Meet the sadhus

A couple of sadhus (holy men) at Pashupatinath.
Note the water bottles and radio, guess they have to do something between tourist photo shoots.

Preparing the oil lamps for offerings at Annapurna Temple, Ason Tole, Kathmandu

Deja vu

 I had to change my plans to include the Sichuan area of China on this trip due to visa issues. A long story, let’s just say it doesn’t pay to be too honest when dealing with Chinese authorities.

The good news is Chinese visas and Tibetan permits are easily acquired in Nepal so I will not be an entering as an illegal.

A fourteen hour flight sounded short after the long hauls to Europe and the Middle East last year, but due to various family commitments I was dropped off at the airport at 10.30pm on Wednesday for my 7.40am flight on Thursday.
Hanging out in airports is something I have become accustomed to over the years, so I settled in with a good book and a coffee with about a dozen other all-nighters. Unfortunately I didn’t bank on the flight being delayed and had to hang on until 9am.

Followed by a few hours hanging out at Hong Kong airport, I finally made it to Kathmandu just a bit tired and hung over.

I was last in Nepal 26 years ago so this trip is going to have a lot of déjà vu – if I can recognize any of it. Tourism opened in Nepal in the 1970’s so in 1985 it was still very much a hippie haunt and very un-westernised.

Kathmandu International Airport is definitely not a bit like I remember it. In 1985 it was a single story, four-roomed timber building with marquees out the front for waiting, aka departure lounges. There were no baggage carousels, bags were thrown into trailers towed by little tractors that parked beside the terminal at an open window and the baggage handlers hurled the bags through the window onto big wooden tables. We walked several hundred metres down the tarmac to disembark and board our flights.
In 2011 they have buses to transport passengers on disembarkation and boarding and the terminal is a three-story brick building of many hundred rooms, not a lot of bright lights but considerably more high-tech than the old one and they have a baggage carousel (although it probably dates back to the 1990’s.)

The cabs are still old and battered, very like the petite taxis in Morocco and the roads are still atrocious, worse than Cairo.

My cab driver unwittingly gave me the first dose of déjà vu when he took a short cut to the hotel and turned into a series of narrow and dark, deserted laneways.
In 1985, my travel companion Helen and I took a 2.30am cab to Nagarkot to see the sunrise over the Himalayas. This was our first OS trip, we were young and nervous, and when the cabbie took all the dark, back lanes he could find and then announced he was lost, we were seriously worried we were going to lose a kidney, or worse.
We didn’t and I made it to the hotel in one piece.
The sunrise was a fizzer in 1985, so hopefully it will be better when I visit there on my return from Tibet.

Past experience has also taught me it is prudent to tip hotel staff if you want good service during your stay. The porter who carried my bags up three flights of stairs insisted on turning on all the lights and the pedestal fan (no air con) after I tipped him 100rs. The fan refused to work so he went off and returned in five minutes to move me to a new room. Up another flight of stairs but thankfully the fan worked although I am a little concerned about the way it has been ‘hot wired’ into the power point.


On Saturday I will be visiting the spiritual sights of Kathmandu and on Sunday I'm taking a cooking class - learning to make the traditional Nepali Dahl Baat (lentil soup) and momos (Tibetan dumplings).