Namaste Nepal
Travel tales
For some time now, I had been planning for a vacation abroad, with my folks. After a lot of googling, I zeroed in on Nepal — a location as international as Priyanka Chopra’s accent. It was supposed to be a short jaunt. And on the extended Holi weekend, we found ourselves navigating the streets of Kathmandu.
Kathmandu is pretty much like a second tier Indian city. Only poorer. Depending on your co-travellers, you could find yourself inserting your currency (no pun intended) in the slot of the Casino machine or that of the temple donation box. Even though my parents aren’t devout temple-goers, it’s not hard to imagine that the latter made up most of my itinerary.
Now, it’s not unknown that temples all over have been massively commercialised and are almost never the peaceful haven they are supposed to be. I will not delve into this matter further because ‘big brother RSS is watching’. Also, a lot of the temple sites look rather dilapidated or are under reconstruction owing to the 2015 earthquake — a rather sorry situation. However, a unique feature are the buddhist temples celebrating an amalgamation of the Buddhist and Hindu faiths — one such temple Swayambunath, situated on a hillock also provides a stunning view of the city.
The entire Temple crawl is totally doable in a day and, from a sight-seeing perspective, that does not leave much at all to do in the city. Here I must mention the remarkable fervour with which the city crowd celebrates the festival of Holi. It was a pleasure to watch the teeming masses enjoying their day out on the streets, more so because no one was bothering the passers-by who were not keen on getting involved in the colours (read us). Thanks to this, a lot of the markets were closed, and that being our only day in the city, I might have missed on some of the daily city fare.
Our next stop was Pokhara — a hill station 200 kms from Kathmandu. We hired a cab to do the trip including the intra-city travel. The road trip is bumpy in parts and roughly 7 hours long which can get a tad bit tiresome. The alternative is a 40 minute flight which is sure to leave you feeling much lighter on the pocket.
Pokhara, however, is a fine spot for a vacation in the hills — a view of the Himalayas, a pretty lake, quaint cafes, adventure activities, and of course, more temples. Tal Barahi, a temple in the center of the lake, is where we started our day. We were advised to watch the sunrise from Sarangkot but we chose to sleep that one out and reached the spot at noon-time. Needless to say, it presented breathtaking views of the valley and an array of adventure activities. My marginal discomfort with adventure sports and a not so favourable weather kept me away from paragliding. There is bungee jumping and a mind-numbing zipline too but they are further off and have high wait times, so one must allow a significant time buffer for these, if interested.
The Pokhara markets offer a wide assortment of local / fake branded apparel — if you aren’t into haggling, do not go. A worthwhile visit in the city is the World peace pagoda. The stupa is a ~300 step climb, that after a treacherous car ride up the mountain roads. However, it is rather worth the effort in that it is peaceful and offers a 360 degree view of the entire valley.
There, however, is a problem with visiting one ‘site’ after the other. Big temple. Wow. Beautiful mountain. Amaze. Temple on mountain. Yayayay! This enthusiasm, however, does not last till the end of the day. And, after seeing a pretty mountain for the Nth time in the day, you go, “Well lovely places dude, but I can’t eat them!”.
Not joking. Eating something is a very primal form of our interaction with any foreign object. Take infants for instance — every single thing you hand them, their instinct is to put it in their mouth. Take people in love — any passionate moment and you have them gnawing at each other.
The oral fixation is for real. And that’s why, in the next travel blog post, I’ll talk about food. Till then, Namaste.
