World Peace

James was nearly back to normal (whether that was good or bad is a matter of opinion) so we looked into doing what we were going to do from the off – boating on the lake. It is probably the one thing that everyone does, apart from the trekking, and there were plenty of places to get a boat from. It was only going to cost 700 Rupees, so only about a fiver or so, for the whole day.

Boats...

We paid the boat man his fee and he led us to our boat. It was nothing special, but looked pretty sea-worthy so we were happy enough. He then handed us two differently-sized oars which would probably make us go round in circles but we took them nonetheless. After a less-than-steady start we rowed away from the shore and into the lake. There were no life-jackets on offer, but I think we would have refused them anyway, the water didn’t look that deep. It was pretty hard going as there were no stirrups (or whatever) to act as a pivot, so we had an oar each and zig-zagged our way out into the middle of the lake.

James, who should be rowing!

There is a small temple out in the middle of the lake which we rowed past but couldn’t get onto as it was busy with locals ringing bells and suchlike, and also because we didn’t want to crash into any other boats, fall into the lake or lose our boat form not tying it up properly. There were lots of people rowing to and from the temple and most of them were locals who were happy to yell “Namaste” over to us, although there were also a number of Chinese tourists who would holler “Ni hao” to us to which we responded in our broken Chinese.

The temple in the lake

It was a glorious day for it too, which was great as the day had started with the usual hazy fog that seemed to linger over the lake as it did at the end of the day too. The haze had cleared and we were being baked in the hot sun, with one last attempt to get a bit of tan before returning to cloudy England. We made our way over to the docking area on the other side of the lake and tied up. Leaving our oars in the restaurant nearby we began our trek up the hills to the World Peace Pagoda that sits on top of one of the highest hills on that side of the lake.

Other boats following us to the shore!

Having heard that there had been some robberies along the way we took out multi-tools and made sure they were to hand, just in case anyone tried to jump us. But we never really thought that we would need them, just a bit of exaggeration on the Wikitravel page we assumed. It was a nice trek up too, although we had to rest a few times due to James’s lack of strength through lack of food intake.

But James, we've only been gong for 4 minutes...

We made it to the top and were pleasantly surprised by the pagoda. It had only been built in 1996 but it was a special place with fantastic views all round. The whole of Pokhara was visible to us and we tried to find our little hotel but couldn’t pick it out of the throng laid out before us. We were up there for a while, taking in the sights and trying not to spoil other peoples photos of the huge buddhas that surround the pagoda.

The World Peace Pagoda

The trek down was much better and thankfully there were no bandits that came charging out of the bushes. We grabbed our oars and rowed back out into the lake, and soon enough we were back on dry land with aching arms and slightly damp backsides. For the rest of the afternoon we made use of the market streets to do some more Christmas shopping and to barter hard, where appropriate. Back at the hotel we had another power cut, which was really unhelpful as we needed to charge laptops, cameras and phones. It wasn’t until we cam eback after dinner that we realised that there hadn’t been a power cut, simply that we had forgotten to put the key in the wall slot to activate the electrics. Whoops. But it meant that we managed to tie up a few loose ends and get ready for the last big push into India. We would be flying into Delhi, but we would have to brave the 5/6 hour micro-bus journey back to Kathmandu first.