Tuesday - more elephants - on to Pokhara

Tuesday was an early start, breakfast at 7am and then into the jeep to see the elephant breeding centre. We wound our way through several traditional villages. These have hardly changed for hundreds of years, except for motorbikes and the cell phones the young ones use continuously. The houses are made of bamboo and grass, with cow dung and mud plastered over them. The roofs are thatched, a bit like houses in the islands. The floors are still hard packed but well swept mud, but we were impressed that everything was tidy and well kept, including the animal enclosures, where cows, goats, chickens were reared.

We were taken to a different river crossing and poled across into the park by dugout canoe. A wetter experience then we had anticipated, since they washed it out to "clean" it before we got in!

At the elephant breeding centre, the main attraction was a pair of baby elephant twins, about 8 months old. All the babies are free to wander, but their mothers are tethered in an enclosure. The twins were cheeky and seeking titbits, which some in the know had brought with them. To frequent cries of "aren't they cute" they were much petted and photographed.

The mothers were interesting, too. Tethered to posts which, in fact, are huge buried tree trunks,on which they performed amazing feats of scratching various parts of their bodies. In places the heavy timber and metal retaining fence was broken away. Since this is in the park, wild bull elephants had got the scent of the females and broken in to mate with them, killing the captive breeding bull as well. Such is nature. The "Stud" bull elephant's skull is in their museum.

Back at the Lodge we collected our gear and went back to the bus "station" to head of for Pokhara.

Unfortunately for this trip there was no "tourist" bus - we had to get a regular one, which was smaller and did have relatively comfortable seats. But it went slowly and was touting for business all the way, making frequent stops. It was a very slow journey, the 6 hours we were expecting, turning out to be more like 9 hours. Coming across our first road accident of the trip didn't help, either. By the time we got to Pokhara we had bad backs, sore muscles and frayed tempers.

We had come to Pokhara to see the famed view of the Annapurna range that is the backdrop to this city by the lake. But in late afternoon and the evening there was cloud cover and we saw nothing.

We made the best of it, wandering out of the hotel and around the bustling night life of shops and cafes that are by the lake edge. In a curious way it's a bit like Queenstown, with a long, narrow lake and the main focus being on tourists - gift shops, restaurants and bars. Like Queenstown, the punters are all European - it's a tourist town. While Warren, Costa and family went shopping Dave and I ducked into a bar for a beer. That was the only thing on my mind at this point. It could have been a smart NZ bar - overlooking the lake it was playing (horrible) western music, and served a full range of western beers. But we had local "Everest" beer - which has marketing trappings of a heavily iced beer glass (been in a freezer) and the (large) bottle of "Everest" has ice on the outside, too. It was surprisingly good - but maybe any beer at all would have been.

Back at the hotel we had another dahl bhaat supper, eaten with gusto, and then out back along the shops for a stroll. We thought we would like some coffee, there were, after all, a lot of restaurants here. We tried hard to find one with an espresso machine. At last we did, only to be told, it wasn't working and they could "make the coffee in a saucepan"! We ended up in a restaurant where we had some dessert, hot chocolate plunger coffee and tea.