Up at about 5:30am for a pick-up at 6:30am which turned out to be a young lad who showed us to the bus station. We had to carry our own rucksacks. What a hard life. Even at 6:30am Kathmandu was already wide awake, unlike us. The tourist bus was a standard Nepalese style bus and it's tourist label just signified it stopped less often. It still stopped too much.
I was amazed at the locals in the back seats behind us, smoking, continually moving around and making as much noise as possible. The road out from Kathmandu seemed to be being laid as the bus lurched and bounced from one hole to another, narrowly avoiding steep drops and other buses and lorries on the road. Reading Time magazine and Animal Farm got me through the 7 hour trip. At Tadi Bazaar the usual bus stop chaos was occurring but we were soon on a jeep to the "Jungle Tourist Camp (Before it was Dipak Lodge)" (Whether this means it is due to become Dipak Lodge I don't know).
We were shown to our dung and mud hut by a shaven headed cook. My pillow was covered in mould and the mosquitoes were breeding in the mozzie nets. We then had a very dodgy vegetarian lunch but the Indian couple from Calcutta seemed to enjoy it. I complained about the pillow and then the manager, who was the spitting image of A J Hiscox my sixth form tutor, and who had just finished a 2-week tourism course in Kathmandu, very politely explained that they were very quiet and we could move into one of the concrete rooms with attached bathroom at no extra cost.
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| Dung hut |
2012
The dung hut was made of elephant dung.
I remember getting through the whole of Animal Farm during the journey.
It was the owner not my sixth form teacher that had just done the 2-week tourism course, in case you were wondering.
I seem to remember that the concrete rooms weren't much better than the dung huts. It looks a lot better these days on the website.
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