We thought the mornings were chilly in Pokhara, but apparently, we were wrong. In Kathmandu, the mornings are chilly. When the alarm went off, I couldn't help but notice my breath condensing as I reached for the snooze button. We did get up and quickly threw on our clothes to keep warm while we got ready to shower. This guesthouse has both a solar heated shower and a gas heated shower but neither of them were very warm, certainly not warm enough on a 40 degree morning. We decided to wait on the shower and instead went next door to the Elbrus GH for breakfast. We told our host about the hot water issue and he gave us two options – we could either change to a third property or wait one more day for our reserved room at the Elbrus. We decided to go see the other property but it was a good 5 minute walk away from the central part of Thamel. The room was nice but another guest told us that the showers weren't all that warm there, either, so we decided to tough it out one more night and move tomorrow. The solar shower finally warmed up enough around 11:00 am to allow us to make a flying run through the not so cold water. While we waited for our shower, we decided to head for warmer pastures (Thailand) rather than staying in Nepal. We would have loved to have gone to Royal Chitwan Park, but we simply don't have warm enough gear for this time of year. There is plenty of cold weather gear available for sale here in Kathmandu, but it didn't make financial sense to invest in warmer clothes for a three to four day trip.

So the plan now is to get to Thailand ASAP. From my preliminary research on HUBB, I knew that the cargo company that everyone uses is Eagle-something. I pulled up the shipping reports on HUBB and saw that Eagle Eyes Cargo was in the same building as Helena's Restaurant, which was conveniently on my map. Before arriving in Nepal, I had also received an email from Suraj at Eagle-something Cargo, so that was who I was looking for. We found the office of Eagle Eyes Cargo and met Jeewan. I told him we were there to find out about shipping motorbikes to Bangkok, and he showed us photos of some bikes he'd recently shipped. He also gave us a quote of 770 USD for everything. He confirmed that we could pack the bikes on Thursday and ship them on Friday. The only thing that was a little concerning was that when I mentioned the email he sent me, he seemed very noncommittal. Re and I discussed it briefly and decided that we would ship with him and left a 125 USD deposit. We arranged to meet Thursday morning at 10:00 am so he could prepare the necessary paperwork before we went to the airport to crate the bikes. As we got ready to leave, he gave us a receipt and his business card. I noticed that his name was not Suraj. Hmmm. I reread the email on my phone as we left and realized that I received the email from Eagle Cargo, not Eagle Eyes Cargo.

Confused, we started walking back to the room when I spied a sign on the same street that said Eagle Cargo and motorcycle shipping. Curious. We stopped in at Eagle Cargo and found that Suraj and Jeewan are somehow related and apparently, Suraj used to work for Eagle Eyes. Suraj proceeded to tell us how much better his service is and generally tried to convince us to change shipping companies. When we asked his rate, the price he quoted us was 50 cents less than our other quote. When we told him this, he then cut his rate to 750 USD. We said we would think about it but did tell him where we were staying. We then went back to the guesthouse and fired up HUBB to figure out what was going on. Eagle Eyes Cargo has been shipping bikes since 1999, whereas, Eagle Cargo has only been doing it for about two years. People seem equally happy with both, so we decided to stick with the shipping we'd already booked. Recognizing Suraj (and his wife, Sara) from the description that the DRZ-mounted couple from Pokhara had given us also gave me pause. They had told us how Suraj had booked their plane tickets to Bangkok as well but had overcharged them by 50 bucks each.

Now we needed to get our plane tickets and found that Nepal Airlines had the best rate. Unfortunately, they do not sell tickets online, so we walked approximately a mile to their office. We got our tickets for Friday and they cost about 205 USD each. The good news was they took credit cards so we didn't need to dip into our cash reserves. On the way back to the guesthouse, we hit the ATM for a whole bunch of Nepali rupees, since unlike Tanzania, the shipper actually wanted to be paid in his own currency. Once we got back to the guesthouse, Re spent some time researching transportation and accommodation options in Bangkok while I finished reading the book I had been working on for the past few days.

After the sun went down, it got cold fast. A knock on our door brought a handwritten note from Suraj and an offer to cut our shipping rate to 720 USD. The note also said he'd sent us an email with a different offer and to let him know. Re than checked my email and found that his other offer was to ship our bikes for 595 USD if we would pack on Wednesday, when he had four other bikes going, or 720 USD if we packed on Thursday. Somehow, the 595 offer seemed too low, since as near as I could figure from the rates we were given earlier by both companies, that the charge for Thai Airways would be something around 575 USD? Puzzled, we decided to put the decision off until tomorrow, so instead we had a light dinner and later went out for a couple of s.