Easter weekend saw another
couple of extra days off work so to capitalise on this time, off I trotted to
Kathmandu. It's a mere hour and ten minutes flight from Dhaka with a pretty
impressive view of Everest from the plane window thrown in. Kathmandu is
charming - laid back, touristy, hippyish and bustling all the same time. We
were staying in Thamel which is the real touristy area of town, and it was a
delight to be able to poke around shops and chill out in cafes. The traffic
like most places nowadays is appalling, and its a very dry and dusty place, but
refreshingly cool and not at all humid. I was staying at Hotel Horizon which
boasted hot water and wifi - it delivered on both of these and was in a handy
location, but that's about all it had to offer. I had booked a standard room
but on checking in was advised to upgrade to a superior room otherwise I would
have no aircon. So I did, only to find the aircon didn't work the majority of
the time due to the almost constant power outages! The poor old place needed a
lot of TLC, but in fairness was obscenely cheap.
So, my time in Kathmandu was spent pottering from cafe to cafe - I particularly liked the splendidly named Phat Kath cafe- eating lovely food and drinking Everest beer, and shopping - Kathmanadu is one enormous open air North Face hiking clothes store. One morning was spent learning to cook mo:mos - steamed Nepalese dumplings - along with a New Zealand couple who own a deli and a dairy farm, followed by lazing in the splendidly named Garden of Dreams - what a revelation and great coffee. Not forgetting of course the sunrise Everest viewing. Up at 4am we were driven to the Kathmandu Valley, around one hour's drive from the city; it was surprising how quickly the town gave way to mountains. We were quite glad it was still dark so we couldn't clearly see the vertiginous drops from the hairpin bends as we wound our way up the mountain roads in our slightly rickety minibus.
At the top it was more than a little chilly as we clambered to a viewpoint on the roof of a strategically-placed hotel - very nice as it was a great view but an odd location to choose as the roof was also home to the water tanks of the hotel which gurgled and whooshed loudly, shattering the silence, any time anyone turned on a tap in the hotel below, which was frequently. The deal was the sun rose over the mountains to a beautiful view of Everest - tada! - except we just got a beautiful view of thick cloud. Apparently we should have been there in September. Never mind, the silence (when the water butts weren't gurgling) and the chill mountain air and the views of at least the near mountains, were lovely. After a restorative coffee off we set on a trek - more like a walk in reality - through the valley. The mountains are impossibly steep and resembled knife-edges, yet are still - somehow - terraced in order to grow rice and other crops. In the valleys there are brick-kilns, in the forests there were jackals (we saw the former but not the latter, and there are villages perched midway up the mountains. Apart from an infcnt of about two years of age whose only words were 'hello money' and a little girl who wanted sweets, we aroused very little curiosity, the villagers being too concerned in going around their daily business of gardening, carrying huge loads of branches on their heads and digging into the red soil to bring out terracotta to cover their stone floors, a dangerous pastime so it seems since the tunnels are often dig too deep and collapse, entombing the workers.
The rest of the day was spent staring at Hindu temples in the midday heat - the majority of the Nepalese population are Hindus, even though the place has more of a Buddhist feel to it. We partook of a traditional Nepali lunch at the ancient capital Bhaktapur, a lovely place full of old brick buildings sporting elaborately carved wooden adornments. Lunch consisted of beaten rice, dry rice flakes with a thali-type accompaniment of various curries and pickles and the combination of the crunchy rice flakes and the curry was surprisingly pleasant. Water supply is a real problem in Nepal, at the time of the old capital's construction massive water tanks were built but since construction of new buildings has now resulted in the water table falling to a lower level the tanks are dry - just a tiny trickle of water emerges from the spout. At one such tank we saw dozens and dozens of plastic water containers lining up waiting to be filled, and at the rate the water was trickling it surely must have taken all day and well into the next to fill them all. The ladies at the wells in the centre of town didn't fare much better, tirelessly lowering their jerrycans into a round 6 inches of filthy, oily water which was all that remained at the bottom of the deep well.
On our final morning the general hubbub in the hotel woke me early which was no bad thing, since it allowed me to squeeze in a trip to Bhoudanath Stupa which is one of the holiest Buddhist sites in Kathmandu. The idea is to walk around the Stupa in a clockwise direction, spinning prayer wheels as you go. It had a wonderful and peaceful atmosphere, quite different to the Hindu temples and I'm glad I made the effort to visit it before my little holiday in Kathmandu was over....
So, my time in Kathmandu was spent pottering from cafe to cafe - I particularly liked the splendidly named Phat Kath cafe- eating lovely food and drinking Everest beer, and shopping - Kathmanadu is one enormous open air North Face hiking clothes store. One morning was spent learning to cook mo:mos - steamed Nepalese dumplings - along with a New Zealand couple who own a deli and a dairy farm, followed by lazing in the splendidly named Garden of Dreams - what a revelation and great coffee. Not forgetting of course the sunrise Everest viewing. Up at 4am we were driven to the Kathmandu Valley, around one hour's drive from the city; it was surprising how quickly the town gave way to mountains. We were quite glad it was still dark so we couldn't clearly see the vertiginous drops from the hairpin bends as we wound our way up the mountain roads in our slightly rickety minibus.
At the top it was more than a little chilly as we clambered to a viewpoint on the roof of a strategically-placed hotel - very nice as it was a great view but an odd location to choose as the roof was also home to the water tanks of the hotel which gurgled and whooshed loudly, shattering the silence, any time anyone turned on a tap in the hotel below, which was frequently. The deal was the sun rose over the mountains to a beautiful view of Everest - tada! - except we just got a beautiful view of thick cloud. Apparently we should have been there in September. Never mind, the silence (when the water butts weren't gurgling) and the chill mountain air and the views of at least the near mountains, were lovely. After a restorative coffee off we set on a trek - more like a walk in reality - through the valley. The mountains are impossibly steep and resembled knife-edges, yet are still - somehow - terraced in order to grow rice and other crops. In the valleys there are brick-kilns, in the forests there were jackals (we saw the former but not the latter, and there are villages perched midway up the mountains. Apart from an infcnt of about two years of age whose only words were 'hello money' and a little girl who wanted sweets, we aroused very little curiosity, the villagers being too concerned in going around their daily business of gardening, carrying huge loads of branches on their heads and digging into the red soil to bring out terracotta to cover their stone floors, a dangerous pastime so it seems since the tunnels are often dig too deep and collapse, entombing the workers.
The rest of the day was spent staring at Hindu temples in the midday heat - the majority of the Nepalese population are Hindus, even though the place has more of a Buddhist feel to it. We partook of a traditional Nepali lunch at the ancient capital Bhaktapur, a lovely place full of old brick buildings sporting elaborately carved wooden adornments. Lunch consisted of beaten rice, dry rice flakes with a thali-type accompaniment of various curries and pickles and the combination of the crunchy rice flakes and the curry was surprisingly pleasant. Water supply is a real problem in Nepal, at the time of the old capital's construction massive water tanks were built but since construction of new buildings has now resulted in the water table falling to a lower level the tanks are dry - just a tiny trickle of water emerges from the spout. At one such tank we saw dozens and dozens of plastic water containers lining up waiting to be filled, and at the rate the water was trickling it surely must have taken all day and well into the next to fill them all. The ladies at the wells in the centre of town didn't fare much better, tirelessly lowering their jerrycans into a round 6 inches of filthy, oily water which was all that remained at the bottom of the deep well.
On our final morning the general hubbub in the hotel woke me early which was no bad thing, since it allowed me to squeeze in a trip to Bhoudanath Stupa which is one of the holiest Buddhist sites in Kathmandu. The idea is to walk around the Stupa in a clockwise direction, spinning prayer wheels as you go. It had a wonderful and peaceful atmosphere, quite different to the Hindu temples and I'm glad I made the effort to visit it before my little holiday in Kathmandu was over....
It sounds lovely and unusual in equal measure! Another pin on your adventure map!
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