Sunrise, sitting on a wooden bench in the waiting room of Jomson's short flat dirt airport.  Jomson is like some Wild West town, with the addition of yaks and small aircraft to the usual milieu of horses and donkey supply trains.

The first of two morning flights with the Italian-sounding Lumbini Airways is over an hour late, and the icy snow up on Nilgiri Mountain is softening under the rising sun.  The goal is to take off before the daily blustery winds muster up enough strength to preclude flight.  Half a dozen bored-looking Nepalese military personnel and about 15 would-be passengers await the arrival of our winged horse from the south, a modern miracle plying an ancient Tibetan trade route through the deepest valley in the world.

At last we hear the distant motor of a small plane, then see it approaching low in the southern sky.  The winged horse arrives, its passengers disembark and gather their luggage, and we board with our luggage -- within 10 minutes of landing, the pilot and co-pilot have taxied the plane down the runway and are revving its engines for takeoff.

In a brief half hour, like a dream, the plane retraces my steps down the Kali Gandaki River Valley. 

The mountains seem closer, the snow-covered peaks now at eye level and just above.  A waterfall in a side valley, hidden from the main trail, reveals itself, its spray a rainbow of color in the morning light.  Terraced farmland clings to isolated mountainsides, transforming vertical slopes to horizontal, arable land.

The soil is red and fertile.  Above Tatopani we turn and fly over Ghorepani.  Poon Hill, with its panoramic view of Dhaulagiri and the Annapurnas, is clearly visible.  Darting in and out of cotton ball clouds, we descend over red rhododendron forests and soar over a blue-green lake.  A fisherman hopefully casts his net, and even the net's circular splash is visible from the sky.

Pokhara comes into view in miniature.  We bank and land.

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