Into the Mountains - Part V (A week in Nepal)

When Dani and I arrived in Kathmandu in the middle of the night, our taxi dumping us hurriedly in a silent and deserted Durbar Square, we had been on the move for 32 hours. 13 hours had been spent in a bus or jeep. We were truly tired and to our horror when we saw ourselves in the mirror in our hotel room we had the appearance of zombies. We hadn’t washed in almost three days. My face was covered in grime from the road and dark circles hung under my eyes. We really needed a good night’s sleep. But unfortunately the very worst part of the journey was yet to come. After showering we quickly got into bed and were starting to feel comfortable and ready to doze off when I felt something soft fall onto my leg and roll off onto the mattress in the dark. I tentatively put out my hand to see what it was and felt something move under my outstretched fingers.

We jumped up and turned on the light to find that a fat little maggot had fallen onto me from the roof. We stared at it in horror for a few moments and then I went to rouse the hotel owner. The likeliest explanation was that a pigeon or some other bird had died in the roof space and was generating maggots that then fell through the spaces between the boards of the fake ceiling. He moved us to another room but needless to say we didn’t stay at this hotel for more than that one night. When we woke the next day to a sunny morning in Kathmandu we packed and left the hotel, making our way to Paknajol to the north of the tourist hub Thamel. Here we booked into a bright, spacious room in the Kathmandu Garden House and sat in the hotel garden, relieved to find somewhere to stay that was comfortable and apparently maggot-free.

Kathmandu is part tourist circus, part patched together developing-world city, and is everywhere bustling streets and fumy traffic jams. In Thamel, the tourist centre, every other building is a trinket shop selling Buddhist prayer flags, incense, wooden Buddhas, metal Ganeshas, stone hash pipes and other bits and pieces for the throngs of Westerners just back from a trek or preparing to leave for one. Nestling amongst the trinket shops are a wide range of restaurants, from upmarket landmarks through overpriced tourist traps to budget establishments offering cheap but unexciting food. That mainstay of hippie-trail South Asia, the bakery and café, is also strongly represented. These cafes offer freshly baked muffins, chocolate cake, croissants and other goodies to accompany your coffee. After 8.00pm several sell their cakes at half price. We spent our first day in the city happily wandering down Thamel’s main street and side roads, stopping to check restaurant prices, marvelling at the high quality of the fake branded outdoor clothing, disappointing trinket-shop touts and sidestepping young Nepali men who leaned in towards us, whispering ‘wantsomehashmyfriend?’ We found ourselves shaking our heads at half the people we passed in the street: the whispering hash dealers, miniature violin players, cycle rickshaw wallahs. Everyone was keen to catch our eye and we were keen to do no more than window shop. As it was the start of the rainy season the sky was cloudy and the street wet with the night’s downpour. We soon got used to weaving in and out of the traffic; people, cars and rickshaws intermingling in the narrow, pavement-less roads. Most of the cars negotiating Thamel’s constrained streets are small taxis: the only big vehicle I saw threading its way down the lanes was a gleaming white 4x4, emblazoned with a blue UN on the bonnet and doors.

Having investigated a few restaurants we realised that rather a lot were outside our budget. One or two would have demanded the best of our daily spend for main courses alone. The Yak Café was more our kind of place. It was fairly cheap and served Nepali and Tibetan food, and so we ate there on the first evening. The café is a somewhat dingy place, poorly lit and low key, with a blue tinge to the air from cigarette smoke. When we arrived early in the evening several of the small tables were already taken and in high walled booths along one wall sat small groups of Nepalis and a couple of men sat on their own, staring into half-finished beer glasses, cigarettes hanging from their mouths. We took a table in the centre of the room and quickly ordered, choosing Buffalo momos, Chicken sekuwa and vegatbale Thukpa. Momos are steamed, ravioli-like dumplings filled with meat or vegetables, which are often served with a thin and very hot pepper sauce for dipping. When bitten the soft dough casing gives way deliciously to the juicy meat filling inside. We shared a plate of these and an Everest beer before moving on to the sekuwa (literally skewered chicken) and the rich, soupy Thukpa. Thukpa is a Tibetan staple and basically a broth with noodles, no doubt ideal for keeping up your energy in the mountains. After the meal we headed out into Thamel’s darkened streets, full up and perfectly contented.

On our second day in Kathmandu we were up at 7.00am in order to get a good spot in the queue at the Indian Embassy. This whole process of applying for a new six month visa was slow and tedious: along with Westerners of various nationalities and a few Nepalis we stood in the cold for an hour outside the Embassy’s blue gates and then waited for another 2 hours inside the compound. All this was just to get a form faxed to London to check there was no reason why Kathmandu shouldn’t grant us the visa. It felt good to finally escape the compound and its creaking bureaucracy but we knew we had to return in four days.

After an early and unmemorable lunch in a cheap café in one of the shaded alleys near our hotel we set off on a walking tour that would lead us to Durbar Square via a series of temples, interesting architectural features, communal squares and hidden courtyards. We wound our way South, following back-roads that linked squares and intersections in which there were often temples with the distinctive triple roof design common in Nepal. Each temple had brass bells hanging near the entrance to the sanctum, to be rung by devotees after prayer, and stone lingams stained with tikka and ghee set up outside. Many of these temples were grimy and sticky with black soot from the oil lamps fixed to their walls. There was a lot else to be seen in the backstreets, from Ganesha figures carved into house fronts to medieval looking buildings leaning out into the street, seemingly kept from collapse only by the mass of telephone and electricity wires that hang in multiple bunches across and between the buildings. After thirty minutes we found ourselves turning into narrower side-streets that must rarely have seen the sun, the buildings either side of us rising up high above the road. There was just enough room for two people to pass comfortably, but of course motorbikes came down too, the riders beeping their horns to clear a path. On either side of the narrow road were tiny shops, their doorways chest height to me, that were selling jewellery, watches and clocks, stationery, white goods stacked floor to ceiling, and brightly coloured saris and dupattas. There were general stores too, stocking goods from soap to sugar. Nearer to Durbar Square these narrow streets also sheltered tiny eating joints, their small doorways covered with curtains that only partially obscured the view of narrow tables, a low roof and in each case a bar topped with plates of cooked meat, soupy dal, subzis and fried delicacies. In between the shops and almost hidden eating places there were occasionally darkened passageways leading off at right angles. Intrigued, I led us down a few of these, having to stoop to get through the entrance. These passages brought us to hidden courtyards with dank floors, in which perhaps no more than a dog would be sitting yawning in a corner. They also led us to communal spaces from which several houses could be accessed and where a shrine or Buddha statue would stand. In one a few chickens picked at grass sprouting up between the bricks of the floor and as we emerged from the dark passage into the open a sitting group of four women looked up to see what we were doing. This open area was connected to another through an archway supported by wooden pillars. We followed the line of the wall round to the archway and stepped through to the next yard, only to beat a quick retreat at the sight of a women who was bathing, her bare back to us. We smiled at the other women and ducked back into the gloom of the passageway.

We reached the square after about an hour but to our dismay were unable to enter without each paying a 200 rupee fee. Small change of course in sterling, but imagine asking tourists to pay to enter Trafalgar Square! Durbar Square is a UNESCO world heritage site and an endangered one at that. It houses the ex-Royal Family’s old palace and several important temples. We decided we wouldn’t pay the fee out of principle and after a timid and unsuccessful attempt to sneak past the guard boxes we resigned ourselves to not seeing the buildings in the centre. We didn’t feel too bad. We had passed through one corner the morning before in a taxi and seen piles of rotting rubbish dumped at the brick base of several of the otherwise striking and majestic temples.