Kathman-don't

Because our diet for the last few weeks had consisted mainly of supernoodles, we spent our first few days in Kathmandu doing nothing but eating at all of the different restaurants around town. However, we soon realised that the good food was about the only thing we did like about Kathmandu. The narrow streets are riddled with potholes filled with muddy water from the constant rain, and are completely jammed with rickshaws, scooters, and the odd out-of-place looking 4WD, all spewing out noxious fumes and constantly honking their unnecessarily-loud horns. There are no pavements so pedestrians run the constant risk of being mown down by one of them. On top of this we were constantly hassled by a seemingly endless succession of rickshaw drivers, tiger balm salesmen, freelance trekking guides looking for someone stupid enough to go trekking in the monsoon, and really annoying guys who come up and play their silly little violins in your face.

We had to wait around for a week for our Indian visas to be processed so we decided to escape Kathmandu and go to the Royal Chitwan National park for a few days. This turned out to be a very good plan. We saw twin baby elephants at the Elephant Breeding Centre, and went on an elephant ride into the park where we saw deer, a peacock, a python, and two endangered one-horned rhinos. However, our favourite bit was when our elephant-driver accidentally dropped his umbrella on the floor and the elephant picked it up with her trunk and passed it back up to him. We also helped to give the elephants a bath in the river although actually they ended up giving us a (much needed) bath instead.

After having to endure a couple more days in Kathmandu because our Indian visas took longer than expected, we finally headed to the Indian border, stopping on the way at Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha. The bus company in Kathmandu had 'forgotten' to tell us that our bus actually terminated in a town about an hour from Lumbini and we would have to get a local bus the rest of the way, but we didn't mind because people are allowed to sit on the roof of local buses and we sat up there chatting with a couple of local college students – in Nepal, the cool kids sit on the top of the bus! Lumbini has become an international Buddhist centre and there are temples built by different Buddhist countries throughout the world, with the Nepali temple marking the exact spot where the Buddha was said to have been born.