God knows how I made it out of bed on the morning of my flight to Kathmandu, but the same goes for the morning of my flight to India; my autopilot seems to work fine and I arrive at the airport in good time, if not really in any kind of fit state for flying.
The coincidence on the morning of my departure to Kathmandu was that many of the people I had met in my stay in Pokhara were also there at the airport: Graeme and Scott from Maya Devi plus Duncan and Rachel from Ker and Downey.
It seemed that Duncan and Rachel had arranged for a saucy little kite called a ‘Pilatus, Â renowned for it’s ability to take off on a postage stamp, to be based at Pokhara to slingshot discerning tourists around the mountains using some of the most experiences pilots the plane has ever seen. It certainly made my morning as they are an entertaining bunch of coves, it felt like a bygone era as we drunk coffee on the chilly rooftop with the Annapurna as a backdrop.
Indeed I have to say that I did meet some amazing people on my stay in Pokhara. If there was ever a way to filter human beings to end up with the best that you can find (or the worst depending on your perspective), the kinds of people who can laugh openly at life, clank glasses as equals, then simply filter them using endurance, ask them to traipse up hills, to fling themselves off with nothing but a hanky over their heads, ask them to run businesses in places where beaurocracy and obstacles would see others flapping on the next flight, you’ll see them finding novel ways to run their lives so that they can keep flying in the thermals that you only find in the roof of the world. I like these people.
Anyhow the Pilatus Posse took off and I made my own path past the Himalaya, skirting the highest peaks like a rat blundering across a razors edge until the little Beechcraft bedded itself back at Kathmandu. I then bought a bag of beer and locked myself in a hotel room to get on with building a couple of websites that I had put off due to learning how to paraglide. It’s amazing how much I get done when the right fuel as applied.
Next morning I flew to Bombay and India, I was missing Nepal already.
