Photos of our Fabulous Adventure
Today is a long drive so we have arranged to leave Kathmandu at 8am. All of us seem to be awake early so it’s good to get an early start.
We get away on time and thankfully the traffic is reasonable until we reach a point where one of the connecting streets lead to the highway to India. Here there is a huge traffic snarl and we literally stand still for about 20 minutes. The group entertain themselves watching a several workers discuss heaven knows what regarding one of their power poles.
Finally we make our way down from 1400m to about 700m on the ‘highway’ – a two-lane narrow winding road full of blind corners, and hair raising drops over the edge to the valley thousands of feet below. In these conditions it only makes sense that you would want to pass along any one of these corners and play chicken with on coming traffic! Not me or anyone in our van, however the whole Nepali population take this in stride and make some very scary death defying moves the entire way to the turn off for Bandipur. Poor Prem, as he was expertly manoeuvring the van through this nightmare traffic, we were taking in huge breaths and exclaiming all sorts of phrases watching many a close call. It was better than a movie!
We made a couple of refreshment stops and by 1:00pm we turned off the ‘highway’ to Bandipur. OMG, most of us had our eyes closed or averted to the floor of the van – the scenery was spectacular but the extremely narrow road was frighteningly close to one edge or the other. Amongst nervous laughter from all of us we arrived at the tippy top and the village of Bandipur, a quaint historical Newari village.
The village is pedestrian only and is absolutely gorgeous. We are staying the the Bandipur Kaushi Inn which opened about a year and half ago. It is a fabulous little Inn, small, quaint, clean with incredible views. Within minutes of checking in, we go to Hills Heaven restaurant for lunch. We all choose momos, pakoras and lemon tea. A light snack as we will be having dinner at 7:30pm and it is already 3:00.
After lunch a few of the group head off to explore the shops. Bikesh & Prem arrive and the rest of us walk over to a viewpoint for a view of the valley. Wow, it is just so beautiful here!
Back to the hotel we relax before dinner. Dinner was a set Nepali meal which was very good, and as soon as we were finished we all headed to our rooms. I was sleeping by 9:30!