Heading to Nepal

First off, Hello to everyone reading this at Jackson Square, how's the mall doing? Chances are the security guards are reading this instead of doing their posts which is fine with me.

Last night was annoying, with all the dogs on the street it's hard to sleep because they bark at each other for a long periods of time. It sorta feels like winter hours in Ontario here because the sun in down by 6:30 which makes for short days. Most places here closed by 9pm, including restaurants. They don't use daylight savings time in India, neither in Nepal.

Yesterday I went to Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park, it's probably the highest elevation zoo. It was okay. They had some red pandas and a couple leopards, the animals look fairly healthy but not the greatest. There was some interesting birds there with some super bright colours(no pictures today because the internet isn't so great) After the zoo I went to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute which as an Everest museum. In 1953 Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary were the first 2 people to summit Everest. Norgay was from Darjeeling and that's why there's a museum here. It was pretty cool to see some of the equipment used to climb back in day, items that were twice as heavy as they are now.

I also saw the 3rd highest mountain peak in the world. Kangchenjunga is 8586 metres above see level and the first ascent was in 1955. The name means "the five treasures of snow" because it contains 5 peaks and 4 of them are over 8400 metres high. This was probably the best part about Darjeeling because I'm very interested in mountain climbing(reading the stories anyway) There are 14 8,000m peaks in the world, all of them are located in Asia. Right now I'm reading about climbing K2 which is the second highest and one of the hardest. Anybody care to guess where K2 is?( don't google it though)

Darjeeling has been a very nice break from the typical business of other Indian cities. It's possible to walk down the street and not get hassled constantly, there's also no cows on the road here and everybody is very friendly. The dogs actually look like dogs here,in Varanasi and Agra they are all very skinny and not actual pets. In Darjeeling people seem to take care of them, they still sleep in middle of the road but I'm used to that by now. The drivers are still nuts but you get used to it. Another great part of Darjeeling is eating at the bakeries, the food is fresh and always good.

Well I think I'll head to Nepal,not sure when the next update will be. Thanks for reading, hopefully you are enjoying it.

Andrew