Kathmandu - 12th May - flying to Lhasa

All set and go for Kailash.. Though my visa & passport to be collected from Chineese ambessay.  All packed and ready had good breakfast and joined the group Steve, Kay, Jenny & Suneeta. I am the youngest in the group.

As I am waiting for visa documents ., adventure started already with only 2hrs left for the takeoff, i have no idea whether that is sufficient enough .. But the tour guy seems pretty relaxed and says don't worry and I started blogging ..

Finally got all the documents around 10:30am and checked in however all flights delayed due to storm whether. So 3 more hours of waiting then.

Kathmandu - Day3 - City walk

Started my day with a walk around KanthiPath, SAARC secretariat and back to Hotel for breakfast. After a heavy breakfast, I started walking towards Katmandu Mall going through the interior, busy with business, busting roads of Kathmandu.





Then visited this Ratna park which is next to Kathmandu bus station paying 25 NPR. It is not that great but decent enough for a walk.






Then went to Kathmandu city mall.. it is more like old Ameerpet / Abids malls in Hyderabad India. view of Singh Durbar from there is very good.


Cricket is all over


Street market


Then I was returning to Hotel, had lunch on the way.

I bought few more things for Kailash trek.. and met my group in hotel.. Steve from UK joined me for Dinner.. this guy is very interesting and he has been living last 20 days in Nepal and took me to this nice restaurant.

       

Kathmandu - Day2 PashupathiNath

Tuesday I wanted to visit Holy Pashupathi Nath and a bit of walk in Kathmandu Darbar Square. Also I had to sort out my payment to tour agent as I landed in Nepal with only INR 5500 at hand. So one of my friend in London runs Glass business in Kathmandu and luckily he was visiting his office here and I asked him to arrange the cash so I don't want to go around with loads of cash.

Had a very good king size breakfast (poridge, baked beans, toast, fruit salad & a tea). Then started walking towards Darbar square..
The first picture from my DSLR on how the beauty of a chowk (one of town center) is destroyed by the number of cables.


Every street has loads of road side mini temples.. Mostly Shiva.. but there are Ganapathy, Srikrishna & other temples as well.


Parrots are quite common and feeding them too .. especially tourists..

 

Lord Shiva temple in one chowk

One of the street view


This Buddhist temple was nice ..

Then I went to Darbar square area.. most of its beauty is destroyed by last year earth quake. The restoration work is underway but it is very sluggish.

Durbar Square has magnificent chowks but 50% of them are closed for visitors as they need renovation work to be done and unsafe to allow visitors.

It also has Kalabhairav template, Hanuman Dhoka...   

Sanskrit University of Nepal


Main chowk of Durbar


Then went to New Baneswar as my friend arranged cash for me to pickup and handover to Trip organizer. Good I had nice walking tour in the morning as most of the noon was raining.. I gave the money to organizer and he took me to a nice restaurant for a lunch..  I ordered for Manbhog thali and it was heavy then he dropped me at Holy Pasupathi Nath temple.

Holy PasupathiNath

I have walked towards the temple from east side .. the other side of bagmathi river. So my first view was cremation on the banks of Bagmathi. Then I walked across the bridge towards template entrance. I was already prepared by friend that It is better if I don't carry any bag as there are lots of monkeys living in the temple. Also no leather items & camera are allowed..

West facing temple is dominated by a huge bull (Nandi) facing east and the Holy shrine. The specialty of this temple is Pancha Mukha PasupathiNath... Facing all four directions and upwards. As it is Nepalis biggest temple and they couldn't afford to go to India for chardham.. they have chardham inside this temple. Along with others like Sri Krishna, Ganesh, Hanuman & Satyanarayan swamy.
I had spent about 3 and half hours in the temple just looking at various sculptures. Around 7pm there was Bagmathi Aarthi (like Ganga Aarthi) which was nice hour long process and also darshan of Pasupathi Nath from 4 sides.

Then I returned to Hotel and enjoyed my Tomato soup and green salad freshly prepared by Shambhu and followed by Thulasi tea,  

Nepal - Kathmandu - First look

This is my first visit to Nepal and first time I thought I shouldn't have given up my Indian passport. Not because I had to pay $40 visa fee ;) but I thought I could miss visa queuing. However when I walked into immigration the process was damn quick. A kiosk will help you to key-in your basic details and a picture and will issue a ticket, then in the next counter pay the visa fee using the ticket, move to immigration officer to stamp your visa and that's it.. Go collect bags and exit. Everything took about 15 mins. Flight landed around 2pm and I checked into hotel by 3:30pm which is 5km away from airport, so you can imagine how quick and smooth everything was. My first look of Kathmandu, I felt Delhi would have been like that 30yrs ago and any south city 20 years ago as everything looked like India.

My hotel (Amaryllis) is decent enough, located in Tourist location of Kathmandu called "Thamel" which is reasonably cleaner than other parts of Kathmandu. I had too much food in the flight so soon after I checked in I decided to take a bit of rest and then walk around Thamel to explore myself. Some how I couldn't catch sleep and then I decided to walk around at about 6pm. I bought my local mobile sim with the help of hotel boy "Dinesh" and then started walking around Thamel.. 

Thamel is mainly tourist focused, full of shops with souvenirs, dance bars, trekking companies & trekking accessories etc. It was fun walking around and I also wanted to walk little bit more so I ventured into bit of Kathmandu local areas. I was initially surprised why people are wearing nose mask and selling them all over as I don't see the amount traffic anyway near to Indian cities. But I soon realized that the air is filled with so much dust due to bad roads after I ventured in to neighboring areas. I started finding lot of temples of different sizes all along.. every one with Tilak on forehead. No wonders why it is called only Hindu kingdom in the world. Its not fair to not mention the girls/ladies are beautiful.  

I returned to hotel by 8;30pm and decided to have a light dinner with soup and fresh salad. ""Shambhu" the hotel restaurant guy served me yummy salad with hot-sour soup.

Over all I liked Kathmandu and there is more to explore...  

Nepal - Tibet - Holy Kailash

Dear fellas
I haven't been blogging for very long time and I haven't really had time for this sort of thing for few years. I have decided to walk a long distance in a challenging terrain and choose Holy Kailash for that. Flying tomorrow (9th May) 8am from Bangalore ==> Mumbai ==> Kathmandu

Wish I could catch up a local life in Kathmandu on 10th May and then join a tour group on 11th May.

Keep checking for more updates.

Cycling Adventure for Manavata Charity

I haven’t been blogging for quite some time (3 years.. isn’t really long to say quietly J), anyway.. I don’t have any excuses… I should accept there wasn’t much to write… may be I was busy… OK.. I will stop these excuses here. This time I am goanna write about our recent adventure for Manavata charity.

A long due fundraising “cycling for charity” finally planned on 7^th & 8^th of August to help raise funds for Manavata. I have been working with Manavata for last 4 years as I like its strong fundamentals of service and a passionate approach to “3H [Healthy, Happy & Harmonious] World”.

6^th August evening, Finally 5 of us [Srini Alluri (Most experienced cyclist), Rams aka Ramappa (fairly frequent cyclist), Naveen Kenche, Sathya Murty & Myself] from Bristol planned to cycle along the Kennet Avon canal route gathered at our house 6 OG @Bradley Stoke. Mom started making Raagi dosa (Our native special) to supplement extra calories for next day. After enjoying the special dinner, had a brief chat on the route plan, back pack kit etc and planned to start @home by 5:45am next day.

7^th The August, most awaiting & challenging day in our journey for a cause started at 4:30am. As usual I am second to get ready after Srini and mean while my brother Pavan woke up and packed lunch for both myself & Srini. We were supposed to take a train @6:30am from Bristol to Reading. Tension mounted @5:30am when we couldn’t find our train tickets but finally @6am, we manage to find them zipped safely in Srini’s bag and rushed to get our train. All managed to board except me due to last minute chases… I took the next train @7am. Boring great western service to London Paddington didn’t serve any hot food… I had to manage with some tea & biscuits. As I reached Reading @8am & met another volunteer Sudha from London and cycled together to a place (Kennet Walk) where we planned to start our journey.

All volunteers busy doing some decorations to banners and prepping their bikes @Sriram Mahabhashyam’s home near Kennet walk. Soon after a quick break fast (though I had a bit heavy as usualJ), we pedalled to begin our first of our four leg journey ie Reading to Kintbury via Newbury town. The final count was 12 [5 people from Bristol, 5 people from Reading(Sriram, Chaithanya, Prem, Vish &Prasad) & 2 from London (Kalai & Sudha)]. It was pleasant morning, Kennet canal was gorgeous with continuous locks, funny watching patiently sitting fishing lovers and also the cycle path was traffic free, so peaceful. We were thoroughly enjoying the beauty of canal, admiring the yester years engineering intelligence in building those locks and most importantly for making them travel friendly for boats. As we started to cross small towns along the canal, it looked like a never ending Amazon… people started taking frequent breaks that reduced our mileage. After pedalling 20 miles, my new bike gave some problems with handle screws, it was not fully stress tested as it is new J My pace came down… I reached 30 minutes late to Newbury by that time others completed their lunch. Rams was helping me to push my faulty bike and it was almost 3pm, we reached Newbury. I managed to fix the problem with help of Srini & Naveen. After a break for lunch we started to pedal towards Devizes. We knew the path from Kintbury to Devizes is tuff one, But in an hour’s time we realised that it is tougher than we thought. All water bottles dried up but hills on the route didn’t melt. Continuous up-hills & down-hills showed no pity towards us and were actually testing our mission for the cause. As we started crossing with courage, some volunteers who were not prepared for such a rough challenge started dropping (Sathya Murthy dropped @Hungerford, Sudha was forced to drop @Bedwyn, Prasad & Vish also dropped @Bedwyn) and remaining 8 of us headed to Pewsey. Continuous up-hills were deceiving us mentally and then we heard the news that Prem missed from the team and diverted in wrong way. Srini took the responsibility to bring him back and we all headed to Pewsey. Its all most 8pm and we couldn’t reach the target (Devizes) where we booked camping site as planned and has to find some other alternatives. Meanwhile Prem was not feeling good to explore and catch the right path and Srini also couldn’t locate him. Dusk in the mid of a forest and missing one of our mate, we decided to go for a help from our exceptional support (Ram Yeggoni & Babji Vundavalli). Ram started in car from Reading to rescue Prem and Babji was checking near by accommodations. The place where we stopped is a small village called Wootten Rivers of Marlborough and there was one B&B (Royal Oak) but we didn’t have any spaces left to stay over night. Fortunately owner of B&B is a gentleman, offered to help by keeping our bikes in his garage and booking a taxi for nearest town where we may find some place to stay but we were actually not looking to take rest until we find Prem. With all those tensed moments, time has just passed and Ram rescued Prem and reached Wootten Rivers by 11pm. At 11:45pm, B &B owner fortunately offered his garden to do camping, that moment he was more than a god for us. I just remembered, Srini words “At difficult times on service mission, Almighty will take care of us with un-expected help”. Another surprising thing was, none of us knew / had an experience of camping before but we manage to build the tents in 30 minutes and that proved our team work at such odd hours.

8^th August, I woke up with Naveen’s words “guys get ready and let’s churn our stuff and clear the garden”. It was 6am in the morning, I had a sound sleep after a stressful journey. Srini was ready by that time and asking people to get ready for another big day to go. To be frank, before sleeping last night I wasn’t expecting to cycle the next day with such stressful cycling on day one. But when we started from Wootten Rivers and headed Pewsey, I remembered my promise & cause for cycling mission, decided to go on for another day. After a quick bite in a small shop @ Pewsey, Kalai & Chaithanya dropped at Pewsay station and headed back to reading by train. Ram & Prem headed back to Reading by car. Now its 5 of us (Sriram, Srini, Naveen, Rams & Myself) left on the mission. It was 9am, with deceiving up-hills experience, we decided to cycle along the canal path though the road is not cycle friendly. We started feeling better riding along the canal but due to rough surface we also started feeling that someone continuously kicking us in the back. By 11:30am, as we were coming close to Devizes we found the journey along the rough surface unbearable. Though I was insisting to ride along the canal, Naveen, Sriram, Srini were enquiring for alternative road path. We got to know that the canal path becomes better after Devizes. We reached beautiful Devizes locks and admired beauty of sequential locks and their storage ponds. The journey was smoother again with eye catching view of locks and started realising the best part of our journey. I would advice people to visit these locks & either walk / cycle along the Devizes locks.

We then stopped on the way at one of the rotating bridges, had a quick bite (bread with honey) served by Srini. On the way, quick Lucozade tablets (Glucose) were very useful. (Srini was not happy to know that we were using them, but we were kind of addicted to it when we were dried out of water). It was 13:10pm, we reached Bradford on Avon, a beautiful village and starting point for Avon river (River joining Bristol). Beautiful bridges here with two canals either side was eye catching and another beautiful place I suggest people to go again is Avon Cliff with huge country side landscapes and upper canal & lower canal walking paths. It was 14hrs, Bath cathedral tower & beautiful Bath-spa city view welcomed us to Bath-spa.

We reached Bath city centre by 14:20, took few snaps on accomplishing 85miles journey and gave send off to Naveen. Naveen came to Bristol earlier to welcome us. Though we were feeling thirsty, we didn’t stop again and started pedalling to Bristol along the beautiful railway path. After few miles of journey myself & Sriram wanted to have a cup of tea then Srini suggested to have some hot soup. We then went to a restaurant @Saltford and ordered four soups and a pot of tea. As we didn’t have any hot food for 2 days, with hot soup and a pot of tea we felt refreshed and energised. Myself & Srini have an experience in Bristol-Bath railway path (we did it last year), so confidence and feeling of coming home made us to pedal with good pace. With in 2 hours including 20min brake, we reached Bristol Staple hill where we have to exit railway path and take traffic road to Bradley stoke. As we were pedalling in pace, we happen to miss one road and pedalled to winterbourne. A quick call to Naveen to get us into alternative path seemed like SatNav on callJ. My last minute cycling with a feeling of an achievement coupled with proud can’t be explained in words. As we entered Orchard gate, Naveen welcomed us with all other fellow mates & also covered us in photo shoot. Though we struggled Saturday, end of Sunday it was a proud achievement for all the participants and the supporters who helped to raise funds of more than 2000GBP for Manavata (www.manavata.org).

For pamphlet - http://charityathome.org/images/docs/manavata_ecofriendlylifetips_1.1.pdf

More pics - http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/Manavata/GreenYourRoutine_ReadingToBristolCycling#

Cycle path - http://www.sustrans.org.uk/assets/files/leaflets/KAcycleguide.pdf

Lokaa Samastha Sukhinobhavanthu.. Sarvejana Sukhinobhavanthu… God Bless All.

Ultimate Adventure

Dai.. mahesh 5:50 da.. a sleepy voice from Ayyathora [Srini] wake me up. Though i was reluctant to wake up early on Saturday, A joy of adventure sports some how pulled me out of cozy bed. After a refresh, as usual went into kitchen to grab my quick break-fast [bread, mayonnaise with carrot]. Planned to start at 6:30 am, Sri called at 6:40 saying Ramesh still loading Renault Scenic with food & stuff, I took a long breath.. pulled an other piece of bread comfortably. Finally started our journey at 7:15am with Renault Scenic with Ramesh driving and Thanigai navigating at front and Srini, Sri & Ram in the middle & me at the back seat :(
Ramesh wanted to show his driving skills with 90MPH burning the roads and we were afraid of it at the same time. After passing through Cardiff, on way to Brecon we missed our way and Sri back in navigation took us to the place in good time though we made of couple of extra rounds in the last minutes. It was Anna, waiting for us at Absolute Adventures called up to give us some directions and finally Royal mail staff showed us the Absolute place.After a short stint at AA [Absolute Adventures], we headed towards Brecon for Canoeing. It was cool thing, we had fun in chasing one another and wasn't an adventurous as expected. Back to AA at 1:30pm, had a quick lunch, a mix of delicious Puliodarai with Khaju and some juices. We again raced towards Swansea to take up the next one. This time we didn't took much time to reach Gower beach.. as we reached Gower, guide was waiting for us also there was a big gang and seem to be south Indians.. as we came closer.. we realised they are telugu.. we were happy we got some to take our pictures when we step in to water :) as every one deliberately wanted to get captured those adventurous feats. Surfing was really a good one and had lot of fun doing that. Thanigai was only one managed to stand on Surf board on the whole group. After 3 hours of long exhausted surfing, we started back to Brecon and on way back stopped at Tesco to get supplements for dinner + drinks. Reached AA at 9pm, Thanigai started preparing Chicken curry and others having fun in helping the Chef. The so called "Kacheri" started 10pm and went on till midnight celebrated Day1 adventures with beers, scotch whisky & wine:)

I am not sure when i slept but it was Ramesh shouting at 9:30am to get ready as we were late to Caving and Steve[guide] waiting for us. Every one got ready by 11am after a quick break-fast, me and Thanigai manage to get few delicious slices of bacon. We were ready with our Caving costume, after a couple of snaps we headed to cave leaving valuable things inside car as its tuff to carry them in cave. We felt really adventures hearing Craig-Y-Nos [meaning Rock of night in welsh] cave where we gonna cave is used to test mental fitness of newly joined British army. It is 90 meters long and was very steep & narrow in few places, we manage to complete that in good time with out any hassle. It was a raining Sunday and we didn't plan any thing after caving as we wanted a break for drinks. We came back to AA and cooked chicken again for late lunch and few beers made it delicious. After lunch we thought of going out to enjoy the scenic beauty of Green valleys and tiny canals. We were driving crazily around, entered into military camp as we saw an outdated restriction board in place. After long drive in military camp we were 20 miles away from AA and found a police car following us. We slowed down to avoid risky hiccups, surprisingly cops slowed their car. We were still confident that we were not chased, As we were 10 miles away from AA there was an other car came in front of us from parking. This time we were sure that something went wrong and we were chased. As we reached a pub near AA took a left turn to pub, thats where the front car took a sudden turn and stopped us on spot. One from back and an other from right side blocked our way. A bizarre sound on top, Oh God its a chopper giving directions to cops below on attacking positions. Ramesh was driving and i was sitting in the front, as officer from the front car came to us and said "Nothing to worry, we found you suspicious and wanted to check you". We said nothing an other well armed cop shouted " show your hands, put your on the front seat" and we did it. An officer came again and called up Ramesh for enquiry, he went inside. I could barely see him explaining something. We were not panic as we did nothing wrong but some where feeling bad & embarrassed for getting into such situation. Officer told over a micro-phone to the chopper squad to move on as they no more required and things turned out cool & unexpected:).

An other cop from left asked me to come out of the car, I came out. It was drizzling and windy, I wasn't wearing any jerkin, I was shivering and stood before the cop. He asked " Do you know why did we stopped you?", I said "No". Then he said " Do you remember entering in to military camp?". "Oh ya i remember, but it was ... " I was afraid to complain about their stupidity in keeping the outdated signboard and chasing people who rushed in by mistake. I said " We are sorry, we rushed in by mistake". "No need to feel sorry, you haven't done anything wrong" Officer replied. "We know" we mummered to each other and grinned. We were checked one by one and taken all details to get checked by central immigration team. Steve came to the place, mummered "What happened boys?", then he spoke to the officer and local police. Then he came to us and said, "Don't worry guys, there is some slight confusion, we know you are all good boys but they wanted to complete the process. Finish up this and come down to pub we have good band playing music this evening". We waited for almost 45 min, Steve came back and spoke to Cops again and managed to take every one to AA to have a coffee. We drived down to AA, one car at front and one at rear side escorting. As we were sipping coffee, A cop came to dinning hall after quick chat with his boss and said "Guys! you are free man now". Phew.. we were under safe custody till now, we realised. Steve also embarrassed with this wanted to cheer up to have fun in the evening with Champagne & a crate of beers. That was really a memorable day with not just an unexpected adventure but especially pleasantries shared with Steve over a so called "Kacheri" and a traditional English fireplace experience was special attraction to the evening.
Day3, every one refreshed & no signs of pensive mood due to yesterdays event and ready for rock climbing and abseiling. Started at 11am reached Danney rock [City of rock in welsh], Steve took couple of minutes to prepare tying ropes, Rock climbing was new for every one and were little excited and we find it easy at the end of play. After a quick lunch we did finished abseiling and moved to Gorge walk. It was real fun doing gorge walk, and with some adventures between. A real fun when we tried to build and walk through a virtual bridge, ramesh fell into water. It was all done finally with lot of enthusiasm and fun and were back to AA. We were pleased with Steve's guidance and decided to give him a good Champagne, Ramesh & Sri has got a good French Champagne, Steve really pleased with that. Steve is frequent traveller to Nepal to experience the new tops climbing, I invited him to India, especially to my home town, To try out Horsely hills so called Andra Ooty. He was pleased to come and hopefull of meeting him in India.