Nepal!

We flew from JFK to Bangkok and spent a rest night in the airport Novotel... $130 a night, but well worth it to not have to hike anywhere. Plus it had an amazing pool, restaurant and spa which we took advantage of. After 16 hours in a plane it was nice to just relax at any cost. Speaking of plane... Thai's premium economy class was amazing. For an extra $300 you get a bunch of leg room, and incredible food. There was enough room between the seats that Mom and I took turns sleeping on the floor in front of our seats.

One thing that surprised me about flying direct was our route... due north over the North Pole. So the really cool thing was going north the sun was setting, but after we crossed the north pole, the sun started to rise to the east. Pretty crazy!

Monday we flew on to Kathmandu. Wow, what a place. Nepal is poor, very poor. Poor enough so that the Maoist party is a major force. Actually they are trying to pull together a new constitution and government after 10 years of civil war. The GDP per person is around $1100. Kathmandu is chaotic. To give you an idea of how chaotic, check out this video!

Our hotel was in an area of Kathmandu called Thamel. It's the backpacker hippy area. Tiny alleys, no sidewalks, full of people, cars, motorycles and bike rickshaws. The pavement was not smooth at all. Can you picture an 82 year old woman navigating this? Well, this aint no ordinary woman, this is Shirley G!

We did get out of Kathmandu one afternoon to go visit the village of Bakhtipur-- this is a small town that has a lot great architecture and made the smart move of banning traffic from it's core. I would highly recommend staying a few nights here. I wish we had!

One of the cool things we saw in Bakhtipur was people threshing rice.

We stayed two days in Kathmandu and then flew on to Pokhara. The flight was in a 40 seater prop plane. Several airlines make a good business of flying tourists to Pokhara. By bus it's 6 to 12 hours. By plane it's 25 minutes.

The weather was hazy so I never really saw any big mountains from the ground. I did get a good look at them from the air though. They make the rockies look like foot hills. Not just because of their height, but their girth and the way they stretch endlessly from west to east. Here's a good photo I took of Manaslu from the plane to Pokhra. It's about 25,000 feet high and the eighth highest mountain in the world. The top ten highest peaks are in the Himalayan mountains.

Pokhara (pronounced POKE-rah), is a small city of 80,000 with the tourist trade centered on strip along the lake. We were here to see Woody's two houses. You'll get to see those in the next installment!