2012 Study Tour: Our journey to Nepal

    All of the seven women study tour group met at Melbourne airport at 10pm on the 27th. There were so many mixed emotions going around about our massive journey ahead, mostly excitement. we were lucky to travel to Singapore on the a380, the biggeair passenger aircraft in the world I believe? This plane trip being the first plane ride ever for some participants.

We arrived in Singapore and had roughly 5 hours to spare, and by this time a lot of us were exhausted,having received no sleep on the first flight. We found a section in the airport to put all our bags down and had a sleep on the floor. It was by far the best sleep of the whole trip.

We then boarded our last flight for the journey,destination-Kathmandu! Whilst everyone was very over airports and being cramped up on an aeroplane there was definitely still some excitement lingering. This 5 hour flight felt a lot longer than the previous 8 hour flight. When we could see Nepal from the aeroplane the excitement erupted from everybody. Nepal, from the air, almost looks like a toy town. Like all these very similar looking houses and huts have just been dropped from above with no order. I think some of us referred to it as being like sims, there were no roads or evident connections between a lot of the places.

Arriving in Kathmandu- There was an interesting start to the trip, Meg, Sarina and myself didn't get onto the first bus from the plane to the airport where as everyone else did. We were a little anxious we would lose everyone, but we went with it and eventually found them in line at the visa desks. Once through the gates we were lucky as we got to skip the bag scanning and got straight through. Padam, Stephanie's (our leader) friend was waiting for us with two buses to take us to our hotel, it was very hectic. People trying to take our bags for us and demanding we tip them when we didn't even know if they were apart of padams group, turns out they weren't.

We had a 20 minute bus ride through the streets of Kathmandu to our hotel, the bus was very quiet during this time, I think everyone was just taking it in and it was becoming very real that this will be our home for the next three weeks.

We arrived at hotel moonlight in thamel, and were allocated to our rooms. I am in a room with meg. We anxiously took our key up the flight of stairs and opened the door to our bedroom for the next three weeks, not knowing what to expect. We were quite surprised, I think mostly at the bathroom. We have a toilet that barely flushes