Pokhara, Nepal – Up at 7:00 a.m. and walked out on to the deck of our hotel only to see the most breathtaking, stunning view of the snow-capped Himalayas. Those two days of bus riding were worth seeing the view from our hotel deck, it was stupendous. Sat in our hotel restaurant complete with bay windows facing the mountains all morning drinking tea. We headed over to the bank to change money but when they gave us the Nepalese rupees, they were all in 1000 rupee notes, no one in Pokhara would ever have change for that. So, we headed to the next counter to change down the notes. I told the guy I wanted all the notes in denominations of 50 rupees or less and that is when the fun began. He opened his steel container and began to pool out bale after bale of money. Yes, this happened to us in India but this was even more fun. He ran out of 50s, so he began to put bales of 10s and 5s upon the counter. I opened by bag pack and just began filling it up with out newest version of real monopoly money.
One rupee is worth 2 cents. Rich saved a whole bunch of 1s, so he could wall paper part of his bathroom. We headed back to the hotel and took pictures of ourselves with our new found wealth stocked on the table. We had asked Babu Ram to organize some bikes for out so we could go cycling through the old city but 15 minutes after we left the hotel, I managed to run over a broken bottle and give myself a flat. We walked back to the hotel, dumped our bikes and decided to head the opposite direction towards the lake. Pokhara sits on a lake and the mountains go jetting down steeply into the water, very similarly to the landscape in Scotland. It is really beautiful that way.
We headed towards the lake side but it took us almost three hours to get actually to the lake because we got stuck in the various Tibetan Craft and T-shirt embroidering shops. Stopped for lunch when we could just barely see the water of the lake and I had Enchiladas, real Mexican food for the first time in five months. Nepal is known for their food mainly because they cook Western dishes really well and everyone coming from India usually goes on a feeding frenzy when they arrive here. The food is also a nice break right between eating Indian for 2-1/2 months and starting Thai and Southeast Asian food.
More shopping after lunch and before we knew it, it was getting dark. We stopped for a beer but skipped dinner for we had been eating our way through town. By the time we got to the hotel, it was pitch black outside and we were both pretty tired after out shopping spree. I ended up buying a silver bracelet for 80 rupees and a carved wooden mask for 200 rupees.