Having spent all of yesterday closeted in the hotel, we decided to venture out unto the village that surrounds us, First of all, we discovered, right outside the gate (and actually, as we were to discover, part of the hotel), not only a modern coffee shop, offering the full range of coffees, but also with good wifi, which means we spent a good bit of time there, still catching up with work.
We also went shopping, most successfully, buying sun hats, a CD of Buddhist chanting, which we heard in the shop, and particularly enjoyed, and, rather more urgently, some drugs for me… prescription drugs, I hasten to add. I had foolishly omitted to bring enough of my various heart pills with me to cover the time we would be away; I had even contemplated not telling Val about it at all, lest she insist we immediately return to Dhangadhi (though she had briefly mooted the idea that we should get someone to enter our room, locate the right drugs, and send them to Yogi’s, an idea I thought was fraught with difficulties. My proposed solution was to find a pharmacy and buy some replacements (and she mentioned the experience of the father of a friend of hers, who, in a similar position, had done just that, and ended up dead!)
But a trip to two pharmacies seemed as though it had produced exact equivalents; only time will tell if it kills me.
In the afternoon, we worked, swam and lazed, then went out for dinner, for the sake of variety, at one of the town’s restaurants. Mosty, it was successful, We had a good table overlooking the main junction, picturesque and lively, and the food was good. I did have to put up with the increasingly drunken conversation of our neighbour, an anglophile… but also the operator of a local tour company, inevitably scouting for business (we had arranged all of this earlier in the day.) Bu the meal was somewhat spoilt by two things: the antics of a crowd of boys in the square below us, lighting fireworks; and then by a ridiculously long wait – an hour or more – for my pudding. A shame, as otherwise we ad enjoyed venturing out.
