lhasa

Still disappointed about flying over Tibet instead of traveling through, the plain landed at Lhasa. We made a short walk around the airport and continued to Chengdu. But...we have been in Lhasa :-). Our language skills are quit useless here, but the lessons Chinese from eight month ago leads us to the toilet and serves us a vegetarian meal :-). Instead of traveling around, we invested the healthcare system at Dali and Lijiang, to find a proper cure for the pain in Rolina her neck, shoulder and arm. After some pills, sprays and more traditional herbal stuff, Rolina is now in a ten days treatment to stretch her neck. I hope she is not getting much taller than me :-). For now we are stocked at Lijiang, so visit us when you are in the neighborhood :-).

relaxing

Nepal is very relaxing after three months India :-). The fresh mountain air, less pollution and less hectic, including the beautiful landscape makes it feel like a holiday. We travel towards Kathmandu, via Tansen, Pokhara and Bandipur, to obtain our Chinese visa. Off course the visa procedure is again a disappointing experience, because we are not allowed to travel by land from Nepal into Tibet to mainland China. Again an embassy forces us to fly. I wonder how it was in ancient times :-). Because of the monsoon, we just saw one mountain peak with snow and a lot of mountains in the clouds :-). I think we should visit Nepal again in a better period and do some trekking.

leaving india

Instead of taking a short cut from Ahmedabad to the border with Nepal, we are traveling around the south of India during the monsoon :-). We have to wait for at least 2 till 4 weeks for a new passport, which we can obtain in Mumbai. To make myself also a bit useful this year, we will visit some projects on behalf of the Dutch program Xplore. The visit at the projects in Pondicherry and Chennai where very impressive and inspiring. In Chennai we got after 3 weeks the news that the new passport was arrived, so we went straight to Mumbai again. After obtained the passport we had to get an exit visa to leave India. This was again a real challenge to our good mood and nerves :-). They only want to give an exit visa if we would take a flight out of Mumbai. Shouting that we wanted to leave over land did not had any effect. So we walked a bit between there office and our embassy till we finally found a possibility. They just copied by hand the originally lost visa in the new passport and we paid some money and off we go :-). After 3 months in India we wanted to get to the border as soon as possible, so we spend some time in the train. From Mumbai to Lucknow and then to Gorakpur and to the border. At the border they checked the passport and especially the visa from Rolina with suspicious :-). But finally it was there, the exit stamp. We bought our Nepalese visa and crossed the border by foot. India was an overwhelming experience :-).