If you like little furry friends, this is the place for you. We heard our little friend scuttling across the room in the middle of the night, and saw him scurry under our door. Luckily Mickey didn’t make a beeline for out biscuits, and caused no real problems at all. The lack of electricity, on the other hand, was a bit of a pain, but not the hotel’s fault – nowhere in town had power. The downside of this was the toilets: we opted for the outside loo, and it was pitch black, even during the day. Squatting in the dark isn’t easy!

Food was cheap, but I think the nearby Three Foxes restaurant was better, and the location is fine. The staff were very friendly, but don’t be fooled by the LP’s description of a ‘charming courtyard’- it is just a plain concrete yard.

6/10

The cheapest place we found in Sauhara, we were taken here first by the unavoidable tout at the bus station and, although we didn’t like the location that much (across some scrub ground at the north end of the main strip), we ended up coming back after a fruitless search for cheaper/better.

The room was pretty basic and, although kitted out with western fittings, the bathroom was a let down – there was not hot water at any time of day, even though solar heating was supposedly installed, and the toilet seat was much too small for the toilet rendering it completely useless.

The owner of this place was a bit of a Del Boy – always on the lookout to sell us something, and too smarmy for his own good.

Pretty average: 5/10

We spent a lot of our time in Pokhara in Laughing Buddha, enjoying at least two meals a day there, every day. It was not just the prices that kept us coming back; the family that own the restaurant are charming, the food tasted amazing, the portions were huge, and the place had real atmosphere when it was candle lit during the nightly power-cuts.

Highlights of the menu include n enormous spinach and mushroom lasagne, with bread and salad, Swiss Rosti (amazing cheesey/potatoey gooey deliciousness), and the simple breakfast, all costing less than 90 pence. For a real treat, try the grilled fish (a whopping 1.10 pounds!).

Laughing Buddha can be found on the North end of Lakeside, near Sweet Memories and Newari Kitchen. Not to be missed.

10/10

Pokhara is bursting with guest houses, and we looked around a few before settling in Pushpa, as much out of fatigue as anything else – the price and standard of rooms seems to be similar across the board. Rooms cost from 300 to 700 rupees with western en-suites with good hot water showers. More expensive rooms have TVs and nicer furnishing, but as always we opted for cheapest and least cheerful. There isn’t much of a garden to speak of, but rooms are clean and in slightly better condition than some of the other places we looked at, and the location is good (just down a sidestreet south of centre point).

We met some American ladies that had been coming here for the past 10 years and thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. We’d have given it more points, but unfortunately the owners tried to short change us twice when we were checking out. Poor show. 6/10

In a desperate attempt to catch up, I have uploaded all of our photos from Nepal to the gallery. Enjoy!

We arrived in Kathmandu without a Lonely Planet (shock, horror) and with no idea of where we wanted to stay. After getting dropped off in the touristy Thamel area, we were lucky to spot another westerner hanging around and we asked him if he knew anywhere cheap to stay. He informed us that Shailung was one of the best value places in town, and this turned out to be true – we paid 350 rupees for a basic but clean two-bed room with western en-suite and hot water, which is much cheaper than anywhere else we could find nearby.

Location is excellent, right in the heart of Thamel, and staff are friendly. There is also a nice area on the roof with a table and chairs and a great view over the city with the Himalayas in the background.

Shailung is not in our 2007 Lonely Planet, but you can find it next to Hotel Garuda or Equator Expeditions. The attached Internet café has a good broadband connection and they didn’t charge us for plugging in our own laptop.

A note about hot water: it seems that most places require both a few hours of electricity and a few hours of sunshine before hot water is available. I cannot fathom why solar heated water requires electricity, but it does, and patience is required in budget places without generators where electricity is sporadic at best.

8/10

Relaxing in Pokhara

I wrote at great length about my love for Kathmandu, but I am sad to confess that I don’t have much to say about the rest of Nepal. That is not because I did not love it – quite the contrary, I found it to be a stunningly beautiful country, but because we had so little time there.

After Kathmandu we headed to Pokhara, the next stop on the tourist trail. We had big plans: trekking, sailing, cycling… but things didn’t turn out as we imagined. It was sunny and hot. For the first time in almost three months we felt the sun on our skins and our tans slowly re-emerged. This had a bizarre effect on our behaviour: suddenly all we could find the energy to do was sit by the side of the lake drinking cups of tea and sunning ourselves.

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Most guidebooks helpfully classify types of accommodation into three categories: top-end, mid-range, and budget. This is most certainly an oversimplification: it fails to take into consideration that the budget category alone is home to a universe of different types of abode, ranging from the flea-ridden pit of hell, to the bog of eternal stench.

After eleven months of sleeping, almost exclusively, in some of the cheapest digs in Asia, I have begun to consider myself a somewhat of an expert in the subject, and yet I still come across hostels that have the capacity to surprise me.

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Kathmandu: the name itself is exotic, conjuring up the smells of incense and spices and the sounds of Hindu pilgrims chanting the holy ‘Om’. After nine days crossing the frigid and barren landscape of Tibet, devoid of life for miles and miles upon end, Kathmandu is an explosion of colour, smells, sights and tastes.

It is remarkable that Nepal can share a border with China and yet be so utterly different. The food, the people, the chaos; it is a whole different world. Where China has concrete cities built around Communist era tower blocks, Nepal has crumbling brick buildings and shanty towns; in place of wide roads and orderly pavements, Kathmandu is a maze of narrow alleys and lanes, where pedestrians, motorcyclists and rickshaws fight for space; instead of noodle shops and dumpling houses, the streets here are lined with men selling pakoras and samosas on portable cookers. 

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