Kathmandu

captivating and chaotic

By Heather & Pravin

February 19^th, 2018

We arrived in Kathmandu from London via an overnight layover in Mumbai, and shockingly, managed to have quite a decent sleep in the Mumbai airport. The terminal was fairly quiet to begin with at night, but then we found a small area with dimmed lights and extra-long lounge chairs and cushioned benches! This kind of area would be unheard of in a North American airport. We stretched out on a couple of benches, bundled up, and went to sleep until around 6am when it was time to find our gate.

Arriving in Kathmandu was a very different experience! The views from the plane as it began its descent over the mountains into the Kathmandu Valley were phenomenal, but the closer we got to the ground, the hazier the air became. Stepping off the plane was like stepping back into time in terms of technology and efficiency, and it took well over 2 hours to obtain our 90-day visas and claim our bags.

The ride into the city from the airport to our hostel was quite the introduction to Asia. It was only about 7km from Thamel, the tourist district that we were staying in, but traffic was insane and it took almost an hour to navigate the congested streets full of motorbikes, beat-up cars, fume-belching buses, pedestrians, cyclists, cows and dogs.

Kathmandu is a crazy place. The pollution is unbelievably bad, and we quickly followed the example of most locals and bought masks to combat the thick stew of dust, smoke, and engine exhaust that dulls the skies and clogs the airways. There is a large number of stray dogs and cows, and while most appear to be quite friendly, their constant presence in the roadways only serves to make traffic worse on the already-congested streets, and you definitely have to watch your step in the side streets to avoid stepping in poop. Outside of Thamel, the pedestrian-zoned tourist area, the streets are exceptionally narrow and crowded, and you always have to be careful of vehicle traffic - more so at night due to the lack of streetlights and motorists not using headlights.

In recent years, the population of Kathmandu has been growing and growing as more people relocate to the city from rural areas in the hopes of finding better circumstances. However, between 22 governments in 26 years, high levels of corruption, civil war and natural disasters, infrastructure development has absolutely not kept up with the growing population of the Kathmandu Valley and this means that the chaos is increasing. We met many trekkers who had been to Nepal repeatedly over the years, and all of them mentioned how much crazier and more difficult to navigate Kathmandu has become in recent memory.

That being said, for all of its flaws, Kathmandu is a captivating place to which I absolutely can't wait to come back. The people are incredibly good-natured and friendly, and the city is so steeped in history and religion that you can scarcely walk a block without passing a Hindu or Buddhist temple or shrine.

We spent a morning exploring the famous Durbar Square, and although there are still many majestic structures in place, we found it heart-breaking to see massive piles of rubble from buildings that collapsed in the 2015 earthquake surrounding the square and even within the square itself. We found before-and-after photos of Durbar Square online, and the scale of destruction is sobering.

Infrastructure in Kathmandu (and Nepal in general) is so lacking even now that it's unfathomable to imagine what life would have been like in the months following the earthquake. Nepal's roads are abominable and mostly unpaved, drinking water is highly unsafe (when it is even available), a snarl of makeshift electrical wires is tangled at every intersection, and we saw perhaps two working traffic lights in the whole city.

kathmandu to-do

We had booked 4 nights of accommodation in Kathmandu, and in this time, we had quite a list of things to do before we could begin trekking. The most important one was to find a guide, since one of the treks we had in our sights, the Manaslu Circuit, required us to have a licensed guide. Next, we had to shop for sleeping bags warm enough for the Himalayan winter, as well as some additional warm layers and equipment. And lastly, there is a lot to do and see in Kathmandu as a tourist! This meant that we had a jam-packed few days ahead of us.

We had done a lot of research online in terms of finding a guide, but really we were hoping to get a good recommendation from someone who had just finished a trek. That didn't pan out unfortunately, and we were starting to feel overwhelmed by the hundreds of options available to us. In the end, we with one of the highest-ranked and most frequently-reviewed agencies, and had a good chat with the owner who proposed what we thought was a fairly reasonable fee, and then we were able to get it down a bit lower.

From what we understood, the daily wages for guides are almost always fixed across the board, so really we were just negotiating to lower the (huge) cut that the agency would collect. Our accommodation was included in the price, as were bus tickets to the trailhead and all the required trekking, conservation area and restricted area permits.

Once we had our trek sorted out, we went on a bit of a shopping spree. There are endless options for buying gear in Thamel, ranging from dingy, dusty one-man knock-off operations to brightly-lit and well-stocked showrooms carrying (legitimate) international brands. We shopped around a lot, and were happy to look for knock-off or unlabelled gear, as we really only needed it to last a couple of months. Much of the gear is locally-made, even if it claims to be "The North Face", and if you look hard enough, you can find excellent quality gear for very reasonable prices.

We did find that the prices varied enormously - from one store to the next, we might get quoted double the price for an item of almost identical quality. Some shopkeepers were happy to bargain, while others wouldn't even begin to budge. Quite a few people were confused by Pravin at first and thought he might be Nepali (until he spoke, that is), so often with a few laughs and a bit of bantering, he was able to get a deal much closer to the "Nepali price".

After two days and many, many stores, we finally came away with two -10°C down sleeping bags, an additional down jacket for me, gaiters for the snow, a long-sleeve shirt and new trekking pants for me, fleece pants for both of us, snow mitts, batteries, toilet paper, maps, water bottles, hand sanitizer, and most importantly, a large supply of chocolate bars for trail snacks.

Our knock-off/off-brand gear ended up working out perfectly well for us. The sleeping bags were an especially good deal, as they kept us toasty warm for all but one of the 42 nights we spent on the trail! Once we returned to Kathmandu in January after all of our treks were complete, we were able to sell back much of what we didn't need any longer and come away with about $65 of the $180 total we had spent on trekking equipment. Everything else, including some other clothes we no longer needed, was able to be donated to the Porters' Welfare Program at the Kathmandu Environmental Education Project. We didn't make it to the KEEP project office until after our treks, but we would 100% recommend anyone preparing for a trek in Kathmandu to stop by and make use of their excellent resources.

Swayambhunath

There are many sights in the Kathmandu Valley that we didn't have time to make it to this time around, but two of the highlights that we did see are Swayambhunath and Boudhanath. Swayambhunath is also known as the monkey temple, because there is a huge number of monkeys that inhabit the site. They are completely accustomed to humans, and will happily accept food from visitors - or even snatch food, phones or wallets from unsuspecting tourists! Swayambhunath is built on a hill that provides a beautiful view over the city. The focal point of the site is a beautiful golden stupa at the top, surrounded by temples, shrines, statues, monasteries, schools and trees. One of the more interesting things about Nepal was how many historical sites are significant to both Hinduism and Buddhism. A perfect example of this at Swayambhunath was seeing rows of Buddhist prayer wheels surrounding a Hindu shrine to Ganesha!

Boudhanath Stupa

As luck would have it, we ended up saving what would become one of my favourite things in Nepal for our very last day in the country. We set an alarm for well before sunrise on the day that we were flying out of Kathmandu, and hopped in a taxi to take us across the city to Boudhanath Stupa. We wanted to arrive early in the morning while hundreds of locals were doing their daily prayer circumambulations around the stupa, and before tour groups descended on the area. The enormous stupa is circled by monasteries, and the surrounding neighbourhood is populated with many Tibetan refugees.

As soon as we got there, we were kicking ourselves for not having stayed in the area for our last couple of post-trekking nights in Nepal, as the area had much more character than touristic Thamel and we would have loved to also have seen Boudhanath at sunset. We spent quite a bit of time slowly circling the stupa, taking in the incense-scented atmosphere and enjoying the flickering light of the many hundreds of butter-lamps. At some points around the stupa you can enter the inner area, and inside there were many pilgrims from around the world prostrating and chanting mantras.

himalayan trekking

We spent a total of 4 nights in Kathmandu before heading off to the mountains to go trekking, and we also spent 2 nights in Kathmandu after trekking before we had to catch our flight out of the country. While chaotic Kathmandu had us both enchanted and exhausted, trekking in the Himalayan mountains was nothing short of spectacular! Our next post will be on trekking the Manaslu Circuit and the Tsum Valley, and then we'll be following up with a summary of our adventures on the Annapurna Circuit and Annapurna Base Camp treks.