The paragliding turns out to be a mild diversion for me, as there is no wind, so the flight is both gentle and short. It was much different when I had done one in Oludeniz in Turkey, as there I was so high off the surface that I might have jumped out of a plane. It’s still a good way to see the surrounding scenery such as the fish farms in the lake, the houses entwined with the hillside rice paddies and the hubbub of the town. My pilot lands us by the lake where fishermen and women are scavenging the marshes.
For Laurie, it was a different story though. Her first attempt at launching is abandoned after she chooses to sit down on the ground rather than running to leap. Her pilot, who is Swiss but who was once the winner of the French Paragliding Championship and was ranked fourth in the world, tells her that he has never had a failed launch before. If only Frank Spencer was 35 years younger....
Her second launch is successful, although not pretty. However, when I meet up with her after the flight, she is in tears, saying it was the scariest thing she had ever done. We even have to stop the van on the way back into town so that she can be sick. I decide it is best for us to walk the rest of the way back, and apologise to her embarrassed looking French Champion Pilot for any mockery this episode may invoke amongst his colleagues.
We stop at a restaurant for food and cocktails on the way back to the hotel, although it is only 2pm. Across the street from the restaurant a Nepalese woman immodestly dressed for local standards parades at the side of the road. A car stops and she disappears into it. The fact of prostitution here is not surprising, as it exists everywhere I would have thought, but the daytime blatancy is a little.
In the evening, Laurie and I go for a meal at another restaurant and my patience is tested by dozy waiters. It starts with me asking to order a cocktail, but before I can finish 'I would like a...', the waiter has run off to light a candle on another table (electricity generally goes off between 6pm and 8pm, but restaurants have generators so they can cook). It ends with them forgetting part of Laurie's meal. When I ask the waiter to take it off the bill, he spends ten minutes calculating the cost of the ingredients, which amounts to not much. I decide to calculate the discount myself, but get followed out of the restaurant asking why I have not given them the full amount. I must admit, I was quite rude. It's not that they mean to be bad, but I am used to getting annoyed at inattentive service.
Tomorrow morning we have to catch a 7:30 bus to Kathmandu, where we'll reconvene with the UK to Oz group.
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