We snatched sleep where we could and Mumbai airport was amazing with comfortable long sofas to lie on, and excellent dosa to snack on, to help pass the 11 hour stopover.
In the bus from Kathmandu airport the sight of overloaded Hero bikes, washing in ditch water and the chaos of the streets was less of a surprise and rather more like seeing an old friend.
Nepal is set to hold the world record for the largest human national flag, on the day we arrived 35,000 Nepali collected in a park to produce what would have been quite a spectacle from the air. The Katmandu Post also reported the terrible landslides in the north, the significance of which became clear when we discovered that the Friendship Highway is now blocked and our return by road from Lhasa to Kathmandu now not possible.
We met a multi national group who we were joining in Tibet, mostly Australian with German, Swiss, Brazillian, Austrian, Portugese and New Zealand. We all parted with passports, forms, lots of US dollars and began the process of getting to know a lot of nice people.
We spent the day in the Garden of Dreams, a beautifully manicured walled garden and a welcome escape from the tourist driven area of Thamel in Kathmandu.
Tomorrow we hopefully get to Tibet for the first time!
