I Heart EG

Thought for the day: I Heart NY (and it's derivatives - of which I heart Beijing is obviously the best) and Che Guevara's face are probably the two most common t-shirts on the planet. Weird how they're just about opposites.

Two Cuddly Yetis and some Moisturiser, please

So, back from The Mystic Mountains Where People Find Themselves (TM) and what did we learn?

1. I didn't find myself. No surprise there as I'm not a hippy (they kind of expect all westerners that visit Nepal to be hippies - this was unfortunate as I had to beat a Buddhist to death with his flipflops to prove my punk credentials).

2. If needs must I can go without meat or alcohol for a week.

3. If I do go without meat for a week I can find places that will cook me steak for breakfast, even when cows are sacred.

4. If you're going to do eight days of trekking, don't do ten-hour days.

5. When you're flying economy Qatar Airways aren't the best airline in the world. They're not even the best airline beginning with Q. If you're going to do long, multi-lingual announcements, pause the in-flight entertainment - surely that's a no-brainer.

6. There's a gaping, yeti-shaped hole in the Kathmandu souvenir industry. I'm not a hippy. I don't want a tie-dyed, hemp kurta or a batik baby-sling. Get me a cuddly yak. Or a stuffed red panda.

And most importantly of all:

7. If you're going up a snowy mountain, wear suncream. No

excuses. None, not ever. Wear suncream. If it's snowing when you leave; wear suncream. If it's minus ten with windchill; wear suncream. If you're walking through a cloud which reduces visibility to less than five metres; wear suncream. Just do it kids, having a face that things fall off if you smile isn't big or clever. Wear it.

Happy New Year

It's Divali here in Kathmandu and everyone's gone new year crazy. Last night was the Festival of Light so everywhere had an offering to the Goddess of Wealth outside. Paintfoodandfire-tastic. Today was New Year's Day itself. We missed the main cow worshipping but saw the precession. That's precession, not carnival - it was more like the gang meet at the start of The Warriors.

The journey back to Kathmandu semed a lot tamer than the journey out. The girl next to me was sick on hour three of ten, which added a certain je ne sais quoi to the overall bouquet of the bus. Also I found out that falling down a cliff during a toilet stop is comedy gold in any language.

Facial update: I picked all my crone skin off during the bus journey so my face is all pink again. All except my lips which are still scaly - my mouth was stuck together when I woke up this morning. I reckon my face is due another peel, which should give me something to do on tomorrow's flight - the person next to me is on for a treat.

Just walking...

So that's the trekking bit done. Eight days from 2000m up to 5000, then back down again. Now I'm aware that writing about eight days where all I've done is walk could easily slip into the realms of uninteresting. I mean if you wanted to hear about a big fat walk you'd watch Lord of the Rings, and we both know you're not going to do that.

Anyway, eight days of trekking has just about broken me. My knees are shot, I don't seem to have full movement in my left ankle and I'm as sunburnt as I've ever been. Now that probably conjures up an image of day-glo pink skin that hurts if you breathe on it. Well that's how sunburnt my arms are. My face is a whole world more burnt than that. It started doing leaking. Which, in my limited experience of faces, isn't something they should be doing. I spent the first hour of yesterday picking crispy, yellow faceleak out of my beard. Even by my low standards of prettiness I looked positively leprous.

The burns evolved a bit since then though. I've now got "crone skin", somewhere between a sultana that you've found behind a cupboard and an over barbecued sausage. Definitely a healthy look for a ginger.

We've had a guide for the last week, Syangbo, he's come out with some great nuggets of wisdom - "why do you want to go to a base camp? That's rubbish. The clue's in the name. Base. It means bottom. Why would you walk to the bottom of something?" (fyi, that was the Learing Base Camp, he was way more scathing about Everest - "more of a queue than a trek"). Syangbo's been out to break us since we made him walk faster than he'd intended on the first couple of days. He ditched the itinerary and has been putting us through ten hours days so that we could see a glacier, climb a mountain and tease the Tibetan border guards.

We've also had a porter, Ultimate Mo, who's hardcore as. The first day he took our ergonomic backpacks, tied them together then tied them both to his head with a bit of sack. That's the way he rolls. I appreciate that having a porter makes me softcore, but I have had clean pants everyday.

Yak for Good

I'm in the mountains. In a tiny, tiny place that you'd struggle to call a hamlet. Four internet cafes. Is that progress? I'm not too sure.

We left Kathmandu yesterday, bumped our way north up a road paralysed by monsoon rock slides and passed out as we got here - oblivious to the fact that we could see Tibet from our room.

Started doing that walky stuff this morning, just getting into the swing of it but it seems to be shaking out all of yesterday's crampedness.

Oh, and I saw a man punch a donkey.

Eggy Style

Three things I've seen today which I wasn't expecting:

1. A monkey riding a goat
2. A dude dressed as a monkey god kicking a rat
3. Someone setting light to a human corpse.

You don't get that in Chelmsford, I tell you.

Kathmandu is ace. It hit just about every preconceived idea of it that I had. Monkeys. Flags. Temples. narrow windy streets. Children imprisoned as goddesses. Holy cows eating out of bins. "Eggy style?" as a legitimate question. Full on weird travelling.

Off into the mountains tomorrow, so maybe catch you in a week or so...

Sporadic blogging

Well, gonna do a soupcon of travelling so figured I'd lube up this blog in preparation.

I see my old travellercliche blog is still getting a heap of hits - to be fair it's mainly the last page where I listed everything I did (and by default, everything that everyone that travels does - that was the aim of the year and particularly the blog after all - so some of that's going to be googled; incidentally the last google hit that led to the blog was pirates and jesuits, which is a flavour of crisps which never caught on).

So, yeah, off to Kathmandu for a couple of weeks. Not convinced I'll be getting a great deal of internet access up in them there hills, so I'm not promising any regular postings, but if I get a few minutes online I'll tell you a tale or two.

Keep it gangsta.