I’ve long noticed that in every long journey there inevitably comes a day when the journey starts to feel stale. You’re afraid to admit it to yourself, you try not to show it, but inside it’s as if someone has switched off the light and you keep making your way farther and farther through the dark.
At the beginning of a trip you are full of energy and strength, you are open to new impressions and sensations, you have waited and prepared for this journey for so long, and now you are finally in it. It fills you up, drop by drop, and with each new day you are filled with new impressions, new emotions, new experiences. But a day comes when all of this overflows, spills over the edge and…. as sad as it is to admit, stops bringing joy.
Or rather, you simply begin to live your ordinary Kyiv life while traveling. Strangely enough, travel, like work, like everything else, turns into routine… You move from city to city. You visit another temple, museum, etc. — but none of it resonates inside you… And all because your perception is already overloaded; it seems to have atrophied or grown tired…. You try to be happy, you reproach yourself for how can this be, it’s beautiful after all (interesting, etc.) — but no matter how you try to convince yourself, it’s hard to be dishonest with yourself… it’s hard to be happy by order. Joy is tricky like that. It either exists or it doesn’t. And it’s hard to do anything about it. That is, I don’t consider the absence of joy to be a problem. It would even be more correct to say that joy is present, just in a more hidden state. Not as obvious as at the beginning of the journey.
So, perhaps, over the past few dozen days we too have entered such a monotonous stretch in our journey. We settled in Kathmandu and didn’t really do anything.
It’s good that we managed to break away to Pokhara after all. It’s very beautiful here.
Today was a wonderful day; it seems routine stepped back for a little while.
In the morning it was sunny and warm. It was the warmest day of our entire trip through Nepal.
We walked around without fleeces, only in thermal underwear, and it wasn’t cold at all. The sky was clear, and a snowy sharp peak was visible. Above the nearest hill there were many paragliders hanging in the air.
Today breakfast was included at our hotel, for the first time on our trip through Nepal and the second time on our entire journey. They brought me an omelet, toast, and even muesli with hot milk. And Volchiy wanted a regular fried egg, which didn’t turn out very well there — so Volchiy ate the omelet, while I happily ate the muesli. Then we decided to move to another hotel and went to look at rooms there.
On the way we rented bicycles. At the first rental place the bikes were low, especially for Volchiy. They were also kind of beaten up. So we decided to keep looking and found slightly more expensive but good bikes.
The room in the other hotel pleased us; it had as many as three windows, it was large, on the 4th floor, and cheaper — so we decided to move. We went to get our things, checked out, checked in, and set off on a bicycle trip around the lake.
