And 32 hours later, we're here!

The last greater-than-24-hour journey that I embarked on was a 28-hour bus ride from Lima to Cusco (Robin, I'm sure you remember this vividly). It featured an incessantly crying baby, an apocolyptic/zombie-themed movie set in the desert (conveniently shown while we were driving through the desert), and a peppering of late-night nausea and vomiting. Today - better yet, the last two days - eclipsed that "personal best" with 32 hours of flights, airports, and connections to get from our comfortable lives in Vancouver, BC to Kathmandu, Nepal. Kiley and I opted for the Vancouver to Shanghai to Kunming to Kathmandu option; the rest of our colleagues are in transit, hopping from Vancouver to Hong Kong to Kathmandu. We'll be reunited with them in about 12 hours.

I had more flashbacks to Peru when we stepped into the taxi at the airport. As I was reaching for my seat belt and coming up empty, I remembered that most of my taxi transit in Peru was sans seatbelt too. Renee, our policy of "safety first" is slow to catch on. The other thing that took me back to last summer was the drive itself. Somehow, pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, cars, and buses shared two lanes of the road - and often lanes for oncoming traffic - without major catastrophe, as lane markers and pedestrian walkways seemed to be more suggestions than law. We were taken to our accommodation, a guesthouse about 10-15 minutes away from Patan Hospital where we were greeted by our didi.

The Coles Notes version: Okay, if you've skipped over everything else, here's the important stuff: we've arrived in Kathmandu. We're settled at our Guesthouse and, after a good night of sleep, we'll be ready to start tackling our to-do list and meet the rest of friends/team tonight.
More stories to come...