If you could be anywhere in the world right now-where would you want to be?

I, like you, am sitting here on Monday morning staring at a computer screen. This isn’t the life I signed up for-I even managed to avoid the normal 9-5 routine and yet I still seem to spend the majority of my time trapped behind a keyboard. Monday mornings are the worst and this is a little chance to daydream about where you’d rather be. For some it’s fancy beaches and hotels and for others it’s mountain peaks or deserts. There are a thousand places I’d love to be now but the first one that came to mind was Dolalghat in Nepal.

Dolalghat is a small village on the Friendship Highway, the main road from Lhasa to Kathmandu. It’s main feature is the bridge crossing the SunKosi River. I was there on Friday 23rd November for one night. I was cycling from South Korea to Cape Town and had just crossed the barren bleak Tibet and dropped into the warm hug that is Nepal. Over the last two days I’d dropped down 3500metres in altitude from La Lung La at 5124m down into Tibet. Seeing vegetation and smiling people for the first time in weeks was such and energising experience. I had joined up with four Spaniards the day before and was enjoying cycling slower and all the breaks they take!

We rolled into town with the sun’s late afternoon glow added an amazing warmth to the colourfully painted buildings. Straight opposite the bridge is the one hotel in town called ‘Hotel Fish Kitchen’! It was an amazing building leaning up against a cliff, the first floor was a shop, the second a restaurant, the third was possibly the dingiest, dirtiest two rooms I’ve ever seen and the top floor were these two amazing rooms looking out over the mountains and river with comfortable clean beds and little windows with shutters and bright blue curtains! We split up between the two groups and headed down to the restaurant for the local Dolalgahti dish which as hot as the sun, luckily there was a steady supply of ice cold Fanta (which is my guilty pleasure on long bike rides-I love the chemical orange taste!).

After the meal we wandered down into the town and bought some supplies for the next day-it was dark out and there were only a few people in the streets, we persuaded the lady who own the shop we were in-which was about the size of a big cupboard to put her TV onto the Indian music channel and we staged Dolalghat first ever dance party using head torches and lighters and strobes and the whole empty street as a dancefloor.

The next day we woke up had an amazing breakfast of hot, milky, sweet tea and bread and spreads and headed back out into the town. There was slightly more than the usual amount of pointing and Hello-ing and it was until later that they laughing and recreating our dance moves from the night before. This whole town just seemed to be full of smiling people laughing at us and dancing around-it really makes me feel happy just thinking back about it and that’s where I’d like to be now, at 9:15am this Monday.

Where Would You Rather Be?

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