite complete! Here a great guy called Ganesh spent endless energy cooking Dal Bhat and pancakes over an open fire inside. One night we celebrated with a special meal of dal bhat with chicken curry. For the first time in my life I saw 700 rupees turn into a live chicken which was beheaded with a heavy knife, twitched for a long time, and was then plucked, washed and butchered (bones included) all in this little shack! A few hours later there was chicken curry for dinner. Also straight from the source came the milk, which was milked straight from their 2 cows before breakfast, the honey which came from alocal man who collected honey from the source and the veg which was all grown on a small plot in the eco-village. It was fascinating to see this way of living, so much more complete than a trip to sainsbury. At the end we thoroughly enjoyed our cycle back down a good 750m or dirt track and had a few less locals laughing at our impractical machines!

The next day we started to retrace our steps first back to Kathmandu where we had just a couple of days left to spend doing a bit more sight-seeing and present shopping before going our seperate ways. We took a trip over to Patan, a town just a few kilometers from Kathmandu with the greatest density of temples in the Kathmandu valley. The Patan museum was also full of interesting explanations of the hinduism and buddhism as practiced in Nepal and all the complex relations between the two, it had been our only museum trip in 5 weeks and we were probably due one! We also visited a couple of large buddhist stupas packed with Tibetans who fled to Nepal after the Chinese invasion in 1959 and now form large communities in the mountain areas and the capital. On thursday morning we boarded planes to return to Delhi and from there both flew to Bombay on seperate flights from whence we parted ways, Dave to England and myself to Sydney where I arrived on saturday night.