Kathmandu, Nepal - March-April 2008

Need more photos of Nepal? There's a bunch more that I uploaded to Shutterfly.

Tricia and I spent Spring Break 2008 in Kathmandu , Nepal , with our Californian friends Adam, Stacy and Jeff. Lucky for us, it was an exciting time to visit – the country's first free elections were on the day before we left. The people were voting to end the monarchy and replace it with a democratic government. The day before the election we drove past the royal palace. Our taxi driver laughed as we went by and pointed at the palace and said “King only one more day, one more day only of king! King ends tomorrow.”


Jeff is 100% pure, you know.	Incense for sale in Thamel	Ancient statue of Ganesh

Kathmandu is an awesome town. It's still a major stop for backpacking hippies, but nowadays tourists can easily fly in. In the 1960s, though, it was harder to get around Asia . The hippie trail used to be overland, hitchhiking and riding on the roofs of buses. Long-haired freaks would ride the bus from Kabul or Srinagar overland to Kathmandu . They'd spend weeks in little dusty Asian towns eating rice and yak cheese, before they'd end up in Kathmandu where they could get a shave and eat pizza. There's still a hippie backpacker feel here, but there's also well-heeled tourists in Gore-Tex getting ready for a mountain trek or a trip up Everest. You can eat for pennies if you stick to the places where the dreadlocked Israelis hang out, or you can have a reasonably priced gourmet feast. We're having a great time. Plus it's easy to get around. It's a very walkable city. The airport is close to the center of town.

Carvings for sale in Kathmandu

When we first arrived, our flight had been a little delayed out of Delhi . The Kathmandu Guest House where we're staying at is great, but they don't do online credit card reservations – we just had an email holding our rooms. They're always so full that they couldn't afford to hold our rooms after we didn't show up on time. So they took us to the Hotel Excelsior down the street for a night, promising a room the next day. Not that either place is luxurious, but I don't recommend the Excelsior. We didn't spend much time there, anyway – we dropped off our bags and went off in search of shopping and fun and dinner. We found this totally cute place that was next door to three other totally cute places. I'm not sure there are any locations in Delhi with this concentration of fun restaurants.

The place we found had a decent menu with western, Indian, and Nepali food. They had plenty of normal tables, but there was also a special room with 4 or 5 Nepali-style tables, where you sit on cushions around the floor. Not so easy for tall guys like Adam and me, and a little hard on the lower back, but a neat experience nonetheless. We were able to get Indian food for our guests, and mashed potatoes and French fries and pasta for Tricia (who was ready for a vacation from Indian food.)

Nepali food is great, but it's really just about the same as Indian food. There are a handful of specialties that are different, like momos, which are pretty much the same as gyoza or potstickers or shumai. Mostly we've eaten Mexican food and Italian food and pizza and mashed potatoes. But that makes us happy.

The Kathmandu Guest House where we're staying is a charming little colonial building that's grown into a 120-room hotel. The Beatles stayed here in the 60s. Ricky Martin stayed here too, but that's not quite as important. Our first night in this hotel they put is in a brand-new room that had just been painted and had new carpet, and smelled like fresh oil paint and carpet glue. We could hardly sleep from the fumes. They were nice enough to move us to a ground-floor garden-facing room in the old heritage wing. I'm not sure which room the Beatles stayed in, but when they were here, our room was probably already fifty years old. Good chance that Lennon was in our room.


Hanging out at the Kathmandu Guest House	The original Walden Books. Maybe.	Doing laundry at the well

The first sightseeing we did was the Swayambhunath Temple , popularly known as “The Monkey Temple” in part because there are monkeys all around, and in part because tourists can't say “Swayambhunath” very easily. It's a great Buddhist stupa on top of a large hill. Lots of steps up, as is the case in so many holy places.

And the steps are covered in monkeys and people trying to sell you necklaces. No one knows how old the whole place is, but there are historical records of work being done on the site in 460AD, and Indian emperor Ashok supposedly visited the place, which would have made it open for worship over 2000 years ago. There are prayer wheels and stupas and people selling singing bowls and monks walking around chanting and people selling CDs of monks chanting and little rooftop restaurants where you can have a cold beer while you watch monks walk around chanting as they spin the prayer wheels.

On the steps up are giant piles of rocks inscribed with the Tibetan chant of Om Mani Padme Hum, which looks really cool when it's inscribed in Tibetan script.

On the way down, we took a different set of stairs so that we could exit by the Nepal National History Museum . Tricia and Stacy made the right choice (for them) by sitting outside while the boys explored the museum.

It's not terribly big, so we were only inside for a few minutes, surrounded by the horror of badly taxidermied dead things. Cases of dead birds with white bead eyes, some pangolins, a leopard stuffed in the act of killing and eating a little dead thing, several Himlayan black bears (which – strange aside, are called “Bhalu” in Hindi, which is where Kipling got the name Baloo for the bear in the Jungle Book. But these little black sloth bears are cute miniature bears – not giant blue-grey grizzly bears like in the Disney cartoon.)

Oh, they also had a fetal elephant and a fetal rhino, both in jars of formaldehyde. And a triptych set of photos of a guy being eaten by a giant snake. The first photo is the snake's mouth with a clothed torso and legs sticking out of it. The second photo is a snake with a giant lump in it. The last photo is a jeep with a couple of guys with cameras taking photos of the snake with the lump. No clue if any of the photographers had tried to pull the guy out of the snake's mouth or not. And maybe it was actually some bizarre form of Nepalese execution-by-snake. Who knows? Such is the weirdness of Natural Museumology in Nepal .

We hired a car and a trekking guide the next day to take us on a hill trek around the Himlayan foothills. Once you get up on the ridge outside of the Kathmandu Valley , you can see all the white peaks of the big Himalayan mountains. We drove up to Changu Narayan, where we saw the outside of a beautiful and ancient temple. We hiked along the ridge towards Nagarkot, where you get lovely views of the mountains. We got a chance to really see the life of rural farmers in the terraced wheat fields out of the city. A dog that we named Tammy followed us up the entire way.


View of the Kathmandu Valley from the hike	Tricia played with a baby goat	Himalayan Mountains in the not-so-far distance

Deepak, Stacy, Adam and Tricia, trekking along	Good girl, Tammy!	Nepali farmer

Some people spend the night there so that they can wake up and watch the sun rise illuminating the Himalayas . When you're there at lunchtime the haze and clouds covers the mountains. But we saw some lovely views of the valley and the surroundings. Then we headed back to town.

Three or four places around here that advertise “Mexican Food,” but we've learned that they can't really deliver. We had enchiladas that weren't bad except the sauce was spaghetti sauce. I guess we should stick to what they do best here. They do pizza pretty well. And Indian food.

We've done some shopping. I got some dzi beads that might be old, or might not. Who knows. Tricia bought a prayer wheel as a gift, and some necklaces. We found a great art gallery that was recommended to us by some teachers we work with. We bought an etching by Seema Seth, a really great montage of Buddhist art.

One morning we took a “Mountain Flight.” You take this great little propeller plane on an hourlong flight around Mt. Everest . We took off just after sunrise, and the weather was perfect. No turbulence at all. We flew at 25,000 feet right at the tops of the highest peaks in the world. A stewardess comes by now and then and says “there's Dorje and Cho-Oyo” and one by one you can visit the cockpit and look out the front view. Jeff was in the cockpit right as we banked around Everest. Awesome experience. The tickets are round-trip, but they don't have a second airport listed – it's kind of funny. Round trip from Kathamandu to Mountain and Back.


Our plane	That's Mount Everest in the middle!	View from the cockpit

We hired a van to take the five of us out to the ancient capital city of Bhaktapur . With the five of us, it's actually cheaper to get a van for the whole day than to negotiate 2 taxi prices for multiple one-way trips. Bhaktapur is this fantastic city with brick roads and ancient architecture. It's still very much an in-use place, with residents and workers. But it's closed to traffic, so it's a much quieter and nicer place to walk around than the Thamel section of Kathmandu where we're staying.

Bhaktapur was originally founded in the 12 th century. Not all of the original buildings are still there, but there are still a lot of excellent wells, temples, stupas, pagodas, and courtyards. They have a neat little building called a pati which is where pilgrims can stop and rest while they are on their way to a holy site. People still hang out in them, like bus stops, but they're not waiting for buses. Just hanging out.

My personal highlight from Bhaktarpur was the pottery square. It's a neighborhood where potters live and work. I expected a Disneyfied tourist trap, but it was just regular pottery folk, wearing traditional clothes, making pottery. Mostly water jugs and temple lamps. And in the square are big areas of drying pottery. I took a zillion photos.


Tricia finds another goat to play with	Shivalinghams	Ancient erotic carvings of elephants

A pati, for people to hang out in	Singing bowls	Monks in the Durbar square

Another day, we went to Patan, which is another ancient city nearby. It's a little more modernized, but still chock full of heritage. And there a self-guided tour book you can buy at the Patan bus stop that helps explain the sights. Adam picked it up and acted as our tour guide.

There's a very sad epidemic of glue-huffing among the street children in Kathmandu. Jeff met a begging huffer who clung on his arm for a long, long time. He reminded us of Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost.

After our walk through Patan we visited two Unesco World Heritage sites – the Hindu temple of Pashupatinath and the Buddhist stupa of Bodnath. Pashupatinath is awesome, but most areas are closed to non-Hindus.

Still, we saw the cremation ghats, some mendicant sadhus covered in ash and body paint (and very little clothing), some caves where hermits live, and a 6th -century temple. From the top of a nearby hill we could see down into the temple complex, with its gold-covered pagoda roofs and statuary.

The Bodnath stupa was my favorite site. We got there in the late afternoon, just as the light was perfect for photos. All the Buddhist pilgrims, and plenty of local Buddhists as well, gather around to circumabulate the stupa. It's one of the world's largest stupas, a huge white dome with a gold point on top. In the center is a bone of the Buddha, according to legend.

Around the perimeter are prayer wheels. Tibetans and Nepalese wearing traditional outfits walk around and chant prayers and finger their prayer beads and spin the prayer wheels.

And there are rooftop cafes where people can watch the whole thing happen. They say it was built around 600AD, but it got destroyed by Muslim invaders in the 1300s, so they had to fix it after that. No one knows how much is original, but it's still one of Buddhism's most holy sites. Look how much taller Adam is than the Nepali and Tibetan people!

Every where we went, we saw signs that the elections were approaching. While walking around Kathmandu we stumbled across campaign speeches in the public square. There are posters and leaflets everywhere. We saw trucks filled with campaigners driving by scattered leaflets to the crowd. In the hills near Nagarkot, a group of Communist Youth marched around waving flags and chanting “vote for the local Community Party” (our trekking guide Deepak translated it for us.)

And everything's been closed. Essentially all government offices – banks, post offices, etc – have been closed all week. Today, on election day, nothing's officially open. We were a little worried, so we stocked up on snacks and bottled water. But as it turns out, there are lots of shops and restaurants where the workers voted in the morning and then they opened back up. Money talks, even during a no-work curfew.

There's been a bit of violence leading up to the elections, but nothing like what they were worried about. A scuffle yesterday between Maoists and the police lead to 7 deaths. Rumor has it that 2 bombs have gone off near the airport, but it's hard to tell if that's the truth or if it's just speculation. But everywhere we've been, there are riot police in full gear, with plastic barriers and bamboo sticks, and the oddest assortment of guns you can imagine. It's as if each policeman has to buy or make his own gun. Some have sawed-off shotguns, some have AK-47s or M-1s. I saw one with a tear-gas grenade launcher. Lots of their guns look homemade, like a Sten made from welded pipes and electrical tape. Mostly, they're standing in the shade. Sometimes they're hanging out in courtyards or temples. We haven't seen any that looked scary or itching for a fight. Mostly, they just want the election to go well.


Voting booths set up in the Durbar Square of Patan	Riot police getting ready to help keep the peace during the voting process

All the big courtyards – the Durbar Squares and the city centers – have large roped-off areas where people will cast their votes. The lines are segregated so that men and women can line up separately (I guess to keep men from bumping into women inappropriately?). We heard rumors that the Maoists have been telling people that they have devices that can tell who voted for who, so that afterwards they can beat up anyone who voted against them. But we also heard rumors that those rumors were started by Royalists who just wanted to spread the rumors so that they could call hijinks on the whole thing afterwards. Hard to tell what's going to happen, but either way, it's an interesting time to be here!

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