Four days aren’t enough to visit Nepal.
We arrived into Kathmandu on Monday. I’d suffered with a migraine all day. I’ve not had a full on migraine since I was a teenager. It was not a good day to be travelling.
Customs took around 3 hours. This helped my migraine.
We grabbed our bags, and sharing with a Swedish chap we’d met in the customs queue, negotiated a fare with a grumpy local taxi driver. Leaving the airport, the smog hit us immediately. It catches your throat. It stings your eyes. You can taste the unburned hydrocarbons as they coagulate in your lungs. Traffic in Kathmandu is atrocious. Kathmandu is not fit for human habitation.
Policemen stand directing traffic at intersections, analogues for the redundant traffic lights that hang dark from dusty poles. They narrowly avoid being struck by the lawless motorbikes and licenseless drivers careering down the over-filled roads with little care for pedestrians or other road users. With no masks and insane drivers, the traffic police’s life expectancy cannot be long.
Our hotel is fine, clean enough, if still smelling a bit smoggy indoors. Given we arrived so late, we didn’t bother exploring our surroundings, instead electing for a quick bite to eat and straight to bed.
I awake feeling much better the next day and head out early to drop washing at a local laundry. We then hop a taxi back to the airport to fly out to Pokhara where we’re due to spend a couple of days.
I’d been warned that air travel in Nepal is patchy. Pokhara airport was fog-bound, so after waiting for the best part of 5 hours, we eventually took off in a small, old prop plane for the 25 minute flight.
I sat on the right hand side, and despite scratched windows (inside and, concerningly, out), managed to get a view above the clouds of the Himalayas.
Pokhara is immediately preferable to Kathmandu. We’re staying by a lakeside where hundreds of little shops line the roadside, selling tat, trekking gear and cashmere scarfs and tops. Prices are variable. Food, taxis and drinks from shops are very cheap. Cashmere, branded goods and drinks in restaurants/bars are UK prices.
The smog is noticeably reduced, and our hotel is half decent. After a nice walk into the small town, we have dinner and retire for another early night as we have a pre-dawn start for a tour the following day.
We get up for the tour, are taken up to Sarangkot, a viewpoint famous for the spectacular views over the Himalayan Annapurna range for sunrise, but our hopes are dashed. Thick fog shrouds the view and we leave before too long, realising that we would have no luck here. The rest of the tour is equally disappointing, with much of Pokhara set as the base for touring the Himalayas, people come here for the views and to relax, not for a foggy lake, a crap waterfall, another lake, and a peace pagoda (although in fairness, the pagoda was quite nice).
We bailed from the tour early, and spent the rest of the day relaxing at the hotel, or wandering the wee streets. A great curry for dinner, we headed to bed ready for another flight, back to Kathmandu.
… Which was delayed, by 3.5 hours. Traveller’s Tip: never fly Simrik air. Fly Buddha Air or Yeti in Nepal.
Arriving back into Kathmandu, we shared a cab with a couple of young travellers, picked up our laundry (which was clean but smells of smog), and wearing our newly purchased face masks, checked back into the hotel. We got a cheeky upgrade, which was just as well, as Shona’s now verging on mightily pissed off after 3x travel failures and one crap tour. Nepal was never high up on her list, and it’s not done much to remedy this. One thing we both agree on though; the view above the clouds was spectacular; and as the tour guide said, Nepal is not the towns and cities; Nepal is in the mountains. Next time…
Travels with Sklaroffs 