Pokhara

Our first stop was a tourist haven with a big lake. We ate and slept like kings thanks to all the tourist stuff. Everything was so well run. The first day we hired a little boat and rowed out into the middle of the lake. From there we could see the mountain that looks like a fish, except it wasn't behaving very much like a fish because we were at the wrong angle. We ended up at a little temple on an island where they praised pigeons, being a sign of peace. They would pick up the pigeons and hold them to their heads while doing a ritual. The pigeons had no idea what was going on.

We also went paragliding. That was something else. Apparently the paragliding in Nepal is the best in the world because the rice fields hold so much moisture that the updrafts are really powerful and you can get really high. Anyway, flying is quite an experience. It wouldn't have worked to see the view of the lake any other way than by flying over it. We got really quite high at one point, higher than the hill tops, and we were flying around with about 10 other paragliders, one of which was the world altitude record holder. He was doing something called parahawking which was basically arial falconry. There was also another bird, which I don't think was attached to a paraglider, about 1.3 m across, flying about with us. So we were sharing the sky with this huge raptor.
The falcon's name was Kevin, and from time to time they enjoyed attaching a camera to its head. If your intersted, look up Kev cam on youtube.

In the evening we went to a bar which had a pet rat which crawled about the tables. It turns out Nepalis really like their dancing.

On the bus away from Pokhara I started to get a little uneasy, because its clear there are about three different places, and the roads that conntect them which are the only places tourists can go. It was a bit like being stuck in a tube. You could only see the country from inside the tube and it felt like there was a country going on outside of it but we were just floating along detached from it. It felt a bit artificial and unsettling and I really wanted to get on a cheap local bus and head somewhere random as soon as we got to Kathmandu.