Janakpur

The bus to Janakpur was scheduled to leave at 6pm, so after strolling round Kathmandu for the day we decided to head to the local bus station early, as having been there a few days before we knew there was a good internet place nearby. After the usual haggling with the taxi driver we got dropped off near the station, but the internet place had no power.

Throughout our 6 weeks in Nepal power cuts have been extremely frequent. In fact, in Kathmandu load-shedding was in operation for 16 hours every day! Apparently this was due to a lack of rain water over the previous months, and since so much of Nepal's power comes from hydro stations, they have been severely affected. It's interesting that life and business seem to continue fairly normally though - many places have generators, and those that don't just use candles, and the restaurants all use gas of course.

So we had a couple of hours to wait around, but at least the bus left on time. It was quite a comfy bus too, and I would have had a decent enough sleep if it hadn't been for the kid behind me. She was on her mother's lap, and so every time the kid turned over or moved about she'd kick the back of my seat. I guess this is perfectly acceptable behaviour for Nepali's though, as no amount of complaining on my part made any difference.

The bus also arrived in Janakpur pretty much on time, so after a very confusing walk into the town Sarah sorted out the accommodation. The guidebooks had alluded to the fact that this town caters mainly to Indian pilgrims, and not Western travellers. This became very quickly apparent when Sarah checked out the recommended guesthouses, as all of them were pretty grim and all of them expensive. Anyway, the place we stayed was actually pretty nice (and the owner guy claimed he was giving us a room upgrade at no extra charge, which I think was true).

So, as usual after an overnight bus journey, we slept for a couple of hours before checking out the town. The main temple complex was pretty cool alright, and very busy later that evening, with loads of Indian pilgrims milling about and the ladies all wearing mad colourful saris. We also strolled up to the Big Monkey Temple, which houses (imprisons really) a poor overfed monkey, and checked out a couple of the towns many water tanks (sacred washing places).

We ate in the excellent air-conditioned Family Restaurant for lunch and later, while Sarah rested back in the room, I returned for tasty snacks, a couple of beers, and one of my favorite things to do on the whole trip - poring over the guidebook deciding where and how to get to our next destination.

I decided to head towards India early the next morning, and so after haggling with a cycle-rickshaw guy he drops us off on the main road (I had asked for the bus park, but it turned out that the buses did stop at this point too - I was just worried about getting a seat, but it was fine). And so we headed to the border, and again after zero border queues or troubles, we were back in fabulous India.