As you know, last week, we went on a Twelve Day Everest Base Camp Trek. This was meant to be a treat to ourselves after surviving the mess in Russia. We actually borrowed money from our house fund to pay for it *slaps wrist*. Yet this turned out to be another hellish experience, which resulted in Dan being airlifted to hospital in Kathmandu – and it wasn’t for altitude sickness...
Oh man, where do we even begin. Firstly, I’ll apologise: I think we’re cheating a little by grouping three week’s worth of blog posts together. We do have a good excuse, mind you. We’ve been riding around in the Himalayas, going where the oxygen gets so thin that it starts messing with your body. Idiots, I know, but it’s just too much fun.
With the odd exception, Dan and I have spent most of the last six-months as a lonesome twosome, having fleeting moments of communication with other humans in shops, hotels and restaurants. This week, however, we had a full-time friend and second visitor, Dan’s cousin, Tom (the guy whose wedding we went back for in June)…
As you know, we’ve had some time off the bikes due to recent scandals and scams. We’ve been slowly easing ourselves back into cycling with some flat, easy rides around Kathmandu Valley. This week, we had our first fully-loaded hill climb in about six weeks – since we were in Europe. Wow. It was tough…
We’ve lived some weird kind of groundhog day this week, as we nursed Dan back to full peddle power. We’d wake up and eat last night’s cold pizza, before going out for a late eggs Benedict breakfast (yes, we were still digging for that bone). We’d then spend the afternoon watching films and gorging on bourbon biscuits. Come dinnertime, we’d head back out for pizza, doggy-bagging the slices we couldn’t fit in our faces, to eat cold the following morning. I kid you not. We did this four days in a row…
It’s been a relatively normal week this week. No court appearances. No visa problems. No in-flight fires. Just your standard week in Nepal. Things got so normal, we even had a duvet day and watched three films back-to-back. Obviously we never actually got in the duvet because it’s practically 100°c. We binged on Toy Story, The Post and The Death of Stalin, only leaving the hotel room to eat…
Visas are a tricky little thing that every traveller has to deal with at some point. The trick to tackling them is organisation. That’s why we applied for our Russia visa back in March, before we actually left the UK in April – four months before we even expected to enter Russia. But all that forethought and planning was quashed by an incompetent Visa Agent, leaving us with an expired visa and a trip to Russian Federal Court…
This week, we arrived in Saint Petersburg after white-knuckle riding the last bit of the E20, which involved four lanes of traffic and dramatic arm signals. Now I was going to jump straight into the goings on in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but I just wanted to point out the amount of steps we’ve walked this week…
After nine nights on the Estonian islands, we truly fell into island life. We cycled no more than 50km a day, indulged in hour-long chats with locals and fellow travellers, and didn’t consider it a successful night’s camp if we weren’t covered in sand. We were so relaxed, we even forgot to pay for a campsite before we left...
Towards the end of each week, we rack our brains, trying to remember stuff that's happened (weeks and days blur together), which I then write about on the blog. This week was no different, except that I turned to Dan and said, ‘we’ve had a pretty uneventful week, this week’. Never will I ever say those words out loud again, as on Sunday, Dan’s wheel rim literally exploded...
