My first impressions of Nepal were thwarted somewhat by the weather. Having carefully arranged to sit on the right-hand side of the plane on my flight from Bangkok, I fully expected to see majestic views of the Himalayas as we came in to land at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport. Instead I was met by a milky, opaqueness and flat dull light, reminding me that I’d left behind the warm air currents of the Gulf of Thailand. I didn’t even get much chance to see the city as we only emerged from the clouds within a few hundred metres of the valley floor. I had purposefully packed my warm fleece in my day bag to ward off the cold air but still felt myself shivering as I strode across the windswept tarmac for the shelter and comparative warmth of the terminal building. Security and customs checks were desultory (no hint of any impending infringement of civil liberties!) but the queue for entry visas was long…and moved extremely slowly. This was due more to the queue-jumping of countless tour-agents than the intricacies of the process itself so, by the time I got to baggage claim, I was feeling reasonably short-tempered.
My teaching placement in Nepal had been facilitated by a charitable British organisation called MondoChallenge and it was their in-country manager, Ram Krishna, who came to meet me at the airport. Immediately, his gentle demeanour and ready smile set my frayed nerves at ease and he bundled me into one of the airport’s dilapidated ‘official’ taxis to take me to my hotel in Thamel.
The next thing I noticed about Kathmandu (after the cold and the bureaucratic nepotism!) was just how dirty and impoverished some of its streets seemed to be. Everywhere we drove past, gutters seemed to be filled with litter and covered with a thick layer of grime; the road was more pothole than tarmac; and small fires of stray rubbish seemed to burn on every street corner. Needless to say, the air quality was pretty dire. Alongside this, though, I couldn’t help but notice how very much alive these streets appeared to be. Baskets and blankets of produce seemed to carpet every spare foot of pavement. Housewives threaded their way through, looking for the day’s best bargains, while an endless procession of children seemed to follow, haphazardly in their wake, unheeded and unhurried. I soon realised that many of the mothers were also carrying their younger offspring in shawls wrapped over their shoulders. Most striking of all was the sheer variety of ethnicity and fashions that ebbed and flowed along the streets. Every hue of skin and every shape of feature seemed to be present in a wild jamboree of differing and complementary dress styles. Salwar kamez and sari floated airily along behind jeans and tracksuit tops. Dainty, impractical (and surely bloody freezing!!), open-toed, strappy sandals picked their way between Nike and Adidas. The only common feature shared by all the faces I saw were a pair of dark, almost black, eyes and a frame of jet black hair. Before we turned up Tridevi Marg and headed into Thamel I realised that I had truly arrived on the Subcontinent.
Carefully installed by Ram at The Hotel Great Wall under the watchful eye of Mahendra and his boys, I soon made myself at home in my top-floor room. I was delighted to have my own bathroom with the promise of hot-water showers ‘most evenings’ – dependent, of course, on the vagaries of the weather and the state of repair of the solar water heater. I took a little wander around the streets of Thamel (which, at first glance, seemed to be endearingly quaint after the brazenness of the Khao San Road) but ensured I was back in time for Ram’s return with the second MondoChallenge volunteer – a guy called Edd, hailing from Dorset. Edd struck me as a very polite and enthusiastic chap and I was surprised to learn after some discussion that he was only eighteen, having given off an air of some maturity. It seemed that his involvement in the Scouts and an unusual amount of travelling had stood him in good stead because he was certainly no wet-behind-the-ears pup, straight from school. Ram took us for dinner at a Nepali restaurant called Zaika in the heart of Thamel’s (very hygienic) food and bar district and we were treated to our first rendering of the local favourite of Dal Bhaat (literally lentils and rice). Much satisfied and reasonably knackered, we emerged an hour or two later with AC-DC reverberating in our ears and swearing by Nepali food and Everest beer (yes, I bet you all wondered how long it would take me to find the local brew…). Ram had given us several pointers regarding food safety, local customs and places to avoid as well as a smattering of the local lingo. He would be meeting us at our hotel in the morning to give us more Nepali lessons and to show us some of the various historic sites around the city. After mounting the five flights of stairs to our neighbouring rooms, Edd and I bid each other good night, expecting the next day to be interesting but, ultimately, uneventful.
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