Went mountain biking in Hattiban today. There are several big hills surrounding the Kathmandu valley and Hattiban is one of them (Shiva Puri, Nagarjun, and Nagarkot are the others). There are mountain biking courses on most of them including Hattiban.
There were 4 of us riding and and we couldn't fit all the bikes, people, and gear into one car so we hired a cab to take us.
This guy was a crazy taxi. The city driving was expectedly crazy but it was in the hills where he shone. Flying up the winding roads, bouncing the engine off the rev limiter, laughing the whole way up; there was barely a moment when there wasn't smoke coming from somewhere on the car. When we finally got to the end of the road and waiting for the second vehicle to arrive (it never made it) I discovered this cab was 35 years old and had 475,000km on an 0.8L engine – half the size of a Honda Civic and only 50cc bigger than my motorcycle. We walked down to unload the second car and started hiking up the track.
The forest was beautiful. It had no undergrowth, only big pine trees and grass and looked so soft it made you sleepy. The grass seemed to absorb the sound so it had an eerie quiet to it, like after a snowfall in the winter. It seemed strange that a forest wouldn't have any brush until we noticed the trees were burnt and a fire must have cleared everything but these huge pines. I'd never been in a place like it.
We rode around for a few hours, got another couple flat tires, and made our way back. It took us an hour to get down.
When I got home and into the shower I discovered I'd taken a few leeches home with me, a couple of us did.
