17 January 2009
After a surprisingly good nights sleep we also had a good breakfast and then drove the final distance to the border. We progressed through the departure system much easier than the arrival system and all the many of pieces of papers were all stamped and our passports returned when we said goodbye to Lobsang and headed into no-man’s land.
On the Nepalese side of the border we had a thorough bag search and then continued down the chaotic street (so different to the Chinese border) we went into immigration and after lots of pushing and the wrong forms, we were passed to another officer who got excited we were from the home of Ricky Ponting and we got all of the stamps we needed and headed outside.
Our driver and guide were not there so SB headed to the phone but there wasn’t any answer, so we walked a bit further down and waited for about 15 minutes when Ram (our guide) arrived and we headed off for the 90km drive to Kathmandu and due to the bad road conditions we only managed a maximum of 30kph.
We had a short lunch stop in the sun which was lovely, it is so nice and warm here and also seems to be crop planting, clothes washing and people washing day, so there seemed to be people everywhere.
We finally made it back to the chaos and noise of Kathmandu.
We were offered an upgrade at the hotel but choose faithful room 303 as it has the best bed and best shower (SB fixed the shower on our first stay here). We had a quick shower and changed into some clean clothes and packaged up the washing and dropped that off, exchanged some books and changed our unused Yuan and SB dropped off his unused down jacket.
We returned to the hotel and chilled out before deciding to have an early dinner (there is a 2 1/4 hour time difference between here and Tibet) and headed out for an Indian – so nice to eat something with flavour and even had a glass of vino to cap off the end of another leg of our trip.