Day 17

I really hope that my days are actually counting up correctly because if not I'm going to think that I missed a day somewhere.

Today we are off on a tour. We're heading to a place called Nagrakot. It's located just outside of the city of Kathmandu, but its up on top of one of the hills. If the weather is good and clear we should be able to see the Himalaya's. We're crossing our fingers though because the weather has been pretty hot and humid and there's always been a haze or maybe that's smog…probably smog around Kathmandu.

The first thing we had to do is get out of the city, which is a challenge. The traffic always seems to be pretty bad so it was a slow ride…in a bus that was supposed to have air conditioning. Did you catch the "supposed" word? Of course its only "discovered" that its not working about 30 mins into sitting in traffic. The only problem with opening up the windows is the exhaust fumes. The thing I think when I see all the pollution is how much the gov't in Canada goes after us for car emissions and in reality how clean our exhaust is compared to most of the rest of the world…..they should spend some time cleaning up emissions on this side of the world.

I was trying to get a couple pictures of how they do wiring here. Here's a picture.

I'm not sure how they figure out what is going where. I'm sure that they just keep adding new wire without taking down the stuff that's not working, because that would take too much time. But I'd hate to be a cable guy in this town. I had to take picture with a high speed setting on the camera because we were bouncing around so much on the roads there that it was impossible to take a picture…at least I could get some pictures before I flew off my seat.

Another interesting thing was the size of the shops. I managed to get a picture.

These places are as small as a closet and people man them all day long, trying to sell something to make a living. Its not just one or two of these shops, there are literally hundreds of them, selling everything from food to clothes to plastic wear, there's machine shops, welding shops, motorcycle repair shops. None are bigger than 12 ft by 16 ft. And then there's the farmers working the oxen, its pretty tough work.

So after 2 hrs up to the top of the hill to Nagrakot….it's cloudy. So we collectively imagined the Himalaya's in the distance, had lunch and did the 2 hour return drive back to the hotel. A nice swim in the pool capped the day off for me.