Stuck by the lakeside

Well as the locals and ex-pats told me before, this place is like the twilight zone, once here it's impossible to leave, kinda reminds me of the line from the Eagles "hotel California". Yet another delay, this time the rain. It's been sunny for about 2 weeks, then the morning I am setting of it rains and rains and rains and it is still raining. I must had said my good-byes about 5-6 times now, it's getting a bit embarrassing no-one believes me anymore. There is some good news though, I borrowed my friend clares phone for she had the same model as my water drenched one and after a set of trial and error experiments I worked out that only my battery was buggered. So 500Rs later and I have a new one and I'm back in photo action. John has been forgiven (for now) and as a very nice surprise he bought me a good-bye t-shirt to take on my travels. The night before last was my official last night, but I had a second last night, last night in my local bar, where (like at the Gurkha's party) I joined the band and did my best to sing Queens "I want to break-free". I have a video recording of it so when I'm next on a good connection I'll upload it to freely advertise my embarrassment. So I've decided to upload some more pictures. There is a great one of the local "virgin" mountain known in English as "fishtail" and Machapuchare in Nepali. It's known as virgin because no-one has managed to climb to the top since a British lead expedition in 1957 failed. It's now off limits to all as it is revered as a "god" to the local triable people. Speaking of fishtail there is a picture of me and my pall Pradeep the owner of the famous fishtail lodge on the lake here. Guests included Jimmy Carter and Prince Charles. I go to swim in the pool on a hot day. There is a picture of me playing pool. Another picture of me with 'firestarter" with helmet just to show my mum and dad that I have at least bought one. On a rainy day there is not much to do other than eat and read and go to the internet cafe. This of course was before Neil my American teacher-journalist-Maoist expert friend gave me the new series of Battle-Star-Galactica on DVD. Now I can go and watch 15 episodes back2back when I get home.
As you might have noticed I have mentioned far more people in this blog entry than ever before, there is a reason for this. My blog address is now out of the bag in Lakeside, so I thought I'd better be nice and not slag them all off in case any of them read what I write. Ohh yeah before I forget I need to give my ego a bit of a massage, so here's a link to the movie I stared in while living in Bangalore. It's in 5 parts so might take a while to download. The movie came in the top 5 of its categorie at the NewYork film festival as reviewed by TimeOut NewYork.

http://vegnonveg.com/EX-PATS.html

Also John suggested I should try and get some sponsorship for my journey, so I emailed several newspapers and GPS companies etc etc. The only success on this front was unfortunately not any sponsorship but a mention in my hometowns local-rag the world famous Oldham-Chronical. Check it out, it made me laugh and smile.

www.oldham-chronicle.co.uk/NEWSTH14.html

Bye for now.