our restaurant and sat down to eat, I was already feeling a bit iffy, due to the amounts of oil we had used in our cookery course, everybody who had done felt the same. The speciality of this place was ‘over the bridge noodles’, the story goes that in olden times a writer used to go over to a small island to write but when his wife used to bring him his food it would always be cold, so to get over this problem they came up with the idea of making a soup stock, then added veg or meat or whatever to it but then to seal in the heat they would pour a layer of oil over the top. Greg told us the story of the noodles in the restaurant and you could see and almost feel the dread from everyone around me, nobody looked particularly impressed with eating such oily food, but we ordered all the same. The veggie option was 5 Yuan, (23 to the pound!) so it didn’t take a genius to work out it wasn’t the most expensive dish to prepare. It arrived and the soup stock looked and smelt like dish water, we added our

ingredients in the vague hope that this would transform the stock into a gastronomic delight, I was thinking who you trying kid here Riley and it was with no surprise that its tasted foul. I ate about 4 mouth full’s before cutting my loses, Rob hardly touched his which kind of showed how unpopular it was!

The next day was an excursion to the Stone Forest, about a 2 hour bus ride away, we had thought we would give is a miss as it was working out quite expensive. We have now realised that we are going to have to change our travelling plans due to the forthcoming monsoon season in Nepal, India and general everywhere in south east Asia! So we thought we’d find an internet café and go and do some research on the Indian Himalaya as this is supposed to be the driest region and also pretty damn nice. We set off in search of café and found a place which gave you 40 minutes free access if you bought