Leaving on a Jet Plane

Well I've learned my lesson about waiting too long to blog. It seems like so much to describe in just one post, so I'll start with the trip over here and see how far we get.

Turns out sleep doesn't come easily for this girl on planes. The flight from Atlanta to Seoul was incredible, 4-seater row just to ourselves, lots of leg room, plenty of areas on the plane to stretch. My food, however, was horrible. I decided to request kosher food for the trip. Why would I do this? I mean really though, why? I thought to myself, "Hmm, if they have to prepare this a special way I bet it tastes great!" It doesn't taste great. Frozen pickled veggies, some kind of olivey loafy pate thing, jelly rolls. It was not the best. Luckily, Abbey shared her grapes with me.

The airport in Seoul is absolutely incredible. They had sleeper sofas upstairs, massage rooms, free showers that were surprisingly nice and clean, and tons of things to do. Unfortunately, we only had a few hours to spend in this place. We hopped a six hour flight over to Bangkok for our next layover of ten hours. This airport is not quite so easy to sleep in, but after a sleepless ten hours and some wonderful thai food, we boarded our last flight to Kathmandu.

After squeaking by the menacing customs officers (two women who just waved us through impatiently when we tried to show them our customs forms), we walked into the dusty heat to find a man waiting with our names on a piece of white paper. He gave us necklaces made of beautiful flowers and went to negotiate a taxi ride to the bus stop. As we waited, I was somehow conned out of ten dollars. As someone who prides herself on streetsmarts while traveling, my pride took a much bigger hit than my wallet.

The "bus stop" turned out to be a gravel pit on the side of the road in dusty Kathmandu. And when I say dusty, I mean dusty in the most foul sense of the word. We were ushered onto a 15 passenger van and squeezed into the last row with a man and his young son. "Tight squeeze," I thought to myself. Ha. Over the course of the next twenty minutes we managed to squish another woman and her toddler into our seat, while five other passengers stuffed themselves into the other rows. We settled into our six hour bus ride with positive attitudes fully intact. For about an hour. After stagnant heat, an hour and a half stopped on the side of a mountain because of a tipped truck, and our first encounter with the infamous Nepali "toilet" we finally found ourselves at the last bus stop in Pokhara. A jovial man hopped onto the bus and rescued us from the backseat as he introduced himself as Nabaraj and loaded our packs into a car bound for his family's home. Nabaraj and his wife Shailee would be our family for the next four weeks, and we settled into their modest home exhausted and grateful to be in our own beds.