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.