There was some misunderstanding between us and Pilgrim’s Guesthouse in Kathmandu; we’d tried to book a room but didn’t have any response and so when we arrived at the airport we decided we would head there first of all to see if they had any rooms. When we arrived they said they had a taxi waiting for us at the airport with our names written on a sign! We were none the wiser, it would have been a free pick up but their forms are way out of date, and we didn’t get an email to confirm this.

Anyway it all worked out okay, we were excited when we first arrived. The streets were busy, full of bikes, pedestrians, cars and buses, and we were back in the land of horn honking! In this part of the world it’s okay to beep your horn at a person, a car, a truck whomever it may be to let them know you’re there. Makes sense in some ways. It’s really polluted in Kathmandu and we noticed this straight away, a soft haze is around all the time with only a 4km point of visibility.

So we checked into Pilgrims and agreed a price for 3 nights with the owner, a frank Nepalese man. We were happy with our room although failed to notice the schedule for electricity and hot water. Every place has a schedule we later learned. It was much cooler than where we had come from and so had our winter clothes at the ready.

For our first 3 days in Nepal we did little but focus on the trek. We were hoping to fit in some sight-seeing but we couldn’t quite fit this into our days of planning. Our plan was to start the Everest region trek from Jiri, the original route from which all Everest treks began before the days of the Lukla airstrip. We were aiming for a 20 day-ish trek taking in the heights of Gokyo-Ri and flying back out of Lukla.

First on our agenda though was to organise our Indian visas for the next month. We were ready for the queuing and thought we would need about a week to arrange this, but as we looked into it and with our time-frame we opted to pay for someone to organise our visas for us. This was obviously the more costly option but it did mean we would be able to start our trek by the end of the week, safe in the knowledge that our visas were being dealt with. It also meant we had to leave our passports behind in Kathmandu with our agent Deepak at Mount Fuji Adventure and Laxmi from the Indian embassy. We were very reassured though that we could put our trust in them and we felt that the steep $90 fee each was enough to confirm this.

So with the visa in hand we had to organise our TIMS trekking permits and find ourselves some gear as well as try to arrange for a one way open flight ticket from Lukla to Kathmandu. Although we were happy to do the Jiri walk in, we most certainly didn’t want to have to walk it out too!

TIMS is straight forward enough, just make sure you know the opening times of their office at the Tourism Board building, 10-4pm we think. It’s (1200rs) for the TIMS permit which is what you need if you’re not trekking with a group or guided tour. There is the 1000 rupee fee for entering the Everest Solukhumbu National Park and we were also told we would need to pay 1500 rupee each for a permit to trek in parts of the Jiri region. We didn’t have any knowledge otherwise and so paid for all 3, perhaps the Jiri one can be avoided, but hopefully it all goes to preservation and conservation of the local areas so for a small fee its worth it.

We rented some down jackets from Guide Himalaya Trekking Shop in Thamel and were happy with the standard of the jackets. We also bought some thicker gloves, a snood each and splashed out on a steri-pen, something we’d been advised to buy if budget could stretch to it. Little did we know how good the steri-pen was until we started using it and so it was well worth the $45 splurge.

Lastly our bus tickets to Jiri and the open flight ticket was bought through another agent who was working at Pilgrims. They don’t work for the hotels’ they’re just agents who pop in to see who they can sell their services to. Most of them are ex-guides and so have extensive knowledge of the system. We thought we would get our tickets through one of these men, he had a fairly decent deal on the table and it was easier for us to organise the tickets in one go. We were booked onto the 6am Super Express Bus from Kathmandu leaving on the 1st to Jiri, and we were told it would only take 6 hours! Hmmm we had our reservations about that one. We also paid $135 each for the open flight ticket from Lukla to Kathmandu, if you arrange a fixed ticket the price should be around $116 if bought in Kathmandu.

Our photographs from our first time in Kathmandu are a handful of street photography images, as we were gathering information, ideas and equipment for the trek. This was for either of us the biggest trek we had done in one go and we decided sight-seeing in Kathmandu would come at the end. We mainly enjoyed food at Pilgrim’s and during the day at other restaurants around Thamel. Very soon we would be venturing out into the mid-hills to start the trek of a lifetime.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0, 18mm f4, 90mm Tele-Elmarit f2.8 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)

We started the day off once more with the cost effective filling breakfast provided by K’s before checking out to start the first leg of the journey. We anticipated around 5 hours of travel so we were keen to get an early start. Our first train with the JR pass took us out of Kyoto on an express train to Osaka where we changed to go to Shimamiya. From here we had to buy train tickets for another train company which included a long winded train journey into the mountains and finally a cable car connection from Gokurakubashi up to Koyasan. The cable car took around 10 minutes and was a steep track up to a small station which still had the same ticket operating gates you’d see in the metro. You tend to find technology in the most unusual places such as vending machines on your way up to a historic temple, or right on the drive of someone’s house, this is something that always amuses us.

So with a short bus journey to complete our travel to this world heritage site we landed at what we thought was our temple accommodation for the evening. The only problem was that Helen had printed off the wrong temple information, when booking this the agents sent through a list of temples even though we had booked only one, others in Koyasan were included in the email, so we realised we were in the wrong place and they sent us up the road to what they thought was our temple. This was around 15 minutes walk up hill with all of our backpacks with us, arriving at the second temple and we found out that this one wasn’t ours either! Nightmare!! Finally we found our temple and it was right near the site entrance, so it would have been the first stop off the bus and the cheapest fare too!! We managed to laugh about it though.

The temple we were checking into is called Rengejo-in, more expensive than some of the others in town but we had read some good reviews and it was a kind of birthday treat for Dave. We couldn’t get into our room until 3pm so we set out in search of some local world heritage sights. We weren’t disappointed and the light was fantastic with blue skies, bright sunshine and red autumn leaves teasing us all the while. The site closest to our accommodation is called Garan and is a temple complex with several halls and pagodas. The Dai-to (Great Pagoda) is the most impressive and beautiful Pagoda we have so far seen on our travels in Japan. It towers above you in strong golds, oranges and reds and glowed in the sunlight whilst school children sketched their surrounding landscape. There were many pilgrim tours taking place as well as tour groups dropping into the site for the day. We loved photographing around this site and with the addition of red leaves against a blue sky it definitely captured our imaginations.

Walking up from Garan we retreated to the temple as we were keen to get our monies worth here. We were introduced to our grand, traditional Japanese style room by a friendly monk who spoke good English. He informed us about the do’s and don’ts, bath-times, ceremonies taking place and so on. We had an hour or so to settle in before the first ceremony which was a 45 minute meditation session. We drank some tea and kept our legs under the table which sneakily had a heater fixed into it, we had noticed the drop in temperature in Koyasan and the paper thin walls weren’t keeping us any warmer. At 5.30pm we attended the meditation session along with other temple guests. It was a really insightful experience as you only ever go into a temple rather than being part of any kind of Buddhist ceremony. The lead monk introduced the session and told us we would meditate until the incense stopped burning some 40 minutes later. Helen has some experience of meditation from her yoga class back in the UK and a few other retreats but for the most part around 10-15 minutes would be the longest. It was a very long 40 minutes but equally we were surprised that it didn’t feel longer. He finished the ceremony by telling us a few tales about the mountainous area, the importance of meditation and a few other more Buddhist related facts. It was something we will both never forget. Afterwards we were led into the dining room where we sat with the other westerners staying the night. We had something like 9 dishes placed in front of us from fruit, to miso soup, several kinds of tofu, pickles, squash, rice and other things we can’t quite remember.

After a quick chat with a nice Dutch couple we went back to our room, used the onset baths and then settled into our beds for an early night. We were due to rise at just before 6am for the morning ceremony. Not before passing the time by light-painting with our head torch and some fairy crazy moves. Much laughter followed!

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)