Narayanhiti Royal Palace

So despite everyone thinking I’m always on holiday, we had only taken 5 days off work the entire year so was very happy when November came round and we could jet off for another trip of doom - this time Nepal.

So the flight there came with the usual problem of not being able to sleep. Though I’m now starting to spot a pattern with this in that the hostesses just basically wake you up for a meal at the time you’ve just dropped off, then you get a bit sleepy and nod off again only for them to come and get rubbish, then nod off again and then someone whacks out a tea and coffee trolley, and then once again to come and pick it up - do that twice on each flight by which point you are like well I’m not fucking sleeping then am I?

The solution - serve tea and coffee with the meal and that’s 4 less wake ups and me and Rose would have probably been a lot less grumpy when we finally arrived to Kathmandu, which by the way looked like a proper toy town from the air, almost as if it were built from lego... Or maybe just me.

Straight out the airport, no ATM... great - luckily had some dollars we could use and got some non official dodgy taxi who was at least cheap - though spotted quite quickly that they gave us the cheap price as they were interested in selling as many tours as physically possible - of which they had quite a bit of time to do so as the traffic was absolutely mental. As was the dust and as was the million electrical cables hanging off pylons which was another level to anything I had ever seen before.

Unfortunately, due to the million flight wake up calls, and Rose fainting last time I charged out the blocks after no sleep, we decided to have a little nap in the afternoon before we headed out for a little explore of Kathmandu Old Town. Probably good that we did so as we headed into what was essentially rush hour in Asan Chole, the market area which was the epicentre of all the chaos where you couldn’t literally move in amongst the hundreds of people, and scooters and people on scooters.

Which brings me to my first main gripe about Kathmandu... Scooters - shitloads of them and due to quantity of them, they wouldn’t actually move any faster than pedestrians - rather just clog up the dusty paths honking like their lives dependend on it. If you weren’t initiated to travelling then going somewhere like this certainly threw you in at the deep end.

So after walking probably a very small distance in a couple of hours we headed back to the hostel where some arse decided to bless me by rubbing a red Bhindi on my head which I then tried to rub off only to give myself a massive red forehead looking like a right plonker as we went out to eat in a nice Indian restaurant in the evening.

After that I wanted a beer, Rose wanted more sleep so I had a little sulk but got over that pretty quickly and I myself was asleep again pretty soon.

In the morning was back to my usual routine of finding a flat white with score above 4.7, which was actually easier than I thought. After consulting Google, I convinced Rose to go to a place on the basis that it had fancy decorated coffee so it must be good. When the coffee arrived it was a massive splat which they also spilt upon giving us so not off to a great start but the guy; and actually everyone that we had met so far in Nepal was super friendly and I also got my first taste of momos which were decent too.

After that we took a walking, or rather a battle tour in amongst the Kathmandu old town, where we saw some Tibetan stupas, some scooters and people and dust and finally to the main Durbur Square which was the main attraction that had been heavily damaged by the 2015 earthquake but still had some amazing temples and luckily the palace was now open for business. Took a walk round there where spotted some Hindu dudes with all the fancy face paint and stuff so was like wanna get a picture of that so walked up to them and this other guy sticks his hand out so I gave him a small bit of change, sit in between the Hindu dudes (sadhus/holy men), get my photograph taken and then they start asking for money. I was then like hang on mate I just gave this guy 50 rupees I’m not paying again, but then Rose made me quickly realise I’d just given money to a random beggar and he wasn’t some random photo tout (not their PR agent)! Whacked out another 50 rupee note and then those guys were like but you just gave the beggar that and we want more - dammit! Only had big notes after that which nooooo not having that so scraped another 20 and left with the Hindu guys thoroughly pissed off - nevermind!

After that visited the Royal palace, which had only just reopened after the earthquake and was quite eye opening, and the rest of Durbur square which had a load of cool temples and a fuck ton of pidgeons.... Pidgeons that would also coo the entire night and keep you awake and be bloody annoying by the end... I may as well throw in my other gripes of Kathmandu in this section too - We went to ‘Freak Street’ but there wasn’t any freaks, there was a very low quantity of slappy dogs (actually not sure if this is a bad thing) and the south side walking tour that we did after Durbur Square was pretty meh.

We then also got a taxi ride which I was convinced we got ripped off with but was too new in the city to really know up to Monkey Temple, which was pretty cool and had great views over the Kathmandu valley and a Tibetan stupa at the top. Unfortunately we chose to go on a Saturday which was their holiday day so the place was absolutely rammed but ahh well.

As we didn’t hang around too long, the taxi driver rectified some of his points by offering to take us to another place ‘Three
Buddhas’ free of charge. This was something I wasn’t even aware existed so alright with this one!

The rip off, but now slightly ok taxi driver then dropped us off to our final destination: The ‘Garden Of Dreams’. This was supposed to be a ‘sea of tranquility’ in amongst the chaos of the city, but that was probably because no one would want to pay an excessive fee for a shit garden.

Actually it was ok... but very small and as we started our little scoot round, this old guy comes up and asks us for an interview. Rose agreed and then we had to answer questions about why we were in Nepal and what we want to do with our lives. Gave him some schpiel (not sure how you spell that) and then he gave us the usual crap of now needing some money to print the story. Do one.

Unfortunately, when we said our story of not having any change and needing an ATM (not within the grounds) he was more than happy to be like yeh alright then I’ll wait, knowing that there was absolutely nothing to do. Probably rubbing his hands, we then asked how long he would be around for and he said another half an hour, so we then had to kill that time walking round what was the same size as a small street. The old guy eventually went so mission success!

Following that Rose bought a new rucksack to replace her chode bag for the trek, claiming it was now her ‘new favourite’ :( Not so pleased with this, but knew it would save a great deal of aching and be much more confortable for the trekking we had lined up.

Night 2 and I did get my way with going for a beer, spending a fortune (£7.20) on a local one which turned out to be from Colorado. Thanks for that. Pretty sure I could find a LOT of things we could have done in Nepal for that cash but that’s me turning into a pretentious hipster twat. We also met some Australian girl who told us a bit about the Annapurna circuit trek we were going to be doing and then we went for some Israeli food which had an amazing Espresso Martini cocktail and some guy with a cartoon head floppy fringe.

After a shit, pidgeon coo infested nights sleep it was then my birthday! We had thought about taking a bus ride to Pokhara that day but decided to actually do some more fun things that day so hired a driver (who again I thought was stupidly expensive, but wore an England football shirt so also gained some points back) to take us around a few of the sites around the Kathmandu Valley.

First stop was Boudanath, where you were supposed to go for sunrise to hear the chanting of the monks but the taxi driver was even less keen than us to get up at that time so went for a respectable 7am and then sat in Kathmandu traffic for an hour or so to visit another more bigger, more super Tibetan temple, which also had a decent flat white close by so everyone was a winner. Was also significantly quieter than the monkey temple, though still about a million pidgeons.

After that next stop was Pushpatinath - a very important holy Hindu site where you can’t visit most of the sites but they still charge you the hefty entrance fee anyway... though I guess it was still less than my craft beer. The main things to see around this area were some temples, and then oddly enough they had a crematorium, where people would go only a couple of hours after their death to be blessed by the river and then taken to a fully visible crematorium point where the son of the family had to burn their parents body.

Was a very surreal place to be, and even more surreal was tourists taking pictures of essentially a funeral, which was totally disrespectful and yeh completely uncalled for. Needless to say I put my camera away and wasn’t too keen on getting close to the ‘action’ anyway but you did have to walk through the area to get to the main Golden Temple area which again you couldn’t get in anyway so the upshot of that section was walking through a few funerals with bereaving family members - yay!

Once we were finished with Pushpatinath, we then took a trip to Patan, another place close to Kathmandu with old temples and pidgeons. This place had also had quite a few buildings damaged in the 2015 earthquake but otherwise had stayed completely untouched for hundreds of years so was quite a cool place to spend a few hours.

We went to the main palace where some guy photobombed us, and a few people spat and then to a cool small golden temple where some dudes told me off for something I wasn’t really aware of before getting England man to drive us to the permit office to pick up necessary documentation to go to Annapurna.

The early evening was then spent stocking up on trekking snacks where Rose thought I bought FAR too many Oreos but there is no such thing before then going to a fancy pants meal for my birthday.

Unfortunately we hadn’t quite realised how fancy pants the restaurant was so only half dressed up for the occasion and when we arrived there was a massive wall of fame of all these royal families eating there. Guess we can add ourselves to that list now!

We first had the drama of the shittest taxi driver ever who got lost about 50 times trying to find the place, even when he had a mate live reading google maps, with the blue dot on it and me telling them to take the correct turnings... they just decided to ignore the correct advice and do their own thing which then meant half an hour of driving in a loop before they finally listened to me and turned back and made the right choices in life!

Once there we blasted out a 7 course dinner which was pretty epic. As part of the meal we were told to make food offering to the gods via a plate in the middle of the table so I donated a couple of beans cause I wanted to eat the rest. Rose however had donated quite a bit more to her god and I felt a little bad so I got some of these petally things to dress it up a bit but then the waitress told me off again as ‘you don’t give that to the god’ - sorry mate!

The dinner was then rounded off with someone else’s birthday cake as Rose hadn’t had chance to tell them it was mine and then we had a browse round the hotel we could never in a million years afford to stay in - looked pretty nice though!

That nearly bought an end to our stay in Kathmandu but first there was time for Rose to fall down a drain in the morning preceding our bus to do our pre planned trek of doom...

It was on the way to the bus station, that wasn’t really a bus station, but a street we were told to wait for our bus on which when we arrived was a street which had a few buses on but not our bus kind of usual shit, but Rose was trying to navigate and we were having a little discussion about which was the best route to take to the non bus station bus station.

At this point she stopped and I thought she had noticed the quite large hole in the road, but as she had rather a lot of luggage clearly hadn’t and next thing I knew she was down waist deep, which in hindsight we can both (I think) laugh at but at the time was pretty serious and Rose badly banged her knee and I was seriously worried that the months of planning we had put in to doing this trek had literally gone down the drain!

Fortunately after the six hour which turned into 9 hour bus ride things had calmed down a bit and we were then ready to commence with the next part of our trip.......Read more