So, from the 'Asian but Western'-surroundings we've moved to the 'Asian but touristic'-surroundings. Although Hong Kong was very new to us, it still felt Western and we didn't really experience a culture shock. The contrast with Nepal couldn't have been bigger, and that started immediately when we landed on “Kathmandu International Airport”; coming from the ultramodern Hong Kong airport, we now had to leave the plane via a staircase and walk through an unheated, wooden building towards the immigration 'desk'. Getting a visa was interesting; although we officially needed to have a picture for the visa, it turned out we could also get a visa after telling the officials our pictures where in our checked-in luggage which we did not pick up yet.

We'd pre-booked an airport transfer and 4 friendly men welcomed us and took us to their minivan; luckily the one with the least alcohol-smell turned out to be the driver. The second guy immediately tried to sell a tour to whatever destination, and he tried to do that without the third guy finding out what he was doing. After almost having hit a cow, two vans, three people and four other cars we made it to our hotel. We still haven't figured out what the official side of the road is to drive on and the amounts of people, riksja's and cars on the small streets are amazing. What a noise they can make and it's a miracle that so far we haven't seen a car hit something or somebody! They all drive slalom through the small streets, honking their horns, and the pedestrians don't care and walk everywhere.

Kathmandu is a big city and we stay in the part called Thamel. This is the tourist ghetto packed with hostels, tourist and mountaineering shops and bars and restaurants. The streets are small, dusty and dirty. The people are very nice and most women beautifully dressed. And despite the craziness on the streets, and hassle with men trying to sell souvenirs or promoting agencies, we feel safe. We stay in the Tibet Guest House, and the room is nice; most of the time we have hot water and electricity.

We've used our first day to get some information about the Everest Base Camp trekking, and to find an agency that could book it. This was sometimes stressful, because there are over 400 official agencies and almost every guy in the street said they knew the absolute best agency to arrange this. We both felt best with the former trekking-guide who ran the agency in our hostel, so we booked it with him. We'll be flying to Lukla on Sunday and that afternoon the trek starts. All in all it will take about 14-15 days to walk to the base-camp and back. Perhaps even longer if we decide to take more days to rest/get acclimatised to the high altitude. We'll sleep in so called tea-houses and only the guide and one porter will accompany us.

We took it easy on the second day and walked around the center a little bit and used the free wifi-connection in our hotel to solve some minor issues with the iPod and laptop. We were able to only partially solve those issues, probably because we'd only bought a small amount of corn for the pigeons who live in a specific temple here in Kathmandu. Feeding them is supposed to boost your Karma ;-)