Nagarkot

At first I planned to make it to Nepal and Tibet this time. Then, I heard that Tibet was closed for Chinese torch relay so I changed my plan to Nepal and Bhutan. But when I got to Nepal and checked with some tour agents, I found out that going to Bhutan was ridiculously expensive, 200USD/person/day for travel fee, not include tour package and other fees. I also checked India but the timing was not sufficient enough for my friend who came on the 29^th Mar. As I still had many days left after finishing my original plan, I asked my tour agent to recommend another place in Nepal that worth to visit. Viewing sun rise and sun set in Himalayas sounded really appealing to me, and I nodded my head right away when they showed me the hotel that we would stay there. It’s so wonderful, is it?

There are various places around the edge of Katmandu valley that offer great mountain views, but the resort village of Nagarkot, 32km from Katmandu, is generally held to be the best.

Hotel Country Villa is a very beautiful hotel on the edge of the mountain. It has a great restaurant, terrace and bar that look out to the valley. The rooms are nice decorated and all have private balconies for viewing sun rise on Himalayas. It was added to my list of favorite hotels just after a check-in tour.

After having late lunch, we walked around for the best place to view sun set and lost our way somehow. So when we got to the right point, the sun set was almost over.

The night was so peaceful and quiet. There were no activities around the place, so we just rolled ourselves in the warm sofa at restaurant bar, sipped hot tea and checked through the pictures we took on our laptops. We also had a friendly group of audience who were hotel staff. They keep asking where we had gone to, guessed from the pictures and kept telling that we were beautiful, ha ha ha …

We woke up early the next day for the sun rise. I actually woke up around 5am, opened the curtain and then continued to sleep with one eye opened, waiting for the sun.

As we didn’t much of the Himalayas on previous evening, we planned to check on it again after breakfast, looking for a much clearer and beautiful view. Unfortunately, it started to rain heavily right on the time we finished our breakfast. So we had to come back to our room waiting for the rain to stop. In the meantime, an idea of celebrating birthday with gummy candy popped up in my mind and we played with it for the whole morning.

Until noon, the rain hasn’t stopped yet, the temperature dropped significantly and we couldn’t see a glimpse of Himalayas so we decided to leave for Katmandu. A little regret but I might be a good reason for me to come back later :D

For more pictures, click here