Where do we live?

From 2010 Nepal Highlights album

We walked to Nagarkot on the weekend - and back again. It was certainly a good leg stretcher for our upcoming 10 days of trekking in the Langtang region and some good hang out time with a few of the people we work with, and also Scotto - fellow EWB volunteer - who came along. 20km each day, with the first day involving about 1200m of ascending and 900m of descending. I'm not sure we always went on the 'intended' route. All I can say is that we were lucky to have some Nepalese speakers with us to ask the way!

Nagarkot is a tourist town, existing purely because of the amazing views. We weren't banking on the clouds clearing for us, but on Sunday morning we were treated to amazing views of the Himalayas stretching from Langtang to Everest. Fantastic and surreal.

From one of the steepest climbs I was able to snap a few shots back towards where we live - so put together the little presentation below.

Of course I took the GPS with - you can see where we walked on day 1 here and day 2 here. We also updated out 'Nepal Highlights' album with a bunch of pics from the trip.

I'm still cursing a pearler of a blister on one of my feet, as is Di, but apart from that, and a few slightly worrying lower back spasms, I thought we handled the 40km of walking pretty well. We've ensured that we continued our morning walks up the 'thousand (713) steps' this week to make sure we didn't slack off.

Finally!

I finally went for an afternoon mountain bike ride the other day. A nice little 45 minute loop door to door and it was glorious! Out the door, along a relatively flat dirt road, up a steep rough road to the Kali temple (where we walk to in the mornings - up 713 steps, or 'the thousand steps' as it's optimistically known here), down the other side, where the road becomes just a walking track and I descended a few hundred metres in altitude past houses, farms with people working in the fields and ladies carrying huge loads on their backs, everyone giving me a happy 'Namaste' as I rode past. After reaching the bottom, the road back was relatively new and cut into the side of the hill - quite spectacular and thankfully it meant I didn't have to ride back over the top. I can handle doing that loop a few times every week!!

Afternoon Ride Bhatti Dandar at EveryTrail

Our Highlights Photo Album

Here's a bit of a photo highlights album that we'll be updating as we go. Enjoy!!

Photosynth Experimenting

Microsoft Photosynth is indeed pretty powerful. I've played with it a bit before - at such famous international destinations as Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square and Gibbon St.

Below is a few photos stitched together from our ride last week. It turned out pretty well... I'm going to do a few more of these I think!

Evening Walk

We went for our first walk down the road the opposite direction to Dhulikhel the other day - into Bhatti Danda, the local area. We met a few nice people along the way...

Prem Lama (photo below, with some random local kids and Di), who runs the local guesthouse and does trek guiding. (Please - if anyone needs his details, let us know!) His guesthouse 'Himalayan Tasidhale' is very new and well done, and even has the promise of hot water - something we've only rearely come across in Kathmandu so far, and don't have where we live!

A few of the local kids displaying their gymnastics...

The local community school.