Ancient cities and hilltops

Kathmandu is nothing like I thought it would be. It resembles a modern Indian city pretty closely. It has lots of trash, poor diseased people, touts, urban sprawl, cloudy polution. Everything you can immagine from big Asian cities. However Kathmandu grows on you as the outlying areas and the city itself does have some most amazing things. Kathmandu is a modern conglomeration of several ancient and separate Kingdomes. The unification of Nepal happened in the early 1700's, and before that Nepal, like much of India was a collection of Kingdoms each with claims and rights to specified land. Boundaries were contested and it was not until the early 18th century that a powerful King, though not the king of the Kathmandu kingdom pressed his rights and unified the country relatively peacefully. The immediate Kathmandu area includes the area which was home to at least 3 different such Kingdoms, those of Kathmandu, Patan and Baktapur. Each of these cities has a centraly located ancient city, now called the Darbur square areas. The architecture is absolutely exquisite with massive teples and palace buildings elaborately carved from huge blocks of wood and stone. Now of course these cities have grown with modern times and the traditional tenticles of poverty and sprawl expand from the Darbur square areas into the countryside in all directions. I'll really have to post the pictures for you to get a sense of these areas, but they resemble something that looks so traditionaly asian in style, but the attention to the detail of the carvings of Hindu gods and practices all over these building seems so un-asian. Its and interesting juxtoposition anyway. We spent a day exploring each of the darbur square areas of Kathmandu, Baktapur and Patan. They are strikingly similar, but worth the visit.

A good laugh

To get away from the clogged dirtiness of the Kathmandu area, we have come up to the hill village of Nagarkot about 30km from the center of kathmandu. This place is great. It is a little town known best for its views of the entire Nepali side of the Himalaya range from Everest in the east to the Annapurnas in the west. Clear days reveal the Himalaya in the distance. From here, you look across half of the country mostly a wide valley of rolling green hills, and if it weren't for the mountains which span your entire field of vision, you would see right in to Tibet. We are quite far away from the mountains, but its stunning to see the worlds highest mountain range in the distance, and exploding toward the sky out of the valley. I feel like I've said this a lot in Nepal, but again, the view is like nothing I've ever seen in my life. Its not like seeing the Siera-Nevada or Rockies in the distance. We are high enough at about 8000ft so that the view is really a huge panorama. Its too bad that our cameras do not do a good job of capturing the sight, I suppose you'll just have to try to immagine. Better yet, come to Nepal!!

After the tourists leave

So we hang here until the 1st of December. We fly to Bangkok then to send some things home and hopefuly see Borat. Two days later, we fly to Hanoi to begin traveling in south east easia.

We'll post pictures soon

Amazing architecture

Central Baktapur

Durbar Square Kathmandu

Floating mountains

Guardians

Leafy greens

Nagarkot farms

Patan Durbar Square

Patan Market

Rooftop view

Salesman

Surrounding villages

TAKE MY PHOTO!!

Tourist Ghetto