After a leisurely breakfast at one of Thamel’s many restaurants, we packed up a few things for an overnight trip up to Nagarkot and left the hotel. We kept our room but Sindee and Sarah checked out of theirs and left all of their gear in our room.
We walked over to Ratna Park where most of the local buses leave Kathmandu from and by a process of trial and error we found out which one was going to Baraktapur and climbed aboard. It was a 20-minute drive to Baraktapur Station on the outer edge of Kathmandu and after getting off at bus we waited for 30 minutes for the bus up to Nagarkot to arrive.
The wiseass young man collecting the fares said it was 50 rupees to Nagarkot but when we got to the top of the road, after driving up through picturesque farmland, we gave him 25 rupees each and walked away. He obviously knew that he had tried to rip us off and that the fare was indeed 25 rupees because he just shrugged his shoulders and let us go.
We stayed the night at a hotel called Niva Home: all four of us in one room for 25 rupees each. The view of the Himalayas, which is normally have been magnificent, was marred by the haze brought by a week of strong warm winds, so we contented ourselves with getting totally ripped on hash: smoking it with Sindee’s pipe and spotting it on the blade of a knife heated by the flame of a candle.
After a meal down in the restaurant, we discovered that we’d padlocked our keys and the room so I spent 20 minutes balanced out on the ledge outside the window, 10 metres above the ground, trying to prise the window open without success. We ended up breaking the padlock with a hammer.
CurseOfTheTraveller 