Hozza's Horizons

My travel diaries

Friday 18 May, 2007 - Kathmandu, Nepal

The first weekend of my Nepalese reconnaissance with Tina and Siling is a slightly surreal and dreamlike experience. It's nearly a week since I reached the North Col of Everest, an extreme physical challenge, and my time since then has been characterised by long days, short nights and a lot of partying. I've not had a proper rest and given myself chance to recharge the batteries, and it's about to catch up with me in a big way.

I see my North Col expedition team off at the Summit Hotel for their flight back to the UK and take a taxi into Thamel to meet up with Tina and Siling. They have invited me to join them for the next month as they travel to quiet corners of Nepal researching tour options for their ethical trekking company The Responsible Travellers. Recently, new areas of Nepal have opened up to tourism because of the Maoist ceasefire, declared last year. Since 1996 the Maoists have been conducting a terrorist campaign throughout the country, and certain more remote areas have been off limits. But recently they have decided to lay down their arms and enter the political arena instead.

Tina and Siling are keen to explore some of these recently opened areas to investigate the possibility of adding them to their tour itineraries, and when I met up with Tina in Kathmandu a month ago, prior to embarking on my Everest expedition, she invited me to join them. May and June is a good time to conduct tourism reconnaissance trips in Nepal because the main trekking season has just finished, and there is a window of a few weeks before the monsoon arrives from Bengal and does its best to put the countryside underwater.

I feel very lucky to be joining them. They're doing all the organising, while I'm merely tagging along to keep them company. Sadly, for the next two days at any rate, I'm not very good company at all, and am poor value for the generous hospitality they provide me with. I keep falling asleep, and for much of the time I find myself oddly lost and confused in a manner I've not experienced before.

It starts on the Friday evening. I meet them in a pleasant garden restaurant hidden away down a passageway off the main drag in Thamel, the manic tourist heart of Kathmandu. They are with a party of friends celebrating the 70 th birthday of John, an Englishman who has lived in Kathmandu for over 20 years, and are a disparate crowd of regulars at Sam's Bar, the place where they met. As well as Tina, Siling and John, I meet Verena, European expat landlady of Sam's, Uttam, an aging Nepali aristocrat, and Anagha, a young Indian journalist who works for the Nepali Times, a popular Kathmandu-based English-language newspaper.

My face has recovered remarkably quickly in the last few days since I arrived in Kathmandu, but I'm still carrying a few cracks and burns to mark my encounter with Everest, and I think Tina is a little shocked when she sees me. Still, my weatherbeaten appearance carries a little kudos, and I feel like a bit of a fraud when I'm introduced as a friend who's just been up Everest. They seem impressed. I manage to remain relatively sociable for about two hours. Then I start nodding off in my chair, and waking up furtively, looking around to see if anyone's noticed. When it eventually becomes apparent that I can't keep my eyes open, I make my apologies and head back to the Summit Hotel.

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