Kathmandu Hotels
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slowing down
Entry 15 of 20 | show all | print this entry |
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the neighbourhood of thamel is where the vast majority of travelers and backpackers who visit kathmandu stay and consequently spend a lot of their time. it's a very compact area that's a riot of signage, touts, and traffic. my uncle who lived in kathmandu for several years once said to me that he thought thamel was unlike any other backpacker quarter in the world. i obviously have no empirical way to verify that...but thamel has an intensity to it that is unlike anywhere else i've ever been and which is at first intoxicating but soon tiring. the lakeside in pokhara is a sort of miniature version of this with similar appeal and exhaustion. they are both extremely easy places to be with every sort of service imaginable...restaurants, hotels, shops (barbers, massage parlours, bars, clubs, bakeries, travel agents)...all with plentiful english and mostly cheap prices. i've spent the past ten days in these places...and it's all started to become a blur. not an unpleasant one, but i'm very much ready to move on. my ability to do that was somewhat in doubt these past few days as i've been waiting on a travel agent to sort out a ticketing error for a flight to calcutta. it look liked i would be stuck in kathmandu until the 26th but today, at the last minute, he managed to get me the seat on the flight tomorrow afternoon which i'd originally been promised. everyone and their dog will sell you tickets here but, as i learned in pokhara, it's mostly a waste of time. there are somewhere around 65 travel agents in lakeside alone but only a few do anything even approaching usefulness. while in pokhara i tried to buy a plane ticket from one of the more useless travel agents...first he called someone who called the airline to get availability. we waited. his contact called back to say the ticket i wanted was available. i said that i wanted to pay with a credit card. he said this would be no problem and then called another travel agent. we waited. soon a motorcycle pulled up and a man came in. he pulled an old style credit card swipe machine from his bag and proffered it as though it were a holy relic. i was asked for my passport, which i didn't have with me. i ran back to my hotel and returned to the travel agent 10 minutes later. both the motorcycle man and his blessed machine were gone. the travel agent offered me a embarrassed smile. i followed him out to the street where a moped was parked. he motioned toward it and soon we were cruising up the lakeside strip to another travel agent, the home of the motorcycle man. i entered to what seemed to be a scene from an absurdist play about travel agents: the owner of the credit card machine was on three phones at the same time and began processing my request without stopping any of his other conversations. it turned out that in the time since i went to get my passport all the seats had suddenly been taken (if they'd ever really been free to begin with) and, in any case, they wouldn't be able to get the ticket sent from kathmandu to pokhara before i was leaving to go back to kathmandu, leaving me to wonder why i would do anything but arrange it all myself and what possible use anyone might have for businesses with such a distinct lack of anything to offer...and how 65 of them manage to survive in such a concentrated space. the travel agent that i ended up dealing with in kathmandu (since things are designed in such a way as to make dealing with the airlines directly impossible) at least had a computer.
tam and i spent a great deal of our time in pokhara with a woman named emily. she walked into the internet cafe that we were using to make a phone call back home. she's a student from san fransisco and on exchange in nepal for the semester. she'd become quite sick in the last few weeks and had to leave the village she was staying in to come to pokhara to see a doctor. she was feeling better but had become a bit homesick during her convalescence. during the course of her conversation with her mother, which tam and i couldn't help but eavesdrop on, she spoke of the state of her recent health in colourful detail and while she obviously realized that everyone could hear the fairly personal nature of it she didn't really care. there was something attractive about her openness in the presence of strangers and so about half an hour later when we saw her sitting in a fruit juice shop, acknowledging each other in that way that strangers who've run into each other multiple times often do, we went in to say hello. to be honest, if i hadn't been with tam i probably would have kept on walking after the little nod of slight familiarity, but tam's a master at meeting people and so i piggy-backed myself into the conversation. a pattern came to emerge of meals spent with emily while in between we whiled away our time being lazy as she worked on end of term school work in her hotel. in the almost three months since she'd came to nepal emily had become quite fluent in nepali. it was fascinating to watch her interact with the cast of characters that populated the lakeside strip: taxi drivers and drug dealers, homeless men and trinket sellers. even in the short time that she'd been there her language skills meant that everyone knew who she was, a state of affairs that she seemed to both revel in and despise. she seemed impulsive and free; delighting in the discovery that her cheap lighter's built-in flashlight shone a picture of a topless woman (and thereafter lighting up the side of cows and the backs of peoples' jackets with large, fake breasts); hugging our flighty and awkward nepali waiter who had endeared himself to her with his frantic uncomfortableness; torturing herself over how to deal with the sob stories of the many people scraping out a living from tourists. she smoked constantly and brazenly rolled joints full of stiff nepali hash in whatever restaurant we happened to be in. she had strangely frivolous tattoos and the convoluted journal of an aspiring artist. she was both enchanting and strangely frustrating. when we parted ways after dinner on our last night in town neither i, tam, nor emily made any attempt to exchange contact information, which seemed both reasonable and silly at the same time. when i think of pokhara i can't imagine it without her walking up and down the street, a displaced ghost forever haunting lakeside.
on our return to kathmandu tam and i managed to reconnect with the american couple that we'd met in chengdu, greg and elizabeth. they had just finished their own tour through tibet and were in the company of many of the people that had shared their van to nepal. we arrived back in kathmandu on the evening of greg's 30th birthday and were happy to be able to join in the festivities. our time in kathmandu took on a familiar pace with evenings spent eating with friends and days spent exploring the city on our own. for a couple of nights we all chipped in and rented a tv and dvd player. it was comfortably strange to be in a room full of westerners watching hollywood films in what could have been someone's apartment. i've not been homesick at all so far, but i was grateful for the quiet familiarity. tam and i quickly had our fill of thamel and so spent our days exploring kathmandu's sights. we went to both of the important tibetan buddhist stupas, the monolithic white dome of boudhanath and the monkey infested hilltop of swayambunath. i found it interesting how the hindu majority make use of these sites religiously as well, often more robustly and more frequently than the displaced nepali tibetan community. perhaps the sacredness of the locations has a common root accessible to both faiths. we went to the old city of patan and wandered around the palace square, visiting the palace museum, nearby hindu temples, and the small but beautiful buddhist golden temple. the last place that we visited was pashupatinath, the most holy hindu site in nepal. the temple complex is built in a sprawling green space that's wrapped around a river, the centerpiece of which is the burning ghats where all nepali hindus aspire to be cremated and have their ashes poured into the river. i'd had a chance to witness this on a larger scale in india at varanasi and so i was aware that these types of ceremonies are devoid of the kind of privacy that they might require in the west. still, it's strange to be standing around at a public cremation watching a dead body being blessed and prepared for burning while the smoke and ash of other services is drifting through the air. anyone is welcome to watch as long as no photos are taken. in varanasi the cremations go on non-stop all day and all night every day of the year. i don't know if the nepali population is such that a similar pace is required, but it was very busy on the afternoon that we were there.
i leave for india tomorrow and so my time spent traveling with tam is coming to an end. he's going to stay in nepal until the end of the month, spending some time in royal chitwan national park and rafting on one of the rivers north of kathmandu, after which he'll be flying to bangkok. it's been amazing traveling with him and a perfect example of the random fortuitousness that occurs when traveling with an open mind and heart. i'll miss him.
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