Into Nepal

We were at the border an hour before it opened, and so we ended up close to the start of a rather long queue. The bus backed down to the bridge with our guide calling directions from the back window. A funny way to leave the country - looking at where you've been. It seems that there isn't enough room to turn around at the end. Typical Chinese manual border processes, mysterious to most, need I say more. Everybody's luggage was meticulously searched for Lonely Planet guides. Any Tibet guides were confiscated, and other countries were read to see if they contained information about Tibet. Not surprisingly we didn't have any, and our guide's bag wasn't searched!

Then a long wait in a chaotic immigration room on the Nepalese side. Not surprisingly, those who needed to apply for visas were finished long before those of us who had applied for them at home.

The first thing we did was to advance our clocks two and a quarter hours. You walk across a bridge and you get jet lag! I think that Nepal is the only country in the world on a 1/4 hour time zone. The rumour is that they've done it so that they are different to India.

The contrast - one side of the bridge looks, feels and smells Chinese, and the next minute it looks, feels and smells like India. All of a sudden the toilets are clean.

First issue. 10 km down the road there was a landslide so our bus and jeep were stuck. We hit the closest restaurant for morning tea (at 8:30 in the morning) while our guide coped with the chaos.

Eventually the road opened, and the bus turned up. We now drive (occasionally) on the left of the road. Don't know who had the Toyota Corolla concession in 1978, but they must have made a fortune in Nepal. It's also warm and humid. Stopped off halfway down the valley to watch a 160m high bungee jump.

After hours of chaos on the countries main highway which is largely single lane, we arrived at a wonderful restaurant perched on the side of a hill for lunch. As luck would have it, it was cloudy and raining so we only got glimpses of the wonderful view. However, the food was great after the fare of the last week. Chicken that wasn't actually yak!

Arrived in Kathmandu about 5pm, and organised ourselves for our final dinner together, and onward journeys tomorrow.

The group went to the Rum Doodle restaurant in Thamel, which has been a haunt of all Everest expedition teams since Hillary in 1953. Over 600 signatures of summiteers are on the wall, and we filled out a large foot which was hung on the roof.

Mandy's flight left Melbourne almost on time, and arrived in Singapore as expected. The flight details of her onward flight weren't available on-line, so I'm hoping that all is well.