I left Katmandu at noon after a big hassle over one guy without a ticket for the bus ride. We took a wrong road just outside of town for a couple of kilometers then got on the right track. Switch back after switch back. The scenery was nice though. We stopped for tea up on a hill side at almost 7,000 ft. at about 4:00. It was now a little chilly. Now it really felt that I was starting a new trip. I was on my own yet I wasn’t. I was with a bus load of people I hadn’t yet met and gotten to know. The people on the bus ranged in ages from a young child about five or six to people who could have been in their late fifties to early sixties. Most of them were young people in the twenties though. It was a convertible ski bus from Switzerland and the top rolled back all the way to the back of the bus, allowing the stereo system to fill the surrounding trees and bushes with western music!