Yes, you read that right. Nepal. After five days travelling across India more or less non-stop, we arrived in Kathmandu, the nation's capital, this afternoon. Getting here has been the longest, and possibly the hardest, journey I've ever made, but I'm daring to hope it may have been worth it.

We'd already spent the best part of two days getting back to Delhi from Jaisalmer when our difficulties really began. Our train, which was timetabled to pull out of Delhi Junction at 5.20pm, didn't leave until midnight, and lost a further three and a half hours on the way. It was after 9pm the following day when we reached Gorakhpur. My stomach infection, or possibly a new and entirely different bug, chose that particular day to rear its ugly head again.

The news didn't get much better when we got to Gorakhpur. Nepal is currently in the grip of a minor civil war between the king and the army, whose powerbase is in Kathmandu, the country's only city of any size, and Maoist insurgents who draw on rural peasants for support. King Gyanendra's coup d'etat this month upped the stakes in their power struggle, and the Maoists responded by calling a strike, which means that all businesses, including public buses, would have to go on strike to show their support for the Maoist cause. Or face the consequences if they didn't. The strike, scheduled for five days, is now in its seventh day. In other words, we could have been stuck at the border indefinitely, waiting for a bus to take us to Kathmandu.

We have less than four weeks left, and we want to trek and still have enough time left to see the Taj Mahal, so we decided to break one of our self-imposed rules ('always travel as cheaply and as closely to local people as possible'), and fly to Kathmandu. Suddenly, time became more valuable than money. Hence, after a hair-raising taxi ride to the border (sixteen people crammed into a Tata four-wheel-drive); a night in Sonauli, on the Nepali side of the frontier; and a less than speedy airport transfer by cycle-rickshaw, partially along dirt roads (6km in half an hour), we made it to Gautam Buddha airport in Bhairahawa. A short but spectacular flight brought us to Kathmandu, and gave us a mouthwatering first taste of the Himalaya: from the ridges of foothills beneath us to the snow-capped peaks on the horizon, the gigantic stone ripples left behind when India crashed into Asia millions of years ago.

I'm relieved to be here, and not only because we can relax and do little things get online or get some laundry done that we haven't able to do for too long. I'm relieved to have left India. India is by turns fascinating, intimidating, exasperating, and, in my case, sickening, and I'm still not sure the rewards it gave me outweigh the sacrifices, in terms of comfort, health and general sanity, I made for it.

I almost certainly won't miss India. But I hope I may yet miss Nepal.