Day 51 - 6th Apr 2009

Started the day early with a breakfast at our hotel and then headed out to explore the immediate vicinity of our hotel. The streets were really busy with people, motorbikes and cars and similiar to Georgetown everyone was sharing the same narrow strip of road. We were in search of an ATM machine to get some money out but with the streets looking so different to home it wasn't so easy. We spent about an hour wandering round and decided to head back to the hotel and take a breather.

We had seen a couple of ATM possibilities on our travels and so I headed back out to try one of them while Liz took a bit more of a sleep. Luckily the second ATM I tried worked and we had some money.

Next we needed to phone up the people who we had booked our next three days accomadation with and get our tickets and pay the balance. This involved walking to their office which was about 15 minutes away. We found it without any problem and got our tickets.

Then we stopped in a cafe for lunch, where interestingly all the waiters were deaf... Luckily we didn't want anything more complicated than what was on the menu, so some pointing sufficed.

After lunch we headed down to Durbar Square, yet another UNESCO World Heritage site. It's quite interesting in that it contains lots of different temples from different periods of history and in keeping with the rest of Kathmandu wasn't actually very square. More of a crazy 20 or so sided maze of an open space dotted randomly with the temples. By the time we had looked round them all we needed a break again from all the bustle so headed back to the hotel.

We asked the freindly manager's of the hotel if they could reccomend anywhere for dinner and they directed us to a Nepalise restaurant owned by the hotelier's uncle and told us to show the hotels card and ask for the 'special'. What we got was a taster of lots of differnt Nepalise food, we'd eat one thing and they'd be on the way with something else! Some of the courses were nicer than others and a couple were a little odd, but overall it was a great experience.

On returning to the hotel we found that there was no electricity on. It seems that there is some sort of power issue, which we never quite got to the bottom of, that means there is a schedule of when your electric will be off each day. Not something you could ever imagine back home. So the hotel was lit by candlelight until partial lights came back on at 8 which was enough for us to pack by ready for our early start the next day.