Visa & Other Officialdom
Most visitors need a valid visa to enter Nepal. Obtain your visa by post from the Nepal Embassy in London prior to travel. Presently this costs £20 for a 15-Day visa. You can obtain more info by visiting the Nepal Embassy website. Or if you can't wait, why not download your visa application form here. Please check with the organiser prior to sending off your passport individually as we may be able to do this as a group in the summer and save on the Royal Mail Special Delivery expenses. We are going to apply for our visas collectively the week commencing 25th October 2010.
Furthermore, you will need to supply FOUR passport size photographs by 10 October 2010 along with your vital stats, such as Name, Christian Name, Date of Birth, Nationality, Passport Number, email and telephone for next of kin. These will be used to obtain a Trekking Permit from the Nepalese authorities.
Please take a spare photocopy of your passport, just in case. You can keep up to date with FCO country specific travel advisory advice here or look at their pretty and of course useful FCO country advice booklet.
The British Embassy in Nepal also has a useful and informative website. Please register the details of your stay in Nepal with the British Embassy. To complete the LOCATE online registration form, please go to LOCATE - online consular registration.
Flights
As In order for the itinerary to work you will need to leave the UK on Friday evening and return to the UK on Sunday evening, so just five days annual leave are required! The carriers of choice are Qatar Airways via Doha or Jet Airways via Delhi. Seats into Kathmandu, Nepal are always in very short supply, so fares range from £565 to £605. However, we do have access to very attractive fares through Touchdown Travel in Horley starting at about £459. We will try and book as a group by the end of March You need to make your own arrangements, unless we get a group of ten or more. Expect to pay around £500.
AccommodationWe will stay in good midscale hotels in Kathmandu and Pokhara (names to be confirmed, but probably the Trek O Tel in Pokhara and the Samsara Resort in Kathmandu) and we will camp along the trails. Please bear in mind that you are visiting one of the world's lesser privileged countries, so service levels may occasionally stray from what what is perceived as the comfort zone.
Cost
Approximately £500 - £580 for an all inclusive 'land only' package, depending on final group size. To see what is included please check the 'Small Print' tab.
Nepal Information
The Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal lies in South Asia and is bordered by India to the South, East and West and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China to the North. Kathmandu, the capital city, stands at an altitude of about 1400m and has a population of an estimated 1.8m competing for every inch of space in typical third world chaos arranged in an amazing and anachronistic fashion: modern concrete and glass structures grow next to an abundance of thousand year old shrines and temples. Geographically, Nepal is slightly smaller than England and Wales with a population of about 28.5 million. Nepal famously has eight of the world's ten highest mountains. The country's lowest point is about 70m and its highest is Mount Everest at 8850m. Hence the climate ranges from subtropical to severe cold across the tiny 200km width of the country. Nepal's GDP per capita is just about USD $120 per month, with a life expectancy of about 59 years. About half the pollution subsist on an income of less than USD $1.25 per day. The country is hugely diverse in its wealth of people, cultures, languages, geography, flora and fauna.
Weather Kathmandu
