Pokhara

Whenever people strike up conversations with me in Nepal, they pretty much ask three questions, always in the same order: 1) What is your name? 2) Where are you from? 3) Have you visited Pokhara yet? Pokhara is like Nepal's version of a lakeside resort-type city. They don't have much clean water here, so a big lake like Phewa Tal is pretty exciting. It's the one thing I missed out on the last time I was here, so I was super happy to finally make it this time around.

After a long and somewhat uncomfortable bus ride (wherein "air conditioning" apparently means "a few electric fans"), Christina and I arrived at our lovely hotel and set off for the lake. We rented an extremely heavy and difficult to paddle wooden canoe and tooled around the lake, visiting the island temple and taking in the beautiful scenery and fresh air, which I had sorely missed after two straight months in Kathmandu.

Phewa Tal, so green, leading up to beautiful green hills

The next day was pretty busy, and started off with setting out for paragliding. I've wanted to do this forever, but in all the excitement forgot to take gravol beforehand. Damns. So we drove up a huge hill, hiked to a cliff drop-off and I was strapped to my Macedonian guide and a parachute. The instructions consisted of, "ok, when I say run, run." I'm like, "...off the cliff?" I cannot even express to you how high this cliff was dudes. But I was surrounded by super buff and hardcore international paragliders, and my desire to not look stupid outweighed my desire to, y'know, live. Luckily the parachute started lifting us before my feet reached the edge of the cliff.

Me and my guide, coming in for a landing.

So it was super cool and kinda like being a bird. You can see the whole valley, and the lake, and it was incredibly pretty. However, to stay aloft, we had to circle over a thermal air pocket. And after half an hour of thermal circling, I was really regretting not taking that gravol. I asked if we could go straight for awhile, and the short answer was no. He asked me if I wanted to land and I was like "yes, please!" as I tried mightily not to vomit from hundreds of feet in the air over rice fields.

My knees, waaaaaay above forest and farms

The rest of the afternoon was spent on a tour of Pokhara. We saw a temple, the river, a gorge, a dam, some waterfalls, some medieval houses, and an underground cave with a temple inside. This tour usually takes three to four hours. Our guide took us through it all in just under two. I think he was in a hurry to get home and enjoy the Dassain festival. Seriously, he didn't even stop the car for the medieval houses. It was like "look to your left. Onwards!" Still pretty cool stuff though.

My favourite part: the cool underground cave, very
Indiana Jones-y

Later, because the town was so empty for Dassain, we had a huge bar to ourselves to have some drinks and play pool. It was probably a good thing, since we were so bad at pool that one game took us over an hour to play. Up at the crack of dawn the next morning so that Christina could leave for a trekking trip and I could catch the bus back to Kathmandu, and thus ended our whirlwind trip to Pokhara. All in all very satisfying and now I can finally say that I've been there to all the curious Nepalis who ask.