Kathmandu Wanderings

I’ve been in Nepal for over a week now, and though I haven’t gotten out of the city yet, I have been vigorously exploring Kathmandu. Business hours here are 10-5 six days a week, though work is frequently interrupted by traffic jams, rain, the electricity going down, and random holidays (like yesterday and this Sunday) so I’ve had lots of time to wander around. It’s amazing what a difference seven days makes—I can’t imagine being able to see anything of interest with only 2-3 days in Kathmandu. I think I’d spend the whole time dazed and lost.

On my third day here, I set out towards central Kathmandu, armed with the maps I ripped out of my Lonely Planet book. I quickly learned a couple of very important things. First, maps do very little good when there are not corresponding road signs. Second, Lonely Planet only covers the tourist areas, which are some of the least pleasant parts of Kathmandu. And third, ditching the map and trying to head in the general direction you are trying to go (by thinking that if you go down a road then turn right then turn left you’ll get to the correct neighborhood) only works if the roads are sort of straight lines. In Kathmandu, there are no straight roads and it’s hard to tell what’s a road, what’s an alley and what’s a driveway. Someone told me that the infrastructure of the city has basically stood completely still for the last 15 years during the Maoist conflict. So now, there are tons and tons more people and more vehicles than before and the infrastructure has not caught up. “The population keeps increasing but the width of the road is constant.” I guess that’s kind of obvious looking around, but in my first days here it helped me understand why the city seems so poorly laid out and poorly maintained. City planning and public health are just starting to pop up but they’re fighting an uphill battle because the city has already developed without their input. How do you plan roads when everywhere there is not already a road, there are buildings? How do you do construction on a road when there is nowhere to divert traffic? 

Answer: Do construction with the road open! This week they are painting lanes.
By hand (with this little push paint thing). While cars drive on it. 

Kathmandu traffic light

One of the more organized roads in town, medians are not the norm

Anyways, my goal that first day was to try to find some of the tourist spots, like Thamel, but mostly I was just wandering. I, of course, got hopelessly lost but eventually found my way back to a main road and back home. When I got home, my "family" asked where I walked and when I could not tell them, Gita decided I needed to be shown around town the next day. We took a tempo (or tuk-tuk) to Durbar Square, where there are a bunch of temples and the living goddess and things. She was basically just trying to help me get my bearings, so we cruised through pretty quickly. I’ll go back on my own sometime and be a picture-taking tourist for a bit. Then we walked up to Thamel, which is a complete and utter nightmare. The majority of the Kathmandu section of Lonely Planet is about Thamel and Durbar Square—a huge bummer because there are so many other interesting places in the city. Coming to Kathmandu and just seeing those spots would be kind of like going to Denver just to visit those Wild West Shops on 16^th Street Mall.

At some point we walked around the New Street area, the local’s version of Thamel. They refer to it as a “mall” but it’s actually a bunch of people selling things off tarps in the street. In Thamel, you can get pray flags, books, DVDs, knock-off mountaineering gear, a pashmina and a pizza. Around New Street, you can get clothing, cell phone parts, all varieties of veggies, personal grooming items and a box full of baby chicks!

Thamel shopping

New St area shopping

After Thamel, we walked to Swayambhunath. I think most people have seen pictures of Swayambhunath (aka “the monkey temple”) at some point, it’s a gigantic Buddhist temple on the top of a hill overlooking Kathmandu with a ton of prayer flags all over the place. Pictures do not do it justice. Other than the annoying staircase up, loaded with people trying to sell you things and monkeys trying to steal food from unsuspecting tourists, it is an amazing place. I very much want to go back and spend a whole day up there. Behind Swayambhuanth, you can walk to some other temples, and then down a back way past a really cool Buddhist monument and then back to Ring Road, where we caught a bus home.

Swayambhunath

Makes me want a backyard just to have a prayer flag tree

After Gita took me around, I also had the advantage of driving all the way across town with my boss, Jeevan, for a meeting. He kept pointing out interesting things that you will never ever read about in a travel book and now I have a whole list of fun things to do here in the upcoming months. I feel no hurry to do everything at once, since I have plenty of time, so I’ve just been walking around by myself with no destination in mind these last few days. I’m much more competent at getting myself around town (by foot at least, public transportation is another story for another day) and I’ve ditched the worthless Lonely Planet book except to look up how to spell places. I understand better now why Asian tourists at MIT take pictures of the squirrels. I feel like that every day when I see a group of cows walking in the road, or a bicycle loaded down with more things than I can fit in my Subaru, or construction workers in flip flops carrying bricks in a basket hanging from their heads. I’ll get used to all the sights around me (I’ve already started to get used to the noises) and until then I am comforted by the fact that everyone else is as unaccustomed to me as I am to them. The only places I’ve seen other white people are Thamel and Swayambhunath. I get lots of stares, adults mostly ignore me and school children love to practice their English on me. The two little kids in a house across the road from me constantly yell “Hello! Good morning!” at my balcony (even in the evening). And at least once a day, a group of teenage boys walking home in their uniforms announces, “Hello, we love you!” as I pass by.