After another horribly wet day and two bus journeys we have arrived at our first campsite and the beginning of the trek proper. I'm a fair weather camper and never saw the point of going out when it's raining; given that the forecast is for still more rain, I'm finding it hard to muster enthusiasm for tomorrow's trek.
It's a shame about the weather because the scenery is interesting. We are at about 1,000 metres and have been following a river in a deep but very fertile terraced valley. The little terraces are full of rice which is in ear and perhaps just a couple of weeks away from being harvested. The trees look amazing, incredibly lush and green including some which were in flower. At this altitude it doesn't get cold and banana trees and bamboo are much in evidence.
The villages are busy and despite the rain people are out and about. We're passing through a Hindu part of Nepal and the build up to the Diwali festival is taking place. There is clearly a lot of visiting going on with the visitors decorating themselves with sticky pink rice - great lumps of it stuck to their foreheads.
We stopped for lunch and a change of bus at Beni. Beni, I suspect, would never qualify as a candidate for a weekend retreat but on a wet day it was a dump. It felt dirty and grimy and not a place where you really wanted to take your hands out of your pockets, never mind linger and eat food.
At Beni we changed to a much smaller public bus which amazingly had the same number of seats as the larger bus we had enjoyed earlier in the day. Now I'm not exactly tall but even I struggled to get my knees into the space provided and for some of my bigger comrades it was an almost impossible task.
