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Published: April 2nd 2008
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The owner of the hotel in Pokhara woke us at 6am in order to get us downstairs in time for a swift coffee before heading off to the bus station. It isn't far, maybe a fifteen minute walk, but the owner offered to drop us off in his clapped-out old car which, considering the weight of our packs, was a real relief. We were still surprised to have made it there without breaking down though. I slammed the door on the way out and the handle came loose in my hand.
The bus was a large, comfortable but ageing dinosaur from the 1980s. If one of these had taken me on the school run aged twelve it'd have been the lap of luxury with its real fabric curtains and tinted windows. As it happened, the curtains flapped in my face in an irritating manner and the tinted windows prevented any extensive photography, at least until I'd worked out how to slide the thing fully open. The countryside in Nepal defies belief... it's like taking the most picturesque parts of Wales, photoshopping the colours and contrasts and expanding everything by 500%. Immense mountains and hills, coated in deep green forests, foaming
waterfalls and bare grey rock, climb up so steeply from the side of the bus it's almost impossible to get your head at the right angle to see right up. On the other side, toe-curlingly deep ravines, decorated with the remains of recent rock falls and landslides (and the occasional burnt-out vehicle) lead to blue lagoons, churning rapids and, on occasion, dark rocky chasms in the earth so deep that you have no hope of seeing the bottom, and just looking inside makes your stomach turn backflips.
This extreme terrain is interspersed, often on terraced plateaus, with small stretches of farmland. Men clad in shorts drive ploughs by oxen, and women in saris squat on their haunches in ankle-deep mud like brightly coloured frogs, hacking at rice plants with their sickles. Kids play in the dirt, often breaking off their game to run alongside the bus, waving and shouting. Subtropical forest collides spectacularly with mountainous rock formations and vice versa, almost indefinitely. The weather was hot, dry and relentless. We settle in for the long haul and read books. Polling stations float by in a haze of loudspeaker announcements and red flags. At one point, in the hills, two
buses obviously comandeered by Maoists block the road ahead. We fear another blockade but our driver guides us safely through. He isn't all good though, this driver, and we get used to the sound of our tyres crunching the gravel at the side of the road's tarmac surface. Only inches away, with no crash barriers, are sheer drops into dark valleys. I bury myself in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and try not to think about it.
At around 3pm, Kathmandu itself came into view. It's situated on a plateau, a bit like Pokhara, but on a much larger scale. Mountains surround the immense platform like looming, shadowy security guards, and in the centre we see high rise buildings surrounded by seemingly endless suburbia and slums. Airliners are climbing steeply above the city, scrabbling for height in the thin air to clear the peaks all around. It's like an enormous bowl of dust, and we descend into it. No sooner have we hit the outskirts than we grind to a halt in traffic. We assume it might be another blockade, or something to do with the Tibetan protests (Kathmandu is a hotbed of political trouble at the moment), but
it doesn't matter. We're now close enough that, if we had to, we could rickshaw to the town centre or even directly to the airport to wait for tomorrow's flight. I ignore the doom and gloom spouted by an ageing, miserable Scot sitting nearby, who tells the entire coach, repeatedly, what a shithole the country is and how it's run by idiots. His pretty young Nepali wife sits behind him with their son, vomiting into a crisp packet and ignoring the man's constant whingeing. We christen him Begbie, after the poisonous Scot from the film Trainspotting.
Eventually we move into Kathmandu centre and I've never seen so many riot police. They stand on street corners, ride in pick up trucks or buses, cruise past in enormous white armoured personnel carriers and simply ooze an atmosphere of control. Which is precisely the point, I guess.
At our bus stop (just a random piece of pavement in the middle of town, it seemed) we were unceremoniously dumped. Cabbies closed in like flies and, in all the commotion, one clues on to the fact we're English and starts shouting 'Lovely jubbley, Del boy...' More out of morbid curiosity as to how
much of the Only Fools 'N' Horses script he knew (not much) we jumped in his car and were whisked to a cheap, but pleasant, hotel. Our room was reasonably priced and came with hot shower, TV and a population of pigeons who lived behind the bathroom window. Maya or I might be enjoying a hot shower at any time of day or night, and within thirty seconds of the water coming on there'd be a glinting golden eye at the window, along with a loud and apparently amorous cacophony of cooing which quite put us off. We showered with the light off after that.
After being stung for 200 rupees by a rather cheeky cabbie, we ate a delicious dinner in a restaurant recommended by Lonely Planet, somewhere just off the main bazaar. When the bill came, we thought possibly they may have raised prices since Lonely Planet were last there, as it was the single most expensive meal we'd had since leaving home! Still, it was delicious and well worth it. On the walk back to the hotel we had to pass through the main bazaar of town late at night and with no streetlights (thanks to
load shedding)... and, for the first time in a big Asian city, felt perfectly safe. A group of ominous-looking young men standing in the shadows on a street corner couldn't have been more helpful when it transpired we'd got lost, and just as in Chitwan or Pokhara, many people smiled as we passed. Kathmandu had the musty, dusty smell and feel of Delhi or Varanasi, but without the uncomfortable confrontations or the ceaseless smell of human faeces. Kathmandu was relatively clean, very friendly and we couldn't wait to get out the next day to explore properly.
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Lix
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NOT UP TO DATE!! *STAMPS FEET*
But good to finally read!! Always enjoyable! Looking forward to next installment; I think we all are... AND PICTURES!! :-) hehehe