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Mark Moxon's Travel Experience in Kathmandu
A lone white man ambles through the square, looking lost in
the way that only tourists can manage. Durbar Square is bustling, but in his
mission to take in the atmosphere he's committed the ultimate sin and the touts
aren't going to miss a minute. 'Rickshaw, mate, cheap price'; 'Picture? One
picture?'; 'Something to smoke...?'; 'Money change, you make money change?'; 'I
am very good guide, sir, many things to see in Durbar Square'; 'Just looking,
sir, just looking, very good stones'. In Kathmandu, you learn to look occupied
all the time if you want to avoid hassle, and he'll learn quickly.
Kathmandu's Durbar Square is a strange collision of worship
and wheeler dealing. The pagodas of the scores of temples in the city's
cultural centre provide steps for people to loiter on, trading gossip and
hatching deals and schemes. For the rickshaw-wallahs it's a place to catch
trade, and for the street sellers it's a Covent Garden without licences or
regulations; and as if the mayhem caused by milling crowds and street vendors
isn't enough, it's also a busy thoroughfare for taxis, bicycles, motorcycles
and porters with their huge baskets of goods, bound for some other dusty corner
of the city. If Kathmandu has a heart it's here, the source of pulsating arteries
that speed off1 in all four directions of the compass.
Durbar Square, from which my hotel was just round the
corner, feels a million cultural miles away from Thamel, even though it's only
a 15-minute walk. Thamel is to Kathmandu what Khao San is to Bangkok, what Kuta
is to Bali, and what Goa is to Nepal: it's the country's centre for travellers.
And with this territory come restaurants, travel agencies,
craft shops, email centres, touts, marijuana pedlars, good pizza and, rather
disappointingly, an almost complete lack of character. I had anticipated a
soul-free environment, but Thamel had all the charm of a McDonald's; I popped
in, did what I had to do, and buggered off as quickly as I could.
Luckily the rest of the city had plenty of charm, even
through the misty haze of my apathy. Swayambhunath Temple, colloquially known
as the Monkey Temple due to its local residents, was a pleasant but not
terribly surprising Nepalese temple – Buddhist stupas, Hindu shikharas, pigeons
galore – but its unearthly combination of Hinduism and hawking made it worth a
visit. Besides, western tourists are such funny creature sometimes, with their
inappropriate clothes, in-your-face photography and a total lack of bargaining
ability, that I found watching the watchers much more interesting than yet
another collection of gunk-smeared statues of the Hindu-Buddhist pantheon.
Especially interesting, though, was one particular western
woman, who must have been in her mid-thirties; complete with tika marks on her
forehead from a recent puja, she was leaning on the grate containing a statue
of Locana, the consort of Aksobhya, one of the Dhyani buddhas who sits in the
pose of subduing Mara, or resisting the temptation of the devil. Through her
mumblings, I saw a look on her face that I recognised: it was the look on a
child's face when snuggling up to its mother, a blissful awareness of warmth
and security.
I get that look when a particularly good Led Zeppelin riff
hits the speakers, but she was getting it from a religion; this was wonderful
for her, and watching her distant smile and lightly closed eyes I wondered if I
was missing out on something magical... but then the grungy guitar line from
Whole Lotta Love started grinding through my subconscious, and I realised that
I've got it all right here, in my head. Music is my portable religion, and CDs
are my icons, blasphemous though that may sound.
What a shame, though, that Kathmandu was perpetually
shrouded in the pre-monsoon mist, clouding out the mountains and making the
potentially spectacular views from the temples more reminiscent of Calcutta
from the Howrah Bridge. People complain bitterly about Kathmandu's pollution,
and although I found it a paragon of cleanliness after India, it's still got a
long way to go as far as air pollution goes; the face mask is as common here as
it is in Bangkok.
One day I walked south of Kathmandu to Patan, previously a
separate city state but now effectively a suburb of the capital; the third city
in the Kathmandu Valley, Bhaktapur, is a little further to the east, and was
again a separate state with a separate king before the three cities were
finally united in 1382 by the rulers of Kathmandu (which is why Kathmandu is
the capital and not Patan or Bhaktapur). Patan has as its main attraction a
huge number of temples, and it was here that I realised that I no longer gave a
hoot about temples. Imagine doing a tour of Europe where the main attraction
was churches: after a couple of months you'd probably break into a cold sweat
at the sight of yet another spire. For me, anything to do with Buddha, Siva,
Krishna, Vishnu and the rest of the gang was, by now, just another building.
The walk back from Patan had its surprises, though. For
example, the fields of marijuana plants lining the River Bagmati are a sight to
behold; one minute you're wandering along the path minding your own business,
and the next minute you're surrounded by luscious greenery, reaching well above
head height and generating a distinctive smell on the breeze. I had to stop to
take a picture, it was such an Asian sight, and managed to attract the attention
of one of Kathmandu's more sociable wasters. After the inevitable small talk he
gestured to the buds swaying in the breeze and asked, 'Do you know what this
is?'
'It's marijuana,' I replied. 'And I thought Calcutta was the
City of Joy.'
'It's grass,' he said, sniffing at my terminology with a
smile in his eye. 'Grass,' he repeated, and turned to go: he didn't even look
back or say goodbye. Perhaps announcing that this was grass was his party piece
and he'd done his bit, or perhaps he'd enjoyed the local crop just a little too
much to hold a conversation longer than two minutes. I didn't mind a bit: some
conversations are dead in the water even before they're launched.
So I returned to Kathmandu, studiously walking straight past
the millions of holy sites and instead marvelling at the insanity of the
locals. For example, I went to an electrical shop to buy a bulb for my torch
which had blown right in the middle of the previous night's power cut; the man
didn't have the right type, and answered my ensuing question by saying that
there were no other shops around who sold bulbs, and none that sold torches. He
obviously didn't get out much: four doors down was a man with bulbs and torches
who sold me what I wanted without hesitation.
The next weirdo I encountered shouted over to me, 'Where you
from? Australia?' Now this was getting strange: I'd been called an Australian
three times already and I hadn't even opened my mouth or put on my bush hat, so
I walked over and asked him why he thought I was an Aussie. 'You've got a
beard,' he replied, as if that was all the explanation anyone needed. It
scuppered me completely, enough to motivate me to book a ticket for my next
destination, Janakpur.
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