Leaving Bandipur

So while we may have had an early night, we also had an early start. i don't wear a watch but Ewan is rather obsessed with the time and I have to say he is pretty good - I asked him to set his alarm so we could get up for sunrise but he just woke up naturally at 5.50am and that was us done for the night.

We were rather excited about the prospect of sunrise over the Himalaya from the comfort of our balcony but we were up far too early and actually the sun rises a little over to the side at the moment, being that it is December and all. So we wondered around the resort drinking tea and going onto the field at the top where the party was setting up for another day. The views were fairly impressive though and it was a great way to start the day.



We took breakfast on the main balcony before walking down to the swimming pool, which had been one of the main attractions of the resort, only that the pool was empty so no swimming for us. We messed around with the camera instead, Ewan in the pool and me messing around practising Yoga on what could be a ideal place to practise Yoga on a Nepali retreat - in fact the whole resort screamed Yoga retreat centre to me. Oh well, I can but dream!




We decided to go for a morning walk into town and walked down to the public washing area where cool spring water emerges from beneath a forest and the women were doing their morning washing (funny that!) and chanced upon a shrine to Krishna and Radha. there was a kindly man at the shrine who encouraged us to come and take a look. It was rather special.



I don't know, the last few times I have been to Nepal I have been particulalry drawn to Shiva, the God who is responsible for destroying and creating, but this year all I seem to notice is Ganesh, the God of prosperity and wisdom and the remover of obstacles and Krishna, the fun loving cowherd who dallied with the milkmaids, danced, played his flute and still managed to remain devoted to his wife, Radna. So it seemd rather approriate that of all the Hindu shrines we could come across, it was Krishna today, I can sense a meaning there somewhere, but that should be no surprise!

We then decided that we would check out and walk back down to Dumre taking the road. I suspect the motorist who passed us thought us most mad, in fact one bus driver actually stopped to offer us a lift, but we were determined to walk the distnace...which actually surprised us by taking about an hour and a half and in fact towards the end we were walking rather quickly for fear we would miss the last bus back to Pokhara. But alas not, a bus appeared a matter of moments after we reached the bus stop and while it was cmpletely packed with only 2 free seats, we decided to go for it and thus endured another testing bus drive all the way back to Pokhara Old Town before taking a taxi to Lakeside.

Back in town it was tea time again before my early evening Yoga practice on the roof in front of the mountains and in peace.

I thoroughly enjoyed our trip to Bandipur. In many respects it was one of the highlights of the trip because we literally chanced it and just went with the flow of things and had so much fun together, working as a bit of a team. Thank you Universe, iI am very grateful.