Kathmandu
Kathmandu Sightseeing
Nepal though, is a vibrant, chaotic, beautiful place. The clothes, the buildings, and the sun over the mountains are all a riot of colours that can be a challenge to do justice, and that shooting Black and White would impede.
The Hotel Tibet is a fascinating, eclectic place, and I love it. The decor and carved wood works walls are remarkable. It has a cosy, old-world feel to it, that really helped set the tone for the trip. Gone was the sterile commercialism of Delhi airport.
We met the rest of our tour group, a disparate grouping of nationalities, ages and purposes. Some were here, like my associate and I, on a simple holiday, others were spending a year travelling and this was part of it; and one hardy fellow, known only as “Iron John” was using this trek to rest up after doing the three week Annapurna Base Camp trek, and before starting the three week Everest Base Camp trek. We had our first Nepalese meal at the hotel, and it was excellent, a local chicken curry, on the bone, with rice and a few Everest Beers. These beers are dedicated to a Ghurkha guide who has climbed Everest 13 times. It makes you reassess your relative achievements. We often hear of westerners who have conquered Everest, but seldom think about the guides who have turned that challenge into their day job. Next time you are sitting at your desk, in front of a computer, stressed by your job, think a moment that perhaps on the other side of the world a Ghurkha is more than 8000 meters up, guiding people to the summit of the world, where human remains are sometimes used as signposts.
After a fairly heavy night of beers, my associate and I decided to skip breakfast and have an extra half hour of sleep. This turned out to be a mistake, as it was a day of hard work and long walks and some fuel and some coffee would have been beneficial.
We took a small purple bus to the famous Monkey Temple. It is not terribly hard to guess what that consists of. It is a large temple on a hilltop, populated by monkeys as well as monks.
There was a short walk up to the temple, that made many of us realise we were perhaps more out of shape than we should be considering the trek to come. I also began to have an understanding of just how heavy my camera equipment would be to carry.
The temple was being re-dedicated ahead of the approaching Dwali festival. Two men, stood on the outer dome of the temple casting saffron water in wide, elegant arcs; forming a perfect, connected series of U shapes around the dome. The saffron water was to purify the temple and ensure all was ready for the festival.
There were surprisingly few monkeys, considering my experience a few years previously at the Monkey Cave in Phuket, but there was a mother and child who were adorable, and so very human. Luckily, one man had come prepared and threw down some seeds, which brought several of the monkeys together.
Back at the hotel, we had an hour or so to ourselves, the first since we arrived, before meeting up as a group to explore Thamel, the busy tourist centre of Kathmandu.
It was busy, loud and bright. Full of tourists and locals selling everything they could from Hashish to Hats, but most especially for some reason “Tiger Balm”.
After exploring for a while, and the group picking up some final equipment for the trek we went for a nice group dinner at “New Orleans” a westernized restaurant that serves a selection of food. The seating was outside, under the stars and surrounded by tall brick buildings. It was a lovely spot. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at the most unfriendly Irish bar I’ve ever encountered. Perhaps it was unfriendly because they were not allowed to sell or import Guinness, but the place was empty and the staff seemed hostile rather than hospitable.
It was leaving the Irish bar that we suffered the only real injury of the holiday, the American gentleman slipped off the curb and twisted his ankle. Fortunately, he was able to walk on it but it was swelled up like a tennis ball for several days.
We got back to the hotel at about 10:30 in the evening, and asked about the hotel bar, the supposedly 24h hotel bar. We were grudgingly told we would be allowed in for one drink. So, one beer later, we retired for the evening.
Back in Kathmandu after the tour, we had breakfast of an omelette and Masala tea at a rooftop terrace cafe before a self-guided walking tour of Kathmandu old town with my Associate.
The walk started at the Thahiti Tole Square with an impressive template in the middle of the square with cars and bikes rushing around it. It was here that we met a wannabe guide...
From there we walked south to the Kathesimbha Stapa, a magnificent, hidden away template, much akin to the Monkey Temple. Our erstwhile guide attempted to engage us in conversation and tell us about the template before trying to sell us his artwork. When it became obvious we were not interested and no tip for his unwanted services was forthcoming, he left to find more susceptible tourists.
We continued down the winding streets to the Sikha Naragan Temple, who’s appearance is spoilt somewhat by the 1970’s style clock bolted to the front of the structure.
It was at this point, as we entered the centre of old town that the crowds became heavier and heavier.
We pushed our way through them to the hidden Yakthu Behal Temple down a small dirty side street and surrounded by dilapidated buildings.
During the walk we saw a huge number of additional temples, statues and strange shops that were not even detailed on the tour guide book of Kathmandu that we were using. It is a peculiar place, ancient works of art and spirituality are surrounded by the demands of modern life or even used as store fronts.
Before going into the Kathmandu Durbar Square, we stopped for lunch in a small restaurant on the 6th floor of a building overlooking the square. The view was quite spectacular.
The square itself was less impressive than the Bhaktapur Durbar Square (Durbar means palace) and had its own living goddess. But to me there can only ever be one true Living Goddess, and that is the first one I have seen. No apostasy for me.
Durbar Square is full of templates and iconography and is well worth a visit. Like the Bhaktapur Square there is an entrance fee, which is a little peculiar as whist i has a greater concentration of temples, it is not truly much different that the roads leading up to the square.
Mid-afternoon, I was back at the Hotel Tradition and made use of the rooftop to take some panoramic shots over the city.
As this was the final day, and I had not had much luck with sunsets, to this point, I decide to stack the odds i my favour by going to the highest restaurant in Kathmandu. Situated on the 8th floor and called Helena’s it offered views across all Kathmandu with the mountains cradling the city.
Beer in hand, I watched the sun set and took a series of HDR images as the fiery orb sank to the horizon. I ended up using more or less every lens I had brought with me.
There was a terrible moment, as I moved the tripod that the camera fell from the clam and could easily have gone over the edge, eight stories down! Luckily it did not and, due to its tough construction, did not come out worse for wear from the bouncing it took on the flagstones!
I am ever grateful for the toughness of the 1D Mark III.
There is almost an element of pretending as a photographer landscape. You setup the tripod, find the perfect focus length, set the focus, ISO, aperture and shutter speed, then press the button with a 2 second delay to let it stabilize and sit back and let the camera shoot away.
After the sun had set, dinner was at perhaps the fanciest and most famous restaurant in Kathmandu called “Killroys” which offers Nepali fusion cuisine. I had Chicken stuffed with Yak cheese in a mushroom sauce and it was delicious.
The omnipresent drug peddlers finally got to me on the way back to the hotel. I told him no once and he carried on pushing, so I told him to “fuck off”, he seemed remarkably offended by that. It’s not every day you get to offend a pusher.
That ended the final night in Kathmandu, all that remained was bed before the long journey home.
Sports & Activities
White Water Rafting on the Annapurna River
At 5am again, we crawled out of the hotel, all bags in hand and paid over the odds for a taxi to the Hotel Tradition where we would be staying after the rafting to leave our unneeded bags behind.
Included in this unneeded bags category was all my camera equipment except for my waterproof point and click. The Mk III is weather proof, but I remain unconvinced that that includes bring sunk to the bottom of an icy river.
We waited for an hour or so on the steps of the tour office for our new guide to arrive, who escorted us to the local bus stop and put us on one of the nicer tourist buses for four hours.
I whiled away the time by chatting to the man next to me, who was the official biographer of the last four prime ministers of Nepal and who now spends his days travelling to the various markets collecting his share of the money of his book sales.
When we arrived we were quickly kitted up and escorted to the river. Just before we got there we were stopped by the guide at the neighbouring rafting establishment as he was supposed to have us as a customer and we’d been poached!
From that false start, we had to change equipment and inflate the raft. Once that was accomplished we climbed aboard and started down the river. We covered approximately 58.1 kilometres in the first day, with a lunch break and it was really quite exciting doing the rapids. My associate fell in towards the end, and we all climbed in to swim once or twice. The water was bracing, coming as it does from the melted snow of Annapurna.
We stopped quite early for the night, but the beer was cheap and plentiful and no one minded. Whilst dinner was prepared for us, we built a campfire, and sat round it drinking beer and watching the flames. The night sky was amazing, but impossible to capture with my point and click camera, so I can only say that without any light pollution, seeing the starts is very very different.
I was in bed by 8:30pm due to the combination of long days of hard work and early mornings.
Due to sleeping on sand rather than comfy beds, we were all up early. After a quick breakfast we were all back in the rafts.
The early part of the rafting was actually swimming whilst the guide piloted the boat and after a long, cold swim downstream we got back into the boat to start riding the rapids. We lost two people overboard at various times and stopped off at a little warm waterfall at the bank of the river.
We finished at about 12, and a short lunch and were bundled into proper local bus. I ended up sat next to a mother and her young child who insisted in taking up about half my seat so she could stretch out. As this was a proper Nepali bus, this was a very uncomfortable few hours. The seats and ceiling are all designed for the petite people of Nepal rather than a 6 foot, broad shouldered, overweight westerner.
Once we finally got back to Kathmandu and I’d got a decent shower to wash the river water off we went out in Thamel for some dinner, heading to the Yak for something to eat and to catch-up socially with our Trekking guide.
Everest by Air
We had booked the Mountain View flight the previous evening, and were looking forward to our one chance to see Everest. This day started at 5am with a mini coach ride to the very basic Domestic Terminal of the airport with my associate and the American lady and gentleman.
There was a little nervousness as a few weeks before a plane from this same company had crashed in the Himalayas with no survivors. But, fortune favours the brave, no one lives for every, and all that convinced us to give it a chance.
After enduring an hour or so of the typical and completely redundant duplicated security procedures we took off in a small 20 person plane.
Mostly, I was shooting with my 70-200mm lens with a 2x extender on from my seat, as this gave the best chance to get a full screen image of the mountains. However, the glass in the windows was poor quality and the images are somewhat discoloured. However, we were allowed into the cockpit briefly and were able to shoot through the main windscreen, which was far higher quality and gave some lovely sharp images of the world’s tallest mountain.
I once again experienced that special treatment some people give to a photographer with professional equipment, as I was invited up to the cockpit more than anyone else, including interrupting someone else’s viewing because the stewardess wanted to ensure I saw “the best view of the trip.”