The next few weeks

Having settled well into the pace of Kathmandu, MotherCare and OGN, the next few weeks will bring a complete shake up. I can't believe how much cool stuff I'm going to be doing in the next short while. My itinerary is as follows:

On April 2nd I'm heading to India for a week. I'm going with Sapna and Sandhya (Rabi's sister) and we'll be joining with Supreet and Sangita, who now live in Delhi. The main purpose of the trip is to visit Uzir (Sapna and Rabi's 15 year old son) who is at boarding school in Moussourie, a north Indian hill station, a six hour train ride plus an hour and a half drive from Delhi, way off the beaten track. Apparently it's beautiful there, with lots of good hiking. Everyone in the party except Sapna is keen on walking, so I imagine we'll do a fair bit. We'll also have a couple of days in Delhi and I plan to use one of them for a day trip to visit Agra and see the Taj Mahal (rather more on the beaten track).

I then have a couple of days back in Kathmandu before heading on another Sacred Summits motorbiking weekend. This time the destination is The Last Resort, right on the border between Nepal and Tibet. At The Last Resort we'll have a chance to experience one or two of the adrenalin pumping activities on offer; bungee jumping, canyoning swinging, mountain biking, white water rafting. Needless to say I'm pretty psyched.

And as if that wasn't enough, the day after we get ack I'm heading off on a 16 (or so) day trek around the Annapurna circuit, supposedly the best trek in Nepal. The reason it's considered as such is because it offers the greatest variety of scenery, villages and peoples. The highest point is over 5400m, about as high as you can get without climbing a mountain (it's about 600m higher than Mont Blanc). I anticipate the trek to be one of the highlights of my entire gap year. Vivek will be the guide. I've also found a couple of other people to go with; Maria, one of the other OGN volunteers, and a guy called Henry who's doing a photojournalism internship in Kathmandu and living in the same place as Maria. I think we'll all get on pretty well. It should be more fun with a couple of other people, plus it splits the cost.

It gets even better. On the way back from the trek, I'm going via Chitwan National Park for a couple of days in the jungle; elephant safari, jungle walks and canoe rides await.

Seriously, how did I get to be so lucky? Only downside, I probably won't be blogging much (certainly not whilst I'm trekking), but I'm hoping (electricity permitting) to put up a couple more posts before I go. I took some photos at OGN today that are so adorable that they need to be seen to be believed. So you have that to look forward to.