Daddy is too tall,
Too tall for Nepal,
Or is it that Nepal is too small for Mr Tall?
It’s a Long way To Gokyo Ri,
It’s a long way to go,
It’s a long, long way to Gokyo Ri,
To the sweetest lakes I know,
Goodbye Kathmandu,
Farewell Durbar Square,
It’s a long, long way to Gokyo Ri,
But we’ve climbed up there!
I don’t ever want to grow up. I just want to rampage around forever!
NOTE: All times are approximate.
07.00 Wake up
07.15 Yoga
08.00 Showers, dressing, maybe a quick game of Smallworld, breakfast on the verandah
09.00 “Jungle School” (maths puzzles, spellings, project on Nepal, learning to make a website, creative writing)
11.00 Playtime at the river & elephant bathtime
12.00 “Jungle School” & snacks from the guest house menu
15.00 Playtime on the giant bamboo swing or feeding the resident elephant with bananas
16.00 Diary Time
17.30 Big Meal at KC’s (not to be confused with KFC, a totally different experience)
19.00 Bedtime stories, into nighties and into bed
19.30 Lights off
20.00 Chill out time for mum and dad
And another day is done…
Jemima (blue top), Scarlett (red top) and Evie (purple top) working on spellings outside our guest house, then later playing with the baby elephant who lives at the bottom of the garden.
This… is… the… best… thing… ever!”
So, we have just spent 4 whole days in Kathmandu to get our India Visas. We have struggled through a complex bureaucratic process, all while negotiating the Nepali equivalent of Christmas.
Specifically: non-standard sized photographs that needed to be taken; photocopies of various documents that had to be made; an online form that had to be filled in by a man who could only use the ‘search and peck’ method of typing (x 5 forms – this was painful, how I wanted to snatch the keyboard from him… arghhh!); and all the associated queues that needed to be waited in to obtain this precious list of compulsory items.
We arrived at the Embassy an hour before opening time, joined the already long queue, received a chitty with our number on (handwritten – the machine was broken), waited our turn, got to the front of the queue (number called out by a security guard – the display was broken), had the forms checked (all correct – yes!) and were asked for payment.
Ah.
When researching the trip in the UK, the price was £30 each. And there was a discount for children. However, things have changed, and the price is now almost £100 each with no discount for children. So we needed almost £500, an amount that with local ATM daily limits being very low would take us 3 days to withdraw, and that we simply didn’t have on us.
So, still trying to smile and answer the kids questions (What’s going on Mummy? Are we still going to India?), we retired to a café to weigh up our options.
Given that we were only planning to spend 3 weeks or so in India, and the main activity was travelling from North to South by train, it turns out it’s cheaper for us to cancel our flight from the South of India to Sri Lanka and buy a new one from Kathmandu to Sri Lanka than it is to pay for the Visas.
So, we think, this is the new plan. The challenge now is cancelling the flights. We have spoken to the call centre, cancelling them is no problem, but we have to pick up the cash refund at a desk in… you guessed it… India! Still working on getting the refund back onto the card we paid on. We may be some time…
by Jemima
If you want to go trekking, you have got to go to Kathmandu first. Here are ten of the most important things you need to know:
1. You sometimes have to be really unkind to people to make them go away when they are trying to sell you things.
2. It’s extremely noisy and it’s likely that the first sound you will hear will be honk honk!
3. When I arrived I could smell hot air but I got used to it. I hope you do.
4. If you want to stay somewhere, I would recommend the Kathmandu Garden House because it’s got comfortable rooms, balconies and a lovely garden bordered by flowers.
5. There are lots of insects so you have got to just not bother about them. The mosquitoes will probably bite you. You can buy a spray called Deet which will keep them away.
6. There is lots of junk on the streets and you will probably get dirty. Try not to bother.
7. Try not to fall in love with pretty things in shops too much like I did because the shop owners will see that and make them really expensive. You have got to bargain by making it look like the thing you want more is the thing you want less.
8. When you are travelling around Kathmandu it is easier to go in a taxi or walk, not go on a bus. The buses are too crowded and sometimes they drive around with the doors open because there are so many people inside.
9. There are street food stalls but I got a very spicy chilli. It made me cry so we got some juice and chocolate! If you want to go to a restaurant, I would recommend the Northfield Cafe.
10. If it’s the festival of Desain, lots of people feel like they shouldn’t be at work so the food in cafes is not as good. But the pizza at the Northfield Cafe is still good!
10.
by Scarlett
We have been in Nepal for nearly a month and by reading this you will find out some of the best places to stay at and visit when trekking.
I would recommend walking to Namche Bazaar in four days with children, two days with an adult and maybe three days with a big group. Good places to stay at would be Tok Tok (with its cozy guesthouse and pretty views of the forest and a river). Chheplung would also be a nice place place to stay. It’s very close to Lukla if you have booked a flight the next day or something like that. In Benkar, there is a waterfall which is great for your children to play in.
Namche itself has a lot of lovely bakeries. I recommend Herman Helmer’s Bakery. It has great apple pie, beautiful pizza but very small sandwiches that aren’t worth the money. The pizza has nak cheese on (it’s nak cheese not yak cheese because yaks are boys and naks are girls). If you want to write a diary or something like that then Herman Helmer’s is often a quiet place to sit. The Everest Bakery is also very nice and it does pasta which Herman’s does not. Apple pie at Everest is more cinnamony that Herman’s.
In Pangboche, they have a Herman’s Bakery (different to Herman Helmer’s Bakery) which does the best chocolate cake I have ever tasted. It was called chocolate trefoil and was proper English chocolate.
At Gokyo, it all quite expensive and I would recommend taking a down jacket which you can hire in Namche Bazaar. You cannot hire children’s down jackets.
Gokyo Ri is nearly always worth the climb to the top except when it is cloudy. The view is undoubtedly the best one I have ever seen. You can see a glacier from above. It’s amazing.
In Tengboche, you can go and see an amazing monastery but you have to be very quiet. In the monastery, you can pay Rs. 25 to light a butter lamp even if you are a child. A butter lamp is a sort of little candle and if you light one, Buddhists believe that Buddha will pray for you. There was a bakery right next to the monastery.
To keep safe, you must always get out of the way of yaks which you often meet on the way to Gokyo. You must also get out of the way of donkeys. If you didn’t, you could get pushed off the edge of a mountain!
by Evie
If you want to go to Gokyo, then you have to go upwards most of the way and downwards most of the way back. There is not very much flat land in the Khumbu region (the region Mount Everest is in).
It is extremely beautiful once you get to Gokyo. There are lots of flowers of interesting colours. They are called “alpine flowers”. There are three lakes on the way and you can go to the fourth one or the fifth one without having to camp, whereas if you want to go the sixth lake, you have to camp because you cannot get back to Gokyo in one day.
The lakes are emerald green. They are surrounded by mountains. It snowed when we arrived and on the day when we climbed Gokyo Ri.
Gokyo Ri is a mountain that is quite hard to climb, in fact there were some grown-ups climbing it who gave up but we got to the top. It gets cloudy during the day so if you want to climb Gokyo Ri, you have to leave very early. We got up at 5 o’clock!
I didn’t want to leave Gokyo because it was beautiful, even though I did get an altitude headache.
On the way down, it is much easier. It took ten days to get there and nine days to get back because we took a detour round Pangboche and Tengboche. You cannot go too far in a day on the way up because you might get an altitude headache like I did at Gokyo. Mummy got it much more than me and my sisters didn’t get it at all.
A 360-degree panorama from the top of Gokyo Ri
Sitting in a little internet cafe in Namche Bazaar, paying by the minute for the 1980’s style computer, I thought I’d just give you a few highs and lows of our first trip into the Himalayas. I’m the proudest mum in the World of three 8 year old girls who can now say that they have had breakfast at 5370m above sea level, looking out over the biggest mountains in the World, having walked for 10 days to get there.
We have overcome episodes of altitude sickness, episodes of what shall politely be called ‘traveller’s tummy’ and episodes of thinking we are crazy to be taking our children so far away from civilisation (as we know it). My personal battle with basically not having enough T shirts (or rather not having enough access to running water to cope with just 2 T-shirts) has been overcome by the rental of a simple en suite room in Namche. Never has a hot shower felt so good.
So, would I do it all again? Well, our plan is to walk the next 4 days back to Lukla, fly to Kathmandu, bus it to Pokara and… you guessed it (if you know Nepal)… trek the Annapurna region! I think we are hooked.
Today we saw Mount Everest for the first time in all of our lives. It was a really amazing feeling as it’s basically the only thing I had on any kind of ‘tick list’ for the trip. We were really lucky with the weather, we got up early and walked to the viewpoint and there it was! Sadly, I cannot post all the pictures we took of it right now (you know, me and Mt Everest, the kids and Mt Everest, Ferg and Mt Everest…all very predictable) as the camera ran out of battery – luckily just after we’d taken the pictures…that could have been very upsetting.
The kids loved it…for about 2 mins then lost interest and wondered off into a military zone to the alarm of our porter-guide, and had to be fetched back and reprimanded. Ah well, I hope one day they’ll realise they were luck to be there.
It made me happy anyway.
Travels with Triplets 