Finally I got organised to start writing this journal. I got back to Kathmandu this afternoon after an amazing trekking trip in the Anapurna Santurary. I can't believe I only been away 2 weeks, there is so much I have exerienced since I left London. I flew to Delhi on 2 October 2008 and was so pleased to have someone to pick me up at the airport. I arrived at Shanti Homes and felt very welcomed, Slept after feeling exhausted from an overnight flight. However woke up by some Indian music in the lounge which was outside my room, a lovely way to wake up, sounded very exotic. I then needed to be brave and decided to take the metro a few stops, the experience to walk down to the metro was both exciting, a bit scary and difficult. There was such a chaos with huge amounts of traffic of all kinds from cars, trucks, bicycles, rickshaws, cows and so on. The smells were also very different, not very pleasent I must say. The hardes part was the children begging. I also felt that a lot of people were staring at me, some smiling, I have no idea why, that will be a mystery to me. Had a lovely meal in Shanti homes on their roof terraced before I went to bed and had a lovely sleep.
On the 4 October I flew to Kathmandu to join a group of another 5 people, 4 Australians and an English girl who I was sharing a room with to do the Anapurna Sactury trek. Arrived in Kathmandu and it felt so chaotic, but I got a really nice feel to the city, it has some kind of buzz, so different to anything I experienced before. The trek up to Anapurna base camp took us 10 days in total was absolutely amazing. I don't think I have been to such a beautiful place before. During the trek it was the Dasain fesitval in Nepal and one of the days on our trek a lot of animals were sacrisfied, so on this day a lot of Nepalese people eat meat, which normally they don't eat a lot of. I loved the beginning and end of the trip when we walked through plataued rice fields and little villages. All the people we came across were so friendly and smiley. The children seemed so happy and seemed to have a great imagination of making games and toys of very little, it certainly makes you wonder if mountains of toys makes our children any happier in the western society. As we accended the scenery changed into tropical forest and then finally mountainous. I never seen such a high mountains before and in the night they were almost flouresent, together with the full moon and the stars it was magical. The last bit before we reached the Anapurna Base camp became hard as we were reaching heights of over 4000m and it was a huge effort walking without stopping on a regular basis. I didn't feel great at this height, headache and my pulse was rising and waking up in the night gasping for air, so it was great the day after when we started to decend. All of the sudden the walk became very easy. The rest of the trek was just as great and beutiful. We have walked about 6 hours a day and I can feel it in my legs, although I didn't get any blisters which was great as I had worried about this before. So today I returned to Kathmandu and the extremely noisy and busy city, but with great buzz. I love it. Tomorrow I am off to Bhaktapur on a day trip which is the third major town in the valley, but no traffic, so I am looking forward to this. Bhaktapur was a lovely city, much more peaceful as there were no cars, it was an old Medival city, with some really old houses with beautifully carved windows and doors. Had three children aged 9, 12 and 13 showing us around the city whom we then took with us to lunch after. In the evening I went with two people from the group and ate Pizza, really nice (better than Pizza Express Pizzas) but strange to sit in Nepal eating pizza, but I felt I needed something different to Dahl Bhati (dahl and rice) Today I am just taking it easy, going to buy my bus ticket to India and then go and sit in the Garden of Dreams and read which sounds like a very tranquil place. Everyone from the trekking group has left now, so all on my own again.
