Ready for the next stage

So my ankle is improving fairly well. It still hurts quite a bit, but I think what was more troublesome were my moods, but let's change that. This last week I have been my own worst enemy, so let's hope that I can get on the improve. No, let's not hope. I just will.

We went to Pokhara for a couple of days. It would have been great to stay there longer, or to continue on to other similar towns. We got to see the Himalayas on the flight over. That was a bit surreal of an experience, you're looking at the clouds, looking at the clouds, up pop some mountains. Righto...

Pokhara is a very nice place and apparently in good weather you can see the mountains from where we were staying. We stayed in a really nice place, although it was up on the fifth floor which was a little bit of a struggle, but most of the population of the places we have been have a much bigger struggle every day.

This is a picture looking town at the township of Pokhara, from the World Peace Stupa. We took a boat ride and then walked up to the temple. It was great there, the main part of the "peace" was the lack of people there, and the beautiful walk to get to the top.

On the way down, we took the other side of the mountain, which was a lot longer. We encountered some kids coming home from school and I think there was a bit of fun on each side, talking to each other and they would, particularly one girl, dance on the road behind us. After a while we came to a stream which crossed the road, and all the kids ran and took a jump over the stream, and this is something that I always like to do and doesn't give me any concerns, and even the dear wife was over on the other side of the stream, however, I was not planning on a second busted ankle, so I took another way, hopping over some stones a little way upstream.

We stopped in at a Tibetan refugee village on the way back down and that previously mentioned dear wife bought a bunch of gifts. We also stopped in at a waterfall. The movement of water is a very interesting process, not just in waves, but downstream in a river. Water can harness a lot of power. The falls were not particularly spectacular, but had a torrent of water flowing over them. On different maps there seems to be conjecture over whether the falls are Devi's Falls or Davis Falls. Who knows really?

Pokhara is the start for many treks, but all we could do was just a bit of short walking. The road back into town was more like those suburbs in the, I guess you would call it, mid west of Sydney eg Yagoona, just not really interesting at all, especially in comparison to the mountains and the lake and everything else.

There was a lot of cloud cover this morning, the World Peace Stupa was a long way out of view, and this meant the mountains were out of view of the pilots, so we had a bit of delay at the airport. The key issue with the airport was that we didn't withdraw any money before arriving, so we were out of cash, and stuck. On arrival at the Kathmandu airport I was far from surprised that the ATM there showed a display "out of service".

Tonight we are actually staying in our first Hostelling International hostel, well we did stay in the Gold Coast YHA, but is that section really part of the trip? The Kathmandu Youth Hostel is nice enough, but like all overseas HI's I have stayed in, just has this really boring vibe.

We got to catch up with our friends Suvecha and Manos again which was very nice, and we had a very nice lunch just down the road. After paying the bill, I realised they had only charged us for one beer instead of two. I was in no hurry to make them fix this one up, maybe things are turning my way.....

Tomorrow we have a fairly early start, and then almost the whole day will be spent in transit, but by the end of the journey we will be saying Sawatdee Kraup to Bangkok.

Melaka and on to Singapore

We spent the last couple of days in Melaka, formerly the hub of everything on the Malay peninsula (it's not really at that level any more, but it is a really interesting place). I'm not using my computer so I won't bother we any pictures today.

Anyhow, we got the bus down to Melaka, I was expecting it to take longer, but it was pretty smooth getting to Melaka Sentral, from there it was on to an old old old bus packed to full house, we didn't really know where we were going, something about Ocean, I'd only written down some vague notes. We ended up in the square of town and Francisca's bag had one of the handles fall off and we just decided to get a taxi.

He took us around the block and charged us 15x the amount that the bus was (we could have walked in about 5 mins, or caught the taxi from Sentral for the same price. What we didn't do though was ask for the price before getting in (rookie error), so when I heard the locks go down, I knew we were in his power.

Up the stairs to Ringo's Foyer Guest House, where we meet Howard, what a character. A good bloke to run a hostel, getting everyone together, and Jonathan is there too. We go for some lunch and then we drink some beers and play this game called Carrom. I'll tell more about that later...it's an Indian game, with elements of pool, air hockey and chess. Howard gets everyone together from the hostel and we all go for dinner in a satay place. That's the way to create a good vibe, get everyone together, knowing each other and having a good time.

Walked around quite a lot yesterday. By the end of the day we were retracing our steps, so two solid days was probably enough, although I was keen to check out the Muesum in the Statdyhus (Ethnography, History and Literature), Melaka in itself is a museum (it is a UNESCO listed site after all), but I am definitely glad to have gone there, somewhere I didn't really know anything about before this trip, but now I would like to learn a lot more, particularly about the days of the rule of the Sultan.

Now we are down in Singapore, we got another bus today, most of our other mates from the hostel headed up to KL, but we had already been there, most of them had come up from Singapore. The hostel here, old mate is sure no Howard. Quite the opposite as a matter of fact...

We're going to have another night here, then we'll head back into KL and move on from there to India, which is the next phase of the trip. We've already been going for almost a week, it's really only just begun but feels like we've been a while on the road.

Speaking of On The Road, I just finished The Portable Jack Kerouac. Good read, I bought that in San Francisco last year. Has taken me a while to get stuck right into it. All done now. I wouldn't mind finding some kind of (light) book on the history of the Melaka area or something along those lines...