Renting a house

At the moment I (Jo) am looking after all the housing for the expats in Pokhara. This includes ensuring there is enough accomodation for new people coming to stay in Pokhara or passing through for language training.
In September and October we have a number of new members coming and so it has been necessary to rent a new house - easy, go to the classifieds, ring the appropriate ones up and have a look - WRONG!!!

There are no classifieds and often no phone numbers. No, just walk around the streets asking shopkeepers, friends and our landlords if they know of any empty houses and then walk on in.
Mark and I went on the back of our landlords motorbike (you don't wear a helmet which is great in hot weather but somewhat fatalistic) to the first house. It was a new house, the upstairs ws available and a Nepali family was living downstairs. The access was along a path the width of me, one shoulder touching the wall of the house, the other touching the barbed wire fence and was so slippery it was scary. The house was lovely and the bathrooms had been done really well but there was no kitchen and no plumbing to put one in. The Nepalis all thought we should just put a table and a gas hob in. When asked where we would wash out dishes it was suggested we could go downstairs to their kitchen or to the local tap down the road and around the corner.


Another house was 3 storeys and was lovely. The downstairs was available but it turns out that the house had only one kitchen, downstairs. The access to the rest of the house was also through the middle of the downstairs unit. Therefore, the upstairs tenants would be coming through the downstairs unit and using the kitchen all the time!
Another house was finished and people were living in it but they were going to move upstairs to the house that would be finished in '2 weeks' and wanted to rent the lower level out. It had the reinforcing iron sticking out of the floor for the walls but that was it. It stills two weeks from being finished 3 months later!
We have managed to find a good house, now we are having problems finding the landlord to sign the contract!