Trekking and so forth

So, I'm back from a week-long trek in the Annapurna region, which was pretty awesome. I took loads of photos, and I'm uploading them here.

First of all, the view of the mountains in the morning from Pokhara, a lakeside city in central Nepal. The mountains look really close, but actually they're just really big.

From Pokhara we flew to Jomsom, which by local standards is a metropolis - it even has a bank. It is, however, essentially just one street, so perhaps not as metropolitan as all that.

It has nice views though.

The surrounding landscape is like the surface of the moon, with no trees, and hardly any plants at all. It's pretty bleak.

Like, really bleak.

The houses have flat roofs loaded with firewood, like this:

The main export is apples, which grow in strange looking orchards:

The population are mostly Buddhist, and write Mantras in Tibetan on rocks. This one says 'Om mani padme hum hri' :

This is the view out of my bedroom window in the first place we stayed:

And this is the view outside:

That's all for now, but I'll upload more soon.

I wrote a long introductory paragraph for this post, but unfortunately due to the decidedly slow internet in Nepal I managed to accidentally lose it, which was...annoying. I can't really be bothered to write it again, so instead I'm going to just launch straight into the photos.

The first photo is the view from the balcony in front of my bedroom window:

I'm living in the inner suburbs, so I'm quite close to the centre but not on a main road or anything, which is probably a good thing, since otherwise I would probably die of the fumes. The family I'm living with are very friendly, and have a dog, which is below (with my shoes)

It's called Bahadur, by the way. I've been mostly spending my time exploring Kathmandu. First I went to Swayambhunath, which is a Buddhist stupa - basically the Buddhist equivalent of a reliquary - it's supposed to have the remains of some famous teacher in it or something. It looks like this:

To get to it you have to climb a bunch of (very steep) steps. Apparently Nepali people go there just to get their exercise in the morning:

It's worth it though, because you get an awesome view of the city from the top:

Today I went to an area of Kathmandu called Balaju - it's a park with various water features dotted around it. The most impressive is called Baisdhara, which literally means '22-fountains', which does what it says on the tin. There are 22 decorated fountains, a hundred years old, which still work (they charged 5 rupees - about 4p - to be allowed to take pictures, by the way, so I hope you're appreciative.):

There is a house nearby which basically shows what traditional local architecture looks like - the distinguishing feature is the windows, though, which are unfortunately slightly obscured here.

On the way I saw a poster advertising the Young Communist League (the youth front of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) ) , which I thought was interesting, so I took a picture of it. The man is Prachanda, the chairman of the Maoists, and next to it there's a red flag with a hammer and sickle on it, which you can't see, but I assure you is there:

And now...monkeys!

I hope you understand the sheer amount of torture which went into making a blog-post this picture heavy on a Nepali internet connection. It was worth it though, I think.