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The capital city almost completely closed down for the day. It was reported that mobiles weren't working, that the internet wouldn't work and that the government would block the tv channels for the day also. Luckily this didn't happen, but to see the ghostly car-free streets for a day when usually there's traffic jams everywhere was quite a shock. It was April 10th, the day of Nepal's election and mumsy was arriving. The only car on the road was the tourist bus taking people to and from the airport, so luckily I just hopped on that to pick her up. She floated down the tall escalator - down, down, down as my excitement and emotions went up, up, up! Finally she was in my arms and it felt so right, like a missing piece of me was finally connected. And so we spent 2 precious days catching up on 7 months worth of life, window shopping and doing final errands before we had to leave for the drive across to Bhutan. It took 2 days to drive from Kathmandu to the Nepal/Indian border where we found the immigration and police not very happy that the Maoists were ahead in the election results. We were glad to be leaving before the final results came out...
Following the World Heritage listed Toy Train, we twisted our way into Darjeeling marveling at the buena vista and thick white mists where prayer flags emerged and would flutter as the heavens listened to them. After Darjeeling we realised we would have enough time to explore Sikkim for a couple of days before we needed to be at the Bhutan border, so up we went, got the special permit at the border and entered without hastle. We found Sikkim to be a very beautiful, lush green and clean state which is very friendly. Amazingly plastic and spitting were banned in Sikkim. After watching the third highest mountain in the world appear and then disappear in the distance we made our way to Bhutan. Since the maps for this part of India are very unreliable and there were barely any city names listed we found it very difficult to find the border town of Phuntsholing and got pretty damn lost, but finally we made it in time to settle into a dingy little hotel for the night before entering into Bhutan on the 17th April.
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