Wout and Sarah's Big Adventure : Lumbini and a looooong ass drive to Pokhara!

ON the second day we woke up early doors to get back down to the River Bank in Chitwan to see if we could spot any more wild life, unfortunately it was very misty at 6am and there wasn't much to see other than hoards of tourists queuing up at the River bank to take their jeep tours into the park itself. We actually felt quite smug that we'd decided against taking a tour and yet had seen so much from the comfort of the cafe as the jeeps were packed with as many people they could fit in and really did not look fun at all!

Our driver came to collect us and we set off to Lumbini, which is known to be the birth place of Buddha. We really hadn't done much research at all about Lumbibi and had left all of this part of the trip to our host brother. The drive to Lumbini was pretty awful in all honesty as the road was really terrible. The drive took around 6/7 hours and the last hour was awful as the road had been dug up to be resurfaced so for about 8 miles we were basically 'off roading'!

Here a little snippet from welcome nepal.com which better explains Lumbini:

Lumbini is the Buddha's birthplace, one of the world's most important spiritual sites and attracts Buddhist pilgrims from around the world. Today you can visit over twenty-five Buddhist monasteries built by diverse countries from Vietnam to France, study Buddhism, meditate and visit the birthplace within the sacred Mayadevi Gardens.

Because the site was so big and it was already starting to get late we decided to take a moto rickshaw to drive us around to a couple of the temples and pagodas. We were all feeling really tired and it was getting toward sunset and we still had no place organised to stay. There were 10s of thousands of people in Lumbini so we were really not confident that we were going to find a room and instead decided that we would head straight for Pokhara.

In hindsight this probably was not the best idea as the drive (which was 165km away) that we thought thought was going to take about 5 hours in fact took more than 8 and the mountains roads at night are an extremely scary place to be. There is again on one road between Lumbini and Pokhara most of which were very uneven, winding and VERY high up. To add to this the Nepalese coaches and trucks have no road safety consciousness and the entire journey we had huge trucks over taking on blind bends! We made it in one piece thankfully and all feeling very exhausted and sick of the inside of our car we reached our hotel in Pokhara at around 10pm.

We spent the next day exploring pokhara and visited Devi Falls and the peace pagoda before heading to see sunset from Sarankot (unfortunatly it was a bit cloudy so not the best views) then in was back to our rooms for some well deserved sleep before the long drive back to Lamatar the next morning.