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Published: December 5th 2009
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The trip from Delhi to Kathmandu began with another rude awakening, this time at the ungodly hour of 4.30am. We tumbled out of bed and into an auto rickshaw for the 40 or so minute journey. It was a bit chilly so we thought to ask the driver to turn the heater up…but then we realized that rickshaws don’t have heaters…they also don’t have walls or windows either, but oh well, nothing like a 60km/h headwind to wake you up in the morning.
The departures terminal of Delhi airport is pretty decent, it has foot massaging machines and free wifi (if you have an Indian mobile).We grabbed some Subway for breakfast, and apparently fast food chains around the world intentionally hire the dumbest and least motivated people they can find because they guy who served us was an oxygen thief. To go with our early morning sub we also had a side helping of delayed flight which always seems to happen to us when we have an early flight. In the end an hour and a half later we took off and soon saw the Himalaya’s from our window which was a pretty cool distraction.
So far Nepal has
been to our liking. The streets of Kathmandu are narrow winding roads with tall buildings. There are a lot less people than India (duh) which means a lot less traffic, honking, cows and possibly best of all a lack of men peeing everywhere (although it has been replaced by people spitting after spending 30 minutes hocking up gobs of phlegm and internal organs). Our hotel is in a good location, it’s about 10 minutes walk from everywhere but it’s in a side street so it’s nice and relatively quiet. We spent our first afternoon having lunch with a couple of random aussie girls and then went for a walk to Durbar square which looks like a bunch of people had a competition to see how many temples they could fit in a small area. After all the trips we have done and all the temples we have seen we have become pretty blasé about temples etc, it’s pretty easy to say ‘oh yeah just another 2000 year old temple’ but Durbar sq is still an interesting area to walk around.
Day two of Nepal was nightmare day for Bianca. Not only did she have to walk UP HILLS, she
View from our rooftop
Note the white mountain peak in the background also had to walk up hills to the MONKEY temple (cue ‘dun dun daaaaa’ music). Swayambhunath temple is on top of a big hill (baby hill for Nepal) and has Buddhist and Hindu shrines and a large monkey and dog population. From the top there is a great view of the Kathmandu valley and presumably when it’s clear a really good view of the mountains surrounding it. After a couple of hours of Bianca cowering in fear we headed back to hotel for lunch on the balcony before our afternoon adventures.
Part two of day two saw us take a taxi ride to Bodhnath, a Tibetan stupa which is apparently built over a piece of Buddha’s skull. Basically the stupa is in the centre of a circle of shops and restaurants and pilgrims walk around it clockwise spinning prayer wheels. The area had a nice atmosphere and afterwards we went to a rooftop restaurant with a view over the stupa and had expensive fanta’s ($1aud! What an outrage).
This evening we went and saw Thamel for the first time. Thamel is the tourist district and it’s very similar to Kao San Road in Bangkok - think overpriced bars,
restaurants and as many foreigners as locals and neon lights. We ended up giving up trying to find a Nepalese restaurant and just settled for a western kind of restaurant and had decent pizzas. Our meal cost $12.95!! To put that into perspective, in India we could have had 108 pieces of Roti bread or almost 3 whole tandoori chickens!
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peter
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Whatdya Monkeys
Cute monkeys BC; you really should get over your fears of such lovely animals. Thanks for latest photos .... I keep looking for Everest. U Graeme says hi from the farm; just another lovely sunny day here in utopia driving backwards & forwards collecting trucloads of grain and loot.