Our day in Bhaktapur - Durbar square

One of the reasons I liked staying in the Kathmandu Valley was that it holds the greatest concentration of UNESCO world heritage sites on the planet.  All within an hour of Kathmandu city.  This morning we headed out for Bhaktapur, which was known not only for it's classic buildings, but also for being closed to traffic in the core of the old palace and temple complex.  We arrived in early morning.  The person walking beside Suzanne is asking us if we need a guide.

 We saw these goats tied to a shrine.  I wasn't sure if they were there to eat the food offerings made to the gods or if they were going to be sacrafices themselves later on.

The Hindu dieties just inside the Durbar (square) were really facinating.  Apparently they have multiple arms to reflect all the traints of that particular incarnation of the god: Each hand is either posed to reflect a particular meaning (compassion, protection, etc) or to hold an object with a symbolic meaning.

The golden door is famous and I've put the photo in original sized so you can see the details.  There's two deities that are particularly revered by the Nepali people and so have the red powder from the bindi.

The woman in the picture was nice enough to let me to take her picture.  Sorry it's blurry:

Bhaktipur was exceptional for the stone temples.  They are from a different period from the wooden temples and palaces and the designs and carvings on them look very different:

We arrived early enough that all the museums and stores were not yet open so we had a coffee where we could watch the square.  In the background at the golden gate, a travel TV show is getting ready to film a local man place a Bindi on the deitis of the golden gate.  The young men at the pillar and sitting by the temple will spend the day trying to get hired as guides by tourists.

The temple was later taken over by bored students waiting for their field trip to start

 With things starting to open, we finished our coffees and people watching and headed into the back streets.

So I read this thing in a photography book...

Before I left on this trip, I wanted to learn how to take more pictures of people. I began looking at photography books to get ideas about how professionals did it.  One author wrote about picture taking in Nepal and India and how he asked people to pose for photos.  His first recommendation was to be a bit goofy and to try and try to win them over with humour. While I can be funny (and funny looking) I didn't think that I would be able be that intrusive without feeling like a pest.  But his second idea was better: He brought along small portable printer and gave a copy of the picture as a thank you.  Being a technology geek, I immediately went looking on Amazon.  Behold: An LG Bluetooth handheld printer

It prints great photos (when it doesn't jam) with this polaroid type paper that holds all the ink inside it.

I first used the printer in Baktapur. We were rained out and went to a Chinese restaurant to warm up with tea and soup. While there, I snapped photos of kids playing cricket while waiting for the rain to let up.
 

I printed this photo and gave it to the kid. He and his friends immediately asked to have a group photo. 

I then spent a very tense 5 minutes wifi- ing the photo to my iPhone which I then bluetoothed to the printer which promptly jammed. Another 5 minutes and 2 blanks later, I got a photo I could hand them. 

When Sam and I went for our walk in Katiike we met up with a farm family. Sam chatted with them and I was able to take a picture. 

The family posed for a photo with Sam and the printer jammed. This time badly, and I had to apologize and we walked away as I jammed some torn up business cards into the back end to free up the gears. 20 minutes of walking, mumbling and fumbling and the jam cleared. Then I jammed it again. Then I cleared it again and the family photo printed beautifully 

Sam and I decided to head back into town so that we could give them the photo. I also decided to disregard the LG instructions on how to use the printer since I think it was triggering the jams.  As we headed out of town and back up the ridge to Nagarkot, I felt a little more comfortable with taking photos and the using the printer.  I took a picture of this man laying down to nap with his children after leading their goats to pasture.

Then, as we came up the hill we saw this family(?) an older woman with two younger girls tending goats and collecting firewood.  

At each switchback on the road we got closer to them and soon we were right behind them.

I took a great picture of the woman

And the sickle that she used to strip deadwood from trees 

And we watched while her picture printed (without jamming!)

Thanks Mr. photographer guy, great idea!

Walking the countryside near Nagarkot

We'd planned on taking Sam with us to a bit of a "Spa" weekend in Nagarkot.  The village of Nagarkot has grown up around a series of hotels built on a ridge-line with views of the Himalayan mountain range (provided the weather cooperates).  Once sunrise has passed, and unless the mountains remain in view, there's not much left to do except enjoy the view with a drink or maybe sign up for a massage.  The guide said that there were some good hikes to local cities with interesting shrines, the closest being 2.5 hours one way.  A five hour walk seemed like a good idea to me and Sam and figured there would be plenty of time to relax when we came back so we started walking along the road that led us away from the centre of Nagarkot and to the other side of the ridge we were on.  Pretty soon the road was leading started snaking down towards the first hamlet on our way.

3 more switchbacks down the road, here's Sam

We saw these people carrying heavy loads on a short cut alongside the road. 

This last woman is trying to figure out how to make the last steep steps (she ended up running them).

The terracing of the hillsides for farming is really something up close

I couldn't see what she was harvesting, but the fields I saw up close (the ones that looked empty) had new shoots of corn growing in them.  The monsoons come in a month in a half, and we were told they start a second crop afterwards.

For technology failure reasons I'll explain later, I didn't take pictures when we first walked the road through the hamlet.  We walked about 20 minutes past it to near the bottom of the valley and realized that our 5 hour hike was likely to take 15 hours with all our stopping for photos and looking at the countryside.  As a result, we decided that we wanted to head back and take a closer look at the people and buildings we had just passed.

The first farm on the way back was well set for livestock and firewood.

Further on, a woman shooed her goats past us.

We stopped in at the Refreshment Restaurant (Now I remember the name of the hamlet: Katiike).  For some reason the Nepalis usually hyphenate the word welcome.

Sam got a chance to use her Nepali chatting with the owner while we relaxed and had a beer

He had some great chickens

I'll end this entry with Sam and I still in Katiike.  I'll have more pictures and a story in the next entry.

Thamel

It took me three passes to find the shop where we had ordered T-shirts on Friday (They had embroidered patterns and had to be stitched onto the right sized shirts). The Thamel is three long streets in parallel with little alleys running between them. Like all of Nepal (that I know of), only significant streets have names and there is no street numbering.  Stores list their neighbourhood and maybe a nearby intersection rather than an address. 

On Friday I took a picture and used my phone's GPS to "pin" the shop on a map.  Because the streets are narrow with high buildings, I should have walked up and down the street to get a better GPS fix. So today I arrived at the pinned spot on my map and...no shop to match my picture. Fortunately I remembered it was on the west side of one of the long streets, so I walked methodically up one street and down the next until I found it. Turns out the pin on my map was about 300 ft south of the actual store. 

What's missing from this picture is the regular stream of taxis, minivans, motorcycles and rickshaws weaving around the pedestrian traffic. The street traffic here requires a whole entry of it's own so I'll post that later. 

4 days later

So it's been four days since we've updated the blog and the opportunity to keep it somewhat chronological has gone out the window. That's okay though, I'll fill in the blanks bullet form and get back with more pictures (I promise).

- When we got to the top of Swayambhu, there were holy shrines to Buddha and important Hindu gods, including the goddess of smallpox (where mothers take their children and make offerings for protection)

- From there we made the first of several trips to the Thamel (a neighbourhood of shops selling to the tourists). If you get something from us from Nepal, trust me, it didn't break our budget. 

- The next day we went to Baktapur. Like Patan and Kathmandu Durbar square, it is a palace and temples complex with narrow streets of shopping around it. We enjoyed strolling the neighbourhoods more than seeing the sights. 

- Barb already posted about our trip to Nagarkot. The weather never did clear for the view of the Himalayas, but I did get to walk down into a small farming hamlet with Sam and use the photo printer I bought for the trip. 

- Starting with Barb, we all got a tummy bug. Barb felt the effects on Saturday, and by Sunday midnight, all three bathrooms in Sam's apartment were in heavy use. Monday was  a recovery day and we are all in various stages of better today. Sam is back at work and I am sufficiently normal enough to walk to Thamel to pick up the T shirts we ordered in Friday and mail postcards. 

That's it for now. I might just blog randomly during the day with photos. I'll close this out with a picture of the T shirt store I took on Friday so I could find it again.

The Road to Nagarkot

So, perhaps my life didn't quite pass before my eyes but the road to Nagarkot is not paved with gold. In fact, much of it is reminiscent of the hard top roads to the cottage except these roads are switchbacks going up the hills to the Nargarkot region.

Our driver was amazing considering the roads. We passed through Bakhtapur and this kid on a bike turned right into the car. The driver jammed on the brakes but did hit the bike and the kid fell off. I don't  think we hit the boy. You will see from our photos that traffic here is chaotic with no apparent rules. As Samantha said, there are a lot of people walking with limps here.

Honestly, I  kind of glad we did it in the dark because I really didn't want to see the lack of barriers. It was a relief to get to the hotel.

We set our clock for 5:00 am and then woke up at 4:00. Nagarkot faces the Himalaya range of mountains with Everest, looking small off in the distance. All of the rooms face towards the range.

This morning it is a bit hazy but still spectacular as the various hills, terraced fields and houses in the valley below. I'll post pictures but they don't do it justice. 

Not sure if the haze is going to burn off today to get better shots or not. David has headed off for a hike with Sam while Suzanne and me are sitting on our balconies listening to the birds and relaxing.

Later, a stroll to see if we can find the rhododendrons that are supposed to be blooming now.

A long way to the top...

Along the way we passed more monkeys

And shrines with monkeys

And shrines

And guardian spirit animals

Goruda, servant of Vishnu says, almost there...

At the top

Climbing to Swayanbhu Stupa

The stupa (temple) at Swayambhu sits on a hill at the edge of Kathmandu overlooking the city.  It is an important holy site for both Buddhists and Hindus.  While pilgrims can take a winding route up the hill reciting mantras, there is a staircase of 365 stairs straight to the top.

Swayambhu has also been called the "Monkey Temple" by tourists because of the large number of monkeys that live on the temple.  These monkeys are eating offerings made at a Buddha statue at the start of the stairs.

More later, we're off to another day of sightseeing.

Morning at Sam's apartment in the suburbs of Kathmandu

This is what skies look like with no pollution laws.  I bought and wear a mask sometimes when it is particularly awful.  Fortunately in the afternoons, there has been a breeze that clears the air a bit.