We arrived back in Kathmandu Saturday afternoon November 7th. For our last few days we had splurged and
booked a suite at the Hotel Tibet International. We had a big and comfortable room at the rear of the hotel, so nice and quiet. Since we arrived in the afternoon we decided
to just hang out in the hotel, relax and have a massage.
The next day we met Urgen and walked to his house, which was
only 20 minutes away. We spent several hours at his house and had the pleasure
of meeting his wife and daughter Tsering. After obtaining her bachelor's and master's degrees in America Tsering had returned to Nepal to help develop
the country for future generations. She is an amazing young lady and very sweet
and smart. She helps train leadership and business development skills to public
officials and entrepreneurs. Check out
their Web site: http://daayitwa.org/. Tshering cooked a fabulous Nepali lunch for
us and after lunch Urgen took us to the local shops for some shopping. It was
very helpful to have him come with us since he could help negotiate the price,
and also knew the best places to take us.
After shopping we met up with Tsering and the four of us
went to a place where she used to volunteer. It was a home for young homeless boys
who had become addicted to the euphoria of glue sniffing. The owner of the
organization provided them a place to stay and helped them break their
addiction and get a new start in life, he was obviously a wonderful
compassionate person. It was a joy to meet him and some of the boys who lived
there.
When we got back to the hotel we went across the street to
the prayer flag shop. Since we were buying from the shop that actually makes
the flags the cost was great so we ended up buying enough for about 4 or 5
years. We like to have a strand of prayer flags which we string across our back
yard and we also added a new flag set that runs vertically up a pole which we
now have installed in our back yard. Buddhist prayer flags are brightly colored - the first time we put some up in our backyard many years ago one of our
neighbors saw them and asked us if we were having a party!
The next day we wanted to go to Swayambhunath which is
referred to as the monkey temple since of course there are a lot of monkeys living there! We had been
there 20 years ago and wanted to see it again, so we found a taxi driver who
still had fuel (remember the fuel shortage) and he took us over there. On the
way we stopped at another stupa that looked like a smaller version of
Boudhanath. Boudhanath is a very large well known stupa not too far from our
hotel, unfortunately it was damaged in the earthquake and was being repaired.
After our visits to the stupas we had lunch and started the process of packing
our bags since we had to be ready to go early in the morning and start the
journey home.
Urgen picked us up the next morning and took us to the
airport. It was sad to say good bye to Urgen. We had really bonded with him since
we spent the entire time with him in the Khumbu. Hopefully we will see him
again either in Nepal or when he comes to Maine every summer. We had an easy
flight to New Delhi and Sara made the smart decision to get a hotel right inside
the airport. The hotel was perfect, we had already cleared security and it was
close to our gate so it was very comfortable and convenient. We had to get up
at 2 AM to catch our flight to London. Once again, Sara who I am sure was a
tour director in another life, managed to get us in first class on the night
flight to London. The British Airways flight was a new 787 Dreamliner. It was awesome,
the service was very good with great food and the flight attendants even made
our beds for us so we could get some sleep.
When we arrived in London we had a fairly short layover and
hung out in the lounge which was right next to our gate. Comfortable chairs,
free Wi-Fi, and free food and drinks- not bad. The British Airways flight back
was business class and we were in the section which was the humpback bubble on
the top of the plane, we’d never been in the top section before which was fun. This trip was the best use of airlines miles
ever! We managed to lie down and get
some more sleep, but with 20 hours of flying were very keen to get home.
