Arrived Kathmandu, Nepal. I am on sensory overload. This place is like nothing I've ever seen, nothing that I could ever have imagined. I checked into my guesthouse, showered and walked out into a darkening city. I walked through the narrow streets of old town, feeling my way to Thamel area, where the tourists dwell and where I planned to meet a Canadian girl I met on the plane for dinner.
I had to feel my way because the streets are without names, so the guidebook map can only help you so much. The streets are also narrow and angled and crammed with shops, vendors selling onions and potatoes in baskets, cars, motorcycles, pedestrians, activity. Some of the streets narrow into an alley or a dead end or a crumbling square where the road is dug up so that you have to retrace your steps or climb over piles of ripped up pavement and continue. The streets would seem blind alleys leading nowhere if there wasn't so much activity in them, so many people, so many colorful lights and silks in the store windows. The stores are built down into the road so that their wooden doors come up to shoulder level and you have to climb down two steps and duck your head under a carved entryway to get inside the store.
The vendors. Colorful silks, pashmina scarves, saris, cashmere scarves, woven sweaters (now I know where the JCrew rollneck was discovered), wooden shelves of dark spices in big jars, bright trekking gear. The smells. Pungent curries, baking bread, sugared pastries. The sounds. Motorcycle horns, police whistles, people shouting, a horn and recorder playing folk music, chime of bicycle bells, dishes being stacked together and washed, the garble of a man speaking into a microphone.
The most important thing. It's not hot. After three sleepless nights in Bangkok, one on the train and two without air conditioning, am looking forward to a long, cool sleep. But first, dinner...
