Earth Observing-1: Ten Years of Innovation

Scheduled to fly for a year, designed to last a year and a half, EO-1 celebrated its tenth anniversary on November 21, 2010. During its decade in space, the satellite has accomplished far more than anyone dreamed.

"Earth-Observing-1 has had three missions," says mission manager Dan Mandl of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Its original mission was to test new technologies, a mission completed in the first year. Its second mission was to provide images and data. Its third mission was to test new cost-saving software that operates the satellite semi-autonomously and allows users to target the sensors.

All of the missions come down to one thing: "We're the satellite people can try things on." Mandl calls EO-1 NASA's on-orbit test bed, and the name rings true.

Testing New Technology: Faster, Better, Cheaper

EO-1 was commissioned as part of NASA's New Millennium Program, set up to develop and fly technology that would reduce the risk and cost of future science missions. In short, NASA told its engineers: find a way to fly faster, better, and cheaper.

"EO-1's primary purpose was to demonstrate that the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) was a suitable follow-on instrument for Landsat," says Bryant Cramer, the program manager at Goddard during EO-1's development and launch. Like Landsat-7, ALI records seven wavelengths of light reflected from Earth's surface. ALI also records an additional two wavelengths to improve measurements of forests and crops, coastal waters, and aerosols.

Later, an innovative new instrument, the Hyperion imaging spectrometer, was added to the mission. Hyperion records more than 200 adjacent wavelengths of light to even better understand the makeup of Earth's surface.

"EO-1 succeeded beyond anyone's expectations," says former project scientist Steve Ungar of NASA Goddard. He credits the mission's success to EO-1's "crackerjack team" of engineers and scientists, who were drawn to the mission because they recognized that they could have a stake in the future of satellite technology.

Hyperion

"Hyperion is probably the future of remote sensing," says Cramer. Hyperion is a hyperspectral instrument, a change in technology that is like going from black-and-white to color television, Mandl adds.

Other remote sensing instruments—multispectrometers—measure discreet wavelengths of light. It is as if your eyes could only see red and blue light; you could tell much about the world based on how much red and how much blue you saw, but your vision would have gaps in the green tones. A hyperspectral instrument corrects this color blindness by measuring many more wavelengths of light.

The science behind the hyperspectral instrument is spectroscopy, says current EO-1 project scientist, Elizabeth Middleton of NASA Goddard. "Spectroscopy is the study of constituents of materials using specific wavelengths," she notes. "Hyperion measures the chemical constituents of Earth's surface."

Space-based imaging spectroscopy enables a wide range of science, including tracking the amount of carbon plants take out of the atmosphere everywhere from the Amazon Rainforest to the Alaskan tundra. It also has been used to find evidence of microbial life in the Arctic and to monitor volcanic activity.

Perhaps the most important thing Hyperion has done, says Middleton, is teach the community how to work with complex hyperspectral data. Germany will soon launch the next hyperspectral instrument, EnMap, followed by NASA's HyspIRI satellite, which is still in the planning stage. Both missions build on lessons learned from Hyperion.

Advanced Land Imager

The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) was built, says Cramer, to test new technology and to provide a safe technology shift for future Landsat missions. The Landsat series of satellites has provided a continuous record of changes in Earth's landscape from 1972 to the present.

ALI differs from previous Landsat sensors because of how it takes images. Previous Landsat instruments scanned from side to side, like a whiskbroom. The image is built from horizontal strips of information. ALI, on the other hand, is more like a push broom. It has detectors arranged parallel to one another and facing forward, and they collect information in vertical strips. This arrangement eliminates the need for the sensor optics to move from side to side, and fewer moving parts means less chance of failure, says EO-1 engineer Stuart Frye of NASA Goddard.

After ten years of operation, ALI has proven that the push-broom technology is stable and reliable enough that the next Landsat satellite uses the same design. "The Landsat community is treating push-broom sensors like we've been building them for years," says Cramer. "That's a tribute to EO-1."

NASA's On-orbit test bed

As the EO-1 mission has aged, perhaps the most critical innovation has come from the onboard computer. "EO-1 has two separate computer processors with 256 megabytes of extra memory each," says Mandl. "It meant we had excess capacity to try new things."

The first new software loaded onto EO-1 was the Autonomous Science Experiment, an onboard intelligent scheduling tool that allows the satellite to decide for itself which images Hyperion and ALI should take. The on-board scheduler prioritizes requests based on what they are for (ranked by theme) and the weather.

"It's a customer-driven method of running a mission," says Mandl. Anyone from an archeologist to a disaster response agency can request images. "Flying a mission with a customizable user experience is one of EO-1's greatest achievement."

Sometimes the "customers" targeting EO-1 are other satellites. As part of SensorWeb, EO-1 automatically acquires images that are triggered by other satellites. For example, EO-1 monitors 100 volcanoes. When another satellite detects a hot spot at any of them, EO-1 automatically acquires an image on its next overpass. Hyperion records the temperature and position of lava flows, while ALI tracks ash plumes.

SensorWeb and the scheduling tool have saved money. "Initially, we were spending about $7,500 per image to acquire them. Now the cost is less than $600 a scene," says Cramer.

"EO-1 is one of the cheapest of NASA's Earth missions," confirms Middleton. These cost savings mean that anyone can now target EO-1 and access all data free of charge, making it useful to a growing range of people.

"EO-1 has done so many different things, NASA got three or four missions for the price of one," says Cramer. "We achieved all of the things that we hoped for and then some."

Online Atlas Shows Climate Change Impact on Forest Distribution Patterns in Iberian Peninsula

ScienceDaily — Researchers from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and CREAF have developed the Suitability Atlas of Woody Plants of the Iberian Peninsula, a series of digital maps available online which for the first time reveal the present and future degree of adaptation to climate conditions of the main plant species found in the forests throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Data shows the tendency of forests to move higher in altitude and migrate towards the north.
Today, territory and species conservation managers need to rely on data and empirical methods on which to base their protection policies. Within the context of Global Change, the maps offered can be useful to evaluate possible changes in the distribution of forests in the future, which could lead to an in depth study of mitigation and/or adaptation tools needed to face these changes.

Until now, a few maps had been drawn for specific woody plants or for partial areas of the peninsula. The Suitability Atlas of Woody Plants however offers a global view of the Iberian Peninsula. The series of maps were created to determine the degree of suitability to climate and/or topographic conditions of the forests' main woody plants. With the help of these maps one can verify, in an area of 200 metres, the topo-climatic suitability of the Iberian Peninsula. In addition, these values can be consulted for the current climatic scenario (1950-1998) and for future projections proposed by one of the foremost research centres dedicated to climate change, the Hadley Centre, located in Exeter, UK.

The Atlas combines advanced methodologies and technologies such as Geographic Information Systems, multivariate statistics and interoperable geoportals to offer both rigorous cartographic standards and information that can be consulted by the general public.

The Atlas was developed by a group of researchers from the UAB Department of Animal Biology, Plant Biology and Ecology, in collaboration with the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF), under the framework of the R&D&I National Plan.

Main features of the Atlas

* Completeness: covering almost all woody species found in forests
* Quality initial data: both the Digital Climate Atlas of the Iberian Peninsula (ACDPI) and the third National Forest Inventory are cartography databases with high spatial resolution and with proven data quality.
* Detailed resolution: 200 m spatial resolution
* Objectivity: numerical quality (known level of error) calculated and documented for each map.
* Interoperability: format in which maps can be viewed allows users to contrast information with other map databases
* Accessibility: maps can be consulted online in GIS format without the need of additional installations.

First results

Researchers have already obtained the first scientific results with the help of Atlas data. They were able to verify that many species could be affected by the reduction in suitability in the regions they currently inhabit. They detected a tendency in forests to migrate towards higher altitudes and more northern latitudes. In this sense, mountain ranges such as the Pyrenees are seen as important protection areas of biodiversity within the context of Climate Change.

Nevertheless, not all species react the same when suffering the consequences of climate change. Species such as aleppo pine, stone pine, or holm oak are more resistant and may even occupy larger areas in the future. In contrast, species such as scots pine or beech are more affected by rising temperatures and longer dry periods and therefore the space they occupy may begin to decrease.

At these moments researchers are studying the total forest surface which could be lost or substituted by scrubs, as well as interactions between forest species when their area of distribution is modified. The fact that forest surfaces are decreasing is of great relevance, since this represents a reduction in CO2 consumption, an increase in the risk of land erosion and modifications in water cycles.

Developing Countries Can Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Help the Poor

ScienceDaily — In the developing world, reducing greenhouse gas emissions is often seen as being in conflict with alleviating poverty, since improving the standard of living is usually associated with increased energy use.
A clean energy development initiative in rural Nicaragua, however, demonstrates that there are cost effective steps developing nations can take to reduce carbon emissions and at the same time help the rural poor reduce their energy expenses, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley.

In a report in this week's issue of the journal Science, UC Berkeley graduate student Christian E. Casillas and professor Daniel M. Kammen analyze simple steps taken by Nicaragua's Ministry of Energy & Mines and the nonprofit blueEnergy to reduce the cost of energy while reducing carbon emissions for a community of 172 households on the country's Mosquito Coast.

The villages of Orinoco and Marshall Point are off the nation's electric grid and obtain their power from diesel generators, according to Casillas. Until last year, however, the homes had no electricity meters; homeowners were billed according to the appliances they owned. This, Casillas said, encouraged indiscriminate energy use, with lights, televisions and radios remaining on, even when not being used.

After the government installed meters, however, energy use dropped by 28 percent, and many people's electric bills also dropped.

The non-governmental organization blueEnergy, whose administrative office is in San Francisco, subsequently worked with the government to institute in Orinoco and Marshall Point a simple energy conservation campaign: Villagers were offered two efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL) in exchange for two incandescent bulbs. This program reduced household energy use by an additional 17 percent, on average.

The net result was less diesel burned, even allowing for the fact that the community's reduced energy needs allowed the local energy supplier to run its generators two extra hours each day, providing longer service to customers. In the month after the conservation campaign, electricity bills dropped in 37 percent of the households in Orinoco.

"What we are saying is, if you're thinking about some of the lowest hanging fruit to lower greenhouse gas emissions, rural communities should be one of the first places you look for making small but very cheap carbon reductions," said Casillas, who is an advisor to blueEnergy.

Microgrids like the one in Nicaragua, often powered by diesel generators, are found by the thousands around the world, particularly in India and China, Casillas added.

"They're dirty, have high emissions, high energy costs and questionable reliability, so targeting these microgrids has the potential for improving access to energy services for those communities while at the same time, for the dollars invested, getting greater reductions in carbon emissions than you might get investing in similar measures where the cost of energy is cheaper, such as in the cities," he said.

"We hope that this paper will spur a wave of efforts to build similar community level carbon abatement and energy service tools, so that communities often ignored or lumped together as 'those billions without modern energy' can create their own locally appropriate development goals, and groups working with them can develop energy solutions, not just efforts to disperse hardware," said Kammen, a Distinguished Professor of Energy at UC Berkeley who is currently serving as the chief technical specialist for renewable energy and energy efficiency for the World Bank. Kammen also is director of UC Berkeley's Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory and a professor in both the Energy and Resources Group and the Goldman School of Public Policy.

The researchers used an economic tool called a marginal abatement cost (MAC) curve to analyze energy use in the community and to pinpoint the areas where investments would save the most energy and the most money. The tool, popularized by the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, has typically been used on a global or country-wide scale to target areas for carbon abatement, but not for assessing small communities, Casillas said.

The cheapest investments for the impact turned out to be the ones taken by the government and blueEnergy, though the model predicts further energy and carbon savings from other simple measures, such as more effective public lighting and use of biogas and wind turbines.

"The advantage of this cost curve for local governments that may have as their mandate better energy services is that it can tell them what the cheapest investments are and how much emissions reductions they'll be able to get for their investments," Casillas said. "This allows them to see, with the limited funds available, how to get the most bang for the buck."

"This paper presents a theoretical and analytic framework that opens a vital new door to value the time, energy and opportunities for the rural poor and those on the outskirts of urban areas. It also recognizes the carbon and financial benefits of integrated strategies that combine energy efficiency with renewable energy to meet energy access, climate protection and economic development goals," Kammen said.

This work was supported by the Energy Foundation, the Karsten Family Foundation, and UC Berkeley's Class of 1935.

Nepali butler inherits New York fortune

By Salim Rizvi in New York

Until a few months ago, he was a butler in one of the more expensive residential buildings in Manhattan. But now, Nepal-born Indra Tamang is the owner of two multi-million dollar apartments in the same building.
The former owner - his former employer, Ruth Ford - died last year and left the apartments in the historic Dakota Building on the Upper West Side to Mr Tamang in her will, along with a valuable Russian surrealist art collection.

The estate is estimated to be worth nearly $10m (£6.8m).

Mr Tamang is happy but quickly points out that his good fortune did not come easily.

"I am happy and have been humbled by the generosity of the Ford family," he says. "I never expected that I will be given the ownership of these apartments.

"But I have been working for the family for the last 36 years, loyally, with honesty and dedication. So my hard work has been rewarded."

Relaxed masters

Mr Tamang was 21 when he was brought from Nepal as a domestic help by Charles Ford, a writer and a photographer.

Mr Ford died in 2002; his sister, actress Ruth Ford, then took charge and told Mr Tamang that he was like a brother to her after Charles's death.

"Charles was like my father," recalls Mr Tamang. "And Ruth has also been very kind to me and I took very good care of her. She used to lovingly call me 'Tamang darling'."

"They were very relaxed masters who treated me like a member of the family. I travelled with them all over the world."
Mrs Ford died aged 98. During the last five years of her life, she lost her eyesight and also developed speech problems. Mr Tamang looked after her most of the time and took care of her medicines and food.

He also worked with Charles Ford on various photography projects, which he now wants to keep as the photographer's legacy. He hopes to organise exhibitions of Mr Ford's photographs and compile a book of his works.

With the story of Mr Tamang's inheritance doing the rounds, the Dakota Building has seen an increase in visitor numbers. It also has links with the Beatles star John Lennon, who died there.

A doorman at the gate to the mansion block said he had been busy since morning, answering questions from visitors.

Mr Tamang plans to sell the bigger, three-bedroom apartment to pay the taxes he owes to the government on his inheritance.

He has not yet asked the co-operative board of the Dakota building for permission to live in his apartments.

But, he says: "The rules of the co-op might be a problem, as they require a minimum monthly income to qualify to live as owner of apartments."

For now, he plans to live in his modest home in Queens. "I have my small house here but I am happy with it," Mr Tamang says.

'Hard worker'

He first got news of the windfall last August, when the family's lawyers told him about the apartments left in his name.
However, the biological daughter of Ruth Ford challenged the will in court and the case was not settled until April this year.

The story made it into the press only this week. Since then, Mr Tamang has been interviewed by several TV channels from the US and abroad.

The former butler, now 57, insists that he has not changed at all following the unexpected turn in his life.

"I am the same Tamang as I have been before all this happened and I will remain like this in future too."

Friends have been coming from all over the city to congratulate him.

Friend and neighbour Narbada says: "Indra Tamang is a very honest and good person, always ready to help others. I am so happy for him, he deserves every bit of it. He worked very hard for many decades."

'Safety fears'

But one Nepali community activist, who did not want to give her name, said that many members of the community had not treated Mr Tamang well before the news of the multi-million dollar legacy started making the rounds.
Mr Tamang's wife, Radhika, is also not entirely happy with the turn of events.

She says that they have not received any money as yet - but they are still being projected as millionaires. She fears for the safety of the family. The couple have a 10-year-old daughter, Zina, who is also trying to figure out what has suddenly changed in their lives.

Mr Tamang says that he will get much less than the estimated $10m value of the legacy after taxes and fees.

But looking forward to receiving a sizeable sum, he says: "When I get some money from the sale of the apartment, I will try and pay the mortgage of my home in Queens. But I will keep my other apartment and use it for exhibitions etc."

Memoir plans

Mr Tamang was born in a small village called Fahil, in the Makanpur district of Nepal.
He says that his mother, two children from his first marriage and his brothers and sisters who still live in his village have no idea about his multi-million dollar inheritance thousands of miles away in New York.

He now plans to visit his family, whom he has not seen for many years.

He also encourages other Nepalis living in America to work hard and be honest in their work.

One day, he plans to write an autobiography, with some help from others. But for now, Mr Tamang plans to take it easy and relax for a while.

He has learnt his lesson from the life of his employers and plans to use his money with great caution.

"I think one should save money for old age. That's when you need it the most to get care," he says.

Wikileaks release of embassy cables reveals US concerns

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has released 250,000 secret messages sent by US embassies which give an insight into current American global concerns.

They include reports of some Arab leaders - including the Saudi king - urging the US to attack Iran and end its nuclear weapons programme.

Other concerns include the security of Pakistani nuclear material that could be used to make an atomic weapon.

The widespread use of hacking by the Chinese government is also reported.

The leaked US embassy cables also reportedly include accounts of:

* Corruption within the Afghan government, with concerns heightened when a senior official was found to be carrying more than $50m in cash on a foreign trip
* Bargaining to empty the Guantanamo Bay prison camp - including Slovenian diplomats being told to take in a freed prisoner if they wanted to secure a meeting with President Barack Obama
* The extraordinarily close relationship between Russian PM Vladimir Putin and his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi
* Alleged links between the Russian government and organised crime
* American and South Korean officials' discussions about the prospects for a unified Korea should North Korea collapse as a viable state
* Sharply critical accounts of UK military operations in Afghanistan
The US government has condemned the release of state department documents.

"President Obama supports responsible, accountable, and open government at home and around the world, but this reckless and dangerous action runs counter to that goal," a White House statement said.

"We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorised disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information."

The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, says the US authorities are afraid of being held to account.

Earlier, Wikileaks said it had come under attack from a computer-hacking operation.

"We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack," it reported on its Twitter feed.

No-one has been charged with passing the diplomatic files to the website but suspicion has fallen on US Army private Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst arrested in Iraq in June and charged over an earlier leak of classified US documents to Mr Assange's organisation.

Wikileaks argues that the site's previous releases shed light on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Engineers Assessing Cassini Spacecraft

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are working to understand what caused NASA's Cassini spacecraft to put itself into "safe mode," a precautionary standby mode. Cassini entered safe mode around 4 p.m. PDT (7 p.m. EDT) on Tuesday, Nov. 2.

Since going into safe mode, the spacecraft has performed as expected, suspending the flow of science data and sending back only data about engineering and spacecraft health. Cassini is programmed to put itself into safe mode automatically any time it detects a condition on the spacecraft that requires action from mission controllers on the ground.

Engineers say it is not likely that Cassini will be able to resume full operations before a planned Nov. 11 flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. But Cassini has 53 more Titan flybys planned in its extended mission, which lasts until 2017.

"The spacecraft responded exactly as it should have, and I fully expect that we will get Cassini back up and running with no problems," said Bob Mitchell, Cassini program manager based at JPL. "Over the more than six years we have been at Saturn, this is only the second safing event. So considering the complexity of demands we have made on Cassini, the spacecraft has performed exceptionally well for us."

Since Cassini launched in 1997, Cassini has put itself into safe mode a total of six times.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington

Thirty-three whales die after becoming beached off Irish coast

Environmentalists are trying to establish what made them cast themselves onto the shore amid fears it could have been caused by Royal Navy sonar equipment.

The whales were found off Rutland Island near Burtonport in County Donegal on Saturday.
It's thought they were the same group spotted in the Inner Hebrides at the end of October.

Dr Simon Berrow of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group said it was one of the biggest mass deaths of whales in Irish history.

He said: "Thirty or 40 pilot whales were spotted off the Inner Hebrides at South Uist last week.

"It looked like they were going to strand. It was bad weather. They were not seen again."

Dr Berrow told the BBC that the Royal Navy had been in the area off South Uist and had moved away.

Campaigners were concerned that the latest sonar equipment could affect the navigational skills of this species deep-diving whales.

But a spokeswoman from the Royal Navy said that when the whales were spotted near South Uist, the closest navy ship was 50 miles away.

At that distance, she said, there was no way that the sonar equipment could have affected them.

In the past, the navy has denied that sonar noise from their warships could cause whales to beach.

However, in America, the US Navy was ordered not to use mid-frequency sonar during training exercises from 2007 and 2009, after a judge found in favour of campaigners who argued the devices harmed marine mammals in the area.

A team from Galway/Mayo Institute of Technology has travelled to the scene off Donegal to investigate.

Sixty whales died in the 1960s off the west coast of Kerry and 35 to 40 animals died in north Kerry in 2001.

A team from Galway/Mayo Institute of Technology travelled to the scene off Donegal at the weekend to see if they could determine what had happened.

Sixty whales died in the 1960s off the west coast of Kerry and 35 to 40 animals died in north Kerry in 2001

Visit to Jordhara.

wazzupp mates?
Eh! Doing good? Yeh keep on.
So here i am to share about a last visit of us to Jordhara. Here we go:
Our actual plan was to photo shoot but unfortunately we had dresses problems so we just remixed our plan. Thinking why not to enjoy if we are together?
I don't use mirrors in bike. But today i put them on my bike coz it is againts trafic rules. I went to golpark where some of my frens were. Unfortunately we missed one more bike. We were trying our best not to cancel the second plan bcoz the first was already canceled.
Deu to some issues goks was trying to pull today's second plan to day after tomorrow. He even changed plan but sudan and me were not ready to cancel. Everytime we go on bike so lets have experience on bus to jordhara. We agreed back.
We went on bus. So pack and hot. I hated to be there. After-a-while we went to hoot ( upside). We had some fun there. Really i was enjoying there with ******. hehe :P . Guys were busy talking. Sudan was busy taking photograph with digital camera without memory card lol. TIP TO SUDAN ( NEXT TIME NEVER FORGET YOUR MEMORY CARD. CAMERA ONLY DOESNT WORK HEHE) We came to police check post. Were told to come down to that F****** hot place again. No matter. Compromised came down. Hot while and travel. Back again, went upside felt some relief. I love singing so i was shouting with songs. But may be natures didnt wanted to listen. When i was in mood lol next unknown, hidden check post came. Again need to come now. Govermental thieves charged driver for keeping passenger to hoot. It is really a nice idea to earn lol.( i was thinking to make same uniform and do some unknown checking and earn some. lol funny but not a bad idea hehehe. ) This time we didnt climbed up better we started enjoying with drunkard person haha. Kidding with him. He was so funny lol. Some peoples again wnt upside unknowingly and in the middle way again bus was caught by police. This time his liscence was taken and charged again. :P . Now we were boored. But fortunately we created some fun with that drunkard person. Lol Guys that man plays well piano hahaah i am thinking to take him as pianoist if i ever create some music albums . :p, finally destination came. Cool i was hanged but fresh up with coll water. Now fine. Went to sucide point. (That is better sucide point guys. Let me know if you wana ever go there i can give you company upto there but not after that haha ). Navraj idea was good to propose a girl in that sucide point and she will surely accept lol.
Down to hotel. i was hungry. watching bhailo and taking pakoras and some drinks. I enjoyed that moment. Moreover i enjoyed the dance of bhailo group. And a lahure was throwing lots of money to dancing girls lol. He will turn to street person if he continued this for more days hahaha. Cedric offered to be sponser for today. Fine, we came out fresh environment.
Waited for a bus. Bus arrived. Went into it. sit, Fine. We were enjoying. Some problems with namraj stomach. Later okey. Came back to city and all departed from goks home.
Ok guys write some comments if i had missed anything :P ...!!

FPAN & Lovingnepal.com team members trekking to Basantpur.

Namastay,
Me pradeep. A time to work, time for fun, time to enjoy, etc etc etc..
Well, this was time for fun and enjoyment. I love to enjoy hehe. Anyway lets go to the topic (man < Cedric style> ) hehe. :P
Well, A late for start, Fresh morning and spicy puri (spicy foods create pblm for my stomach. Somehow this happened this day too but i didnt shared with anyone hahaha).
We started from golpark. I was totally unknown about Basantpur. i didnt expected that was that far and road straight up.
Nice chit chats, new frens intro (not formal), kidding, everyone enjoyed. Everyone had issue of own. Someone had issue of his girlfriend lol , someone had issue of legs and slippers, someone had pblm of kukhura hahaha..funny.. :P. someone was busy with cigars. someone had issue with leadership and someone really was in tenson of home tutions lol. Some of them were really advertising of work., their offices. Isn't it S***** ? hahaha.. Someone had issue in restra that he/she wasn't asked for food item. lol. Tomato catchup had issue of ants hahaha.. Someone was really proud of karate.
Slippy way, though hardly we reached to basantpur. A first station was preety beautiful and rest after a long walk , nice moment. Hungry, we took breakfast. Goks started fighting with abiskar. Namraj and rekha were busy watching scenery, Shanti was busy talking, Cedric was busy taking cigar and sun bath. I was enjoying the fun. Geeta and Shusil were watching.
Geeta really had problems of her sliper and she fell down for two times and hurted her leg. Sushil was kidding with geeta about hurting her second leg and same thing happened hahaha lol. Goks was thinking to cut a hen ( nice idea to make good memory). Goks, namraj, abiskar, were busy searching hen. But unfortunately we couldn't get. Shusil was really boored after going up from the first station. We couldnot get hen and a way back to jhumsa.
Way was not preety easy but i always loved adventure. Coming down team was divided into two groups eventually. Me, abiskar and shusil and next group of rest members. Shusil was in hurry so first (we) group came down pretty fast and waited for next. They came and i saw goks helped his shoes to geeta hahaaha.. Nice job dude.
Down to highway, i saw checking and really worried for protection weapons we are carrying. We could be in problems if they were caught. But fine, nothing happened like that. We were hungry and went to a resort. Odered burgers, momo and chaumins. Rekha was preety sad lol coz she was not asked what she want to take haha. I took a burger ( Really it was not good my stomach was paining later). Shanti found ant in choumin haha but ant were in cathcup. Now coming to highway from resort again. I ran first Dont take it negative why i was running. i guess someone took wrong but actually i ran for kanchi aula hehehe...Stopped a truck enjoyed there. Cedric was really enjoying there. Isn't it? :) . noise, songs.... Really i love enjoying it. I really love travelling. I wished if it was quite long but it didnt. Destination camed and we departed.Tired. Came back home , dinner and was using net in mobile (wifi) laying to bed. Unknowingly i slept with my IMS, Pc, mob on. Later 3.34 AM i woked and saw messages, Really many of mah frens were angry coz i didnt replied hahaha. How can i reply i was in deep sleep lol...
Anyway i enjoyed trekking. New friends, more close to old friends . Good time. Hope to go somewhere else same way. But really not trekking hehehe... ;)
Here are some pics :



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