Day 27 Mount Everest and Kathmandu 3 March 2012

This morning we had to get up at 5am for a mountain flight to see Mount Everest. Since this was our only day in Kathmandu, we had to be lucky since sometimes flights are cancelled because of bad visibility. With our boarding passes in hand and luck by our side we headed to our plane with only a half hour delay (we were told it could be a delay of 10mins to 4 hours).



The highlight for both of us was the visit to and the view from the cockpit, since security measures have not taken over completely in Nepal.



After the one-hour flight we received a certificate stating “I did not climb the Mount Everest, but touched it with my heart”, capturing the moment perfectly.



Upon returning to our hotel in the centre of Kathmandu we headed out for breakfast at a rooftop restaurant of Durbar square, a world heritage site.



Following the advice of a family friend, a true Nepal expert, we headed out to the Monkey Temple, by rickshaw, where we still had to climb about 200 steps to get to the temple. As always, no complaints from Ana. The temple itself was really nice and had besides monkeys hundreds of cylinders you could turn for good luck. Martijn went nuts, Ana is a bit of a germ-a-phobe, only turned one, and then used hand sanitizer.





Since we only had the one day, we hired a taxi to bring us to 3 other world heritage sites: a Hindi temple with crematorium which was a bit of a tourist trap, the largest Buddhist Stupa, a lovely serene place, and finally the Durbar square of Patan, where we had a rooftop snack in the late afternoon. There was a gigantic scroll and Martijn was like a little boy in a candy shop!









Then to get back, we and two of our group mates, used the loudest joined (crammed) minibus (which ironically was playing the song “Just Chill”). We had dinner at a trendy restaurant with all the other Dutch people in Kathmandu. We ended the day with an amazing massage from an NGO that trains and employs blind massage therapists.