Kathmandu

My first item of business in Kathmandu this morning was to find the company that I arranged my trek to Everest Base Camp with and to let them know that I had arrived in Nepal. Several months ago, when I planned my trip for this summer, I found a trekking company in Nepal that was recommended in my Lonely Planet guide book. I began a correspondance via e-mail with a man named Suresh who worked for the company, Royal Mount Trekking. After only a few weeks had an entire fourteen-day Everest Base Camp trek organized and paid for, complete with a round-trip flight to the airport nearest to Everest as well as a guide to lead me and either a porter or a yak to carry my bag.

I found out pretty quick today that Royal Mount Trekking is a one-man show, and that one man is my pen pal Suresh. I located the office of the company on a busy city street in Kathmandu and followed a sign that guided me up a steep, concrete flight of steps in a narrow opening between two buildings. The office is being remodeled and they have yet to build a walkway to bridge the six-foot gap between the concrete stairway and the entrance to the building. Leave it to resourceful Nepali construction workers, though, to create a temporary solution out of a few loose two-by-fours. I walked softly across the shaky contraption, hanging on to whatever I could on either end, and fortunately I'm still around to tell about it and am even writing this in my hotel room and not in a hospital. Suresh and I didn't have a whole lot to talk about. In a nutshell I'm going to rent a sleeping bag and a down jacket, slap on my pair of hiking shoes, and just go for it. I've read that a lot of people do the Base Camp trek without any guide or porter at all, so I should be alright, despite the less-than-professional appearance of the Royal Mount Trekking operation.

I faced a sightseeing dillema when I finally headed into the city this afternoon. In 2007 I saw most of the major sights near downtown Kathmandu. Today I was planning on taking a taxi out to some of the far-flung temples and stupas in the Kathmandu Valley. Unfortunately, though, the Nepali cab drivers are on strike to protest the rising gasoline prices, and visiting the remote sights in the valley was unrealistic. Despite the fact that I was tired and irritable from waking up early this morning to catch my flight out of Bhutan, I decided to walk through the rain and filthy Kathmandu streets anyway to visit the nearby Durbar Square; which I had already seen in 2007. The experience tested my patience a little bit, but every day I feel like I should do at least one thing worthwhile, and the visit to Durbar Square turned out to be a pretty good option considering the circumstances.
Dealing with a few shady street characters is inevitable while walking through Kathmandu and I encountered plenty of them during my journey to Durbar Square this afternoon. The guys wandering the streets are more of an annoyance than anything, and they definitely aren't dangerous or violent, but let's just say that I've been offered enough marijuana in Kathmandu to throw Woodstock ten times over. Today I was approached by one individual who started by buttering me up for the sales pitch. “Where you from?”, he said. “How long you in Nepal?”, “What trek you go on?”. Finally he leaned in closer and spoke in a subdued tone as if he were letting me in on an incredible secret...

“Do you know know that in Nepal you can get very good hash?”

... “Yes, I do know that, but I don't smoke hash.” I even went so far as to tell the guy that I had never smoked hash or anything at all for that matter. That turned out to be just the right thing to say, as the guy looked at me like I was from another planet and then walked in the other direction.

Durbar Square is the center of old-town Kathmandu and is filled with centuries-old Newari archtecture. The buildings of Durbar Square are icons of Nepal and the traditional tiered roofs with intricately carved wooden supports are instantly recognizable throughout the country. When I visited the square in 2007, I spent only a few minutes wandering through and really didn't get a great feel for the place. The strike by the taxi drivers today was the perfect opportunity to get to know it a little better.

I usually am vehemently opposed to hiring local guides in less-developed countries, as many of them are just glorified beggers looking for a quick dollar and it's impossible to know if the information they are giving you is accurate or if it is a complete fabrication. Today though, I went ahead and hired a guide and even paid him well by Nepal standards since I was too tired to really haggle with him. My Indian guide, named Rama, gave me some pretty interesting information and I think that it may have even been legitimate. I had one question in particular that I absolutely had to ask him. Several months ago I showed my pictures from my 2007 trip to a friend of mine. She pointed out a picture of a large, colorful Hindu statue and asked what the skulls that the figure was wearing represented. I had no idea and figured I would never know since it would likely be years until I would get back to Nepal again. Today I stood in front of the same statue in Durbar Square and asked Rama, “Hey, what do those skulls mean?” Rama said that the statue was a depiction of the Hindu god Shiva. Shiva takes on many forms, but the two main forms are his creative side and his destructive side. This particular statue represented the destructive side of Shiva, and the skulls represent death.
I passed by some Hindu sadhus at Durbar Square. Sadhus are essentially Hindu monks; men who devote themselves to religion and rely entirely on contributions for daily support. In Kathmandu there are probably more fake sadhus than real ones, as many of them dress up and hang around at popular sights around the city to make a little money from tourists. The sadhus I met today were obviously fake, and probably would have looked more appropriate at a Six Flags theme park than in Nepal, but I decided to pay them off and get a few pictures anyway.
Towards the end of my tour Rama dragged me into a thangka painting shop and a restaurant, for which I'm sure he got paid a couple of kick-backs, but the restaurant actually had some incredible views of Durbar Square. When all was said and done I got an earful of questionable information and gave Rama some encouragement to hassle future visitors for money. With that said, I only paid the guy seven bucks for an hour-long tour, and with that I got the views from the restaurant, the explanation of the skulls, and someone to snap a picture of me with fake sadhus. For a rainy day that could easily have been blown just waiting around for my Base Camp trek, I'd say that things turned out pretty well.