Nepal – Pokhara to Macau

Pokhara is a friendly, quiet town. The entire 'lakeside' is one big tourist trap of course, with nothing but souvenir shops and restaurants, but it's all so small scale and cute that you don't mind that. It's quiet in the streets as well, with as many cows walking about as other traffic. Of course we had to try and see the mountains up close, so we got up early one day to drive to Sarangkot. That's a nearby village in the hills, from which you have a better view of the Annapurna range on a clear day. Although the lowest peak is over 6900 m high, the range does not look as impressive as the Swiss Alps – the peaks don't seem that high because they're in the distance. To see them really up close, you'd have to go trekking for five days or more, so that wasn't really an option for us. Besides looking at the mountains, there is (fortunately!) not much to do in Pokhara, so apart from a little rowing tour on the Fewa lake we took it nice and slow.
On our last day in Nepal we flew back to Kathmandu – the 7 hour busride was nice but you don't really want to do it twice in four days. In the afternoon, we checked out the Swayambunath temple, a Buddhist complex at a superb hilltop location on the edge of town. The tall stupa is partially painted gold and has the cute all-seeing Buddha eyes on four sides. With all of the prayer flags it's a very colorful site. Because we'd seen on the travel site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the Chinese were giving out a 'limited' number of permits for Tibet instead of 'none at all', with Pujong's help we tried a final time if it would be possible to go there from Kathmandu. No such luck, unfortunately…
So yesterday we flew to Hong Kong via Delhi, as planned. It's so nice to be in the civilized world again! Because we visited Hong Kong last year as well, the place looked familiar and it felt a little bit like coming home. Here we can drink Starbucks coffee again, and we're not asked every 20 seconds whether we need a taxi or a riksha ride. And the food is really good, not just 'ok'. And there are shiny shopping malls with Armani and airconditioning! And hotels with really comfy beds, where your feet don't get dirty if you walk barefoot. But because we already know Hong Kong, we did not spend much time there, just one night. After a morning of shopping we took a Turbojet boat to Macau, which is where we are now. Funny to be in the middle of Asia and see all of the signs in Portuguese (as well as English and Chinese). Macau is China's Las Vegas and even has an exact copy of the Venetian, everybody's favourite kitch casino. We'll check that out tomorrow, tonight we tried to win back the costs of our extended vacation in the Wynn casino. And we almost succeeded! But in the end, we left the Wynn a little lighter than we entered it, of course. We'll try again tomorrow… 🙂