Hello all you out there half a world away. I will post comments first and then add pictures.
Overall we are really enjoying ourselves. Even if this is a very idiosyncratic vacation that requires negotiating power outages, garbage in the streets, and tailor strikes.
Our hotel is very clean and safe--in the heart of Thamel, yet down an alley so we feel a little barrier from the chaos that is Thamel. The hotel propriator is very friendly and his brother, not coincidentally, runs his own tourist bureau and eager to book tours for us. Before coming I predicted the hotel owner would have a cousin who ran a tourist bureau--I should have guessed a brother! The food also is good, throughout Kathmandu, and even the hotel's food is very good.
The only downside is the internet access is not as advertised. Compounding this difficulty are the frequently power outages in Kathmandu--about 4 hours a day. It seems assured that whenever I manage to get a connection, or have just sat down at a restaurant with free Wi-Fi, then a power outages hits five minutes later. A schedule is published but we seem to always misread them. Or they are just wrong.
Yesterday we visited the famed Swambhyu or Monkey Temple. Most noted for a huge stupa or stone monument. And of course monkeys. Hundred of prayer wheels surround the stupa; surround them are people offering to interpret the site. For a small fee. We had our own driver, Ram, and it seems the main reason to hire a guide is to fend off other would-be guides. In addition to monkey there are dogs, dogs everywhere. The dogs are often sleeping, curled up like the devnagari script we are endeavoring to learn.
Last night we ate at a place we are coming to enjoy, the Pilgrim Bookstore Read-and-Feed cafe. Excellent food, with large plates for small prices. We also tried Tibetan millet beer, where one ferments millet and then pours hot water over it to extract the drink. It comes in a metal pot that that sips from through a metal straw.
Today we took it slightly easy, trying to catch up on Nepali lessons (I think I mentioned we booked 12 hours of instruction in the Nepali language; we are halfway through, learning a lot but it is not easy. I think only we would take a holiday that involves homework.) We also tried to find internet connections; we could check webmail but little success.
Donna had the ambition to have a woman's business suit made. We tried a couple of tailors in Thamel, but that wasn't working for us. So we mentioned this to Mr. Lamsal, the tour-guide-brother-to-hotel-owner, and before we knew it his wife and daughter had whisked us into a taxi, dodging Kathmandu traffic (as close to a near death experience as I wish to enjoy for many years) to Bagbazaar to a good tailor. Only to find the tailors were on strike, demanding hire wages. Hire wages from whom is not clear to us. Nonetheless, Donna purchased some pretty fabric and going to a different part of town, or perhaps a different kind of tailor, she is having a traditional style Nepali dress made for her. The irony is the cost of the tailoring itself (not including the fabric) is what the two taxi rides cost.
Strikes are common in Nepal. A garbage collection strike has been on for an undetermined amount of time, and the garbage has piled up.
I will try to add pictures to this post. Our attempts at directly connecting laptops has been frustrating. And then our future plans are quite full. On the weekend we go to the jungle reserve in Chitwan, where elephants, tigers, and malaria await us. After returning to Kathmandu we'll pop over to Pokhara for a couple of days, and before we leave we hope to do a flyby of Sagarmatha.
In advance we wish you all a happy New Year. Nepal has its own calendar, which runs 57 years in advance of the western calendar (so I am writing to you from the year 2066, all you sci-fi fans), so January 1 will be recognized mostly by Westerners here. It has its own time zone niche, 13 hours and 45 minutes ahead of pacific time. That 15 minute shift feels very Nepalese to me.
Despite the power outages, piles of garbage, and internet mishaps, we are really enjoying our time here. It is what we had hoped for.
