Nepal - We take our chocolate cake on vacation

When all of us Yale ladies were out at a dinner, we exchanged terrifying flying stories. Featured heavily was Yeti airlines, one of the Nepali national airlines, which has a 1 out of 7 in international travel ratings (don't tell Mom) although the UN Food Programme uses it. So I faced our morning flight with a little trepidation.

The hotel gave us wrapped cheese sandwiches which we x-rayed along with our chocolate cake and luggage. When we checked in, the man at the counter made sure to repeat our flight number several times which tipped me off to a situation I had been warned about: sometimes Yeti Airlines puts you on an earlier flight so that they fill up the planes. Not sure if they just cancel the last few planes...

Although the flight to Pokhara is only about 20 minutes, a flight attendant passed through the cabin with cotton balls for your ears and hard candies and instant coffee for your tummy. And if you're going to die in a fiery plane crash it may as well be with this view.

The one side effect of leaving on an earlier flight is that you arrive early and your taxi is not there to meet you. Not content to wait in the beautiful sunlight, N asked a policeman to call our hotel and get the taxi to come. They were a little surprised to say the least. (At one point while I was standing in the warm sun eating my radioactive sandwich, someone stepped over casting a shadow on me. Without thinking, I plaintively whined "you're in my suuuun"....and they moved out of it!)

We had tentative plans but when we relayed them to the woman at the front desk of our hotel she told us how cute and misguided we were. So suddenly N had plans to go paragliding that same afternoon. We spent the morning wandering around Pokhara as N got more and more nervous about jumping off a mountain. (She made me promise to tell her parents if she died which made me freak out a little bit about the thought of that conversation.) I hugged her for luck and set of on my own adventure -- getting a massage. 

I think my experience might have been more uncomfortable actually. I went to Seeing Hands, a massage clinic staffed entirely by blind masseuses. I had a deep moment of ableist worry but reflected on the ability of anyone to make a living wage in Nepal and decided it wasn't too exploitative. (Different opinions welcome, reader). My masseuse was a man and kept asking if he should massage my butt as that is, as it happens, a part of the back. I said that I was cool and he could concentrate on my shoulders. My shoulders are a bit screwy as a result of a car accident when I was 23 and a few years of swimming and rowing recently -- and this massage huuuuurt. I actually started to cry. Gah. 

I recovered by wandering around the city (even the non-touristy bits) and treating myself to beer while waiting (worrying) for N's triumphant return. 

She had a slightly traumatic experience as well when she and her paraglide buddy blew backwards (instead of jumping off the cliff on the first go) and then landed on the wrong side of the river. I think we both came out of the day ok, and enjoyed being in a town where we could cross the street without danger and breathe without ingesting a year's worth of pollutants.

 Last point: this is the elevator door in our hotel. What say you, Japanese maple or pot?