Melanie and Gavin's Travels

Kathmandu the 2nd time around

It's been nearly a month and we are back in Kathmandu. It sure looks different both 1) the second time you get here and 2) after 25 days in the mountains. We haven't seen a car for nearly a month, let alone a PROPER shower. So there are good and bad points to it!

This morning we went to the airport at 6am. Which meant we walked to the end of the small road in town and there we were. The doors to the airport were locked (I have never seen an airport locked) but within a few minutes about 50 people had gathered and were also waiting. All of the porters were there with the expedition gear too. When they let us in 15mins later it was pretty chaotic. There is one small room with 4 little desks for the little airlines there. there were no lights on and no line ups or anything. So we checked in, gave them our bag and went through some version of Nepali security. And then? Well we waited. We waited for a plane to arrive. Because along with never seeing an airport locked before I have also never seen an airport with NO planes. We had to wait until after 9am as there was fog in Kathmandu and none of the planes had taken off yet. So the plane flies onto the runway, a very short runway with a brick wall at the end, and then they take the luggage off super quickly, everyone hops off the plane, the new luggage goes on and then the new people hop on. Within 5minutes of landing it took off again.

The flight was great! There were only 15 seats in the whole thing and we could see what the pilots were doing and everything. The views were brilliant, and we could see some of the trails we had walked to get to that same place over 3 weeks beforehand.

We are back at the same hotel in Kathmandu. Things are less alarming and I am walking around looking at all of the shops and restaurants like a kid in a candy store. It's so much warmer here which is awesome! We had beautiful showers and are anxiously awaiting an early dinner hour to go to this great Mexian restaurant we went to last month. over the next few days we need to get some laundry done, find the Indian Embassy to apply for our visas and start being tourists in Kathmandu. There is much to see so it should be good. I plan to spend some time catching up on news here on the net and downloading some photos for people to see as well. We looked through the papers earlier and along with the Maoists and Gvernment reaching an agreement here for the first time in 10yrs (these are promising times for Nepal, fingers crossed!) the Nepal paper had a piece about Brittany divorcing Kevin! I was kind of surprised to see that in there.

I am getting a bit more excited for India too. It is somewhere Gavin and I want to go, but added it on as we would already be in Nepal and it's also cheap as chips. But we have just heard so many things from travellers that make us very aware that we are going to love AND hate it. So I'm prepared for that but it doesn't make me dying to get there if you know what I mean. so we will see how it goes. And if we don't want up to 4 months there we can speed up our flights to Oz and either go home early or do something else like maybe some time in Eastern Europe. Our flight goes back through London anyways and we both want to go there.

posted by melaniewilkes @ 9:13 PM