Nagarjun Forest Reserve, which apparently was home to pheasants, deer and monkeys! It was described in Lonely Planet as an enjoyable 2 hour cardio-hike to the summit of Nagarjum and was a great way to escape the pollution of and noise of Kathmandu. The enjoyable 2 hour cardio-hike turned into a 3 and a half hour steep uphill slog not quite what we were expecting! Onward and upward we went to which ended in a slightly grumpy and extremely knackered Helen made worse by the fact that my feet kept bleeding, by the time we reached the summit the cloud was coming in fast we could feel the rain in the air and it was starting to thunder - hmmmm great 3 and a half hours for this, I think were the words I was mumbling to myself! The views or what we could see of them we great but I had decided to investigate why my feet kept bleeding so I kicked off my shoes and got Rob to inspect my feet and to my horror there was some kinda of black worm like blood sucker that has attached itself to my foot. By this point I was

frantically kicking my foot around and screeching to poor old Rob ‘get it off, and ‘what the bloody hell is it’! He was saying ‘I think it’s a leech, your not supposed to pull them off’ I was like ‘I don’t bloody care, get it off me’! I don’t think it helped that we had watched Species, an alien type film the night before! Thankfully the blood sucking little critter was knocked off and I started to calm down, so the only thing left to do was check Robs feet, and yeap he had one right between his toes, so with a short sharp wack it was off his toe and on the floor, these things really didn’t realise how lucky they were to still be alive! The only thing left to do was to clean up our feet the best we could and cover them in insect repellent, this not being the most pleasant of experiences we decided to get back down this hill as fast as we could, fortunately the insect repellent did the trick and we weren’t plagued by the critters