Himalaya Adventure: DAY 2 SAT. OCT. 4 KATHMANDU, NEPAL - PARO, BHUTAN

A quick breakfast, a quick introduction to our tour leader Subash Tamang, quick hellos to our tour mates, and a quick reunion with Gail and Michael and we went back to the airport. More endless waiting: more paper work. This tour used Kathmandu as a jumping off point only for Bhutan. But my luck's holding: I have a window seat for the plane ride into Bhutan and the Himalayas.

And the luck held. Once airborne, the views were ... well, there are only inadequate words. About 15 minutes into the flight, the snow capped peaks of the Himalayas poked above the clouds into a clear, shockingly blue sky. Then, on its own, a rock and ice island emerged in the cloud ocean ... Mount Everest. Everest is a pyramid fortress of a mountain. I took videos which, sadly, cannot be reproduced on this blog site, because the files are too big. I have since posted them to my facebook page, which I hope you get the chance to view. But, as I was taking the video, I felt strange. I had really seen Everest .... really? Or was it a dream?

The peaks rolled on for the next 20 minutes. I fell in love again with Lhotse, not as tall as Everest, but broader, more rolling and massive. Then, abruptly, the show was over. We began our descent into Paro airport, the only international airport in Bhutan, and an airport with a reputation for a steep and hairy descent. We strapped in and anticipated an airshow. Our destination was unclear. Clouds and mountains closed in and I got an uneasy feeling about this: such close quarters and rock walls are not a good combination for an airbus losing altitude. Then, through the cloud barrier into one of the most impressive landings I've ever experienced. We twisted and turned through tree-lined valleys, sometimes only meters away from our wing tips ... or so it seemed. Out of my window, as our pilot performed his aerobatics, I could see our runway, a hard left, then a hard right, miles away. "No way," I thought. But our pilot nailed it, perfectly, even smoothly. For a few brief moments, our fat clumsy airbus flew like an F-18.

Paro was beautiful. The buildings and the people are out of "Lost Horizon". We bussed along a twisting, breath-taking mountain road which followed a raging river, past landslides into the fairy tale capital of Thimphu. We unloaded and melted into our hotel. In the evening, we walked through a bustling market to get our first sense of Bhutan: sights, sounds, smells ( good and bad ) assaulted us. The altitude began to insinuate itself upon us, and the jet lag from the last couple of days beat us up. We were done in completely. A good dinner, with a Diamox-polluted local beer (actually a really good beer: I enjoyed one at lunch without Diamox and it was great ), a birthday celebration for one of our company and then complete surrender to sleep. Why are we doing this to ourselves ? Oh yeah ... Everest.