T-bird is in a mighty sulk. Refuses all nourishment, makes gnashing
noises with the teeth – the sort that entails expensive visits to the repair
shop, and will not be consoled. You see, Blandine and I went off to Nepal without
her – and what is worse, we hired another bike there. T-Bird is a jealous bird.
Sure I can take you, T-Bird had said. Bangalore-Kathmandu?
Poosh! Boosh! Nothing to it! While the offer was tempting, spending a week
getting there, and another week getting back – when we had just a month for the
whole Nepal
trip – it just wasn’t on. We sneaked off on an airplane when we thought T-Bird
wasn’t looking.
 |
| Landing in Kathmandu |
Kathmandu was cold and
blustery when we landed – and it had an easygoing, freewheeling way about it
that was like a shot of bubbly wine. The fellow at the emigration desk waved me
through with a grin, glancing at the blue of my Indian passport. He didn’t even
open it.
First Impressions… Meandering streets leading
nowhere, tumbledown houses, broken pavements. It looked a bit like good old Bangalore on a bad day, but with a certain kind of charm
that Bangalore doesn’t
have – not any more, it doesn’t. Wandering around the crowded bylanes is a lot
like exploring the old quarters of any old Indian city – except that every few
steps or so you come across unexpected moments of sheer beauty. Like this sea
of pigeons at a corner Buddhist shrine….
 |
| Buddhist Pigeons |
We had a nice cup of Nepali tea just beside this particular stupa.
Teen Pati – that was the tea brand. Very perfumed. It seemed to be the hangout
joint for the local teenagers. A Buddhist temple as a hangout joint… A sad
looking long haired Gorkha youth sat beside me. He looked like a lost rock
guitarist. How you like Kathmandu, he says.
Beautiful, I reply. Yes, but very dirty, he sighs. I take a diplomatic sip of
tea. Boy, wait till you see my hometown, kid, I say to myself.
Temples seem to sprout all
over Kathmandu like a bout of eczema or a bad
rash. There must be a million there, all sorts. But they’re quite unlike the
Indian temples – they look sort of exotic to the plainsman eye. Red pagodas and
cast iron dragons and screaming eagles of brass and stuff. And the Buddhist
temples look very definitely exotic – being unusually clean.
 |
| An absolute jing-bang Buddhist temple bang in the middle of a busy neighborhood |
 |
| The temple dragon |
Getting a roof over the head… We installed ourselves
in a cozy little apartment-hotel – Melungtse. More apartment than hotel,
actually. After a couple of days, it seemed we’d been living there forever.
Highly recommended for long stays in Kathmandu.
It’s a bit on the outskirts, not in touristy Thamel, where most of the other
hotels are. You can see the Himalayas from the
rooftop. No, you can’t see it from any odd hotel in Kathmandu.
You wouldn’t believe you were surrounded by the Himalayas,
in most parts of the city. And it has a nice little garden. Tea on the terrace
looking at the Himalayas waking up to the sun and pretty flowerbeds down below,
and the owner Mr. Giri bellowing a cheerful Good Morning fixing the fiendishly
complicated water recycling gizmo on the roof – what a way to start the day.
Just some peanut crumbles needed to make it perfect, and yup, you get those too
– at the Pumpernickel bakery in Thamel. I brought back a small cartload to Bangalore. Actually, just
the sight of Mr. Giri fixing the water recycling system is the money’s worth.
He’s a nice guy, he really is. Even when negotiating the rent. Make you feel
right at home. Even when negotiating the rent.
 |
Hotel Melungtse, Maharajgunj, Ring Road Kathmandu – 5 Stars
|
Keeping the fingers in… Here I am at the apartment,
doing guitar practice. It’s a baby guitar. Discovery: the baby guitar is an
absolutely marvelous travel guitar. Not performances, of course, but it’s
perfectly adequate for scale practice and keeping the fingers from going rusty.
Besides, if you buy a decent one, not the cheepo ones at Reynolds, you can get
amazing sounds from it that you just can’t from other guitars. Since you have
to get the same note from a much shorter neck length, the strings are strung
much looser – so you can bend, pull and hammer them almost like an electric
guitar, but the sound is that of an acoustic with a soar throat. Very bluesy.
 |
| Congress baby guitar as the itinerant guitarists travel guitar – 3 Stars
|
Getting a bike… After
a couple of days braving the local busses and taxis – if you complain about
public transport in Bangalore, boy, wait till you get to Kat – we decided for
the sake of our sanity to hire a bike. We checked out a lot of bike hirers in
Thamel – including the ones listed in Lonely Planet. But the thought of leaving
my passport with one of those pluguglies – you have to do that, you see, as
surety; that’s the hitch – it made me downright queasy. They looked to a man something
right out of a B-movie of the more violent type.
I finally settled on Balaram – largely because of his wide,
honest smile and booming laugh. And the fact that his bikes looked a shade
better than the others. And the fact that he was offering us a brand new Yamaha
YBR 125 – just 128 KM on the odometer. A new addition to his stable, he said –
just that week. Balaram is also highly recommended; we had a great experience
with him. His is the first bike hire joint you see when you enter Thamel from the
King’s Palace side via Tredevi Marg and take a sharp turn right on Thamel Marg.
Here is the man himself, complete with his bike and his
wide, honest smile:
 |
Balram’s Bike Hire – Narsing Chowk, Thamel Kathmandu, Nepal – 5 Stars
|
After T-Bird, a 125CC Yamaha seemed like coming down in
life. It whined and screamed on climbs that T-Bird would have sneered at. And
by golly, there are climbs when you set out to explore Kathmandu Valley.
But hey, the little bird did the job, getting us from point A to point B
without problems.
Finally having something growling between the legs – a bike,
I mean – opened up the vistas. We bought us a map of Kathmandu Valley
and set out to explore it like it had never been explored before.
And what a place it is… much as we love Bangalore, we have to admit that after you’ve
done Nandi Hills and Tipu’s Palace, you’ve more or less shot the bolt as far as
tourism is concerned. But the Kathmandu
Valley – Oh Me God – just
go off in any direction from the city in a 360 degrees arc. It’s bursting with
places to see every 100 meters or so. We’d barely scratched the surface by the
end of the month.
Where we went: The absolute top favorites…
Boudhanath: Despite the simplicity of the giant
stupa, there is something mesmerizing about the place. We went back thrice,
once in the late evening for night worship by butter lamps.
 |
| Boudhanath by day |
 |
| Boudhanath by night |
Bhakthapur
Durbar Square: About 20 km out of Kathmandu. It’s a lot better than the two more popular
Durbar Squares within Kathmandu. At first
glance it’s enormous, spreading and grand. Then you see the smaller details, like an
intricate stone carving here, a brass serpent rising from a water tank there…
and it’s painfully exquisite. We spent two whole days exploring the place and
could have spent another two. It’s not just the main squares where the tourists
breed, the little side alleys where real people live real lives in centuries
old traditional Newari houses, temples and stupas and religious water tanks loitering
all over the place. There’s the shock of discover at every other step.
 |
| Bhakthapur Durbar Square |
 |
| Bhakthapur - Serpant robinet in the king's bathtub |
 |
| Bhakthapur - pillar detail |
 |
| Bhakthapur - another square |
 |
| Down the bylanes of Bhakthapur |
 |
| Bhakthapur - old men at play |
Tistung village perched over the Palung Valley:
A little side road leading off the busy Tribhuhan highway at Naubise soars into
another world. The road climbs on and on, over hills and ridges and valleys.
Firs and pines all around. It looks like Switzerland, in parts. And always,
in the backdrop, the Himalayas glistening in
the cold bracing air. No one around except the goats. Finally you come to the
picture-perfect hamlet of Tistung on the very summit at the height of 2030 m.
 |
| The Himalyas from Tistung |
The Tibet
boarder – the road to Lhasa: We didn’t want
to go through the hassles of a getting a Chinese visa, so we didn’t bike all
the way to Lhasa.
In any case, it can’t be done with 125CC under you. With T-Bird, yes. But the
way up to the border post is doable and is a lot of fun too.
Here’s a gorgeous gorge along the way, and our little bird
taking a picnic break beside it.
 |
| Little-Bird on Lhasa Road |
 |
| Gorgeous gorge on Lahsa Road |
Buddhist Monasteries: There are about half a million,
each more beautiful than the other. Here’s one I particularly liked, on the way
to Dakshin Kali (which by the way is heavenly too, esp. the lonely Mata temple
perched on the hilltop with strong winds blowing through the simple stone
structure).
 |
| Monastery on the way to Dakshin Kali |
And dozens of other places, which I simply can’t do justice
to in a single post… I ought to have made a post a day while I was there, like
some other bloggers do. But then this isn’t a travel blog, kids – it’s a humor
blog. You ought to know that. Serious posts like this are an aberration.
Nepali Cuisine… In a word: Momo. That place is
bursting with momo joints. Small, greasy ones; big, posh ones; middle of the
road ones (which are only half greasy and half posh). We had momos morning,
noon and night. We ate momos until it spilled out of our ears. Yes, there was
that thing called Nepali Thali Set, but it looked suspiciously like a
watered-down North Indian Thali, so we left it alone. All this was a bit sad,
in retrospect, because Thamel – the touristy quarter of Kathmandu
– is crammed with tempting cafes, restaurants and patisseries. French haute cuisine,
Korean noodle houses, Irish pubs, German bakeries… you name it – most run by expats
settled in Kathmandu, so the food is pretty
authentic. Reasonably priced too. In that small 5 km square area, there were
more interesting-looking restaurants than in the whole of Bangalore,
and Bangalore
doesn’t have a shortage, on that front at least. But in the name of being true
to the local cuisine, we avoided them. So: momos. Regret it, now we’re back.
Actually, one day we tried going beyond momos. There was this
little Tibetian restaurant we found in a hidden side street behind Boudhanath
that actually went beyond momos and thukpa. They had all kinds of
unpronounceable stuff. They even had freshly made Chang rice beer, which I
couldn’t find anywhere else. After getting over the mental block of boiled rice
bits floating in my beer and the gamey smell, the Chang proved surprisingly
tasty. But not a repeatable experience. And we had this greenish thing with a
long unpronounceable multi-part name which turned out to be nettle soup. Yes,
the stuff that looks like a thorn bush. It tasted like nothing on earth. And I
had dysentery for the rest of my visit. Nettle, it seems, can cause food
poisoning unless carefully prepared. Next day: back to momos.
 |
| The courtyard at Nepali Chulo |
Nepali Chulo: We finally buckled down to eating a Nepali
Thali at this restaurant caught in a time warp, a traditional Newari mansion
cluttered with ethnic geegaws. Yes, it wasn’t all that different from a
standard North Indian Thali. But the experience of eating in this sunlit old-world
courtyard was something else.
Nepal
Police…Absolutely impressive, totally unlike the rude, pot-bellied perishers
here. They look lithe, sharp and poster-boyish to a man, in smart blue uniforms
– like something out of a Jacky Chan movie – and they are unfailingly friendly.
One of them stopped me once – he was diverting the traffic for a political
rally. Sounds familiar? Ah, but instead of whistling rudely in my face and
yelling Munde Hogi! Munde Hogi! He smiled an apologetic smile, asked
where I was going, and then gave detailed instructions for alternative routes
to get there. And this, mind you, in the middle of the rush hour with cars
honking like mad behind me. If that had happened in Bangalore, I would have fainted from shock.
And Bangalore
policemen are reputedly the best mannered in the country…
Drivers License… Legally, you need an International
Drivers License to drive there. But Lonely Planet says the Nepal Police never
check. Taking courage from that, I landed in Kathmandu
not only without an IDL, but without even my Indian Drivers License. I’d just
submitted it for renewal – I had just a Xerox copy of the old one. The first
day, I puttered out on to the roads with my heart in my mouth… was Lonely
Planet correct? Oh Me Gosh, No! – The police were stopping and checking fellows
left and right. Luckily, we never got stopped. The Nepal Police seem to have a
policy of not hassling tourists and Blandine with her pretty brown hair
fluttering in the wind looks a bonafide tourist. Actually, I did almost
get stopped once. Blandine’s brown hair was for once tucked away in a helmet,
and I didn’t look sufficiently exotic to the Nepali eye. But the moment I said
‘India’,
he waved me on with a grin. Blandine didn’t even have to undo her helmet strap.
Fini…
When I handed Balram the bike back, at the end of the month,
the gear was sticking a bit and there was a bit of chipped paint on the rear.
His smile slipped a bit, but he didn’t make a fuss. But as a fellow bike lover,
I could read his eyes. It was after all a brand new bike. But hey, however
careful you are – if you are going to go roaring up mountainsides on a bike,
it’s going to show. I promised him this writeup on my blog to cheer him up.
Back to T-Bird and her sulk.
