The hills are alive...

Namaste all
I promised to write about my arrival in Nepal before I head into the mountains tomorrow. So here it is.

We arrived at the airport to a smiling faced, Sarba (our guide) waving wildly at us. He had gone with Sandy a few years back when Sandy had become extreamly ill and was unable to make it to base camp due to food poisoning. Sandy has raved about him since, so there was no question who we'd be going with. He wisked us out to the car and presented us with floral necklaces as a welcome and the chatted non-stop all the way to the hotel. Turns out that when Sandy went with him in 2007, it was just him operating out of his living room, but now he has an office with several guides. Unfortunately he was not going to be accompanying us on our hike, but was sending us with his brother instead, as things at the office were just too busy to take 3 weeks away (personally, I think the fact he has a one year old at home, as well as another small child may have something to do with it as well).

After freshing up at the hotel, we walked to Durbur square which is a really cool square with all sorts of things going on, huge giant temples, street merchants, people carrying things 5 times the size of me, you name it - it's happening. After we met up with Sarba at the end of his work day and went out to dinner with him so that they could catch up. I did run into some credit card issues, but thanks to a wonderful friend and cousin at the bank, those have been fixed : )

The following day was spent with a driver doing "the sites of Katmandu" which included a very cool Buddist temple with prayer wheels that were 8 feet tall and prayer flags draped everywhere. It's so pretty. Another older kind of town square with some cool temples and finally the "monkey temple". which surprisingly enough was quite devoid of monkeys. Sandy had been to this temple before and remembers them being everywhere, but this time we had to search for 45 min before we saw any of them! Eventually we stumbled across a few which followed us back up to the temple. Sure was glad we got to play with the ones in Jaipur!

Later that evening Sarba and his wife and 2 little boys took us to a traditional Nepalese dinner which included music and dancing. It was a great night with so much food!!! Unfortunately my tummy had continued giving me issues since earlier in the week, but it wasn't the normal travellers issues. We decided that with it not getting any better and heading out into the mountains tomorrow - we'd better get me to a doctor.

So Sarba the amazing, walked me down to a local pharmacy, spoke to the pharmacist and somehow convinced him to call the doctor in specially for me. So within a half hour I had an appt with the doc, 3 different kinds of meds (turns out he thinks I had food poisoning in Goa along with a travellers bug) and was on our way back to meet Sandy at the hotel. Yeah Sarba!!!!!
What an awesome guy!

If anyone would like to see the route we'll be doing over the next 3 weeks you can check it out at
www.nepalnomad.com it's the 22 day Gokyo lake , Cholapass, Everest Base Camp trek
what that means is that there won't be any updates for that time period as there's no internet on the side of the mountains! I promise to make up for the updates when I get back - but yes, I will be disappearing off the face of the earth for the next 3 weeks (in other words, mum, I'm fine!).

I'll talk to you all in three weeks!

namaste