Nepal

Crossing the border from India into Nepal at the town of Sunauli, we spent one night in a nice enough little place called The Old Cottage – it wasn’t a particularly old place and it sure as hell wasn’t a cottage, so we’re not quite sure where the name came from but the blokes that ran it were very helpful and friendly. The following morning we set out on our bus journey north east through Nepal up to the capital city of Kathmandu.

Nepal obviously being a country with one or two mountains, it came as no surprise to find our journey would be a fairly slow going 9 hour journey across mountain roads. Thankfully, the road was a considerably more civilised mountain road than anything had been in India with the majority of the way actually a tarmac road. We never really went over about 1600 metres altitude so the scenery was lush and green all the way with plenty of rickety quaint little villages scattered along the hillsides – very picturesque.

Our original plan for coming through Nepal was to do some trekking, hopefully the 18-21 day Annapurna circuit. Though we had made a bit of a cock up with the time of year we arrived here as it was now monsoon season, meaning it was really hot, humid, wet and a lot of low lying cloud obscuring the views. So we decided to change our plans a little, now only intending to spend 2 weeks in Nepal just to get an initial feel for the place and then head off into neighbouring Tibet.

So after the obligatory first night in a new city staying in a dump, we moved ourselves round to a really nice place called ‘Hotel Ganesh Himal’, just round the corner from the main Kathmandu tourist district of Thamel. A comfortable hotel with a nice garden area to relax in was a welcome change, particularly after visiting Varanasi in India - the filthiest place known to man, and picking up a somewhat inevitable virus. Thamel is a major tourist haunt, equal to the likes of Koh San Road in Bangkok, every building is either a restaurant, bar, souvenir shop, travel agency or hotel, and even considering we were here out of season western tourists were all over the place.

Whilst Paul spent the next few days recovering from whatever virus he had picked up in Varanasi, I took to the streets and looked up the local attractions in and around Kathmandu. Starting in the old town, which is dominated by Durbar (Palace) Square, which was built around the 17th century although many of the buildings around the square date back much further - one of the key reasons why Kathmandu is known as a living museum.

The area comprises a number of individual small squares and temples, which historically was where the Kings lived and were crowned. No royalty now remains, though instead they have a real life goddess known as ‘Kumari’ that lives in one of the buildings called the Kumari Bahal. A girl of between 4 years old and puberty is chosen to be a Kumari after passing many tests: she must have 32 strict physical characteristics; she must be from a family of gold or silversmiths; she must not be scared when put in a dark room with men dressed up as demons shouting noises and wearing gruesome masks and she must be able to select personal belongings as her own from prior Kumari’s which if she were the reincarnation of Durga, she would recognise as her own. The reign ends when she has her first period but her family collect a sizable dowry for all her hard work.

There used to be a number of smaller towns surrounding Kathmandu but now the city has grown so much it encompasses them all. Just 20 minutes walk from Durbar Square is Swayambhunath Stupa, which literally means ‘ self arisen’ and is derived from a time when the Kathmandu valley was once under a lake & it is said that the Stupa arose from the water. Thought to date back to the 5th century, the complex comprises a number of small temples and a museum, though is dominated by the huge white Stupa with a gold gilded spire & the eyes of Buddha staring out over the valley. Around the Stupa are prayer wheels and as with every Buddhist temple, pilgrims or devotees will turn each of the wheels (all containing the mantra ‘om mani padme hum’ which means something like ‘hail to the jewel in the lotus’), whilst walking around in a clockwise direction. This mantra is present in every prayer wheel in every Buddhist Monastery or hand held prayer wheel and by spinning the wheel you are in effect saying the mantra over and over. Swayambhunath is apparently a great place to visit for views over the whole valley which if it had not been drizzling and overcast, it may have been!

Once Paul was feeling a little better, we headed over to one of the most important cultural sites around Kathmandu; Bodhnath, dating back to the 6th century albeit the Stupa was rebuilt during the 14th century. Tibetan Buddhism is practised here and all around the great white Stupa are lanes with small businesses producing all manner of paraphernalia required for Buddhist life; butter lamps, singing bowls, drums, robes as well as many tourist trinket shops. Many of the Tibetan refugees have fled to Nepal as well as Northern areas of India since 1959, after the Chinese invasion of Tibet.

We then set the wheels in motion to get through all the necessary red tape to make our trip into Tibet happen. With no independent travel being permitted in Tibet we had to rely on a tour agency to plan & book everything for us – all for the princely sum of roughly double the price of what we could’ve booked it for ourselves had we been allowed to do so...

While we waited for it all to be organised we decide to head to Pokhara and spend the week there instead of Kathmandu. 10 hours on the bus later of travelling through beautiful lush green mountain scenery we arrive at the lovely little lakeside town of Pokhara, another popular tourist destination used predominantly as a gateway town for people starting treks out into the mountains. In 40+ degrees & with daily monsoon rains we weren’t up for any of that, opting instead to hire a little moto-scooter for a few days to explore the countryside with considerably less physical exertion.

Our most active day in Pokhara involved being rowed across the lake & then hiking up the hill to the Japanese Peace Pagoda. Lots of sweating and plenty of good views later we made our way down through the forest, past the paddy fields & back into town for another lakeside meal.

After the heaviest day of rain yet from this year’s monsoon, we got back on the bus & returned to Kathmandu. Our journey was delayed several hours while we waited for the mountain roads to be cleared in several places where they had been blocked by landslides, triggered as a result of the heavy rains (28cms in about 15 hours).

We spent another couple of days getting all the finalities sorted with our various visa & permits we need for Tibet, mainland China & re-entry into India before hooking up with the rest of our tour group & headed north through Nepal up to the Tibetan/Chinese border.

It was really disappointing that we got the season wrong with Nepal, we had really been looking forward to this section of the trip and the trekking options we had hoped to do. Having said that, it was a good initial taste of the country and has confirmed to us that it’s definitely worth returning in the future to have another go - when the weather is a little more favourable of course!