The hotel (the Yak & Yeti) was a very pleasant surprise; four stars and well equipped. We had to rush straight out to dinner though at the Rum Doodle – the restaurant that everyone goes to before going up Everest. We all engaged in a rather unusual tradition of signing a cardboard Yeti’s foot, to go among the hundreds of others adorning the walls and ceiling of the Rum Doodle.

We are a big group, about 36, and everyone got to know each other pretty well last night, the proceedings lubricated by lots of cheap Nepalese beer! The evening culminated in a rikshaw race back to the hotel which John and I would have won (thanks to a bit of judicious cheating and momentum-stealing by grabbing the other rikshaws) if not for the fact that our chain broke on the home straight!

The city itself reminds me of Thailand, except that everyone speaks English which is handy. The GBP/USD goes a very long way here – some of the group have bought a lot of their trekking gear here for something like a fifth of the prices at home.

Like Thailand, however, there seems to be a vast range in terms of pricing; street sellers offering wares for a pittance while the more “Westernised” shops charge an order of magnitude more. I think it is more than just them ripping off the tourists though, and perhaps indicates a real class split. Perhaps the most noted example of this was when an adult offered one of the guys a boy, aged no more than about 7, for 500 rupees (about