Pokhara, page 2 of 3

In case you forgot - we were walking over the obscure road, now stopped by these families. They dance for us, quite happy as you can see on this picture, and ask for our donation for their new temple. Our bus yesterday to Pokhara was also very often stopped by this kind of groups. We give them a small amount of money (we are Dutch, remember) and walk on. It is difficult to find the bridge we are looking for; we don’t even see the river – which is not too strange, because it is 30 meters down in a small ravine. And it is very hot! But when we ask for the bridge, a bit difficult, because nobody speaks English in this area, the river turns out to be very close.

The view however is a big disappointment, the bridge and the small ravine are totally covered with plants and trees and nothing remains to be seen of the water streaming far below. We only hear a soft murmuring, nothing like the thundering noise I expected! Mission completed, but we are still far away from the Lakeside and feel very hot and tired. To take a taxi seems a nice idea, but no taxi’s are to be found over here, that’s clear!

On the other side of the airport is a bus station, we will be able to find a taxi over there. Obviously we have now left the rich and standard neighborhoods and are heading for the slums. I have never seen houses like these, very small (more like the houses we make for our dogs when we don’t trust them inside), completely made from newspapers, cardboard and the remnants of worn clothes, everything to be found on the rubbish-dump nearby. When it rains one time properly you will have to rebuild them! Contradictory to what you (and we) would expect, people were relaxed and some children even wanted us to visit their home! But we were very tired after this small relaxing walk, which happened to take already half a day, and only interested in reaching the bus station as quick as possible. Here we indeed found a taxi to take us back the last four or five kilometers to Lakeside. Before we went back to the hotel we took a large fresh juice in a small juice shop, very nice when you are that thirsty!

Early in the evening we went e-mailing, to keep our family up to date with regard to our latest adventures. We saw a lot of e-mailing offices, but mostly they had only one (= 1) computer and this was always occupied by a local computer addict. This office had more PC's and we saw one woman typing an enormous amount of information in an experienced way, clearly also an addict. But I must admit that the familiar feeling of the keyboard under my fingers made me quite happy for a moment… This feeling didn’t last long; soon the lamps started to flicker and after a moment of hesitation left us definitely in the dark. The same happened of course to our PC’s. A moment of terrible silence followed, and then the woman next to me started to scream and curse, first in English and, when she couldn’t find sufficient impressive words to express her feelings, in French. I had only typed one sentence, so I could laugh about it all.

We left the e-mail shop and the desperate woman (she just sent another very big email, but it was only batched and not sent yet and could it be that that was also lost??) and went to eat on a roof restaurant that had an extra electricity generator and a lot of candles. Very romantic and still we had warm food. Jacques loves the sizzling steak that they serve everywhere in Pokhara (so much worries beforehand that he wouldn’t get enough meat!). Jacques tested the quality of this steak in a lot of restaurants and the only place he can’t recommend is the ‘Steak House’, were they boast to serve the best steak in town but in fact it is the worst, so take care! Not that it stopped a lot of young people to eat there and they were very happy, but maybe this was more related to the quantity than the quality of the food! It took two hours till the lights started again and then in the night all electricity failed once more, our rotor stopped and the room slowly (?) started to heat up…

So we didn’t get much sleep and the next morning it was totally clouded, a fine excuse to try today to really relax a bit, not like yesterday… We took breakfast in a garden full of flowers next to the lake, so we could watch the bisons taking their bath in Pewa Tal during our breakfast. Now we were close enough to see the bisons weren’t that clean when the entered the water - to be honest: they seemed to be totally covered with crusts consisting of some mix of mud and shit. When they left the water they looked very clean again… Jac started to worry where all the dirt disappeared to, this because we wanted to swim a bit in the lake!

We succeeded in hiring a boat – of course after walking a lot till we found a place where we could hire a boat for only two times the price local people paid – and we went to the middle of the lake, to a very small island in the lake on which the Hindu Varahi temple stands. This was not so special, more interesting to people who like doves (there was a big pigeon-house next to the temple and the temple was covered completely with doves and -shit) than to people who like temples, so we soon left again.

It was delicious on the water, warm but with some cooling wind. Now it was time for our swim, but Jac couldn’t forget about this dirty bisons, it didn’t help to explain about dilution factors and so I was the only one to take a very refreshing dive! Normally I’m much more dirt sensitive than Jac, only when it comes to almost invisible flies visiting his beer or his food he worries more than I. And, as I know now, when it comes to shit covered cows!