With our beloved Lonely Planet in the hand, we start our visit to the beautiful unesco heritage Kathmandu Valley in Nepal.
We stay in Thamel, which is Backpacker's Paradise, with lots of shops selling cappuccino, carrot cake and everything a backpacker can miss after eating Dal Bath (rice and lentils) every day!
KATHMANDU
Kathmandu Durbar Square
The King's residence
12-arm gods and goddesses
Woman selling marigold flowers
used for hindu rituals
Ganesha with marigold neckless, one of the most popular hindu deities,
who is supposed to remove obstacles in life
Man wearing a typical nepali hat
David filming the market activity
The monkey temple, a buddhist stupa looking over the city
PATAN
The Kathmandu Valley is full of impressive historical squares, and as we go from one city to the other, these squares become even more beautiful. The next one we visit is the Patan Durbar Square, a city next to Kathmandu.
Patan Durbar Square
People sitting at the temple,
which is the meeting point for the locals
As we walk through the city, we see a lot of temples where the mixture of buddhism and hinduism is even more clear. Here you can see a shrine with buddhist prayer wheels surrounding a Nandi bull statue, which is the vehicle of Shiva, the Hindu deity par excellence!
In the buddhist golden temple there are
statues that resemble the hindu god Hanuman
BHAKTAPUR
We then move to Bhaktapur, where the most impressive Durbar Square awaits us, with the highest wooden temple in all of Nepal. The entrance fees also get more expensive, but for these views we don't mind paying up to 15USD!
Bhaktapur Durbar Square
Enjoying lunch and view over a smaller square near by
The street market
Girl carrying water from a street tap
(no running water in the houses)
Drying rice in the sun
The city is much more authentic than Kathmandu,
with nice cobblestone streets and little shops .
Here we meet Sandeep's family (a friend of our Nepali friend Sujit back home) who invites us over for a delicious nepali food homemade by his mother, who also gives me about 20 bracelets that married women always wear in Nepal!
Sandeep's family
BOUDHANATH
This little buddhist town was once an important stop on the route between Nepal and Tibet and has a grandious stupa, with tons of monks in bordeaux robes, locals and tourist going around clockwise as is the tradition in tibetan buddhism. It was really funny just to watch people walking the street just in one direction!
Here you meet some westeners chanting mantras and learning
the art of meditation, and also some western monks wearing their buddhist robes
Woman selling candles to light at the stupa
NAGARKOTH
To relax from all the impressions of our sightseeing we decide to spend a night in Nagarkoth, where you can watch the Himalayas from a quiet Hut in the mountains. The day was foggy, so we couldn't see even a single peak, but we certainly relaxed a lot in our cute refuge called "The End of the Universe"
Caro
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