Kathmandu is like a giant time, money and energy vacuum. I've now spent a total of fifteen days in this place and it's starting to feel like home. I must say I'm gaining quite an affection for the stream of bell-ringing cycle rickshaws rumbling past, wandering men pushing jars of Tiger Balm, the not-so-hushed tones of teenage boys offering "hash? ee-shmoke?" and less-so, the omni-present blue camouflage armed-soldiers patrolling the streets and beggars' constant cries of "Hello sister! Rupees!"

Tourists in India and Nepal are discouraged from giving handouts and prominently displayed signs on the streets plead "Do not encourage the beggars." In India, I was mostly too scared to get close enough to the often disfigured, limbless or tongueless beggars to hand them anything. Over time I've become a bit jaded perhaps, unable to pick and choose from the sea of destitute faces and outstretched hands. Generally, I give money to no-one.

The 26th was my birthday and the day began with me getting scammed. A Nepali woman carrying a young boy walks alongside me in the gutter with the usual attention-getting tactics. I ignore her at first but she insists she wants no money, only milk for her son. I'm feeling generous so I walk with her to the grocery store and unload 240 rupees ($3.50, about three times what I pay per night for accomodation) for baby formula. She smiles warmly and tells me all about her "good American friends." It wasn't until after I walked away that it occured to me, "Duh. She's Nepali. Surely she's not spending twice the nation's average daily wage on fake milk for her baby." Turns out to be a well-known scam here; the woman sells the milk back to the store for slightly less than what I paid for it. The woman makes a bundle, the shopkeeper puts it back on the shelf to sell again to some unsuspecting sucker such as myself and makes double the profit. Arg. Back to being a stingy asshole.

The rest of the day was perfect. Lauren and Jai took me to brunch at a New Orleans themed restaurant (pancakes, eggs and a bloody mary). Lauren and I then took a treacherous taxi ride on Kathmandu's desperately under-budgeted roads to Kopan, a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery with colorful gardens and hundreds of fluttering prayer flags atop a hill overlooking the Kathmandu Valley. We had a peaceful moment, checked out some hot monks and headed back to Thamel to get the party started.

My smiling, sweet birthday posse (including wacky and wonderful Mark and Monique from the trek) met me at OR2K to assemble for our field trip to the foreigners-only Casino Royale where the real fun began. Sure, it's no Vegas but it's a low budget backpacker's dream. No minimum chip purchase and a boatload of freebies. Yummy buffet dinner, free drinks and cigarettes at the tables, free shave or haircut, palm reading and massage. A Punjabi millionaire diamond mine owner and his friends invited us to join them for dinner at their giant VIP booth where they proceeded to crack jokes and ply us with alcohol while we watched the rediculous lip synch stage show. At the end of the meal, my friends presented me with a piece of raspberry cheesecake from the buffet with a candle, the Punjabs bought me a bottle of champagne and the band sang Happy Birthday in Nepali while I danced around and took photos of all my drunk happy friends.

My luck was up on Black Jack, down on Roulette, but I ended 100 rupees up after placing a last-minute save-face 500 rupee bet on red. I ignored the glares of the other (mostly-Indian) gamblers who appeared to be taking their game verrrry seriously while I bounced around excitedly waving my piddling stack of chips. The night ended with a drink and a good stomp at Funky Buddha Club and me feeling like I'm ready for 29.

Lauren and I will both leave Kathmandu in the next couple of days and make a run for the border. My plan is to spend the next two months or so in the cool of the Indian Himalaya but I'm now accepting that anything could happen. More from there.

Life in Kathmandu is pretty good and I might need a firm kick in the ass to remind myself how lucky I am to be here.

I called my sister the other night. It was the first time we'd talked in about six weeks and we had a lot of catching up to do. Right around this time I am beginning to feel a bit homesick. I miss my family terribly. I daydream about coming home, giving my nieces neverending hugs and whisking them away to spend the day exploring the city.

I miss my friends. Dancing, hikes in Marin and lazy movie nights. I miss San Francisco. Hills, bay, restaurants, fog, funky freaky people. I miss good music. Breakbeats, Qool, my stereo, my car stereo, outdoor parties. I miss food. Eggs Benedict, American pancakes with real maple syrup, bottomless coffee, chicken enchiladas, salad, wine.

But really. I am in frickin' Nepal. I developed wanderlust in Australia when I was 22. I've wanted to come to Asia ever since hearing the stories of friends who'd traveled here. I love this place and every minute I am relaxing in a cafe with other travelers on a Tuesday afternoon or breathing pure mountain air or swimming in a holy lake, well, I should be grateful dammit!

Lauren and I spent most of yesterday hanging out at an Isreali restaurant called OR2K. They have blacklights and play low-volume trance. The food is yummy. It rained on and off most of the day so we hung out and made friends with a few of the 15 or so Israelis hanging around eating and smoking in their trademark Thai fisherman's pants and headbands. After dinner, we went for a bit of an explore and found ourselves on a cycle rickshaw out of Thamel's confusing and eye-boggling maze of lit up businesses and onto a little night temple tour.

I'll be in Kathmandu for at least a few more days while I wait for my Indian visa to get processed. I'll be enjoying Thamels's unusually good culinary offerings and the company of my friends in the meantime. My motley crew of companions at the moment includes Lauren, Hiro, Jai, Maria, and a newly-acquired group of friends at OR2K. We've been having a blast together and while it's not the cultural-immersion of India or the rigors of a trek, it's certainly nice to get some R&R. Makes for fascinating reading I am sure, so I'll try to stir things up in the next few days.

Thank goodness for fast, cheap internet. New photos up today from my trek as well as the New Year's Festival, Bisket Jatra, in Bhaktapur and some post-trek chilling out in Pokhara. Enjoy.

There's a Maoist strike going on today, tomorrow and Thursday and the country is quiet. More news from Kathmandu later.

And now, 'Lauren and Allison's big night out.'

Coming down from Annapurna Base Camp back towards Pokhara, we planned to spend some time at the hot springs at Jhinu. On the way down we stopped at Fishtail Guesthouse in Chomrong for lunch and to pick up some things we'd left on the way up. The Fishtail is perched on the hill in Chomrong, a small village in a stupifyingly picturesque region of the Annapurna foothills. With windows on three sides, the dining room provides a stunning vantage point to see both the high peaks of the Annapurna slightly hidden in the Sanctuary above us and the green lushness of the river valley below us. During lunch, a storm rolled in. We watched for several hours as nature entertained us with her show of sound and light.

The rain slowed to a mist. Then something very stange happened. An enormous white cloud rose from the valley floor and converged with an inpenetrable gray mist that seemed to be almost poured down from the mountain valley to our left. Faster, the clouds gained momentum and traveled down into the valley, thinning as they went, every wisp soaring past and finally disappearing all together as if a giant vacuum beneath the valley floor had sucked it all down. The sun came out. A double rainbow arched perfectly over the green foothills across from us. A smiling face in the clouds appeared in shadow on the mountainside just below the rainbow.

We decided it was time to go. We packed up our things and began the descent to the hot springs, just about an hour's trek directly below us along the river. It was about 4:30 PM. A light sprinkle had begun again, but we put on our ponchos and were on our way. On the way out of Chomrong, we stopped and talked with a girl from near Bishop, California. We hit it off instantly and wanted to chat, but she shooed us away, reminding us of the time and pointing out a gray cloud overhead.

Right away, we lost the trail. The real trail that we didn't see went up and over a wall (of course!) but the one we took winded gently through farmlands and into trees. Walking down felt right and the trail looked well-trodden. We walked for about an hour as the rain steadily got heavier. The trail got smaller. The sky got darker. We got a bit concerned.

Then the trail disappeared all together and we found ourselves what felt to be about halfway down, standing on about a 45 degree angle in ankle-deep mud in the middle of the forest. No trail, no sign of other people. At first we decided our best plan of action was to continue down. We weren't sure we could retrace our steps back and we knew the valley was the right direction. We walked for a bit more but the descent became too steep. We decided the smartest thing to do was to spend the night there and try going back up the next morning.

In search of some sort of shelter from the rain, we found a large boulder with two small dry ledges. By the light of our flashlights, we changed into dry clothes, climbed into our sleeping bags and curled up for a long night. We both managed to get a few hours of shuteye before sunrise when we awoke, ate a little trail mix, took some photos of our night's accomodation and began the process of finding a trail back up.

After about two hours of walking back toward Chomrong, Lauren spotted a roof. We cheered and whooped and nearly broke into a run when we saw a woman, the owner of a guesthouse we had passed the night before. We hugged her and told her about our little ordeal. She hugged us back and gave us breakfast, piling on extra potatoes to compensate for our missed meal. We laughed a bit and breathed a sigh of relief. While in retrospect we realized we were in no real great danger, it was certainly a humbling experience to spend the night on a rock.

The monsoon has come early in Pokhara and most days are at least partly rainy. Two days ago, some friends and I rented a paddle boat and spent seven hours on the clean, clear waters of Phewa Tal, Nepal's second largest lake. We swam, got some sun, and had a picnic; the closest thing to summer fun I've had in a while. I'll go back to Kathmandu in a few days.

I'm back in Pokhara after finishing a 16-day trek through the Annapurna Range of the Himalayas. Simply put, it was the most physically and spiritually challenging and rewarding experience of my life so far.

The trek began on a centuries-old trading route that we shared with decorated mule trains and men transporting everything imaginable (live chickens, food, building supplies) to the roadless mountain villages, sometimes a month's trek away. We would wake early most days, walking between 3-9 hours per day, ascending or descending as much as 2000 meters at once. We stayed in teahouses, charming family-owned guesthouses that dot the trail in clusters and provide a cozy respite at the end of a long day's walking. They all serve the same committee-approved menu of dal baat (lentils, vegetables and rice) and other traditional Nepali fare as well as some western options of inconsistent quality (pizza, enchiladas, fried Snickers bars (!) ). In the higher altitudes, the menus became simpler (no butter or bananas, boo!) and we went without luxuries such as electricity and hot shower but the omni-present kerosene heater under the dining table and hot lemon ginger tea with honey soothed away the day's exertion.

We spent two days in Ghorepani, a village just below Poon Hill where, in clear conditions you can see an uninterrupted panorama of the Annapurna Range from afar. We watched at dawn as peaks played hide and seek behind the clouds. Here we cut over to a trekking-only path en route to our destination, Annapurna Base Camp (ABC), a natural amphitheater of staggering proportions where you're surrounded 360 degrees by 7000-8000 meter snow-covered peaks.

As we gained altitude, the trail rose through a multitude of climate zones that made me feel like we were emerging through layers of the earth's outer core. From the warm, humid rocky river gorge valley we ascended stone staircases between gorgeous green terraced farms, through thick bamboo, oak and Rhodedendron forests, slowly up through the temperate regions, rarely losing sight of the looming Annapurnas above us. Clothing layers came on and off as we made our way up, down, up, down, in rain, thunder, hail, and elusive sunshine. I spent more time in my 200-rupee rain poncho than in the $200 North Face Gore-tex jacket I've been schlepping around for the past nine months.

Finally we emerged above the trees into the cold barren alpine landscape to arrive in ABC in a snowstorm and I felt like I'd been plopped onto the surface of the moon. Visibility was almost non-existent when we arrived but we knew the mountains were there and waited patiently for them to make their presence known. At 9 o'clock, the sky cleared. Lauren and I went outside and gasped at the sight of the ghostly mountains looking almost blue illuminated by the full moon. The next morning we got up at 5 and climbed above a Tibetan-prayer flag decorated monument to Anatoli Boukreev, a famous Russian mountaineer who died in an avalanche in this very valley on Christmas day 1997. I sat there for hours, full of emotion and thought, gazing up from the depths of the Sanctuary at the imposing masses above me. Such power and energy these mountains hold. Later in the morning when the heat of the sun began to melt the snow, I could hear the rush of waterfalls and streams, the rumble of small avalanches and the deep crackle of a glacier moving beneath me.

We descended slowly by a different route than the one we took up, taking five days to do what most people cover in two. We took our time meandering through a lush sub-tropical zone we hadn't seen before. Thick with corn farms, thatch-roofed huts, waterfalls and dozens of species of birds and bright butterflies, the valley back out to Pokhara felt and smelled oddly like Thailand.

And now, a teeny geography and political primer for anyone interested. Nepal is a little country sandwiched between India and China. The Himalayas stretch from Pakistan in the west all the way to the far side of India in the west. 8 of the 10 highest peaks in the world are right here (including Everest, which I have not yet seen) and 80% of the population lives off the land in small villages scattered around the mountainsides.

The in-power political party is quite corrupt, as seems to be the trend in this part of the globe. Since 1996, the Maoists (the Communist Party of Nepal) have been waging a "people's war" against the incumbent government and ever since, much blood has been shed as the Maoists have fought to assert power in the country's most defenseless areas; the mountain villages. They kidnap and sometimes harm public servants, hold strikes (bandhs) that slow the country to a grinding halt and sometimes place bombs in strategic areas. The American Embassy, having issued continual warnings for years now about avoiding "non-essential travel" to Nepal is probably not psyched with my being here. This said, the Maoists have a strict "no harm to tourists" policy and I have not once felt threatened or scared for my safety.

Lauren and I saw Maoists during the trek. Two nights in a row they entered our guesthouse, wielding nothing but their photocopied manifesto to share with their captive audience. They resent the government's profit from trekking permit fees and now collect their own fee from trekkers to support their efforts. Low on funds and not desiring to support their tactics, we hid upstairs in our room both times and came down after they'd left. Makes a lousy story, I know. Don't worry, next time I have a story about our brush with real danger...