Nepal Wine Trekking – Continued

We finally have some good Wi-Fi and can do some updates. I’ll start of from where I last left off even though it is many days later and we are in Delhi, India on our way home.

If it’s Saturday, we must be leaving Sanctuary Lodge! Honestly, we have lost track of the days. Thanks to our trip leader, Krishna, we are kept on schedule!

We left Sanctuary Lodge Saturday morning after another amazing breakfast. We really left the Lodge reluctantly, it is so beautiful. And did I already mention we saw Fishtail Mountain every morning! We were so lucky. Every morning Krishna would wake us with the call “Morning dear, mountain clear!” and the staff would be outside our door with tea and coffee. It really doesn’t get any better than that.

After a trek of about an hour and a half out to the main road, we boarded a bus to Pokhara. The bus ride to Pokhara was interesting. The countryside was green and the roads very crowded. We traveled on a major highway, but it was in very poor repair. Many sections were gravel and in general the roads are very dusty. Drivers constantly toot their horns to let other drivers they need to move over… I’m coming through! The hierarchy is based on size of vehicle. The roads are full of very large trucks (lories), buses of various sizes, motorcycles, scooters, pedestrians, cattle, goats and ox carts. Half the fun of an overland trip is watching the driver negotiate the road. You would swear we were going to have a head on collision but we never did.

We arrived at the Pokhara Grande Hotel early in the afternoon and had an all afternoon to ourselves. I did some shopping and while Pete had a beer in order to be able to use slow Wi-Fi to check our email. Our evening dinner was at a Lakeside area restaurant called Moondance. The special of the night was a roasted wild boar. Pete and I both ordered the special and it was delicious. It was served with veggies and garlic potatoes. Some of us finished our dinner with lemon meringue pie– yum! The pie isn’t on the menu, you have to know to ask for it. Krishna had never had lemon meringue pie before but you could tell he loved it.

The following morning we drove to Phewa Lake, and were taken on a boat ride around the lake. Our “oars woman” was a Nepali woman who moved us smoothly around the lake to a shrine in the middle of the lake. After visiting the shrine, we headed to the International Mountaineering Museum. It is an enormous museum containing information about the ethnic groups in Nepal, Nepali geology, information about the flora and fauna and the climbing history of all of the major Himalayan peaks. There was also a section on Babu Chhiri, the Sherpa whose family we visited with and wrote about in the previous post.

After touring the Museum, we headed back to our hotel and had the afternoon free to ourselves. We all headed out in various ways to shop and eat. We eventually ended up eating in the hotel bar where the Nepali food was excellent.

Pete finally found a bottle of Hinwa wine, a Nepali wine made from a Himalayan Barberry. He was only able to find the white wine but that was better than not finding it at all after traveling all the way over to Nepal.

It was a 2012 Hinwa Winery White. Actually on the label it said it was “manufactured” in June 2012. The color was a light peach color, it wasn’t overly sweet and had good acidity. Most of the others thought it had a peachy flavor like a Bellini while I though it was just fruity. Overall not a bad wine and one that would be very pleasant to drink chilled on a hot afternoon. Leslie particularly liked it.

The next part of our trip took us rafting on the Seti river to our river camp, the details of which we will write about in our next post, so stay tuned! It was amazing. We will also be adding some pictures we took along the way.

Links to the other Nepal articles:
Almost to Nepal
Namaste from Nepal
Nepal Wine Trekking
Seti River Rafting
Royal Chitwan National Park