The views were beautiful. The road generally follows by valleys of impetuous rivers. Of course that sometimes it has to jump from a valley to another, so there are some steepy slopes. Everything is very green except for the distant peaks that appeared on some streches and the river and its banks. There were some forests, lots of terraces for agriculture, lots of banana trees. We saw a lot of rafters on those wild grey waters. We saw also some stone quarries on the banks, but I don't remember seeing more than one with a machine. Everything is done by hand in this country. That applies to road and bridge construction and repairs also. We passed by plenty of them on this trip, as there were many places that suffered land slides and some half broken bridges.

There was an english old man seated nest to me in the bus. Although he seemed a kind person, I didn't understand much of what he spoke. I had allways this problem with english people: the most of the times I have much difficulty understanding their accent. He had a young nepali guide that all he did was smiling. I think he had the same problem as me, not understanding a word of what his client was saying. However, I could understand that the english gentleman was a retired worker of any industry and he liked a lot to travel around.

I tried to follow the story of the hindi movie that passed on the video. It wasn't hard to understand the story - it was a love drama mixed with lots of bandits that are defeated by the heroe, that gets his love at the end. This with lots of singing in duet and lots of dances also. I must confess that watching parts of these masala movies is quite amusing to me, by all its naivety - the colourful clothes, the way they dance, the female voices on the songs on the extremeties of the high frequencies, the duets, all makes me smile and makes me remember indian hotel rooms.

The journey lasted about 7 hours. Not bad, for a little more than 200 Km. Recently I read the log of someone who spent the double of this on this same trip one and half a month before us. When we arrived in Pokhara there was a taxi drivers strike going on. At least it was what we were told. We could notice that something strange was going on, most probably some political unrest. We had passed at least one political demonstration in one village. Apparently the buses weren't stopping at the usual place, but anywhere a little bit away from the center of town. We got our luggage, we managed to get rid of all the touts, not that abundant, anyway, and we started walking in the direction of where we imagined it was the center. The place was crowded with lots of people watching "what's going on" (we didn't know what it was) and some police men with batons. We could feel the tension in the air. Some hundred meters away from the crowd we managed to get a taxi. Taxis in Nepal could be hard to be found, specially if they were supposed to be in strike, as they are normal cars with no special painting. On the other way, the probability of seeing a car that is not a taxi is very low, so we simply waved to every car we saw, that's how we ended up getting our taxi.

The driver had some difficulty finding where we wanted to go, the Twin Peaks Hotel that was advised by that dutch couple we had met in Kathmandu, but at the end he managed to get us there. The place looked nice, a cottage with a small garden in a neighbourhood whit similar houses. The owner was a little round man with asiatic look. We liked him from the first minute we saw him. I guess he was Gurung, that was his family name. We told him that his place had been advised to us by a dutch couple, they had told that it could help us getting a good price. I'm not sure the man remembered the dutch couple. He asked us how much had they paid, as he would make the same price to us. We mentioned US $6 and that was what we paid for the room with bathroom with tub and hot water. They had a nice balcony with a view to the Annapurna peaks. Imagine yourself in a tropical environment, all green, with banana trees and everything, enjoying the warm, and gazing at snow capped mountains! That's Pokhara! I really enjoyed those moments at the Twin Peaks Hotel and at the esplanades at the border of the Phewa Lake.

After leaving our things at the room and a quick snack we were asked about our plans by Mr Gurung, the hotel manager. When we told him that we would like to spend 3 days in the mountains, he told us we had two choices - going to Biretanti by bus or to Jomsom by plane. We chose this last option and he offered himself to arrange the tickets. We agreed and we settled that we would call him some hours later. We would be wading in Pokhara that afternoon.

We spent a splendid relaxed afternoon. The "lake side" of Pokhara, the part on the border of the lake is too touristic, but that was the only major con of the place and it didn't bother us much. In fact, all those tourists, hotels and restaurants with terraces gave us that "holiday feeling" that it's much enjoyable. The landscape has a more "tropical look" than in the Kathmandu Valley, the greens seems lighter and they are all over. Then there is the lake, dark green, covering all the valley and surrounded by high hills. Well, these hills are a little short to the Nepal standards, but they would deserve being called mountains anywhere else. There were some rice fields on the border of the lake which were being cropped.

The town doesn't seem very big, but it's widely spread. This seems to be the standard in this part of the World - sometimes it's even a bit difficult to identify exactly where it's the centre of the towns. Everyone allways mentions two parts of Pokhara, the "dam side" and the "lake side", corresponding to the localization relative to Phewa lake. I suspect that this division works mostly for tourists, as those are the more touristic areas; the town must have other wards. The lake side is more cosmopolit, with lots of restaurants, cafes, hotels, every sort of shops (that was the only place in Nepal where I saw a supermarket), etc. It's basically a street on the border of the lake.The dam side, where our hotel was located, was more calm and less crowded. Some say that accomodation is cheaper on this side, we didn't check. We needed about 40 minutes for walking from the hotel to centre of the lake side.

I was a little worried with my entrance without passport in Thailand on the way back home, so I faxed again to the portuguese consulate in Bangkok, explaining my situation in detail. I tried again to get in touch with Delhi, but I had no success.

It was already dusk when we went back to the hotel to meet Mr Gurung. We had already phoned him in the middle of the afternoon and he told us that we had good chances of obtaining tickets to the plane to Jomsom. We walked with him to the office of Everest Air, where we got our tickets.

We had dinner at the lake side. Our trek began in Pokhara walking between the lake side and the dam side :-). The nights there were a lot warmer than in Kathmandu, so it was nice to enjoy a summer's evening in November. The temperature during the day was quite the same as Kathmandu.