First Light

First, some shots from yesterday. First up is a shot from a rooftop near the Kasthamandap temple:

Then, we have a stupa near Durgar Square:

Finally, a shot from inside a small multi-level Buddhist temple, somewhere in Kathmandu (I think it was in Asan Tole, but I was jetlagged as all hell and my memory fails me):

Anyway. Another day, more sightseeing. My guide Krishna and I began with the famous (and World Heritage listed) Buddhist temples and stupa at Bodhnath. This place is amazing, and manages to transcend the hordes of tourists thronging around its base:

We then followed the tourist trail to Pashupati, home to the holiest Hindu temple in Nepal (Pashupatinath) and a well-known funeral ground. I didn't even take my camera out at the cremation until my guide suggested it to me, and although I felt more than a little ghoulish and insensitive, I'm glad I got a record of an incredibly haunting scene:

The sightseeing day was concluded at Patan, a small village outside Kathmandu that absolutely swarms with fat, bus-riding tourists. The main Durgar Square ("Durgar" meaning "palace" - thus, there are at least three Durgar Squares in the Kathmandu valley) was very interesting but hard to photograph, and I didn't feel like I got anything worthwhile until we walked a little further away to some much less touristed temples.

This evening has consisted of formalising trekking arrangements and eating/drinking with the trekking guides. I finished up the evening at a local Nepali "nightclub" - unquestionably "authentic" since I was the only non-Nepali in the place. Eventually I got shortlisted for what seems to be a local custom: get up and dance with your friends while the singers play a call-and-response game with you. Since I can't speak a word of Nepali, I couldn't respond to the calls, and I can only imagine what they were saying about me. Apparently it was in good humour, but I was standing there imagining things like, "Hey! Look at this rich foreigner! Let's get him drunk and then take his wallet!" and "What a tosser. He thinks he's being all cultural while we're having a laugh at his expense!" Good fun.

(All of these photos are links. I encourage you to click on them, see them at full size and quality, and explore the rest of my Flickr site. All of my photos, including the majority that haven't been posted here, are available in a set called Nepal 2008.)

Touchdown

The clock on my laptop still reads AEDST time. Apparently it is 3:27 in the afternoon, 12th November. That means that roughly 24 hours ago I finished the last of my overpriced cappuccino and strode confidently through a pair of obstinate automatic doors into the customs section of Sydney Airport. Time is a strange beast.

As I stood in the arrivals area at Tribhuvan International Airport (possible slogan: Proudly made out of brick since 1975), waiting for my backpack and hoping that I wouldn't require the services of the "Missing Baggage Complaining Desk", it finally sunk in. After five months of planning, hoping and financial navel-gazing, I was on the ground in Nepal.

I had known for a few hours that I was no longer in a part of the world with the edges blunted off, though. Picture this: I had just made it through customs at Delhi International Airport. I was tired, cranky, and not entirely sure how to even get to the departures area to transit to my flight to Kathmandu. I pushed my little airport trolley out the doors, ignoring the incredibly persistent touts, hoping to see DEPARTURES writ large on a nearby building. I had stepped no more than twenty metres from the exit when I turned into a dead-end alley by mistake. The rough concrete of the alley floor was scattered with lumpy piles of tattered cloth, and it wasn't until one of them rolled over to face me and hack up something obscenely biological that I realised they were people sleeping rough. Welcome to India; have a nice day.

Today has been spent sightseeing around Kathmandu - pictures will go up as soon as I get a reliable upload to Flickr. Until then!