Mountain Biking the Kathmandu Valley

This morning I ate a couple of tasty pastries from Thamel's "Hot Bread" bakery, then headed off on a mountain bike for a ride along the North edge of the Kathmandu Valley. It's funny how mountain biking is a little bit different everywhere. In Utah "mountain biking" usually means finding trails in the mountains and biking down them. When I went mountain biking in Peru in 2006, my guide, Juan, loaded our bikes onto the top of a filthy bus, and after a six-hour ride up one side of the Andes mountains we pulled the bikes off and hauled down a narrow dirt road through tiny Peruvian villages. In Nepal it seems that every mountain in the country that's not covered with snow is terraced with rice patties. Naturally mountain biking in Nepal involves navigating tiny paths between the flooded rice fields

My Nepali guide, Sunila, led me out of Thamel and we headed up a bumpy road that happened to pass by Nagarjun Forest, where I spent a day hiking in 2007. After only twenty or thirty minutes of biking the whole Kathmandu Valley was spread out below us. As I looked out over the valley I could see rice fields in every direction and the classic Kathmandu scenery of red-brick-and-concrete buildings with blue sillouettes of mountains as a backdrop. Sunila led me off the road onto a dirt trail and within minutes we were biking along the edges of bright green rice patties..Half the fun of the ride was people-watching as I cruised along the fields. Nepali women in the bright red clothing typical of local Hindus carried large woven baskets with them as they tended the rice. In the mean time the men shaped the terrain into new fields and plowed existing fields using teams of water buffalo. Several times we passed by Nepali kids walking to or from school (I couldn't quite figure out which way they were going). All of them wore their school uniforms of light green shirts, dark pants or a skirt, and a necktie.After traversing several miles along the edge of the valley we popped back out onto a paved road and Sunila led me to Budhanilkantha, a local Hindu temple. Budhanikantha was highly recommended in my Lonely Planet book, but to me there really wasn't a whole lot to see there. The temple is centered around a small pond with a stone image of the Hindu deity Vishnu lying in the middle. Hindu pilgrims come to Budhanikantha to gather and pray in front of the Vishnu statue. Maybe I'm not a very sophisticated traveler or maybe I just didn't appreciate the place for what it is, but I really didn't see what was supposed to be so impressive. The place was definitely worth stopping by, but I'm glad I didn't go out of my way to get there. Originally I considered paying for a cab to take me to Budhanikantha and back, but for only a few dollars more I got a mountain bike and a guide for the day instead. That option turned out to be a whole lot better.Before leaving on the epic trip I figured that I'd have to get my hair cut a time or two while I'd be gone. There's no better place to take care of that than in a developing country, where prices are cheap and the service is good. I dropped by a local beauty parlor this afternoon and let a Nepali barber trim me up. First came the typical work with the clippers, but the guy also brought out an old-school barber's razor to trim around my ears and neck-line and then massaged my scalp afterwards. I was apprehensive at first because I didn't want to end up looking like Vanilla Ice on a bad-hair day, but the haircut is the best I've had since my visit with Ron the barber at the BYU barbershop in 2005, and it cost less than three dollars. I doubt that Ron would give me the same treatment for that price.

I had an early dinner at a Tibetan restaurant in Thamel called "Old Tashi Deleg". I ordered "Tingmo", which is a Tibetan dish of a giant bowl of spicy curry with potatoes and pork, and three soft, steamed bread rolls on the side. There are some really great restaurants in Thamel. Dinner tonight was one of the best meals I've had weeks and it was as authentic as Tibetan food comes.

Tonight I rode a local bus packed with Nepalis about twenty miles East of Kathmandu and got off at the "Le Meridian Gokarna Forest Resort", where I had booked a room for the night. The room is one of four free nights that I got for signing up for an American Express card back home, and I'm definitely not disappointed with the place. The Gokarna is a four-star hotel with an accompanying 470 acre Gleneagles golf course. Only a few hours after leaving my ten-dollar room in Thamel the staff at Gokarna welcomed me like a celebrity and quickly ushered me to my massive room with a king-size bed and complimentary slippers. It's refreshing to stay in a nice place once in a while. Cheap rooms are alright and I could stay in one every night of the trip if I had to, but spending just one night in a really lavish place recharges me, so to speak, and just makes it easier to travel for the next little while. Besides that, it's something to really look forward to as well.Checkout time is 12:00 tomorrow and I'm going to use every last minute that I have at the Gokarna. I think that I'll eat about half the food that the hotel has prepared as breakfast for it’s guests, then I'll spend an hour in the pool, an hour in the gym, then another hour in the hot-tub. If I've only got a handful of nights in lavish places then I've got to make my time at the Gokarna really count.