Alarming Developments

Short Version:
We explore Pokhara, which doesn't agree with one of us. Bus action!

Long Version:
Nene's alarm went off at 0600. Nene did not wake up.

Waking up in a psychedelic room was disorienting. The bright green, bright yellow, and bright orange walls were a bit much. And it was REALLY weird to not be getting out of bed into a cold morning, pooping into a hole in the ground, and then walking for several hours.

Instead, we ate delicious foods then went back to bed.

Later, we found espresso, and it was good.

Later still, we ate more pizza, window-shopped for art and random stuff, saw Honey Hunter bicycles, and ate more delicious foods in a place oddly dominated by Western women dining solo, or in large groups.

Then we went home, where Nene slept through about ten hours of Puppetvomiting. Then she was awake for a day of solo exploring while Puppetnapping occurred, interspersed with Puppetwatching of televised sports* and unintelligible local comedies.

Eventually, we left Pokhara, on a bus labelled Tourists Only! that was full of locals, including two young women who transferred on mid-intersection from a taxi labelled Anis & Menis, which was is just about the best taxi company name ever. We had the best seats in the bus; front pair on the passenger side. Excellent views out past the heavily-populated control cabin to the outside world. Unfortunately, the excellent seats we had weren't actually ours - we'd not realised that there were allocated seats, and had just sat in the ones we liked best. Luckily, the couple who were supposed to sit there waived their rights to the seats, and we stayed there for the rest of the day, which is how long it took us to reach Kathmandu, despite only stopping a couple of times; breakfast at 0930 at a place with the most foul-smelling urinals in the world; lunch at a riverside place with a curry-dominated self-serve buffet arrangement. Our bus ticket came with a lunch voucher. For a different establishment. They didn't seem to notice or care.

The bus-wranglers herded us all back on the bus, and we went up, and up, and up. Past the black polythene urinal we'd visited on the way out, then over the pass and down into the Kathmandu valley, where before long we hit the first of the slumburbs on the outskirts of the city, which became one lengthy passage through a grim landscape full of people and animals and stink. At least in the Kathmandu slums they had people picking through the trash in search of interesting stuff, which made for a lot less vile fume action than in the nastier outliers of Pokhara, where the piles of trash were on fire. Of course, Kathmandu stinks worse as it is.

And then, before we knew it, we were ejected from the bus into the seething city. All the conditioning we'd acquired in Delhi seemed to have evaporated during the weeks we'd spent in the wilderness, and being surrounded by hordes was a bit disconcerting, but a taxi to the International Guesthouse sorted that out, and then it was food and sleep o'clock, right up until 0430, when Nene's alarm went off.

Nene did not wake up.







* = Replays of old cricket matches between random countries, including a full ODI series between SAfrika and Orstralia. It's quite disconcerting falling asleep watching a cricket match, then waking up to find that, in what is apparently the same match, the score has changed in a way that is not possible