Thur, May 8 - Kathmandu

I am up at 5:30AM, WAY before the other guests. The sun is up and the garden is inviting. It's an opportunity to finally make serious headway on my journal.

Yves turns up at 6:30 and suggests that I move to a chair further from the adjacent building, where they are doing brickwork. I move and shortly thereafter, some mortar falls onto the chair where I was sitting. Hmmmm, what if it was a brick that had fallen? Yves says that builders are required to leave 30% of a lot as green space, but in practice, builders will bribe government officials and build out 100% of their space. Hence the reason for a five story wall abutting the garden.

In addition to good food, Yves has good coffee at the Garden House. I order a small pot and am quickly wired. I also order curds for breakfast and they are superb. Creamy and sweet, they go perfectly with some apples and bananas I bought from street vendors yesterday afternoon.

At 11AM, Khum Subedi, one of the owners of Unique Adventure, comes to meet me at the hotel. He wants to know, "Was I happy with the trek and climb?"

"I'm very satisfied." However, there are many things which I think could be done better, starting with a good gear checklist. Khum asks me to write down any improvements and I will send him a list of my ideas in June which he can either use or not. His situation is very similar to Bikash in Sikkim. The competition is fierce, with over 300 trekking companies in Kathmandu, and he needs to differentiate his company in some way. He has a certificate for me in his office which documents that I successfully climbed Island Peak.

On the way to his office, we pass the Rum Doodle Bar, which I remember from 1986, when Caroline and I stayed in Kathmandu for a few days. That's about all I remember from Kathmandu.

The hotel relies on a shallow well for most of its non-drinking water and this afternoon the pump gives out. People are asked to please not take showers till this crisis has passed. Yves laments the fact that it is late and will be impossible to obtain a new pump this evening. A plumber is called and he does show up. They discover that the windings on the pump motor are burned out. Rather than buy a new pump for 8,000Rs, the plumber spends the next two days repairing the motor by rewinding it. I'm staggered, but this is far cheaper than getting a new pump or new motor. In the meantime, we borrow water from the hotel next door.