Suburban Kathmandu
Not quite the guidebook dream.
“For many, stepping off a plane into Kathmandu is a pupil-dilating experience, a riot of sights, sounds and smells that can quickly lead to sensory overload. Whether you’re barrelling through the traffic-jammed alleyways of the old town in a rickshaw, marvelling at the medieval temples or dodging trekking touts in the backpacker district, Kathmandu can be an intoxicating, amazing and exhausting place.” - Lonely Planet travel guides.
By this stage in our travels, we feel like old hands at navigating arrivals. Jon smoothly inserts himself into a scrum of fake North Face puffer jackets and emerges with rupees and SIM cards. Then, we sit patiently in a battered sedan in a carpark beyond the airport, while the driver of our cab waits for a friend with a phone to reach another driver with a cab which has enough petrol and can therefore take us to our apartment in the suburb of Teku.
Once we are off, the lanes of traffic, the merging and swerving, the darting motorbikes, have a soporific effect and our eyes blink slowly like the dark-eyed cows also amongst us. Every now and then the tempo changes with the shrill whistle of a traffic policeman. I am transfixed by the whiteness of his gloves gesturing like flickering doves in this city of grey smog, grey clouds, grey air, grey fumes.
We arrive at our landmark: the Transport Management Department, a warehouse with an abandoned air issuing car registration plates. As the driver phones our landlord, the car is circled by small children kicking half-heartedly at a deflated ball. The local hound approaches us, stiffly squats his thin frame and maintains eye contact while defecating a shrivelled balloon, attached to a piece of string. I realise Teku will not be the Kathmandu of the guidebooks.
Teku is a packed suburb bordered by the Bagmati and Bishnumati rivers. It’s only three kilometres from the Kathmandu of guidebooks, Freak Street, the Hippie Trail and Durbar Square’s historic temples. We thought we would be able to easily walk across to this part of town, but on our first outing that evening, I struggled to even cross the road.
Inspecting our new home we found comedy slippers (gladly received) and large gaps between the windows and the frame (not so gladly received). The apartment was beautiful but bitterly cold as it never received sun. We huddled in our jackets, boiled water for tea and switched on the heater, only for the whole place to plunge into darkness. Our landlady appeared in the hallway to explain, by torchlit sign language and a few words, that the heater tripped the electricity for the entire apartment block. We took the news with fortitude and went to bed full wearing all our clothes. Tomorrow was another day.
Each day we got better at being Teku residents. I wore my first ever N95 mask against the air quality, turned my head from the corpses cremated in the Bagmati River and followed school children to learn how to cross the road. In a street with potholes the size of craters we bought layers of warm clothes.
We visited friends in the expat area of Patan to see how the other half lived (though we all still ate with our jackets on). We enjoyed overpriced drinks in a bar with the country’s top comedian. We got outfits made for a wedding: me with a team of local girls matching a dupatta to my kurta, and Jon being measured by a dutiful tailor's son who played the Nepali flute and wished to be a full time musician.
Then I got giardia and things got harder again. Feverish and shivering, I spent my days lurching to our high-stepped toilet, clinging to the wall for balance. Jon bought drugs on the street, but Christmas loomed as a choice between heating (me) or eating (Jon) so he instead found a taxi to take us to the village of Nagarkot, altitude 2195 metres. Stepping from the cab, my legs buckled and the hotel owner sat me down to gaze at dazzling white peaks against a blue sky. Puppies tumbled at my feet, and the hotel staff brought me soup and toasted sandwiches - a snack we still call the Nagarkot toasty.
For a week, I convalesced while Jon ran and hiked. I nursed myself with crisply fried eggs at breakfast, Nagarkot toasties and a range of curries. I watched the light shift across towering Shishapangma at 8027 metres, diminutive Mangengoth at 3485m and half a dozen peaks between. My soundtrack, along with the puppies, was the Nepali flute, played by none other than Jon’s tailor (It’s clearly a small music scene!)
Returning to Kathmandu, we abandoned our chilly apartment and checked into a budget hotel in touristy Thamel, where hot water, electricity and food were at times easier to come by. We visited temples, drank rum in a tiny bar of ladders and landings, ate daal bhat until we felt like Sherpas and dodged the daily gauntlet of shopkeepers offering Gukha knives and North Fake jackets.
Kathmandu had been a wonderful place for the senses, but it wasn’t the right work base for us for a multitude of reasons - from the practical to the political. We felt bad about cutting our stay to only a month, but early in our life on the road we learned there was no point forcing something that didn’t feel right. We changed our tickets: first to India for a wedding, then Hong Kong for a trail running race, and onwards to another race in China - in March 2020. What could possibly go wrong?
Sounds like an experience! I could almost feel the cold reading this
You guys are so tough!