My Gap Year

Soph and I have just come back from probably our most action pack weekend to date!!We left at the crack of dawn on Friday morning to catch our bus down to the sunny area of Pokhara, wasn’t the most comfortable of bus journeys, Nepali roads are always a bit bumpy!!We managed to make it to Pokhara though in fairly good time, and also managed to make friends with a Tibetan man called Nawang, who very kindly showed us around on our arrival, and managed to get us a very cheap taxi ride to our hotel!We hadn’t actually booked a hotel before, so just picked on out of the lonely planet! When we got to the Yeti Guest House we walked into what looked like a jungle, there was no-one around at all, so we were about to go and find another hotel when suddenly the guy that ran the place jumped out of one of the trees, he’d been picking some fresh fruit for the other guests!!Immediately we thought he was a very cool dude so we decided then and there to stay!!We had our complimentary tea and chatted for a while, and the next thing we knew Kamal (the owner) was rushing off to book us to go para-gliding!!That night we we’re both a bit tired so just went out for our first western food since we’ve been in Nepal, and then went to bed!!

Saturday morning again we were up fairly early, but this time we had no problems in getting up early as we were about to be flown 3000m into the mountainous sky!!We got to the para-gliding place a bit early, so we just sat around preparing ourselves for what was about to come. We then got a mini-bus up the mountain with the instructures, who were all absolute nutters!!! Had to walk a little way aswell to get to our take off point!!Everything happened so casually, we waited around a bit until the instructures could see the birds in the sky, and then the next thing we knew we were strapped to one of the instructures and were running off a mountain!!We both thought we were going to get really scared but you actually didn’t have a chance to because everything happened so quickly!!We were up in the sky for about 45mins , and at the end got to do some para-gliding acrobats!!!After the para-gliding we felt that we should settle our stomachs again with a bit of grub, so went to one of the many restaurants in lakeside and had some food!!In the afternoon we decided that we were going to continue to be active and hired a rowing boat, and rowed ourselves out to this island in the middle of the Phew-tal lake which had a temple on it!!It was so nice and very peaceful rowing around the lake, took us a while though to actually get anywhere, we were not very co-ordinated!!In the afternoon we sat around in the ‘jungle’ at the hotel playing cards with two other guys from england staying there, which was really nice, and before we knew it there were about six of us all sitting around!!We decided that we wanted a cheap local meal that night, so went to a place down this alley which literally only had 1 table, and had yet again mo-mo’s (we are both so hooked to mo-mo’s).  After the meal we all went to a place callled Busy Bee’s, which had a live band, with a very enthusiastic guitar player who at one stage decided to jumped off the stage into the crowd, best place ever!!!

On sunday we had a bit of a lie in, grabbed some breakfast, and then caught a local bus to Devi Waterfalls!! The waterfalls were really pretty though didn’t actually have that much water as it is not the rainy season!!We then decided to go to one of the Tibetan refugee camps near the falls, and it turned out to be the where our friend that we met on the bus lived, so we called him up and he came and gave us a free tour round his home!!He showed us all the places that we probably wouldn’t have seen, we went and saw these women making carpets which was amazing to watch, got to have some serious patience to make them!!We then walked around all of the houses and watched everyone preparing food for the Tibetan New Year that was coming up, got to try some Tibetan bread which was amazing!!We then went and visited the monastry in the camp which was really nice, they to were making all kinds of things for the new year!!We then went down into the cave that was below the waterfalls which was amazing, and was the first time for are friend Nawang aswell!!We then went and had some lunch at one of the local family cafe’s. had mo-mo’s again as they are traditional Tibetan food, and whilst eating we met the Tibetan national goalkeeper!!!!In the afternoon we decided to go and walk up to the World Peace Pagoda, which according to the locals should take about 20mins, took us 1hr!!!The view from the top though was amazing and the temple was pretty amazing too!!!

On monday we decided that we were going to hire some bikes and cycle our way round the lake!!We managed to find a bike really easily and then headed off!!Initially the ride was ok, but as we got further and further away from lakeside our bums were getting in more and more pain!!!On our way aswell we got stopped by these tow little boys who just decided to jump onto the front of our bikes, so we cycled them to there home!!After about 2hrs of cycling we decided that we were in so much pain that we had to head back to lakeside for some lunch!!!In the afternoon we just relaxed around lakeside, did a bit of shopping, and discovered that the Tibetan people sell everything for such better prices!!!In the evening we actually met up with two other volunteers who had just got back from trekking around the Annapurna range!!It was really nice to see them and see all there pictures - made us want to go trekking even more!!We went to bed fairly early again that night as we were going to have to get up at 6 the next day!!!

Altogether we had an amazing few days in Pokhara, and we are definitely going to go back!!!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 7:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.