Home, sweet home

One of the most difficult things about leaving India is leaving our home. I had never had such a nice place, and will not again for, I guess, a long time.
It was built around 1960, when the colony was established, as a two storey house with a garden. It is spacious and convenient.. And of course we have staff helping us to manage it, otherwise I might not find it as easy to live!
From the garden, with the terrace upstairs.

The big dining room/ living room.

Kitchen.

According to Elizabeth, the dining room/ living room + kitchen is equivalent in size to the whole of our previous flat in Paris. Ouch. Cela augure mal pour le retour.
Master bedroom.

The attached bathroom (yes, Indian style, all bedrooms have attached bathrooms).

Garden bedroom/ office.

Backyard (one of Ruben's favourite hangouts recently).

Then, going upstairs.
The guest bedroom (messy as we are beginning to organize our move).

Antechamber to Ruben's bedroom.

Ruben's super sized bedroom.

And his bathroom.

Great terrace.

Finally, we have had some friendly squatters in the house! We haven't seen them much since the heat wave started, but we were glad that they were mosquito-hunting before that.

Trekking in Nepal - 2/2

Day 3: Kyanjim Gompa valley (3850m), then down to Ganesh View Lodge (2500 m), 8 hours.
After a long night of tossling around fighting altitude-headache, we set out to explore the valley beyond Kyanjim Gompa. The summits were high and splendid, the valley a great, barren river of rocks, the sky a perfect blue.. We had reached the adobe of gods and it was beautiful.
Looking back at Kyanjim Gompa and Langtang Lirung summit (7225m) over it.

We crossed a large moraine before reaching the bottom of the valley.

One more look behind us.

Sadly we had to turn back after one hour, as we had a long way to go that day.. We would have loved to follow the path leading to the glacier at the end of the valley, but it was really too far out.

Leaving Kyanjim Gompa.

We went down the valley, through Langtang village, Ghore Tabeli, the forest, Lama Hotel, and finally stopped at Ganesh View Lodge. It had been a long day of walking again!

Day 4: Ganesh View Lodge (2500m), a lot of ups and down, and down to Syabru Besi (1430 m), 7 hours.
Our guide convinced us to walk back to Syabru Besi through the mountain, rather than following the river as we had done on our way up. According the Tsering, the way was mostly flat and would not take much longer... The path turned out to be beautiful, suspended in the middle of the slope, 'en encorbellement', passing through blooming rhododendrons, and offering amazing views.. But it proved much longer than we had expected, and Eric's knee seriously bugged him that day.

Here we are on the 'flat' part, which actually turned out to be a never-ending succession of ups and downs.

Our first village on the way: Serpagaon (2600 m). One of the charms of the path was that it was empty, except for a few villagers. Very few trekkers hike there.

Before starting our descent to Syabru Besi - a steep 1200 m to go -, there was a nice view point on the valley.

We stopped for lunch at Khanjim village.

After a good night of sleep in Syabru Besi, it was time to leave the mountains, sadly. We still had some nice views on the road.

As we had a bit of time before our flight in the evening, we stopped at Pashupatinath temple, the oldest Hindu temple in Kathmandu. It was really nice and impressive to visit. There were cremation ghats of course, over the holy (and dirty) Bagmati river.

There were also sadhus resting, posing for tourists, or just living their lives.. And lots of monkeys.

Walking to the airport!