HTMW Recaps: April 2018

I normally add a quote to the beginning of each post that sums up or enhances my writing. However, I’m going to use my monthly recaps as an opportunity to sum up the month – be it the mood, the weather, my feelings… Anything really. I spent half of the month exploring Nepal, a simply beautiful country full of high passes, snowy peaks and some of the most spectacular views I’ve ever seen. This quote sums up how I felt about Nepal.

‘The mountains were so wild and so stark and so very beautiful that I wanted to cry. I breathed in another wonderful moment to keep safe in my heart.’ – Jane Wilson-Howarth

In January 2017, I announced I was going to start monthly recaps on my blog. If you missed last month’s recap, you can find it here.

We finally went to Nepal! It’s been such a long time coming that it felt like it was never coming, and now it’s all over, just like that. We had a fantastic holiday, and all four of us fell in love with the country. The people are extremely friendly, the trekking was excellent and the weather was lovely (for the most part). I was gutted to come home again, the two weeks simply flew past.

April wasn’t all about Nepal, however. I also had a couple of fun nights out, I went for a night away with J over Easter and I finally saw The Streets live! All in all, a great month!

The Highlights

• Visiting Highclere Castle with J. J kindly got tickets for us to visit Highclere for my birthday, and over Easter bank holiday weekend, we made the trip to Newbury. Highclere was made world-famous in Downton Abbey and is a really beautiful stately home, set in acres of rolling grounds. We explored the house and then wandered the gardens, chatting and taking photos. Afterwards, we ate a roast at the hotel we stayed at, drank Prosecco, napped, ate a baked Camembert and drank more Prosecco. It was a lovely night away to break up the long weekend and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves!
• Bowling, dinner and drinks with my team. Every quarter or so, our team have a night out and this time, we went bowling! I organised everything (I love organising!) and we went to All Star Lanes in Holborn, which serves excellent food, good cocktails and you can, obviously, bowl. Needless to say, we had a fun night out and my team won at bowling too…
• A beautiful sunny evening and drinks outside for the first time this year. We made the most of it and headed to my favourite haunt, Flat Iron Square, near the office. It was wonderful to stand and sit outside without a jacket on and not feel cold! We had an extremely fun night out.
• Experiencing Nepali New Year. We were woken from a nap on our first day in Nepal by throbbing loud music, pulsing across Kathmandu. We’d been warned it was Nepali New Year and that there would be celebrations – a massive street party with DJs playing a spectrum of R’n’B classics, to be exact. We headed out to experience the celebrations for ourselves, delving into the back streets of Kathmandu and eventually reaching the party. There is a story from this evening – a short one, but a story none the less – that I’ll be sharing in the future. Needless to say, it was a fantastic way to spend our first evening in Kathmandu and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. All I will say now is: Happy New Year. It’s 2075 in Nepal now!!
• Sunrise over the Annapurna mountain range. This experience was so special, so breathtaking and wonderful, so emotional for me that I will be writing an entire post about this very soon. In the meantime, you just need to know that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so special as witnessing a sunrise over some of the highest mountains in the world. It is extraordinary.
• A day trekking alone. After an extremely long third day of hiking, I chose to take the fourth day easy to ensure my knee wasn’t completely shot to pieces and whilst the other three headed off to spend the day hiking to some hot springs, I took off alone to start the descent back towards civilisation. It turned out to be one of the best days of the hike! I saw monkeys and generally had a wonderful, easy three hour walk through the jungle to the next overnight stop. It was relaxing, pleasant and I was walking through some truly beautiful landscapes, with fantastic views most of the day. I was pleased I’d chosen to do the easier route and have such a lovely day!
• A day on safari in Chitwan National Park. We had hoped to see a tiger, but we had no such luck. Despite this slight downside, we had a lovely day out in the national park. As well as the jeep safari, we took a two hour canoe ride down the river to start the day, where we disturbed a rhino taking his morning bath! It was incredible to be so close to such a magnificant animal and watch it wallow happily in the water before we floated past. Later, we saw several other rhinos, as well as crocodiles, lizards, deer and monkeys. We also saw a plethora of birds, including a Bird of Paradise, a hornbill and lots of kingfishers that flashed blue amongst the foliage across the park.
• Too many gorgeous sunsets to count! So many. In Kathmandu, in Pokhara and in Chitwan. The dust in the atmosphere made the sunsets glow red and apricot, with the sun slowly lowering below the horizon like an orb hanging over the world.
• Seeing The Streets live at Brixton O2. I got my ticket way back in October, and came back from Nepal a day or so earlier than I may have otherwise to ensure I could see them. When it came to it, I’d actually not had any sleep for 40+ hours, so only needed a few drinks before I felt quite drunk! The Streets were amazing. They really brought it and the atmosphere was fantastic! I actually really enjoyed being there on my own (I’ve never been to a gig or concert alone before) and I went to the front to get right into the middle of things, which was awesome! When Blinded by the Lights came on, the place just kicked off and everyone went crazy, dancing madly, jumping up and down and pumping our fists in the air. It was electric!
• Buying LOTS of treats at Borough Market. What to do the day after pay day, when you’ve just arrived back from a two week holiday abroad where there is little or no cheese to be found anywhere? Yep, that’s right – head straight to Borough Market and buy up everything in sight! I had a lovely hour and a half, wandering around, tasting every sample going and getting in some beautiful fresh vegetables, a couple of delicious cheeses and various other treats. Yum!

The Lowlights

• All the bus journeys we had to do in Nepal. Well, only three. But it felt like more. The roads in Nepal are harrowing – twisty, poorly maintained and often with HUGE drops on one or both sides. There are no crash barriers to help prevent a fall and I spent the majority of our journeys wincing at the driving (think overtaking on blind bends) and hoping against hope that the brakes on our bus weren’t going to fail, sending us plunging off a cliff. I’ve definitely gained a few more grey hairs from the worry of those journeys!
• Suffering from asthma on the first day of our trek. We started our first day of trekking late, which meant it was steamy hot. In addition, the first section to hike was extremely dusty and vehicles going past kicked all the dust up behind them. The combination of heat and dust left me struggling to breathe as we walked, especially on the uphills. I must have taken my blue inhaler about eight times in total that day, and very nearly had an asthma attack. Luckily, during the following days we were high up in the mountains where there are no vehicles and the air is much fresher, and I didn’t have to use my blue inhaler again for the entire trek.
• Niggling, ongoing knee pain. After the drama in March when I injured my LCL and could barely walk for a few days, the mere fact that I completed a five day trek on my knee is pretty awesome. Thank goodness for knee braces and painkillers, I say! Still, all the exercise and the strain of going up and down some pretty knarly hills has meant that my injury continues to niggle and my knee feels weak and is still quite painful. I’ve now booked a doctors appointment and hope to be referred for an MRI scan.
• A bad stomach. It was kind of inevitable, but I got ill in Nepal. All of us did at one point or another. I’m sure it’ll clear up shortly, but in the meantime, it’s a bit of a pain!

Posts This Month

• End of the Line: An Introduction. Since I won’t be travelling as much overseas this year now that Nepal is over, I wanted to explain why and to introduce a new series I’ll be producing on this blog – End of the Line. I’m planning to visit all 28 stations at the end of all 11 underground lines in London and writing about what I find in each place. First up very soon: High Barnet!
• Postcards from Norway. A selection of images from the trip I took to Oslo and Bergen in January, and the latest in my Postcards from… series.

My 2018 Reading Challenge Book of the Month – April.

NB: The list on my reading challenge post is constantly updated as I tick off books that I’ve read and add new books I want to read, so flick back to it from time to time to keep up to date with where I’m at!

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters.

I found the first couple of chapters of this book difficult and I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it. Then, quite suddenly, the story gripped me and I finished the rest of the book in an afternoon!

This is an extremely atmospheric book, providing wonderful depiction of wartime London and the Blitz. The characters are strong and the storylines well written. It’s an unusual novel since the timeline works backwards – you start in 1947 just after the war has finished, then move back to 1944 and finally end up in 1941. Each time you shift back, you learn more about the characters and what events shaped them into the people you find at the beginning of the book, in 1947.

The book ended very abruptly, leaving me feeling a little cheated and with a few questions left in my mind, particularly for one character. While the book delves back into the history of each character, I found that I wanted to know a bit more about where they went after 1947 and what they did next. I kind of wanted to know if things worked out for them and so on. Still, there’s no denying this is a slick novel and I did enjoy it. Of the four books I’ve read so far on this 2018 challenge, it is actually my second favourite book!

Rated 3.7/5 by Good Reads, I’d actually go a little higher and rate it a solid 4/5.

Next up in May: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, as recommended to me by A.

In April, I also read:

• Lost in Mongolia: Rafting the World’s Last Unchallenged River by Colin Angus. I began reading this book in New Zealand, but started it again this month and finally completed it. Colin and three others travelled the entire length of the Yenesei river, from its source in Mongolia and right through Russia to its estuary in the Arctic Ocean. It’s an incredible expedition and Colin writes about it very well – I almost wanted to jump into a boat and follow in their footsteps! I love reading about places I’ve visited in the past and enjoyed this book since it covers parts of Mongolia, as well as Lake Baikal and Irkutsk.
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Burrows and Mary Ann Shaffer. I saw the posters advertising the new film adaption and decided to read the book, since it looked like the sort of film I’d enjoy! I wasn’t wrong – this book was really well written. It’s slightly unusual as it’s written entirely in the form of letters, with very little actual dialogue, but it didn’t lack in the slightest. I’ll be interested to see how they’ve adapted the book into a film. The main character is the sort of person I could definitely identify with and the ending is neat and satisfactory. Again, this provides insights into the Second World War, when the Germans occupied Guernsey – something I hadn’t realised before and found fascinating.
• A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa. A true story, and one that filled me with horror on more than one occasion. Ishikawa was born in Japan, but his family moved to North Korea in the 60s when the author was thirteen years old. This memoir recounts his upbringing in North Korea and his escape from the country after Kim Song-Il’s death. It’s a harrowing story, especially when you consider that everything he tells has happened. The book provides a rare insight into life inside this notoriously secretive country, and is a testament to human spirit and the urge to survive against all odds.
• Night Trains by Andrew Martin. I’m going to be honest. Don’t read this book unless you really do love trains. I do love trains, and even I struggled a little with this book. It’s non-fiction, and whilst Martin does recount the journeys he takes across Europe on its dwindling night train service with some flair, he also goes into a huge amount of detail over things such as the stations they run from, the locomotives pulling the carriages and the history of each service. You do need to be a certified train geek to enjoy this book properly! Since I’ve travelled on a fair amount of Europe’s night trains, I enjoyed finding out more about some of the journeys I’ve taken, but generally wouldn’t recommend this book to most of my friends or family since I think they’d just find it all a little, well, dull.
• Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America’s Strangest Jail by Rusty Young. A remarkable insight into life spent inside Bolivia’s notorious San Pedro jail. Young heard about Thomas McFadden from other backpackers and went to visit him in prison. The two struck up a remarkable friendship and Young told McFadden’s story from start to finish. It’s ultimately a biographical piece of writing, but it’s told very well and I was hooked from start to finish. I downloaded it just before I left Nepal and I’d finished it before I touched back down in the UK!

Instagram Pictures of the Month

My photos this month were taken mainly in London and Nepal, with a couple from Highclere Castle as well.

I choose these three images based on which got the most likes on Instagram and then tell the story behind the picture. Disclaimer: They are not necessarily my favourite photos!

Colour in Kentish Town, London. A and I wandered the streets around Kentish Town after eating lunch at my house. It was the first time she’d come to see the new flat and I bought some treats from Borough Market for lunch and we caught up on each other’s news and gossip. A is one of my oldest and best friends in the world – she knows me inside out and I love spending any time with her. We enjoyed our stroll around my new neighbourhood afterwards, continuing to chat and slowly changing A’s mind about North London… As a stoical South Londoner, she had her doubts about me moving north, but I think our wander that day kind of convinced her that North London has its merits!!

The View from the Window, Kathmandu, Nepal. J and I booked a nice hotel for our first night in Kathmandu without the guys, and this was the view from our bedroom window. We were thrilled to be so high up and to have such a great viewpoint across the city! The noises, colours and vibrancy of the city swirled around us as we lent out of the open window, and we admired the mountains in the distance, blue and inviting, promising us great things when we finally began our trek in a couple of days time.

Sunrise over Annapurna, Poon Hill, Nepal. This is what I struggled up Poon Hill at 4.30am for. One of the most beautiful moments I’ve experienced so far in my life. As I said, I’ll be writing a full post about this with plenty more photos. For now, enjoy this one. It doesn’t even go halfway to doing the experience justice!

Coming Up in May

May is a much quieter month than April, mainly because I don’t have any major, exciting overseas plans! My calendar is actually surprisingly blank, but I’m going to make the most of it and try to do as much writing as possible, take a trip to the cinema and start the work on my End of the Line series. At the end of the month, I’ll be heading back to Wales for a family gathering, which I’m really looking forward to!