Kathmandu at first sight

Every place is magical at first sight. Even so, Nepal is special. When I was a child, Nepal was that special country with the highest mountain in the world. Later, it was a place overrun by drugged out hippies. Then it was where the celebrity murderer Charles Sobhraj targeted loners and was eventually arrested, tried, and jailed. And in more recent years it has been a trekker’s paradise, its reputation as such only briefly eclipsed by the political uncertainty of the brief years between murders in the royal family and the end of the monarchy. For me Nepal is a place full of stories, of a lifetime of seeing bridges and rivers across which was a foreign country. I dreamt of finding out what it was really like.

So, when the boredom of a two hour long journey in an aluminium tube ended with us dipping into a valley whose floor seemed to be a continuous carpet of buildings, I peered out eagerly into the haze. The valley is a bowl which naturally stabilizes an inversion layer full of stale air in winter. In the last days of October the haze was just beginning. Where was Boudhnath Stupa and the Swayambhu temple? Where the famous Darbar squares?

Once on the ground, our taxi sped through streets which didn’t seem as full of traffic as tourists’ tales. We stopped at traffic lights near one of these multistoreyed pagodas which were the Nepali style of Hindu temples. I raised my phone for a photo which, as I realized later, caught four of our main concerns for the next few days: traditional architecture, banks which could change Indian currency, ATMs, and electrical wiring which was even more haphazard than what we were used to in India.

A little way outside the airport the roads were lined with three-storeyed brick buildings: as in the featured photo. In a few days I would begin to recognize this as traditional Newari architecture: the lowest storey given over to shops, the next for living in, with the kitchen and pantry at the top, just under the peaked roofs. The red-brick facade was part of this traditional architecture, with plastered faces being derided as an imported English style. When I thought of the colonial architecture of the Indian hills I realized that this identification is not wrong. Further into the center of the town I saw the strange inversions of industrial capitalism: shops presented the traditional curved blades of khukris as exotic but mass-produced foreign goods as part and parcel of normal life. Notice the difference between the traditional folding doors of the shops in the featured photo and the modern doors of Khukuri House. This is part of the inversion.

In no time at all we were near our destination in Thamel. This is a traditional part of the town which has turned touristy, like the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris. I was quite certain that the rickshaws parked on the side of the road were Orientalism turned back on tourists (locals travelled by scooters, buses, and cars). There were many new buildings here. The process of destruction of old houses was accelerated by the major devastation in this quarter caused by the 2015 earthquake. Before I reached my hotel all I could see was a jumble of interesting sights. It would take me a few days to begin to piece them together into a picture of life in Kathmandu.