Like this:

We ended up leaving the Last Resort late (even for us) having felt seriously reluctant to abandon the shady veranda where we had breakfast, watching the gardeners tend the lawn.

After another plunge in the pool, we eventually made it out onto the road, going past a load of bungy jumpers on the bridge preparing to hurl themselves out into the 160m gorge. We managed to slightly unnerve them as they were getting ready and all standing in a crowd at the centre of the narrow cable bridge, squeezing past them with our overloaded bikes and panniers, pressing them up against the mesh fence, which didn’t feel particularly safe.
Down more of the downhill (and in fact up) of the “world’s longest downhill”. Whoever said that has clearly never cycled it as there have, ever since the top, been repeated sections of steep, grinding up. We were in a steep, beautiful gorge, alongside the bouncing Sun Khosi river. It was weird to think we had been camping at its headwaters in Tibet 2 days ago, and here we were next to the same river but in a different country and entirely different landscape.
We were passing through little villages every 10km or so. They are usually overrun with children and chickens. Outside the villages we pass lots of goats grazing by the sides of the road, usually tended by an old man or a child. Out in the fields, the women are re-planting the rice seedlings, wading around in shin-deep mud, all wearing stunning brightly coloured saris. Again, as in Tibet, it seems to be the women who do most of the work – planting rice, lugging huge piles of wood or grass on their backs, herding animals, washing clothes, cooking. The men seem to sit around talking, scoot around on motorbikes a lot, or just stare at Sarah. Maybe there is some other invisible job all the men do, but it does seem to us like a pretty unequal division of labour.
As we descended, it started getting hotter and hotter. Our road also continued its ups and downs and, eventually, as we reached Dalalghat (a town that seemed to pride itself on its fish restaurants and stank of old fish), finished its down entirely and headed up. A couple of times I had a bit of a head spin, black and white, stars in my eyes moment and had to sit down on the side of the road. We think it must be the heat and humidity. For 3 weeks, we have been over 3,500m and in dry—ish weather and even on hot days, not too hot. Now, it must be 35 degrees in the strong sun and very humid. A bit of a shock for our bodies – or mine at least: Sarah seems to be coping alright and the humidity is doing wonders for her hacking Tibet cough, which has pretty much disappeared.
It is a bit weird being in a new country as well as we have to start all over again our discovery of how things work, where to eat, what a restaurant looks like, where to stay, where to buy drinks etc. We have found out that China definitely offered more in the way of cooked food stops. Pretty much anywhere in China proper (not Tibet), you can stop, even in the most run-down dump, and there will be someone able to whip up an amazing, clean, fresh, tasty meal. That is definitely not the case in Nepal, where we have already been rebuffed a couple of times when we’ve walked up to what definitely looks like a restaurant and asked for basic food (dhal bhat, usually) and have been looked at like we’re mad.
The plus side is that pretty much everywhere there are little stores with fridges selling cold drinks. Our coke/fanta/sprite intake on this trip is definitely heading stratospheric.
So, lunch that day ended up being us sitting in a drink stop, having bought some drinks and a pack of crisps and eating some left-over Chinese buns and a jar of Chinese fruit we had been carrying since Tibet. Plus the crowd of children and men who came to stare – oh and the cockerel, tethered by a piece of string tied to its foot and to the wooden railings, which wouldn’t stop crowing very loudly.
On from there up a steep, long (1 ½ hr) climb in the pouring afternoon monsoon rain to Dhulikel, a scruffy hill resort just East of Kathmandu. The climb was tough, with our bikes loaded once again with all our kit after having had 8 days “off” in Tibet proper with the van carrying most of them. But it was brightened up by the occasional shouts, whoops and thumbs up of the trucks passing by and, bizarrely, the weird urge lots of guys sitting on the roof of the buses had to give us “the finger” (i.e. American “F… Off”). Not sure if it means something different in Nepal from the rest of the world (we doubt it!), but since it mostly comes from teenagers, being cool on the roof of the swerving buses, we suspect it’s just them showing off to their mates. Quite amusing.
Dhulikel was the lip of the Kathmandu rim, so it was a gentle down from there in towards Kathmandu.

The road, pretty good so far, then crumbled into muddy roadworks, and we eventually began heading into the main city at 6ish. Being 2 ¼ hours behind China, it gets darker much earlier here, so we are not going to be able to cycle late as we occasionally did in China. But we would have been OK, weaving through the choking, black-exhaust belching, heavy rush-hour traffic if only….
…we hadn’t had our worst moment of the trip so far. We came to a busy junction and it wasn’t clear which way to go to our hotel. I swerved across the traffic to ask a policeman who was standing in the middle of the junction directing traffic. The last thing I said was “I’m going right” (meaning to the policeman). I had thought Sarah would stop and wait for me, seeing me check with the policeman, but unfortunately, a minibus blocked off her view of me, so all she had seen was me shoot off to the right and heard me say I was going right. She hadn’t seen me stop immediately and start talking to the copper. So, she cycled hard off to the right and kept going harder as she couldn’t see me ahead and thought I must be hidden in front of some bus or other.
I meanwhile had found that my asking directions of the policeman was a total waste of time. He didn’t understand my “Durbar Marg?” question (Durbar Marg is the equivalent of Trafalgar Square, i.e. the very centre of town) and eventually pointed me back in the direction we had come from (totally the opposite, it later turned out, from the correct way). A bit confused, I therefore crossed back over to the edge of the road…. and found Sarah was nowhere to be seen.
Now, you might not think this sounds particularly worrying. Both Sarah and I have been in plenty of foreign cities alone before etc etc, but… I knew the address of our hotel, Sarah didn’t; Sarah had both our phones, so I had no comms; Sarah had all the Nepali money, I only had Chinese; it was getting dark quickly; Kathmandu isn’t small; there could have been loads of places called the same name as our hotel; we couldn’t just jump in a cab and ask for our hotel as we had our big, bulky bikes and all our kit. Add to that that we hadn’t been apart at any point (apart from our brief time off in Chengdu) for 7 weeks. And I suddenly felt very lost and worried. Where had she gone? What was she doing? What had happened to her?
My instinct was to stay put and hope she came back. So I did, standing where I had last seen Sarah. After 20 minutes or so, I asked someone walking past if they could help me call the hotel we were booked into – thankfully a decent place (Hotel de l’Annapurna for those who know Kathmandu… very nice) which was able to cope with a situation like this, sort of – and ask them if Sarah had somehow arrived. She hadn’t. I knew she had stayed there on her last trip, so hoped she might find it, but feared she might have gone off elsewhere. Silly ideas started going through my head as well that she might have been knocked off her bike etc.
It was by now getting very dark and so I asked some other people for help – two guys who were just standing by the junction. I assumed they were waiting for someone, but it turns out they had simply come out to watch the evening junction – quite common “entertainment” (and how right it proved to be for them this evening). Seeing as Sarah wouldn’t be able to see me even if I did come back, there was no point staying where I was, so I asked them to help me find a phone kiosk to be able to call my phone (which Sarah had) using a card. Of course, I would have called her phone, but in a world where all numbers are pre-programmed, I don’t know hers – a lesson to learn! But, no kiosks around. So, then I asked if I could use one of their phones to call my phone. Very kindly, they agreed to let me make the international call. No connection. So we called the hotel again. 40 minutes had gone by and Sarah had still not arrived. I was getting pretty worried now.
Meanwhile…. Sarah (as I later found out) had cycled hard up the street looking for me. She reached a junction, still no sign of me, so she stopped. Realising I wouldn’t have crossed a junction without her, she did just what I had done and came back to where she had last seen me, the busy junction. So, our instincts were both the same at least (good sign for marriage!). But, due to a few badly-placed flagpoles, we were both standing there unable to see each other. After 15 minutes with no sign of me (I was over by the cow chewing cardboard on the other side of the road), Sarah set off to try and find the hotel. Sobbing to herself, she weaved her way through the Kathmandu traffic, occasionally tearfully asking policemen the way. She got to the hotel and arrived in tears asking the concierge if I had arrived. I hadn’t, of course. But I had by this time called the reception desk. Unfortunately, however, comms between concierge and reception did not exist, so while I was calling the reception to ask if Sarah (“A girl with a big bicycle”) had arrived, they were saying no, while she was waiting with the concierge outside, in tears, wondering what to do.
So, back to the junction, where it was now pitch black and I was standing with Ashish and Yamlal, my two new friends who were finding the increasingly frantic Brit with a huge bike quite an interesting event. We called the hotel again to let them know where we and were then trying to work out how to get a tuk tuk to load my bike to get us to the hotel. At that point, a shriek across the throbbing Kathmandu traffic: “Phil!!!!!”. “Sarah!!!!” It was like a Bollywood (or as they have here – “Kallywood”) movie… a run, skip and a tearful hug in the busy traffic. It turned out that eventually reception and concierge had spoken and, after an hour, had put two and two together, a hotel cab had been hailed and they had all, Sarah, hotel driver and concierge, driven to find me. Lots of tears and hugs. Then, Sarah, hotel driver, concierge and Ashish and Yamlal (who we invited back for a beer as thanks) all piled into the cab, and I stuck close to their tail all the way back. Beers in the bar and then exhausted to bed.
We had a busy day the next day buying brake pads (old ones worn after the Tibetan downhills and our spares didn’t fit), me getting my beard trimmed, washing our clothes in the bath, having a massage, eating endlessly, having a swim in the pool and, most satisfyingly, managing to get some Nepali-style number plates made for our bikes which say “Beijing to Delhi” on them.

We found the helpful man who made them by Sarah pointing at a rickshaw’s number plate and asking where he had it made and then being led off down an alley by someone else to a number plate maker/artist. They look very smart and we now get lots of comments from people as they drive past – either about how we are from Beijing, or thumbs up for going to Delhi.
We left Kathmandu the next morning and headed up over the rim of the Kathmandu basin before dropping sharply into the Trisuli River valley.

 A spectacular ride, which we both really enjoyed, but we definitely are finding the heat is sapping our energy. Lunch was dhal bhat and momos (dumplings) and then it was on and on down the valley (but with lots of little ups) until we got to just before the Hogwarts-sounding Mugling. There, as planned, we found the River Side Resort, a slightly run down version of the Last Resort where we had stayed before Kathmandu. They had some big company do going on, so there was no accommodation, but we were allowed to use their showers and restaurant and camp in their car park. All fine except that we have discovered we cannot camp in these temperatures and humidity – or certainly not in the tent we have. We both lay there with sweat pouring off us, me unable to sleep. With no air moving and with the heat building up inside the tent – but unable to open it up due to the horde of mossies waiting outside to sink into our veins – it was a pretty horrific night.
The next day we headed down (and up and down etc) to Naryangath, where the road comes out onto the plains. For the first time since Chengdu we are out of the Himalayan mountains and side ranges. And, for the first time since we started the trip, we are truly out of hills completely. From here to Delhi we are on the edge of the wide Ganges plain, with a couple of small ridges to cross, but basically pancake flat. Very weird after 2 months of up down.
Finding a lunch spot was (and is generally, we are discovering) a bit difficult. Again, blank stares when we ask in villages for food. The only option seems to be coach stop restaurants which appear every 25km or so along the road at best and which are often closed, under repair or only offering one unappetising dish. Our first attempt (after lots of village rebuffs) at a “restaurant” ticked almost all these boxes – looked like a building site, had a load of guys sitting around doing nothing and when we asked what we could eat, one sweaty man looked down at the ground and pointed at a mangy hen pecking at some mud and said “That”. Hmmm. We rode on and eventually found an OK place further down the road.
Given our sweaty tent experience, we have decided to stay in villages, however bad. That night (Sat 24th July) we stayed in Arunkhola, just short of a ridge we had to climb the next day. Bed was OK, though the blood-spattered walls were unnerving, as was the hand-sized spider watching us.

Today, we have headed out of Arunkhola, up over the ridge – a hard climb (though made much nicer by us finding a water spout and washing area by a Hindu temple, where we doused ourselves, with a couple of locals looking on bemused) – and out on across the plains. We are heading through a mix of beautiful forest, with signs warning against poaching Rhinos and Tigers – though to be honest there aren’t that many in the parks, let alone outside them – and intermittent houses (they love to paint them lollipop pink or bright green) and paddy fields, with all kinds of life going on on the road. The road itself is very good quality, no potholes or mud at all really (…yet!).
Now having lunch in Butwal. Aloo jeera is the new favourite, so it’s that and paratha for both of us. Yum. Weather very hot, definitely sapping our energy, so a good break here, 65km done, before heading on for Gorusinge (47km) where we plan to sleep. General plan is to reach Mahendranagar on Friday 30th before crossing into India and then, in theory, arriving Delhi evening of 1st August or earlyish on 2nd. Flight on 3rd.
STATS
Day 9 To Kathmandu. Dist: 101km Avg 15.0 Time 6hr 41 mins
Day 10 Kathmandu to Riverside resort. Dist: 102km Avg 19.9km/hr Time 5 hr 6 mins
Day 11 Riverside resort to Arunkhola. Dist 93km Avg 19.2km/hr time 4hr 50 mins