Nepal: Kathmandu Valley 1-12 Aug

I went back to Kathmandu after some really enjoyable alone time in idyllic Pokhara, taking the six hour Blue Sky bus back to Kathmandu. We stopped at the same places at the same times, 9.30am and 12.30, getting off in the sweltering muggy morning to eat spicy chana at the road side restaurants. The bus drops you off at a different place to where it leaves in from once in KTM, but it’s still only around a ten minute walk to Thamel so don’t believe the taxi drivers that it’s a Rs200 ride, just ask and walk around the corner.

Imma and Alex who we met on the trek were still in KTM, and also Kritika who was leaving to go back to the States in a couple of days, so we arranged to meet up and swap pictures from the trek. Thamel was packed with Chinese tourists now; apparently this was their season even though it was mid monsoon. The signs outside of guesthouses and restaurants were now in Chinese not English, and the hotel I went to before was full and had put up their prices. I wandered around for a while but got tired of searching for a half decent place for under Rs500 and ended up at Potala Guesthouse who had a single room for Rs600. It was a clean, helpful place although the room was tiny and didn’t have a window to outside, the only window opened out into the corridor so that every tiny noise was amplified and echoed and blasted into my room. I could hear each footstep like booming thunder, let alone all the squealing and shouting from school groups staying there, so a one night stand it was for me and Potala Guesthouse.

That night Imma and I took a cycle rickshaw through the Old Town to the QFX Cinema at the Civil Mall to watch the new Batman movie. It was her 24^th birthday. It’s easy enough to walk through Old Town although it’s tightly packed and quite manic, but we were in a hurry so the cycle rickshaw rolled and tumbled clumsily through the crowded lanes to get us there. I ended up doing a lot of walking and a lot of getting lost in the Old Town, which gets tiring very quickly. Batman was cool although it had a lot of cheesy one liners, too many maybe, and wasn’t as dark as the others but still fun with our huge buckets of popcorn. The movie cost Rs250 and the popcorn Rs150, so cheap for us. There were quite a few Westerners in the cinema.

Alex, Imma and I arranged to go to Bhaktapur the next day, a historic Newari town only around an hour and half bus ride into the Kathmandu Valley, for the Gaijatra festival (cow festival) taking place on the 2^nd Aug. We weaved our way through the Kathmandu old town of alleyways, tiny shops selling electronics, bags of dried beans and fruit, incense, wagons of fruit and vegetables and the ever present throng of hundreds of motorbikes beeping and intertwining themselves amongst the people and wares, stopping for no one. The place to get local buses is Ghantaghar (The Clock Tower). We asked around and found our bus (most people speak enough English to help us in KTM) and hopped on.

The bus did its thing, stopping and starting and bumping through the streets to get us there. We were a little bit unusual on a local bus, most tourists take private cars or use tours because it’s so cheap in Nepal. But when we got there the boy taking the money charged us Rs100 instead of the Rs35 it was meant to be which was very cheeky of him. I refused and was going to get irate but milder Alex paid up and we just got off, not worth the trouble he said. Maybe ask before you get on the bus how much it is and then insist on paying the same amount as everyone else, it’s naughty to try charge tourists more on things like public buses.

Bhaktapur a world heritage site, a well preserved ancient place and so a welcome break from the big city dirtiness of KTM. We got to the gates of the town and were asked to pay the hefty sum of $15 each as an entry fee, which lasts for a week. If you’re part of the South Asian countries (India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan etc) you can pay much less. Alex has an Indian residency card as he’s half Indian but they still wouldn’t let him use it because he wasn’t born there, although they should have. The gates lead you into the very pretty, ancient streets of old Bhaktapur, where the buildings are preserved, the streets are made of red brick and the shops are tiny little boxes where people sit on the floor amongst their fruit, shoemakers sit with their legs crossed cobbling away and women sit with sewing machines fixing or making clothes. It was completely charming and picturesque, a real look into past and present Nepal. There were a few Western tourists but not many, I was surprised as this town must be the Venice of Nepal and I expected it to be teeming. Actually, there were many Nepali tourists there for the festival, which made the flavour of the place so much more authentic. This isn’t an overly renovated, tourist trap relic of Nepal, but a living, breathing, vibrant town strong with the history of the Newari culture of the country.

Alex and Imma

There are a few guesthouses in the centre whose prices seemed to differ wildly. The first one we went to was quoted $25 (Rs2250) a night brought down to $18 when questioned. The second one I saw was around the same, these were the ones looking onto the main square. But I walked around a bit and found one for Rs800 for a double room which Alex and Imma had, and another one for Rs600 which I had. Mine was called Himalaya Guesthouse, and it was really comfortable and friendly, although if you can take a room at the back then do. The whole old town is built on top of one another, so that the back of one house is around two metres from the next, you’re practically living with the people around you if you have your windows open. Backing on to the street is much noisier and crazier though, not just living noises but the hooting and hollering and beeping of the festival, and Bhaktapur is an early riser.

We wandered around the town and ate some food in the quaint restaurant in the main square, watching over the town as it got excited for their festival the next day and enjoyed their Friday afternoon. Children and adults were munching down ice creams from a cart, it was very hot. There are tourists shops around the main square selling Thanka art, Buddhist and Tibetan artefacts, T-Shirts and wood carvings, but taking a little exploration revealed there were also lots of old temples where the townspeople sat and socialised as the day grew cooler in the evening, and alleyways where you might find a chicken, some children playing and those tiny old shops and business that make up the town. Everything closes really early in Bhaktapur, we try to find a local daba to eat in after 8pm and they had all shut down, so we ate at the restaurant at Himalaya Guesthouse which was tasty. The eccentric manager kept coming over and cracking ‘uncle’ jokes and laughing hysterically, until we laughed with equal vigour. Then he would abruptly stop and glide away to see to something.

Friday afternoon ice cream

Thanka art

The next morning was the Gaijatra festival and the tiny cobbled main street outside my guesthouse was packed with noise, bodies and colour. This was the ‘cow festival’ and apparently they used to dress up real cows and march them through the streets, but thanks goodness it has evolved into each family making a shrine for a family member who has passed away in the last year. The shrines are colourful structures, consisting of a main tall plinth wrapped in colourful clothe, streamers and anything bright they could find, topped by horns and a hairy tail. On the plinth is a picture of the person being commemorated, and is carried by the men of the family while the extended family of men walk together looking tough behind. The women and children walk behind them holding incense with linked arms, even the oldest members who can barely hobble are paying their respects. There is some mild weeping and looking mournful, but it isn’t a mourning of the Western kind. It felt like more of a celebration of their life and a commemoration than sorrowful march for the deceased. In front of the shrine being carried are huge groups of children (some as young as two) and youths, whether they belong to the family I’m not sure, doing a dance with sticks to others playing drums, trumpets, flutes. They walk two steps and then bang the sticks together doing a dance to the beat of the music. It’s like a festival, a big occasion for the town and a main event in their calendar. There was lots of colour, dancing and music. From the hobbling elders to the tiny babies dressed up like Shiva with black make up all around their eyes and sparkly clothes, to teenagers flirting with each other and seeing who can do the most wacky dance, to youths flaunting their trends and sticking in their crews and layers of teenagedom like this group of rockers I found.

The rockers

They were all there, every facet of society; dancing, laughing, mourning, celebrating, commemorating. It was a wall of culture, energy and sound and colour, and was fantastic fun.The idea was to walk all around the town centre in the procession until you came back to the same point you started. The streets were packed and we squished and coiled our way around all the bodies and banging sticks and drums, and watching all the colourful spectators who sat on every temple step or every raised surface to view the festivities. We found a tiny corner shop that sold the curd and honey that the area is famous for, sold in little clay pots kept at room temperature to allow the curd to set. We sat down and guzzled the tasty dish down while watching a very funny small girl strut and talk to us in Nepali, as if she were having an adult conversation with us. She was very hilarious and cute, and played balloon games with Alex and told him ‘what for’ at every opportunity. The festival lasted all day, and when the afternoon rain came it only quenched a tiny portion of spirits.

yummy curd and honey

funny little girl 

Miraculously, at 7pm the town emptied and cleaned itself, and the day was over as if nothing had happened. Even in mid festival time the town was early to bed and early to rise. We met up with Alex and Imma’s guide from their trek who was from Bhaktapur and along with a couple of his friends, he took us to a home in the warren of alleyways whose front portion was a tiny restaurant, just some tables in their hall looking out from their kitchen. They gave us a few litres of chhaang beer, crispy fried buffalo, some chana beans and some hard roasted black beans. Even though he was 27 years old, he said his family still expected him home by 9pm.

The next day Alex and Imma were leaving, Imma had a flight to Calcutta where she was going to do some studies for the PHD she is doing at Cambridge University. Alex was heading a few days later to Delhi to also do some work on his PHD from Oxford University. We said our goodbyes and I was sad to see them go, I really had a great time hanging out with this intelligent, fun, gentle English pair and hope to see them sometime back home in London.

I stayed in Bhaktapur for another day and night and spent it taking longer walks around the historic town, not talking to anyone but just gazing unnoticed into corners and the daily, unhurried lives of the Kathmandu Valley town. I saw some beautiful wood carvings and temples, and peaked into a few old guesthouses to nose around the low ceilings and heavy wood of the oldest buildings. I loved all this time alone, just doing whatever was my whim without a care in the world, answerable to no one.

The next on Sunday (which is the start of the week in Nepal) I asked around for the bus to Boudhanath, one of the holiest Buddhist sites in Nepal and one of the world largest stupas. It was two local buses that cost virtually nothing to get there but it wasn’t far or complicated, someone just wrote down the names of the stops and I went to the busy main road and asked around. I squished onto two local buses with some bemusement from locals but everyone was really friendly and helpful, telling me where my stops were. The level of English was still good, much better than I thought it would be, but it’s not surprising since I found out that everyone learns it at school.

Boudhanath is nestled a few kilometres from the centre of Kathmandu and was once on the ancient trade route from Tibet. It’s now home to an influx of Tibetan refugees. It’s well worth the visit as it’s so easy to get to and is a colourful afternoon of culture, history and living religion in a modern day, that which makes visiting religious sites that much more pleasing. It’s surrounded by art and jewellery shops and cafes and restaurants. You can also stay in this area overlooking the Boudha for around Rs500 for a single room in a decent guesthouse if you wanted to, I’m sure the lanes and alleyways around it are worth exploring, and the active temples of Buddhists and monks interesting to witness. While walking around the stupa (always clockwise, like the prayer wheels) I met two Italian guys and we stopped to have lunch of tea and momos looking into the stupa from high up. They were staying in a place in Bhaktapur owned by Italians where even the Nepali staff spoke Italian, and had a few days itinerary planned for them where they got driven around to sites and then home to their Italian friends, staff and food. What a wasted opportunity of getting a real sense of the country I thought, Nepal is the easiest safest place to immerse yourself in.

Getting a local taxi-bus back to Thamel was interesting; they are the tiniest minivans I’ve ever seen, almost like a toy one for children. We were on our way in the packed space, noses and thighs of locals and me rubbing together, when the full force of monsoon rain came down. The roads instantly turned to torrents and sheets of water came at us from all directions... up, down, sideways. The dilapidated old van was held together with bits of wire, metal rods and tape and the water came up past the wheels and lapped inside. The driver’s window didn’t close so he had to hold an umbrella out the window, and the wind screen wiper’s effect was like a black comedy. But still he screeched and swung the van around the streets like it was a clear day and I eventually fell out the van into a deep ditch of brown water up to my knees. KTM was suffering from floods; there was not enough draining, too many people and too much rubbish. I tried to pick my way through the old town where the water was an unspeakable colour and texture, coming right up the stairs and into the doorways of shops. Cars, rickshaws and motorbikes gingerly tried to drive through the tiny waterlogged streets where there was no other way through than to get foot deep into the water. Teenagers were perched on ledges looking at their fashionable shoes getting ruined, and mothers were holding shopping bags and babies above their heads. And this happens every other day in the monsoon.

I eventually got back to Thamel after getting lost in countless tiny alleyways, where I had to look for a new guesthouse. After walking around soaked looking at all the options I decided on Hi Hostel and a cheap dorm bed for Rs250. Thamel was now packed with Chinese tourists and most of the guesthouses were full. In the hostel I met a friendly half German half Thai girl who said she had two beds in her room that she had booked and kindly offered it to me so that I didn’t have to be in a dorm which was very sweet. She was leaving to go home the next day but told me all the interesting stuff she’d been doing over the past couple of days and gave me some good tips. She told me of a festival the next day at a temple she went to and got some beautiful henna from, Pashupatinath about an hour walk from Thamel so I decided to go there. I had to spend around six nights in Kathmandu to wait for my Chinese visa and extend my Nepali visa (clearly, one month is not enough!). Thamel wasn’t a bad place to spend six days, but I was yearning for the mountains and nature that I knew surrounded me, I didn’t want to be in a city when I knew how close all that was to me. Outside Thamel (the tourist district) I walked what felt like the entire city, to temples and markets, just to explore the lanes and lives of the people there. It was very hot and muggy, and either extremely dusty or extremely wet when the rains came. I went to some small shopping malls and found them full of clothes and shoes all exactly the same and lots of tack (all priced way over what the average local could afford as is the way with shopping malls) and teenagers milling around flirting in groups of boys and girls.

In Thamel I moved to Kathmandu Guesthouse which is famous for being the first hotel in Thamel, it’s quite posh but they generously have lesser rooms for $2 (shared bathroom with the rest on your floor) if you can get them in time, which means you can stay in a really nice place with a peaceful beautiful garden but in the ‘peasants’ quarter, which was fine by me. The building and gardens were really nice and so was my room for that matter, even at $2. The only thing is they didn’t have electric points in the rooms or wifi, you have to go to reception for that. There is this really annoying tax on everything in Thamel, 10% service charge and 23% government tax, so beware your bill will be higher than you think most of the time. I spent time in the comfy chairs in the garden reading and chatting to the bored waiter who had to stay there all day in case some important guests sat in the garden to order food, but mostly it was quiet. I hung around the cool reception that offered respite from the hot hectic streets, using wifi and getting to know the receptionists there who were very interested in my travels and why I was hanging around Thamel for so long without going trekking. I also spent a lot of time in Or2K on Mandala Street, an Isreali restaurant with cushions for seating, soft lighting and good wifi, with yum shakshuka for breakfast and dahl bat for dinner. It was on the expensive side but you could laze in a comfortable corner so I used it as my living room.

Garden at KTM Guesthouse

Pashupatinath Temple is definitely a must see when in KTM. It’s the oldest Hindu temple in Kathmandu and is sometimes referred to as ‘the Varanasi of Nepal’ because of the cremations that take place on the river that runs through it, it’s considered holy as it runs through to the Ganges. You can read all about the temple here. I went during the Teej Festival where thousands of women go to honour Lord Shiva for the long and healthy lives of their husbands. Tourist aren’t allowed in the main temple but can walk all around the grounds and also get a small peak from outside it (it seemed to hold a giant gold cow in a round room with a huge light dome over the top). It costs Rs500 to get in to the grounds and you can really spend a good few hours there as there’s so much to see. There’s the main temple area, huge grounds with old temples and smaller stone shrines which babas have made into their homes, peeking out with their painted faces and orange robes, or lounging around in their cloths with their hair piled high on their heads and their beards adorning their skinny bellies. There is a hill where you can walk up and around the temple on a stone staircase, where Indian women offer henna with their grubby dark eyed children watching on. A woman did some fast but beautiful henna on me and tried to charge me Rs1500 (this is what you’d pay in a posh salon for an hour long job on both arms by a professional henna artist) but I refused and paid her the actual street value is for a 15 minute job, Rs300. There were monkeys everywhere, strutting around or leaping from one hilltop temple to another. I watched the remnants of a cremation on the banks of the river, where men were stoking a fire and others in the water sifting something, what I’m not quite sure. There are two points for cremation, one for the rich and one for the poor.

The cremation on the poor side

The red dot is a blessing from a monk

the main temple, women lining up to pray for their husbands

Flora and the babas

A young Nepali of 21 presented himself to me as a guide (quite a few men do this around the temple) and even though I told him I didn’t want one he hung around out of interest and told me lots of facts anyway, free of charge. He told me that it cost Rs5,000 for the poor cremation and Rs10,000 for the rich. There was an old age home beside the river, where the poorest people went when they didn’t have family or friends to look after them as they got old. The government sent them there, where they waited patiently in ever increasing levels of dementia and loss of bodily function to die and be cremated on the river. He took me inside the old age home which was open for tourists to see the temple that was inside it. I was uncomfortable and showed distaste at gaping at the old residents in their courtyard and into their tiny box rooms that faced onto it, I didn’t want them to be stared at like they were in a zoo I said, it felt highly disrespectful to me. But he quashed my concerns and told me that here they have a completely different view of this than in the West. They didn’t mind in the slightest, tourists came here as volunteers to help them, and also left donations for them. He laughed at me to show me it was ridiculous to feel uncomfortable. I felt awkward being there and seeing these tiny bent figures hobbling around, waiting for death and their government cremation, struggling through the small dramas and indignities that this temple home on the river allowed. But, it’s true. Death has a different atmosphere to Hindus, it’s lived in the open. We sat together in the courtyard where he told me many interesting things. I think he just liked to practice his English. His father who is also a guide saw us, and he told me his father would be proud to see him with a tourist and doing his job, even though I wasn’t paying him. His details are xxx if you ever need a good guide in Kathmandu, he has been trained and knows the city well and is very nice and easygoing.

Another good temple to visit is Swayambhunath, the ‘monkey temple’. It’s only a forty minute walk from Thamel through some of the less hectic streets, where you pass some other small temples on the way and also an orphanage where you can visit and make a donation (although it makes me uncomfortable to visit orphanages like they’re an attraction, obviously donations are extremely welcome). There are quite a few stone steps leading up to the temple which is shaded by trees and swinging monkeys. The atmosphere is nice, a few people selling things along the pathways and with the shade and benches under the tree it’s not a chaotic place at all. Once you get to the top of the stairs the entrance fee is Rs200. There is a main stupa with great views of Kathmandu, encircled by some tourist shops and roof top restaurants (soda with fresh lemon juice, perfect for a hot day) and then a complex of shrines and temples with a Tibetan monastery and museum. There were mainly Nepali visitors there and some Western tourists, I was largely ignored and left to wander around in solitude which I love. I spent ages watching some ridiculous monkeys climbing up to the top branches of a tree and leaping, almost somersaulting, through the air and splashing into a pond, man it was funny. They did this over and over in the hot afternoon, scuttling and jumping and swimming, I must have looked crazy sitting there laughing my head off at them.

I got my Chinese visa without too much hassle, although the embassy and its processes were highly annoying without any information and people in queues to find out which queue to stand in. It cost $40, remember to take a photocopy of your passport, a passport photo and only USD not Rupees, in cash. After going back after a few days to collect it, I did some more of my endless walking through Kathmandu to find the Nepal Immigration office. There they charge $30 to extend your one month visa (which originally was $40) for another 15 days. You can extend for longer than 15 days if you want to as well. The office was grubby and run down and full of the strangest tourists I’ve ever seen, and also a guard relaxing on a huge rifle while playing with his two year old daughter in the waiting room.

And so was my time in Kathmandu and the valley. Lots of dusty or soaked walking, temples, shopping in Thamel for scarves and chess sets, embassies, solitary wandering, people watching and reading. After my six days there alone, I was going to meet up with Ido who I met in India. We were going to do some more amazing trekking and so it was back to the lovely Pokhara to trek Lower Mustang, happy times!

Here the Nepal pics.