So I guess after those crazy nights in Katmandu it was time to split, and we headed off to beautiful Pokhara.....Pokhara is the EXACT opposite of Katmandu....relaxed, not heavily polluted, and an easy going way of life. So we take the Tourist Bus to Pokhara which is a fairly harrowing experience, as there's frequently dodgy passes and lots of sharp corners....the bus drivers are really incredible with their sense of space and ability to maneuver through the tinniest spots. We arrive in Pokhara and head out to try and find a hotel that was recommended to us by some Canadians we had sat beside at the OR2K restaurant in Kathmandu.....so Dave and I decide it's within walking distance and we try and walk to the location, and Dave takes the lead in guiding since he has the business card with the map....of course Dave is a bad navigator and soon we're off wandering nowhere near the lake which is where the hotel is supposed to be...one funny part about our lost walk is that we're heading down a sidewalk and a taxi stops beside us...Dave looks over expecting them to offer us a ride and starts laughing....I immediately look over and see that instead of an empty taxi there is a passenger in the front seat and several of his goats sitting in the backseat looking at us....hilarious sight, I wish I had the time to snap a photo but I didn't, oh well! So after several baaaad jokes (we use lots of dry humour involving puns during our travels) we decide to just take a taxi to the hotel. We arrive and check in, room seems alright.
After checking in and haggling over the price, we decide to head out to some cafe that Dave had read a great review about in his Lonely Planet book called Moondance....so we start heading out in the direction of that place and we find it immediately, or so we think...we sit down and have a nice meal and are in the process of leaving when we realize the place is actually called Moonlight, but Dave forgot that we were looking for the Dance instead...like I said, excellent navigator lol....oh well. We then head out and pop by a pub called Busy Bee where we have a few beers and call it a relatively early night. Now we get back to that hotel and try to sleep but find the beds are absolutely terribly hard, and there's a mini farm next door with birds and dogs howling and clucking all through the night....we had a really crappy sleep, and then went to have a shower in the morning and found that the water wasn't working, damn! So this being our first crappy experience we decide to check out early and go find other digs....we end up finding a really awesome place called the Hotel Elia which has rooms for about $5 a night and was pretty sweet....at this point we realized we were so overpaying for our place in Kathmandu where we were paying about $15 to $20 a night for a place that wasn't nearly as good as this place...such is life.
So after checking in and showering, we decided to rent a boat and go for a cruise on the lake, and end up realizing that we're not very good boatsmen, as we basically kept going in circles....apparently I'm a stronger rower than Dave is, but such is life.
We ended up just boating for an hour, some exercise finally! It was starting to look like a big storm rolling in and we were shocked to see people paragliding up in the thunderous clouds...crazy ppl. So after boating of course we decide to book into some paragliding for the next day ha ha. We set that up and decide to actually check out that Moondance place, as we passed the real place the previous day on our way to the pub the previous night...it's actually a Canadian run Nepali restaurant and we have a pretty awesome dinner....I had an amazing Indian Chicken Korma dish...so delicious! At one point, we were randomly waving at some Chinese girl who was taking a picture of the signage, and she started reviewing her photos and started laughing at the site of us two goofballs waving away...so she ended up coming up and joining us for a bit.....After dinner, a few beers and some pool, we were pretty tired, and didn't want to miss our paragliding in the morning by sleeping in, so we head off home to bed...Saturday night and in bed by 10:30...wow.
So the next day of course we sleep in a bit too late and are rushed to get down to some place called Mike's for breakfast by the Lake before our gliding....we get there and rush to order our food and finish it....I snapped a pic of what may possibly be Dave's last breakfast as shown here.
So then we head out to the spot to meet up for the paragliding, and of course the pilots are 20 minutes late so we rushed through our meals for nothing. So we drive up to the hilltop and it's a fairly far ways up there....quite a bit scary for someone who is afraid of heights ha ha...so here we go off paragliding. Here's a pic of my pilot....99% perfect sounds good to me! And a pic of the aerial view of course...beautiful area it is.
So we ended up getting about 20 minutes of paragliding, as the sun was starting to become covered with clouds which reduces the high temperature wind currents that carry up the parachutes to keep you afloat....we had a pretty awesome time, and had a great landing (unlike some of the other pilots....we watched one guy crash into another landed pilots parachute and cause them to land on their asses, while another pilot nearly missed a rock pile and had a bit of a rough landing for the female passenger ha ha....oh well they were all okay!
So after the paragliding we head back to the hotel and then stop by a coffeeshop for a coffee, a small bite, and some free WiFi......now we had been in Pokhara and knew some Danes we had met on the Everest trail who were there for some Electronica fest.....several times we had thought we had seen the Danes, and each time I would yell the one guy's name out and run up to the person we thought was him, but it ended up not being him each time much to my embarrassment, well okay I don't really get embarrassed so that's all good he he.
So anyways, I'm drinking a coffee and Dave spots this Jens guy, so we actually get it right and he comes and pops by and tells us where to get the tickets for the fest, and where their hotel is, and invites us to stop by for some drinks later on. We agree to meet up in a few hours and chill out for awhile......we then start heading over to their hotel, when we're suddenly caught in a massive downpour....absolutely crazy storm....one of the funnier moments of this huge storm was that this random cow from the street wanders over to take shelter under the same awning I'm hanging out under...the store owners try to shoo him/her away, but it refuses and hangs out.....after waiting for awhile we realize the storm isn't going to let up, and I'm the only one with an umbrella, so I run over to a store and buy Dave an incredible umbrella, and a few beers for the pre-party. Here's us with our sweet umbrellas...
We arrive and have a pretty awesome time with a huge group of different nationalities including Danish, English, New Zealander, German, and a few Canucks....we have a few drinks, share some stories and laughs, and are somewhat entertained my some crazy drugged out lady in her late 40s....she was called the Rainbow lady, and she was quite the character....at one point she got up and gave a toast to rainbows and told us how we were all her rainbow children....I became concerned that I had stumbled into some cult, and that my drink was poisoned, but it ended up being okay....the rest of the group just looked at each other in awe and shock at the strangeness of this lady (here she is in all her glory)
....so anyways it's getting late and we all paid 52 euro to go to this festival, so a bunch of us pack into this small compact taxi...I think we had about 7 of us in a taxi that normally fits 3 passengers comfortably....we head off to the fest and rock out for awhile. Eventually Dave shows up with a few others from the party and tells me about this hilariousness of the rainbow lady who hopped in their cab and had no money whatsoever....she said she was going to be fine and would just share rainbows with the security guards and get into the festival no problem....well apparently she didn't get in, and it was probably about a 45 minute walk back to town at least lol
So after having our hilarious DJ stage crashing night a few nights back, we decide...what the heck, let's crash this stage too.....I think I got kicked off about 10 times, but just continued to go on stage and eventually they just stopped kicking me off lol....here's Dave and I again on stage.
So eventually I lose most of the group, and decide I'm quite tired...I then start opening random tents asking if I can sleep in them, but apparently people don't appreciate being woken up at 5 am by random strangers, and I received several nos....looking back, it probably would have been funnier just to crash in one and see what the people had to say in the morning but oh well..So I eventually find one of the guys that we went to the festival with and he's lost his wallet and money and has no way to get back...I offer to share a cab with him and we head back to town...I have no clue where Dave is, and he has our room key.....so I drop off the English dude, and then give some pretty bad directions to our taxi....he stops at my hotel and won't accept that 900 I have left, as he wants 1000 rupees....so off to the bank machine...arghh.....I'm also hungry at this point and offer to buy him breakfast if he comes and joins me, but he refuses....hard to make friends at 7 am I guess! So I get back to the hotel, and of course I"m locked out...I somehow convince the staff to let me into our room and crash....Dave returns around noon, apparently he thought I had the key and crashed at the other hotel with the ppl we went out with, and then realized he had the key in the morning when he sobered up a bit...damn Dave!
So we get up around 3 pm, and Dave hops in the shower....now I decide to get some revenge by locking him in the shower room, as there's a place for a padlock ..I lock him in there for awhile and go for a wander to purchase some things and return...unfortunately I didn't take off for too long and he barely spent any time in solitude...
So we eventually head out for a late dinner at Moondance again, and meet some random ppl at the tables by just being friendly...we also see the Danes and some of the others from the previous night walk by, and we yell out to them, but only the Kiwi girl acknowledged us...we felt snubbed! so we hang out at Moondance, and eventually decide to head down to the BusyBee for a night cap....on the walk there, I start walking down the middle of the road instead of using the sidewalk and meet some cute Danish girls.....I end up convincing them to come with us to the pub, and they come along. At one point, I decide that I should pass on "the Tee" which is a Quiksilver T-shirt that myself and my Aussie buddies have all worn around the world at some point....we agree with the girls that they should try and get a woman at a ping pong show in Bangkok to wear it and take a photo....there's plans to hopefully meet up with them in Roskilde ( a music festival in Denmark in the summer and maybe I'll get it back!)
So we hang out with these girls and meet a few others and have a great night of beers and lots of laughs...it was a very eclectic mix and I was really on top of my game when it came to humour...I had the whole table laughing on end...it was a fun fun night....we also somehow got to stay well past close and have beers with some of the staff....we then get back to our hotel at like 3 am and try to grab some sleep.....we have to get up at 7 am and leave for the bus station...so we get up and...wow.....we are about to get into the taxi out front, and I jokingly ask if I can drive....to mine and Dave's surprise, the driver lets me drive...yikes.....so I drive us to the bus station.....Nepal is loose....I don't know how we get away with these things!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PrnTldaepE
So after getting to the station, the other taxi drivers are in awe and howling with laughter that some foreigner is driving the taxi instead...I give a generous for this display of awesomeness.....
We hop on the bus and head to Chitwan.....most of the drive was spent sleeping of course. We get to Chitwan, find a cheap hotel (250 rupees a night or 3.50 CAD) and check in there...it's an absolute dump, but so cheap so who cares......we then go and find some lunch where I find a new friend...
We get up the next day and head out for some elephant ride where we have some laughs at some of the tourists in the area, including this kid who appears to be wearing a purple dress...well it's just a shirt too long, but still seems quite dress like....
We manage to poke some fun at him, and then sit around waiting on our platform to jump on an elephant, but our tour guide dude ended up ditching us and only putting the other ppl on elephants....we figured we were just going to be screwed out of a ride, but ended up getting put on one finally....it was okay...kind of bumpy and fun, but went on for way too long......we entertained ourselves with stupid banter such as "Dave, if you were an elephant and had a cellphone, who would you call?" to which Dave would give an equally stupid answer "The Meerkats, to warn them I was coming to stomp on them"...it definitely helped the ride go well.....eventually a rhino was spotted, and all of a sudden the poor rhinos were surrounded by about 12 elephants with tourists snapping photos....our elephant was particularly aggressive and not afraid of pushing through the shrubs and bushes to get right into the rhinos faces....we felt kind of bad for the rhinos...but such is the price of tourism I guess....here's the baby rhino.
Well okay...Rhino....and then here's a pic of some other ppl riding their elephant through water since it was kind of hard for me to snap a photo of us.
After the Rhino ride, we went for a late breakfast, as we were absolutely starving...this point our waiter had an amazing shirt that Dave absolutely loved...the shirt makes no sense, but it was so awesome that I offered to buy it off the waiter for Dave....I bought it, and Dave called it the nicest gift anyone has ever given him lol.
Yes, the English fail is epic..and we look like the coolest guys around..especially with our mos!
After our late breakfast we took in a Jungle Safari tour...which truth be told, kind of blew goats.....after being on the South African one where you could see so many animals, this one was pretty crappy cause the jungle coverage was so thick, it was pretty hard to encounter any animals....that being said, Dave hadn't been on one, and since I'm a good friend, I tagged along, hoping to see Tigers!
Here's a good pic of Dave and my Safari tour, where we not only saw a Tiger, but also we saw Rhinos going at it, double win!!
Ha ha okay, well we didn't actually see any Tigers..sigh.....but we did see a few Rhinos...at one point our crazy tour guide decided to try and goad one of them into coming closer to the vehicle...
We also saw a fair bit of elephants, but they were all human driven, so it's not like they were wild or anything...here's a few pics
So the rest of the safari was pretty dull other than seeing a few monkey, so I even managed to fall asleep at one point..much to Dave's delight...it's not easy sleeping in a bouncy jeep, but I somehow managed to find a way to do it ha ha.....other than that, we just basically poked fun at the other couples on the trip.
After it was all wrapped up, we decided to chill out and have a beer and watch the sunset, which was quite nice! Just the right amount of gay I think ha ha....here it is.
We then had a nice dinner and a few more beers at a cool place called K.C's which went well with my KC baseball hat I've been sporting ha...I asked for a discount but they weren't going to oblige. We had a pretty early morning bus so we headed off to try and catch some sleep and not sleep in of course....
Well trying to catch sleep was a terrible experience, as our room was filled with mosquitos, we were plagued with weird dreams due to the malaria pills (although I might add, the dreams have been quite incredibly entertaining from what we do remember....Dave was Batman in his dream...had saved the day, and was riding up an elevator to go to a nice dinner (as Bruce Wayne) when something happened to the building and his lift was falling down and going to crash into a huge fireball from an explosion....yes Dave managed to kill Batman!!! I"m not the least bit impressed over that dream, seeing as how Batman is my superhero of choice...thanks Dave! Another one of his dreams involved me getting murdered on his front step..like wtf!! Oh well, to be fair I've also had my share of odd dreams, such as me going back to Canada after Sri Lanka for a few days cause I couldn't decide where I wanted to go next, and I randomly showed back up at work and started working for free for a few days...yeah weird eh.
So anyways, that night also had the usual mix of Chickens, Dogs, and Birds all in succession cawing, woofing, growling, chirping throughout all hours of the night..and our place didn't exactly have sound proof walls, so we struggled to sleep. We actually ended up sleeping in...and ran off to catch our morning bus....
Now we get to the bus station, and find that the ticket that Dave bought us wasn't actually a ticket, just a receipt, so it looked like we might not even get on a bus...I jokingly mocked him for buying fake bus tickets, but eventually we got on one and were on our way.....we arrived back at Kathmandu in the late afternoon, and were going to go get KFC, but decided to have showers and head back to OR2K again....we just love that place, even though we're not vegetarians! I quite enjoyed the bus ride..sticking my head out the window at any opportune time to taunt or to just smile at the pedestrians.
So after the much needed showers, and the delicious falafels at OR2K, we just chilled out having a few beers and then I started chatting up a nice Belgian girl....we ended up heading out for a few drinks with her and her friend at an Irish Bar where, for the first time in Nepal, we managed to get in trouble for something!! I had been told to try a local drink called Roxy by my paragliding instructor, as well as a few other Nepali people, so I ordered two glasses of it, and the server got mad at me and said we don't serve that and don't serve people who want to drink that, and took away our menus!! We were in shock that we were being asked to leave for ordering a drink, but eventually he caved and at least let us order a beer.....so after this shock we juts had some useless banter over who's moustache and toque was better...and the Belgians agreed Dave's was better, so I was a pouty again, since all the girls we've been out with seem to agree on that one, boo!!!
So after the Irish bar was closing we tried to find some other places but nothing else was open since Kathmandu kind of has a dull night life so the Belgians called it an early night....but since it was our last night together, Dave and I decided to try and make a go of the night, but with much failure....We got a rickshaw driver to drive us to the Monte Carlo casino which is at the Yak and Yeti hotel (where we partied for New Years)...as we were pulling up, our driver said Dave wouldn't be able to get in cause he was wearing flip flops....so we decided that he should wear my socks and pretend they were shoes.....well the security staff at this uptight, modern place didn't think we were as funny as we thought, and refused to allow us entry...Dave for lack of shoes, and myself for lack of trousers....so we offered to buy the trousers and shoes off the security guards, but they still weren't having it...so sadly we decided to head back to Thamel to see if we could find something else...at this point, Dave, being jealous of my driving of a taxi, in Pokhara, asked to drive the Rickshaw, which he was allowed to do....I goaded him and harassed him accordingly and we had a good laugh at the ride.....we got back to the guesthouse, and found nothing else open so we called it a night.
I rose a bit early, did some shopping, then we grabbed our last breakfast together *big tear*...we reminisced about the past few weeks and the awesome times, and then went and finished up a few errands.....I packed my bags and headed off to the airport, over 2 hours early (which is pretty much a record for me).
Of course, with Nepal's dodgy power strikes, when I went to check in, the computer crashed, and I received some dodgy piece of paper for my boarding pass....oooh Nepal....so unorganized....so I got on my plane and landed in Dubai, where I found an equally unorganized mess...I had 2 hours before my flight, but cause of the dodgy paper ticket, had to go get a new one printed out....well the ticket counter itself was a mess, with heaps of people pushing and shoving their way to the front...I got to the ticket till, and the lady informed me that I needed a return flight to board my plane to Sri Lanka due to Visa regulations......so at this point I became somewhat worried, and was going to sort out some internet or book some random flight, but then her supervisor said it was okay for me to board the plane without one....well I was happy about that, and went through another dodgy airport security check, then got on some bus which took forever to get going...I didn't even get to the proper terminal and gate area until 15 minutes after boarding was supposed to commence....I grabbed a quick bite, but found the flight was delayed due to issues getting ongoing passengers over to the gates....the plane was quite empty so I had nice leg room and relaxed....I got to Colombo at 1:55 am, and had no issues with getting a visa or through security....went and found a guest house near the airport, and tried to sleep....well that was a miserable failure again as there was a dog fight outside my window...and the one dog must have been mortally wounded, cause the howling of pain kept me up for 3 hours....i tried putting on my ipod to try and block it out, it was so miserable...i felt like going outside and shooting the damn thing to put it out of it's misery....
So I managed to find a bus to Colombo, and have found I can only get a night bus to my next destination, so here I sit in some internet cafe, escaped from the rain, and just chilling out....been on the net for almost 2 hours now...not much else to write....would like to upload some more videos, but the computer here is pretty old and dodgy...at least this post is nearly complete.
Until next time, keep fit and have fun!
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