Bhaktapur

by Vincent

Durbar square

Golden door

Narrow street with souvenir shops

Pottery square

Posing in front of an imposing temple

 

 

Women sculpting wood

Typical Nepalese puppets

We can find some erotic sculptures on some munuments in Nepal...

Close to Kathmandu, in the same valley, there are a couple of others cities which are worth a visit. Bhaktapur is one of them. This town is like an open-air museum: there are very well preserved temples, monuments and statues everywhere. Since there is no traffic and not so many people, it's a very calm and peaceful place, perfect for getting lost in the narrow streets linking the three main squares. The only thing you have to take care of is the slyness of the guides. In Durbar Square, all of them want to take you for a tour in the city for the whole day. One of them who spoke French followed us with insistence during 5 minutes. We told him 20 times that we were not interested but he said he wanted to stay with us to improve his French!

The city has also a lot of craftsman who sell very nice things. Bhaktapur is famous for sculptures and pottery in particular. And after walking a few hours in the streets, there are many nice restaurants and cafes on terraces, perfect for having a rest, eating good food and looking at the Nepalese life in the squares...

Kathmandu

by Vincent

Busy streets of Kathmandu

In Kathmandu, there is a small temple in almost every junction

Durbar Square, the heart of the city

Kathmandu seen from the tower of Basantapur

A woman praying in front of a statue in Durbar Square

Men talking in Durbar Square

Rickshaws waiting for tourists in Durbar Square

Ali Baba shop

One of the many fruit seller you find in the streets. Bananas are delicious!

Who wants some dry fish?

Thamel by night. The touristic neighbourhood.

The beautiful "Garden of Dreams" in Thamel

Chicken sizzler, momos and a tongba, the huge Tibetan beer served hot and made with millet.

The day after the trek: a good Italian pizza with James and Alice, the English couple we met in Langtang.

The famous Dhal Bhat in a Newar restaurant. Nepalese eat it every day!

Typical Nepalese dances in a Newar restaurant

Signatures of some of the most famous mountaineers at Rum Doodle Bar. Among them: Reinhold Messner (probably the greatest climber in history, renowned for making the first solo ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen and for being the first climber to ascend all fourteen peaks over 8000m), Sir Edmund Hillary (the first who climbed Everest in 1953 with Tenzing Norgay), Maurice Herzog (the leader of the French expedition that first climbed a peak over 8000m, Annapurna, in 1950)  Rob Hall and Chris Bonnington. During my stay in Kathmandu, I also met a few times the guide I was supposed to go with in the Everest region. He had climbed Everest as well as 4 others 8000m peaks. It was really interesting to talk with him about his experiences.

We had spent one day in Kathmandu before our trek in the Langtang region but it was just to organise the trek (permits, national park entrance fee, shopping, etc.) so we didn't really have time to see the city. But there is a little story worth telling... To go to Langtang, we needed to buy a bus ticket but the thing is that you actually need to go to the bus station to buy the tickets. Since we were short on time (the station was quite far), we decided to pay the services of one of the travel agencies of Kathmandu to do it for us. We came to that agency in the morning and they told us to come back in the afternoon to collect our tickets. So I came back in the afternoon. It was another guy at the office. He looked for my tickets in all drawers and finally found a piece of paper completely crumpled that he gave to me. It was written in Nepali so I couldn't understand anything except some numbers: 6.30. But the bus we had booked was at 7.30. So I told him there was a mistake and the guy answered that 7 is written like 6 in Nepali. Are you joking? Do you think I'm a stupid tourist who will accept a crumpled paper with the wrong time as a bus ticket? He insisted and on my side, I started to be angry and a bit rude with him. But after some more discussions, I accepted the ticket and left the office. Later, I asked another Nepalese to see if the ticket was for 7.30 and he confirmed. So that was it: we discovered that Nepalese write numbers differently and it's very confusing for us: 7 is written like 6 but there is also 1 written as 9, 4 written as 8, etc...

After the trek, we came back to Kathmandu. Berit had to leave 3 days later to start her new job in Norway and I was staying in Nepal longer to do another trek in the Everest region. The capital of Nepal is clearly not one of the most beautiful city of Asia. But it's probably one of the most polluted. Because of its location in a valley and of bad atmospheric conditions, the pollution is stuck and makes the tourists stay as short as possible in the city. From what I heard from my parents and from what is written in the Lonely Planet, Kathmandu was the destination of hippies and drug addicts in the 60's/70's. Even if there are still people proposing drugs every 500m, the tourist prototype has completely changed. Now, it is full of trekkers ready to start a trek or coming back from it.

Most of them stay in Thamel, the huge touristic neighbourhood, full of shops (selling textiles, Tibetan carpets, thangkas, CDs, books and fake mountain equipment), restaurants and bars which reminded me of what you can see in Thailand. The neighbourhood doesn't really look Nepalese but it was not so bad to come across good restaurants (very good pizzas!) and bakeries again. We can also find a beautiful and peaceful garden, "The garden of dreams" which is a very welcomed place in the middle of the chaos of Kathmandu.

The rest of the city is not so uninteresting. There are hidden temples everywhere, small shops selling all kind of things and a lot of narrow busy streets. The main sight is Durbar Square, the heart of the city with the most spectacular monuments of the capital.

After Berit left, I stayed longer in Kathmandu. During the trek in Langtang, I had my right knee constantly inflamed and swollen. For those who don't know, I had been operated of my crossed ligament more than 6 months before. However, my doctor in Barcelona had confirmed me before to travel that there was no problem to do intensive trekking and mountaineering. He even said it would be good for re-building the muscles of my leg and wrote a certificate. I wasn't worried until I called my mother. I was thinking it was normal that my knee reacted like that. So I went to see the doctor of the French Embassy to have an opinion from a specialist. His verdict was immediate: don't go to the Everest region. Not completely convinced, I asked about my situation on some forums on Internet, asked some friends who had been operated before and went to see another doctor at a private clinic in Kathmandu. After a lot of research and advices, I had to accept the obviousness of the situation: I had to cancel my trek in the Everest region, as well as my others plans. It was a big deception because I had spent a lot of time planning and I was looking forward to this since a long time. And it is so infuriating not to do it whereas I was already there, to think that I would have to come back to do it. But well, that was the good decision and it's better to take no risk with health. However, I'm a bit annoyed by the advice of my doctor in Barcelona. He was wrong and he's a bit responsible.

So I had to change my plans... Shorten my travel and go somewhere else. In the next posts, I will describe the trek I was suppose to do in the Everest region as well as the others regions of Nepal I visited.

Trekking in the Langtang National Park

by Vincent

The hike starts in the forest.

The teahouse where we slept the second night, close to Langtang village.

On the second day, we got closer to the high peaks...

Tamang woman. Is she small or am I a giant?

Little Tamang boy

Prayer wheels. Always walk on the left!

Typical Tibetan house in Langtang village.

A woman and her baby walking along a Mani wall. Prayers are inscribed on it.

Porter, a really hard and common job in the mountains of Nepal.

Yak Yak Yak!

Tibetan Buddhist mantras in front of the beautiful mountain of Gang Chhenpo (6388m)

The impressive south face of Kimshung (6781m), viewed from the village of Kyanjin Gompa.

Walking in the Lirung valley, on the way to the glaciers

Langtang Lirung (7246m) dominates the valley

Following the river upstream to Langshisha Kharka

Berit walking towards the huge ice/snow block of Pemthang Karpo Ri (6830m), marking the border with Tibet

Langtang Lirung (7246m) hidden in the afternoon clouds

Climbing up to Kyanjin Ri, the view gets better and better...

Summit! We are only at 4619m but Langtang Lirung (7246m) seems so accessible. It's more than 2500m higher!

Langtang Lirung (7246m) and Kimshung (6781m)

Women at work in Thulo Syabru

The view on rice terraces from Thulo Syabru

Meeting happy kids on the way to Sing Gompa

The amazing view from Laurebina Yak, from left to right: Annapurnas (8091m), Manaslu (8156m, the eighth highest mountain in the world), Ganesh Himal (7422m) and the mountains of Tibet.

Gosainkund, the holy lake at 4400m

Better not to try to walk on it...

A sadhu we met next to Gosainkund lake. He came from Cachemire in India by foot and planned to stay 3 years there. "But it's god who decides!"

Rhododendrons. We can see a lot of them in spring time.

A trip to Nepal requires to visit the mountains of Himalaya and there is no better way than trekking to do so. Since I heard about the Himalayas in my young days, I always dreamt of exploring them. And this was also one of the main goals of this travel. We hesitated a moment between going to the Annapurnas or Langtang for our trek and we finally chose Langtang which sounded like a little hidden paradise.

No guide. No porters. 90% of the tourists in Nepal go trekking with a guide but, honestly, it is quite useless in the regions where you can do teahouse trekking such as the Annapurnas, the Solo-Khumbu (the region of the Everest) and the Langtang, except maybe if you have no experience in walking in the mountains. Even if there are no signs, it's generally very easy to find the tracks and there is always someone to help you anyway. Walking in the Himalayas is not more complicated than in the Alps or the Pyrenees. For teahouse trekking, the only thing you need is a small backpack with some warm clothes, a rain jacket, a map, a compass and a Uno game.

The Langtang National Park is located north of Kathmandu, just next to the border with Tibet, within a day's drive of the capital, and includes the Langtang Valley, the sacred lakes of Gosainkund and the farmland of Helambu. When you go to Langtang, the first adventure is to get there by bus. It's hard to imagine how any bus can take 10 hours to cover 115km! We had our seats in the first row, just next to the driver, which gave us the best position for some adrenaline rushes. The beginning of the road is quite OK but it gets worse and worse, more narrow, without asphalt and with high cliffs. It was really scary and dangerous. Sometimes, we were even wondering how a Jeep would pass on the road, and we were inside a bus! On top of that, the driver (who was using just one hand to drive, was talking with his friends behind him and was calling with his mobile phone) was constantly turning with the left wheel just on the edge of the cliff and I don't know how many times we thought we would fall down the cliff. We were actually checking if there were buses at the bottom which had fallen before... When we finally got to Syabrubesi, our destination and starting point of the trek, the first thing we thought about was to find a way to come back by Jeep.

We spent the first three days to walk up the narrow valley of Langtang to Kyanjin Gompa, the last village of the valley, at 3900m. By following the river upstream, it offered us the opportunity to explore small villages and pass through forests of pine, bamboo and rhododendrons, ascending pastures to arrive to an alpine landscape, surrounded by high snowy peaks. It's possible to spot monkeys, red pandas, snow leopards, many yaks and even the Yeti... Well, we saw only yaks and a few monkeys. This isolated region is inhabited by Tamangs whose religion practices, language and dress are very similar to Tibetan.

During those first three days, we also founded the "Uno clan" with an English couple, a guy from Finland and a girl from Ukrain. We met every evening at a teahouse and played together with others tourists and guides. We had some very funny nights! Teahouse trekking is a really nice and easy way to explore the mountains. The only problem for me was the food. One day, I ordered lasagna and got something which didn't look at all like lasagna. My stomach got quite bad the next two days and I couldn't eat the food from the lodges anymore. The only thing that attracted me was Snickers bars!

From Kyanjin Gompa, we did three excursions. I first went alone up the Lirung valley to see the huge glaciers of Lirung and Kimshung. Then, we went on a day trip to the end of the valley, at Langshisha Kharka, which offered us a spectacular mountain view in a very peaceful and quiet environment. We met almost nobody except yaks. That place is said to be the site where a lama found his lost yak he was running after, leading to the valley being named "Langtang" ("Lang" is Tibetan for "yak" and "teng" means "to follow"). The last excursion we did was a climb of a peak next to Kyanjin Gompa called Kyanjin Ri where we had fantastic views of all of the high mountains around.

Then we walked down almost all the way to our starting point and climbed steeply again to the holy lakes of Gosainkund, at 4400m. The lakes were still frozen and surrounded by snowy mountains. The place was really beautiful and allowed us to enjoy an amazing Himalayan panorama at Laurebina Yak: from West to East we had the Annapurnas, the Manaslu (8156m), the Ganesh Himal, the peaks of Tibet and the Langtang Lirung! Just that! The last day, we went down to Dhunche to take our Jeep to Kathmandu with the English couple we had met during the trek.

We spent 9 days trekking in Langtang and we can only recommend it. It was a beautiful region which offers a wide variety of landscapes with a Tibetan culture and many options for side trips.

Berit had the wonderful idea to offer me a GPS for Christmas and I immediately couldn't stop using it during the trek. So here are some statistics of our 9 days in Langtang National Park...

Trip length: 137km
Total ascent: 11456m
Max elevation: 4619m

Here is the map of the trek in Google Maps:

Display the map in Google Maps