Never saw a Yak, let alone a Yeti

leaving a trail of sweaters behind us as we peeling them off, panting

[Click on the links to see pictures] We didn't do our research. I figured, "Kathmandu: exotic, but, Himalayas: freezing." I imagine that temperatures do drop, especially at night, on the trail north of Base Camp on the trek up Mt. Everest, but down in Kathmandu, which I only later (2 days before the trip was over) read about in the guide book, days are pretty balmy due to the fact that Kathmandu is actually south of New Delhi. (This is a lesson in the value of reading, and illustrates why, on the whole, the oral tradition as a means archiving the facts is a dying art. We had asked, several people, about January weather in Kathmandu and no one advised us that gauze clothing and copious quantities of sunscreen were just the thing.) Anyway, leaving a trail of sweaters behind us as we peeled them off, panting, and flung them away, we visited Nepal. And for a rushed trip of only 8 days, we did pretty well, visiting many of the points of interest in Kathmandu and its surrounding valley, as well as the pretty mountain town of Pokhara, to the west.

In old Kathmandu, life goes on much as it must have done in Europe in the Middle Ages, only with scooter exhaust added to the dust and smoke.

Kathmandu is a miniaturized storybook city of shops with cockeyed, tilting Dr. Suess pies and cakes in their windows and of crooked dusty lanes intersecting at tiny squares where people sit on Hindu and Buddhist temple steps selling little piles of tomatoes or green chilles arranged in checkerboard groups of 8 on a cloth and where all those sleeping dogs we keep hearing about lie, undisturbed in the sun. As you weave through the narrow streets among pint-size people walking and carrying loads on yokes or their backs (things like refrigerators and 3 seater sofas) and steering bicycle rickshaws and motorcycles over potholes and debris and past those sitting vegetable vendors and the sleeping dogs, more tiny people gaze down from overhanging balconies of crumbling carved wood which pucker out above the scene, and stand in the low hung doorways in brick fronts of same buildings which bulge, threatening to tumble into rubble as you pass. Perhaps urban renewal ought to be an item for the city council's upcoming agenda, but you loathe to think of the day that such picturesque squalor is razed or even restored,though perhaps the people who live in it day to day wouldn't mind having city water piped to their houses rather than having to go to public spigots to wash clothes, wash themselves, and fetch water home to drink. In old Kathmandu, life does go on much as it must have done in Europe in the Middle Ages, but only with scooter exhaust added to the dust and the smoke of cooking fires and of fires laid by homeless beggar boys to keep warm as they sleep in the streets without enough clothes on.

Goods and services that are of dubious legality

In the clean (you realize once you've walked through the less gentrified areas of old Kathmandu) winding roads of Thamel, which is the new tourist center since the decline of the opium and hashish market area near Durbar (Palace) Square called, after its hippie denizens of the '60's and '70's, Freak Street, you must make a studied effort to look up and notice the beautiful antiquity of the buildings which on street level are covered by claptrap, trinkets, and stuff for sale to tourists by friendly English-speaking locals who always say, "Just have a look." Walking through the area, you can buy any of those things--tee-shirts (that say "My friend went to Kathmandu and all I got was this !@#$ tee-shirt"), billed caps with the eyes of Buddha sewn on them, pied Mad-Hatter hats, Nepalese jewelry made in India, sweat shop carpets (some Tibetan or Nepalese and some Kashmiri or even Afghani)--as well as goods and services that are of dubious legality. The stamp of the hippie era has not faded where the tourists stay but been etched in commercialism. page two

travel writing
kuwait
abu dhabi
family photo album
home
ŠJanice Adams