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The time in Pokhara seems to have disappeared with only our hotel bill to remind us we have been here a while, and suddenly we are off trekking tomorrow! Typically, the sun has been shining most of the time we have been here,but the last few days it has started to be a bit wetter and the heavens have opened tonight... hopefully it will rain itself out and be beautiful tomorrow.

Pokhara is a very nice, relaxing place to spend time and we have enjoyed cycling around and exploring a little bit as well as just relaxing with a drink looking out over the lake.

We have taken in a few more of the tourist attractions including a walk to see Devi's falls which is quite an impressive waterfall disappearing 50m down underground into a limestone cavern – it was apparently renamed when an unfortunate Swiss couple disappeared down the hole in the 60's. Drew was relieved and Heather was frustrated that the barriers kept you a long way back from the torrent of water plunging down the hole which makes quite a roar during the monsoon. From here, we walked back over the hill via the World Peace Pagoda which was built by Japanese monks and sits on a ridge above the lake. It is famed for its panoramic views of the Annapurna range, but sadly once more, clouds confounded us; however, it was still a pretty good view over the lake and surrounding hills and worth the climb. Descending from the Peace Pagoda takes you down to the lake on the other side from Pokhara so we had to get a boat back over – we took absolutely no persuasion whatsoever when offered a cold beer to take with us on the boat.

We also spent an interesting couple of hours at the fairly new International Mountain Museum. Some of the exhibits were unintentionally entertaining (for example, we suspect a quirk of the museum's funding was responsible for the fact that it gave you the impression that outside of Nepal, mountain populations exist only in Taiwan and Slovenia). It was quite interesting to see artefacts from several expeditions to the 8,000m+ peaks including Annapurna (which we read Maurice Herzog's book about) including gruesome photos of his frozen digits falling off. There were also some good displays of the all different Nepali castes and ethnic groups. It whet our appetite for the trek seeing more details of the Annapurna range than the monsoon weather had allowed us to do in real-life.

Kayaking on the lake was great fun although 4 hours was certainly enough to wear us both out and allow us to pick up a bit of sunburn despite liberal applications of sun cream. Our technique could definitely do with some more work as even as we were paddling back into shore to return the kayaks we were still unable to prevent ourselves from spinning in circles whenever caught by the slightest wind or current. Paddling around gave us a great opportunity to spot kingfishers darting around on the water's edge. We found a lovely little landing spot from where we went for a swim, the water was very pleasantly warm and seemed pretty clean (although we were careful and would not fancy seeing a toxicology report on it). We also found a very nice, secluded, lodge overlooking the lake where we had lunch while Heather dried out in the sun after an inelegant dismount from her kayak dumped her in the lake.

We are due for a very early start in the morning but should probably get used to it as it is standard practice on the trek to set off at 6am (or even earlier on some days!). We are very excited about it and will write it up as soon as we can when we get back.

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