Power outage

Today we hit the breaks a little bit - we've been going at such a fast pace this week that it was time to relax a little. My batteries were out in multiple senses of the term, so I needed a day to recharge. This is a vacation, after all! 

The one "active" event of the day was zip lining for me. 

Ami wasn't able to make it since she was feeling a bit under the weather. I've always wanted to go zip lining but had never had the opportunity, so when we found out it was offered here, I didn't hesitate one bit before signing up. Plus the scenery here made it a stellar opportunity.

The zip line started at the top of a mountain and ended at close to the bottom. It was nearly 2 km in length, although the speed of up to 140km/hr meant that the ride was over pretty quickly :) I'm not sure how fast I ended up going, but it was more than fast enough for me to get my adrenaline fix. The zip line is a pretty basic concept - you sit in a harness and are flung down the edge of a mountain as fast as you can go. You have a break cord (to be used during the landing if you're coming in "hot") and a release cord if you accidentally hit the breaks too hard and are stuck in the middle of the cable. I didn't have to use my release at all - but did have to break a little at the end. Wow was it fun!

This particular mountain was covered in trees with at least 3 waterfalls cascading down its sides. I admit that I really only noticed this once I was at the bottom, since my focus during the ride itself was spent entirely on feeling the wind on my face.

If I had to choose between paragliding and zip lining, I'd have to give the edge to the former because you're up there for a lot longer and have some time to enjoy the views as you're doing it. I'd still highly recommend either activity, though. 

After my morning adventure, it was time to relax a little. Ami was confined to bed basically all day, so I went next door to the spa for some classic R&R. 60 minute papaya facial? $10. 75 minute traditional Nepali massage? $18. If I were here for any longer I would be getting massages every day. Turns out that a traditional Nepali massage is similar to a Swedish massage except that it uses a special kind of local oil. It also incorporated a little stretching similar to a Thai massage and - for lack of a better word - thumping similar to a Turkish massage. I'm actually kind of proud of my knowledge of international massages, now that I think about it...

The rest of the day I spent around town. I had some administrative stuff for Booth to do plus a few other odds and ends. I sat in a cafe overlooking the lake, sipping a lemon soda, snacking on mo mo's and thukpa, and playing on my iPad. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon, really. 

Speaking of lemon soda - these things are delicious. It's just a bit of fresh lemon juice mixed with soda water, but in this heat and humidity it is delicious. Interestingly enough, in India they make them with limes and Nepal they make them with lemons. Weird, right?

Like an idiot, I had forgotten to turn my nice camera off last night, and it must have been in "play" mode or something because the battery was dead when I woke up. I forgot to bring my charger with me on this trip, so I had to go find a camera shop to buy a charger. The first shop I found didn't have chargers for my particular battery, but they did have a universal charger of their own (not for sale) and offered to charge my battery for me at a nominal price. Score! I left my battery with them and came back a few hours later to pick it up, fully charged.

My final goal for the day was to get some of my paragliding photos online. I don't have a way to transfer them from my SD card yet, but I had purchased a CD from the paragliding company with photos of me on it. It doesn't have the photos of the amazing views but rather just ones of me saying "weeeeeeeeeeee" from various angles, but I figure that's better than nothing. I find an Internet cafe and try to upload the photos to Shutterfly. Well, not surprisingly, the Internet here is crazy slow. And the browser keeps crashing. And I can't have more than one window open at once. I was able to email myself a couple photos using gmail before the power went out entirely.

That's right - the power in the entire neighborhood went out. Ami was a good 10 minute walk away from me and she lost power too. Hers came back on after about 20 minutes, but the power in the internet cafe stayed out. The only reason this was an issue was that my CD was stuck in their computer with no way to retrieve it! I'm leaving first thing tomorrow morning so can't go back for it. The proprietor of the cafe ris up an elaborate chain of extension cords to connect my computer to the backup generator so that we can get the CD out. The generator apparently is very weak - they only have it to keep a light. USB going in these types of situations, so he was worried that it wouldn't be enough to turn on the computer. It took a good 45 minutes to find out, since we had to wait for some other guy to get off the landline before we could try. Apparently the generator was powering the phone, so we had to let him finish his conversations before we turned the phone off. Yes, conversations as in plural. He kept hanging up and then dialing someone else. He probably made 15 phone calls in toal. My CD issue only took 2 minutes to resolve, so you'd think the guy could have waited to finish his series of phone calls without making me wait, but whatever. I got my CD back, which is all I could have hoped for. 

Tomorrow is another travel day. The saddest part of tomorrow is that Ami and I will be parting ways. Thankfully we know we'll be seeing each other in a couple weeks in Colorado at the GSAP retreat, so that will make it slightly easier to say goodbye.  I had been hoping my friend Sudeshna wold be joining me for the second half of my travels, but she wasn't able to et the time off work. I'll be going it alone for the next few days - don't worry, I promise to stay safe...