When it comes to healthy food perhaps Nepalese cuisine has some of the answers. The national dish ‘Dhal Bhat’ can be quite healthy.  The main ingredients are Dhal; a lentil curry and Bhat; meaning rice. It’s the lentils that provide the good news. There are a wide variety in Nepal and like many pulses these provide a good low calorie source of proteins, fibre, vitamins and minerals – they can also lower cholestoral.  So the next time you go for a curry, perhaps try the healthier Nepalese version. On your holiday to Nepal, I am sure you’ll like to try this tasty Nepalese food.

Vaishya Dev is known in tourist books as the God of toothaches here in Nepal and is represented in Kathmandu.

Here it is in an alleyway, in essence a large collection of metal washes nailed to each other at the base of what was once a sacred tree. Hindu mythology, its culture, combined with Buddhism gives Nepal an endless array of festivals and unusual practices that have long disappeared in neighbouring Asian countries.

On a holiday to Nepal, you can get very modern dental treatment (much more cheaply than the West) with European trained dental technicians in very clean, modern clinics. What’s nice, is that dentists also examine your tongue and advise on diet, sleep and other factors. There is an ‘interconnectiveness’ with treatment, much like Buddhist karma, looking not just at the symptom but also the cause from a lifestyle perspective.

However, traditions still remain, here a boy enters his head into the symbol to relieve toothache. Shamans too also perform ceremonies around toothache patients, dancing with yak tailed sticks and chanting but they are often more expensive than the dentists

Thanks to Richard who has updated us with some more photographs from his holiday to Nepal with us last April. As you might imagine a holiday to Nepal is a very colourful one. Already group numbers for our next holiday in October are nearly full.  Here is quite a nice photograph of a young Nepalese girl he’s taken. With around 70 different castes, a multitude of ethnic groups and a sizable Tibetan community, Nepal really does have a multitude of cultures to photograph.  Thanks again Richard for your input and I hope everyone enjoys the photos.   Here’s the link:

https://www.facebook.com/trickygordon/media_set?set=a.10152459575668109.1073741846.589083108&type=1

You might remember a few months ago we confirmed that former Miss Nepal, the lovely Jharana Bajracharja has become a friend and offered to work with Angel Holidays to teach meditation to our travellers. Meditation and spiritual holidays are becoming increasingly popular. Jharana is a celebrity here, and since winning Miss Nepal in 1997 has become a film actress both in Nepal and across the border in Bollywood. In Nepal, outside of the celebrity culture of the West, Jharana walks freely and is unhindered by the press or local people.  She’s treated as an equal and nothing more. It’s partly due to the removal of the ego and ‘ego-grasping’ as it is termed by Buddhist and Hindu religions; a frowned-upon process whereby we become attached to ‘who we are’ as a opposed to our equal place as part of humanity.   I wonder why famous people are so revered in the West? Nepal has a high degree of intellectual spirituality; theories about who we are and our position in the world have been developed over thousands of years – even the police force have daily meditations. Here’s a photo of Jharana in all her glory in 1997.  She can teach meditation and its benefits in the beautiful Pagoda room on the rooftop of our hotel overlooking the city. I wonder how Simon Cowell would react if he could walk freely around London with no one making a fuss of him? Might he suffer from ego-grasping?