Having toured the many towns and villages of Chitwan, we had dinner followed by an early night.  We headed to our room at 9pm, read for an hour or so and nodded off.  We were both awoken at 2am by the rustling of a biscuit rapper.  Not knowing which of the many jungle animals had entered our room, I was elected to get up and investigate, nervously of course, but I could see nothing.

To cut a long story short, this damn thing kept returning once the light was out – it was so noisy – we were pretty sure it was only a mouse, but we were worried that it might have been a snake, especially since we had seen so many along the riverside that same day.  This fiasco went on for 3 hours -torch on, torch off, until Sam spotted the tail of a mouse, phew, finally we could fall back to sleep.

We are still laughing about it writing this post.  Sorry, we didn’t manage to get a photo of the little bastard.  I vowed to remove every crumb of food and packaging from our room today…we’ll see.

Yesterday we enquired about a local bus to the nearest big town so we could withdraw some cash, only to be told that the most efficient and quickest way was to hire a motorcycle and ride ourselves – I was very excited.  Mind boggling – the 3ltrs of fuel costs more than the hire of the bike for a day, £2.50 and the fuel was about £3.

What an experience going through the villages en route to the nearest town, about 20 Kilometres away. In some parts the roads were almost impassible and it took us over an hour. We stopped at many local shops for bottles of coke (15p) and then lunch. At one shop we were greeted by a little boy who spoke the best english we’ve heard since we arrived, all learned from school, clearly a very intelligent boy (pic5). We entertained the family as they asked loads of questions and he translated.  As a traditional Hindu family, there were amazed that we were not married, especially at our age.  They are connected to the internet regularly so we said we would upload this picture, we gave him our web address and swapped email addresses.

We were a little nervous riding through the national park, which is petty vast, having seen the sing on the way in (below). Watch out for the Royal Bengal Tiger – a lean mean killing machine and the top predator in the jungles of Nepal – luckily we came to no harm.

This sums up the people here in Chitwan and most probably the whole of Nepal; after returning the bike, they drained the tank of fuel and refunded us 1 ltr – we couldn’t believe it!