Saturday 24 August 2013

A walk with friends

The next morning we were at the school gates by 6.30 waiting for two of the teachers –Kumar and Germain to collect us for a trip to a famous view point. The four of us squeezed into one of the standard Nepal taxi’s – the size of Peugeot 206 – and bumped our way out of dusty Pokhara before winding steadily upwards for about an hour on a surprisingly good road. For the first time in our trip the mountain Machhapuchere, which looks like a gigantic Matterhorn-esq pinnacle from Pokhara, revealed its famous fish tail summit towering above us.


From a low pass we walked up a good path through a lush, mixed forest, pleased to be able to keep up with a Nepali sports teacher fairly easily. We passed an agricultural research station build by the British, with lots of little cottages looking like a 60s seaside development in the west country.








After only an hour of climbing, at one point glimpsing the red behind of a deer through the trees, we emerged onto an open hill top with excellent views of the Annapurna range, although now partially obscured by developing cloud.



We stopped in a village for a traditional Nepali ‘daal bhatt’ lunch where it was decided we should have chicken as a celebration. This meant we had to wait well over an hour for our food, presumable as said chicken was caught and prepared, during which time the two of us embarrassed ourselves by failing to grasp the local rules of rummy.




 The main vegetable with the dish when it arrived was a juvenile fern – I had no idea you could eat such thing, but it tasted quite good. After this it was a steep decent, with many hundreds of steps, passing some buffalo delighting in a muddy wallowing hole, back to the road and the bus to Pokhara. The bus traveled at a maximum of 10 mph, trying to maximize the distance between it and the previous bus and thus the number of customers, but at least it felt safe.





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