Well it has been one month already! Since my last update I have returned to Kathmandu. Leaving Pokhara was very sad. It was tempting to rent a room and stay there for the whole 6 months!
My last week in Pokhara included an overnight trip to Gorkha, which was the home of medieval nepali kings. The bus ride there was arduous. Riding on the roof is normally enjoyable, but this bus was extremely overcrowded and they just kept loading more and more people on. Gorkha itself was not that nice a town, it just seems alot of Nepali towns and cities have not worked out how to dispose of there waste, so they leave it lieing around in the streets, Pokhara is really the only place I have come across that seems to have worked this out.
The highlights of Gorkha where the excellent Momo (a nepali style dumpling) house that I found. The girl sat out the front of thew shop doing nothing but making momo's and they where delicious! It is always comforting to see your food cooked in front of you.
The other great thing about Gorkha was its old Shiva temple which sits on top of a large hill (the other thing about Nepal is that everything is at the top of a hill...). It was quite exciting for me as they let me inside the temple, which they often don't do unless you are hindu, so it was the first time I had seen the inside of a hindu temple. Unfortunately they had a no camera rule, so there are no pictures. But there where alot of shrines, some holy men chanting with alot of flowers and rice and various other offerings laid out in front of them, quite an interesting experience.
Back in Pokhara, I got into the kitchen of the Dal Bhat place I ate at regularly. Dal Baht, for the uninitiated is the staple of the Nepali diet and consists of rice, lentil soup - which you poor over the rice, a curry which is generally potato based and can contain whatever other vegetables you have handy, a touch of pickles and often some form of steamed spinach like vegetable. I was interested in learning some Nepali cooking so they let me into the kitchen to help cook the curry! It was quite like making a stirfry only with a different set of ingredients. Luckily the curry turned out well as everyone that ate there that night had to eat it..
Since being back in Kathmandu I have been busy organising my Indian visa and planning for Langtang trekking, which pending the absence of any transport strike I will start on tomorrow! There was also some sort of 'Bangle Festival' which mostly seemed to involve all the women getting there hands henna tattooed, so I had that done as well (don't worry mum.. it's not permanent..)
And that is about that for now, I am just mentally preparing myself to walk up mountains for 8-10 days.
