Sunday the 1st of September.
The evening after our last entry we headed out for dinner at a lovely place called “Big Belly”. After our delightful meal out our free time was well spent exploring the city in the evening. Upon arrival back to the hotel most of us headed up to the roof to fullly encapsulate the city from above, this was well timed as we were then able to see the lightning from above, giving an extra light to this magical city.
Monday the 2nd of September.
An early start for us this morning as our first excursion was planned to Boudhanath temple closer to the airport, a short drive away. This was one of the 7 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Kathmandu and one of the biggest Buddhist temples in the world. It was an amazing place to be able to see, hundreds of prayer flags were spread from the top of the temple to all four corners of its base. Our guide from Asian Trekking taught us about the 5 colours, green represents the purification, yellow representing the soil, blue representing the sky , white representing water and red fire. Also, prayer wheels representing each reincarnation of the Buddha, linden the outside of the temple and the surrounding area.
Later we got a chance in the temple to light candles and pray to bring us good fortune. The lighting of the candles lead to a Puja ceremony, where monks chanted and blessed us with handmade friendship necklaces, for good luck on our trek.
For lunch we traveled from the hotel to “New Orleans”, a restaurant of which was fabulous! The decor was amazing, with plants and patterned woods everywhere. some people had the largest burger you can imagine and the kebabs were lovely too.
In the afternoon we needed to pack our bags…again…this time for the connecting flights to Lukla on an even smaller plane. We will need to get an early flight, so we will need to be up for 5:45am for a 7:30am flight. Our holdall this time needed to be much smaller with a weight limit of 10kg and our hand-luggage being 5kg. Not much at all, and easy to say that we all struggled and took a lot of time.
Tonight we are going to “K2-Too” steakhouse, it will be our last night in Kathmandu so we are going to make the most of the good food! We are all very excited about getting into the Khumbu valley and starting our long trek to Everest base camp and to our community project in Khumjung.
Watch this space for our next blog update!
The Lhotse Patrol
Louis Bown
Will Graham
Stuart Burton
Charlotte Ellis