Encounters

I have met a beautiful Italian lady who has been volunteering in Nepal for a month. We met on the roof-top garden of a restaurant at breakfast. Our plans for the day were not overlapping, but we decided to meet again for dinner and go visit Bhaktapur today.

My plan was to go look for the trekking agency and arrange all that. Easier said than done. One thing that can be extremely frustrating for a tourist is looking for an address, as addresses don't seem to have a street number.

So I spent more than a couple of hours running up and down one of the major traffic roads in the city looking for the Sherpa Cooperative. Nobody knows anything about it Out of the couple dozen people I asked only 2 people could give me some directions. Of course they were pointing in different directions and did not work. Also nobody answered the phone. It's history, probably.

Tired and frustrated, with some difficulty breathing from the terrible pollution, I returned to the familiar area of the city and started my search for the second agency that was recommended to me. Not much luck either, but at least someone answered the phone and, eventually, Arjun came and picked me up from the store where I was.

It seems that many companies are fairly volatile, they change addresses or disappear altogether.

I spent a couple of hours in the agency to discuss details with Arjun, the company owner, and eventually left with a bunch of information. A little more expensive than I thought or expected - more expensive than similar services offered by other agencies - but highly recommended. So I had to think about it.

Ater spending most of the day on these searches plus an unsuccessful attempt to go take some photos (raining again) I met again Yvonne at 7:30pm and we went for dinner.
This proved to be another example of "ghost places". The restaurant we've been looking for, mentioned in her Routard guidebook, does not exist any more. We asked and asked and looked around and there was none.
Eventually we went to a restaurant praised as a popular meeting place for (homesick?) tourists. Good to know - there are no homesick tourists! We were the only customers.

We enjoyed the traditional Nepalese dhalbaat (main ingredients: lentils and rice plus some other vegetables), had a very nice conversation and decided to meet in the morning at 9:30am to go to Bhaktapur.