Day 6 – Wednesday June 24 – Bhaktapur and Pashupatinath

When I went off to Durbar Square yesterday, the driver asked me which one I wanted to see. Huh? As I mentioned before, Durbar Square is a fairly generic term and there are 3 Durbar Squares in the Kathmandu area. Bhaktapur is probably the furthest one away, but it is more than just the one square. The old section of town is on UNESCO’s list of places you really have to see before they are completely destroyed (The new section of town is a place you wish you could avoid if you head east out of town but can’t).

The UNESCO list is a wonderful thing for local governments because it is effectively a global permission slip to charge lots of money for entrance. Most of the amazing temples in the Kathmandu valley have very low costs for tourists to see. But Bhaktapur is about 10 dollars per person which is close to a months income for some Nepalis. This must rake in a fortune during heavy tourist times and hopefully it really does go to helping preserve this amazing location and helping its residents.

One of the issues with these attractions is that the entrances are filled with hopeful tour guides. Times are tougher now with fewer tourists, so they have the added tool in their belt of playing the guilt card into hiring them. I had taken the tour of Bhaktapur 15 years ago and just wanted to enjoy myself this time. The thing with tour guides for me is that just a few hours after the tour is finished, I have forgotten most of what they told me. So I try to brush them off as much as possible. We were quite successful with this for the most of the entrance area but then we met two boys who surprised us.

On our way through the main entrance, a small boy named Sushan tagged along with my sister. She tried to get rid of him, but then he plainly stated his goals. He had no interest in being a tour guide. Sure, he could point us in the right direction, but he was much more interested in practicing his English with us. So he tagged along with us. And he turned out to be an excellent guide making the stay in Bhaktapur far more enjoyable than I would have thought possible.  

Later, his cousin (Sushan, I am sorry, I have forgotten your cousin’s name) joined us as we wandered around. There is much to see in Bhaktapur and I had a great time, but one of the highlights was seeing the Thanka (pronounced something like Tonka as in Tonka Toys) painting school that Sushan goes to. We were able to tour the facility, and watch several paintings being made. The thankas can take upwards of several months to complete and look like back-breaking work. At the top of the school there is a room where they sell thankas to tourist visitors like us. In the back of the room was a very large thanka that took 7 masters a few years to complete. It was amazing. But they aren’t cheap. I had bought a thanka of obviously lower quality at a much more affordable price in Thamel a few days ago so I was thanka’d out, but Sarah bought a cheaper, student-made thanka that she liked.

On the way back to our taxi ride home, we stopped in Sushan’s school supply store. Sarah was very surprised that the only thing Sushan said he wanted in the store was a English Nepali dictionary that was out of his price range. Sarah bought it for him as thanks for the wonderful tour. At the end of our stay in Bhaktapur she even inscribed the cover with a thoughtful message about how important it was to stay in school. Sarah and I really do hope he sticks with it and we fully expect him to do well.

From there we headed to Pashupatinath. It was already a long day and we were pretty tired. This heat will kill your enthusiasm very quickly. So we made it a very short stay. Just long enough to see the funeral pyres, and to watch the monkeys jumping in to the river to cool off and play.

Tomorrow is our drive to Jiri and its going to be a long trip, better to rest now….

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Day 5 – Tuesday June 23 – Durbar Square, Swayambhunath, and Patan Zoo

Yesterday I saw Durbar Square with Sarah but it was midday, really hot, and swarmed with people. I wanted to see it in a different light so I got up early and left the hotel at 6:30. I was a bit disappointed that it was so bright at that time, since I wanted to see it with a bit more of a warmer light. By the time I got there it was morning, really hot, and swarmed with people. But it was a different kind of crowd. This time it was filled with people visiting the temples as part of their religious practice, and vendors selling fruits and vegetables on the street. It was fascinating to see people doing things as part of their normal routine.

I managed to do a panorama with the new gear from Really Right Stuff. I’ll let you know when I have completed some of the stitching of the pics. That will probably happen when I get home. But setting up the equipment is quite an event for most of the locals. First I extend the legs of the tripod, then attach the panning clamp and level it. From there I attach the arm to moves the lens’ nodal point back. I attach the camera’s l-bracket and mount the camera to the arm. I rotate it a few times to make sure I have it all set up right and then take the pictures. The entire process takes about 20 minutes and reminds me of the care I took when taking photos with a 4x5 camera on hikes around the Olympic Peninsula near Seattle. I could take the same care with every photo, but I don’t. When I do take the extra time, the ratio of fantastic to crap photos goes way up. 

After my second visit to Durbar Square, I went back to the hotel and met Sarah for breakfast. Since there were a few more things I wanted to see during my stay and they happened to be things she wouldn’t mind seeing again, we decided to arrange for a tour. For today we decided it would be Swayambhunath and the Zoo at Patan. I think this was the first time anyone had asked to go to the Zoo at Patan because she had to ask us if thats where we really wanted to go a few times. Eventually a price was agreed on and we were to meet down in the lobby around 12:45. At 12:45 we were there but she was on her lunch break and would return in 10 minutes. 25 minutes later we were still waiting. When she finally arrived it seemed that she just started to arrange the tour that we book several hours ago. Ugh. Well then the driver showed up and it turned out to be the same guy as this morning. And off we went.

Swayambhunath is one of the typical sites that every Kathmandu tourist visits. At the top of one of the hills inside the Kathmandu valley, it is one of the most important religious sites in the city. There are two ways to visit this place. First there is the very energetic way which is what I did 15 years ago. If you are coming here in a taxi or private car, you can go the lazy route which lets you off very close to the top. You still get to see may of the monkeys that swarm this place, you just don’t get quite as stinking hot as you would if you climbed all those steps from the bottom. And despite what others will tell you, its not all that more gratifying to do the whole thing.

We then had a short climb to the top where you are greeted with an incredible view of the city. Time for a pano. We spent an hour or two here wandering around the temple at the top and having a lunch of chow mein. Then we met up with the driver and moved on to Patan. Apparently most tourists who go to Patan see the Durbar Square there. But we saw the zoo. Its not a very big zoo, but what they have is very impressive. In fact, for certain animals I think this may be one of the best zoos in the world. Seriously!!! I used to have a membership to Miami’s MetroZoo and have visited the zoos in Seattle, DC, Sydney, and SF often. I love zoos. But I have never been able to have such a good viewing of tigers, rhinos, hippos, or leopards as I had here in Patan. In fact I was no more than 5 feet away from the leopard. Incredible.

And then we headed back to the hotel. Tomorrow we have a visit to Bhakatapur and Pashupatinath planned…goodnight.

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Day 4 – Monday June 22 – Durbar Square and Thamel

Well, these late mornings are great, but I may need to take better advantage of my time here. By midday we finally got out of the hotel and went out to Durbar Square in Kathmandu. Durbar Square is apparently a generic name referring to the square opposite the old royal palace. There are three Durbar Squares, one in Kathmandu, another in Patan, and a final one in Bhaktapur. Today was just the KTM one.

As with any tourist location in Nepal, a westerner is instantly swarmed with people selling their wares (usually a bunch of crap) or their skills as a tour guide. Read up beforehand and just soak up the wonderful space like I did. Some of the tourguides are very persistent, and may end up insulting you to try to get you to hire them. I am not sure if that works with others, but it just turned me off.

Unfortunately, the skies were not good for me for this entire trip so far: cloudy, not a hint of blue skies, and very bright. So my pictures aren’t quite as good as I could imagine. But I am still pretty happy with it all.

After a few hours in the square, we went over to a little rooftop restaurant. This one’s claim to fame was that it was a rotating restaurant, kind of like what you find at the top of the Seattle Space Needle. Except the motor in this one was broken. Add to that some horrible momos, and a TV with terrible reception at an ear-shredding volume, and the end result wasn’t what we were hoping for. At least they had a good view over the square and of the surrounding rooftops.

Nearby the square on the New Road (although I see it listed in Google as Sukra Path) is a little market my sister loves to visit for glass beads. We sat for a while and found a few items we couldn’t live without. Well, I think I would have had more success at living without them than Sarah would. We finished up our shopping and headed back to the hotel for a short rest.

Dinner tonight was at one of Sarah’s favorite spots: Kilroy’s. I guess the quality of the food is subjective. It helps if you had been in KTM for a while. At that point, any European food is starting to look and taste really wonderful. In fact I seem to remember Kilroy’s being incredible last time around. This time, it was OK.

Perhaps one of the more entertaining aspects of the night was watching the movements of the older gentleman sitting next to us. After his dessert, he walked downstairs and talked with one of the workers. And then out of nowhere he started screaming about the noise created by some band that was playing nearby. It seemed very out of place and, although my description was very quick, you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that he came across as a real ass. After our dinner was finished, we wandered through the restaurant looking at the photos on the wall. We then saw our screamer in some of the pictures: co-owner of Kilroys. Thats too bad, perhaps it was just a bad night for him.

Well, thats another day over here in “Mystical Kathmandu”…

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Day Three – Sunday June 21 – Changes Again

Ahhh, finally a sleep in. A 9AM breakfast and lazy morning is much more like it. After that I went to my room to clean up some more photos while Sarah met with colleagues in the lobby. After she was done, new changes to the plan were announced. We would be going to Jiri after all. If the worst does happen and we get stuck, we will have a helicopter take us back to KTM. Although it is a terrifying 9 hour drive, its a 35-45 minute helicopter ride. And it can be a terrifying and sick-making flight. We will be out there for about 6 nights and then return to KTM for our last few days.

She also let me know that we would head out to the monkey colony today. While the road out to Jiri is pretty scary, it is a relatively good road. Not too wide at certain points, but you aren’t likely to slam your head against the window several times per minute. Thats a pretty accurate description of some of the road to this other location a couple hours out of KTM. The first 3/4 is actually fairly smooth. And it goes through quite a few small villages with locals doing what locals do.

There were men working on the road, women tending the fields, kids running around, chickens and cows and goats roaming anywhere they pleased. And then the paved part ended and it was a good hour of the worst road I have ever been on. A roller coaster this bad would be illegal in most countries. I tried as hard as I could to keep my head from snapping off at the neck. Sarah and Pravesh commented on how much the road had improved over the years. This was an improvement?

Finally we reached the destination but I cannot go into that here. Toward the end of our stay we had a wonderful lunch with rice, peas, and a wonderful mixture of mushrooms, tomatoes, and beans. Quite spicy and oh so tasty. I keep meaning to take pictures of these meals. Arrgghh.

For the return journey, the road had not improved at all, though I think I was able to handle it a bit better. Then again, I had just eaten a very spicy and acidic meal, so there was just a little churning going on as well. On both the way out and the return I was very happy with my new camera. The benefit this time was the automatically changing ISO speed, 1/8000 sec shutter, 8 fps, and good fast lenses. On the paved roads, I was sometimes able to use the zoom with great success. On the more rocky roads, the 50/1.4 really helped to keep the ISO down for less noisy shots. The fast shutter speed allowed for some good sharp pictures even though I couldn’t hold the camera very still. Sure, it would have been better to stop, but we didn’t have all day, and I managed to take about 1000 pictures on this one day alone.

One thing I noticed in this type of shooting was that the 80-200/2.8 that I have owned for about 15 years is still surprisingly fast at finding the correct focus. The 50/1.4G is very quiet, but much slower at focusing. Its a pretty demanding scenario since we were sometimes moving around very quickly and I don’t see it being an important question in the purchasing decision of any future lenses. But the weight is really tough on my arms. The D700 is hefty on its own. The battery pack adds a little, but the 80-200 is just as heavy as the body, perhaps more so.

By the time we got back to the hotel we were very shaken. On the elevator up to the bar, we all noted that it felt like we were still moving a bit. Much the same feeling as getting off a boat after being on high seas for a few hours. After resting for an hour or so with a soothing beer, we ventured down the street to a wonderful little Chinese place, and then an early night to bed…

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Day Two – Saturday June 20 - Arrival into Kathmandu

It was another early morning today. Well, not quite as early as yesterday, but considering the late night after my sister’s arrival, I didn’t get the beauty sleep I normally require. Sarah raves about the breakfast at the Novotel at the airport, though apparently all that is needed for a quality morning meal for her is a bowl of miso soup and some lychees. That sounded a bit on the revolting side for me, but I was willing to give it a shot. Its not quite as weird as I expected, but I won’t be having it again. I thought that overall it looked like any standard nice hotel breakfast buffet. Certainly not as good as the Hilton Sentral Kuala Lumpur, but good enough.

Perhaps the more interesting part of the breakfast was the argument we had with the waitress about the cost. We thought it was included in the room, she thought it was not. The manager of the restaurant came over, and he stood by his employee. Someone from the front desk came over and agreed with the manager. All this over a 10 dollar dispute. We left the desk without paying, but the desk attendant made it clear that he would be charging our cards the extra amount. It turns out that for this trip I am a little more prepared than usual. Not only do I have a copy of my entire itinerary, including confirmation numbers, stuck inside my notebook, I also have all emails from hotels printed out. The email from Novotel clearly stated that breakfast was included. We showed that to the desk as we checked out a few minutes later and, while a bit confused over the whole affair, they apologized to us for the mix up and removed the charges from our bill.

Apparently one of the benefits of the Novotel is that it is walking distance to the hotel. This may be true under a few very special circumstances. First, you have to be dressed in very light clothing. Second, you have to have no baggage with you to sap your energy (I didn’t notice any sherpas up front). And third, you have to be willing to stink up your entire airplane cabin from the smell of sweat that has dried into your clothes from the steaming hot walk you just completed across several football fields to get there. Since we were not willing or able to comply with those three requirements, we took the free hotel shuttle. The first stop was ours.

Thai Business Class. Ahh, yes, this is a better way to travel. I sometimes get to fly business on United because I use my miles to upgrade. The only time I ever paid for business was when Piedmont Airlines would occasionally ask for only 10 dollars extra to upgrade. Once, due to a travel approval snafu, Captaris had to pay for a business class flight on KLM to somewhere (the customer had already paid for me to be there, plus it got me one of those cool KLM houses, my only one). But the flight from Bangkok to Kathmandu is so ridiculously cheap that the business fare is really quite affordable.

The benefits of the upper class were pretty good. First there was the massive check-in area for the 16 or so people in that cabin. Then came the attendant who ran off with your airport tax money and returned with the receipt while we lounged on some little stools. Then the dedicated immigration officer who reviewed our passports and visas. One escalator below we relaxed in the lovely Thai Business lounge. OK, not sure how much relaxing we could do in 20 minutes, but this was a benefit and dammit we are going to take advantage of it. I wandered around a bit with my camera to take a few shots of the building, but then it was time to move on to the flight.

We boarded and waited for the flight to start moving. It gave me a chance to pull out my laptop, transfer photos from my camera, and see what I got. I much prefer this over the routine from the last trip to Nepal. I took one after another roll of film and waited 3 weeks until I returned home to Manhattan to see if I had anything good. That was with 25 rolls, multiplied times 36 exposures, that gave me about 900 pictures, total. This time I have a 12 MP camera. An 8GB CF card lets me take about 550 pictures, and I have 4 of those cards, plus some older 4, 2, and 1 GB cards as an extra backup. I can offload all of those to my computer and 2 backup drives, enabling me to have three copies of each picture just in case any drive fails. A little Powershell script takes the pictures off my cards as soon as I attach the reader, and Robocopy easily synchronizes all of the disks. I have no realistic limit to the number of pics I can take, though if I really push it, I guess I am stuck with less than 41 thousand. Whew, I think it will be a good thing if I can manage to take up to 8 – 10 thousand images. Though I expect many of those to be components of HDR and Panoramic photos. You are already starting to see the results of some of the 5-exposure HDR (High Dynamic Range) compilations on my flickr account.

The pictures from the airport looked pretty good. I am especially excited by one of the handheld HDRs of the airport architecture. The handheld HDR is something I often tried but rarely had good luck with. First on the D70, it only auto-bracketed 3 exposures. Then the motor drive could only handle 3 frames per second or so. The D700 could do brackets of up to 9 exposures, though I am sticking with 5 so far. Plus, the drive is 8 frames per second. That extra half second makes a world of difference when it comes to keeping the camera still enough to get this effect.

A movie later (something with Renne Zelleweger about her moving to Minnesota from Miami, pretty good), and we were approaching Nepali airspace. Unfortunately we were on the left side of the plane and the Himalayas are on the right. Usually this is not a problem since you cannot see anything anyway, but today, Everest was peeking out. I grabbed my gear and got a few shots off. None are all that good since it was so far off and the airplane window obscures quite a bit at that distance. But the image in my head is wonderful.

I headed back to my seat for approach and landing. Coming in is pretty amazing. These are foothills, yet the plane is flying below their peaks for the last few minutes. And we are down. Like in Doha, we all walked down the steps from the plane onto the tarmac and into the terminal. Just like Bangkok, there was a medical team waiting for us to take temperatures and assess us. I passed! Whew!! We waited in line for the immigration official to stamp our passports. Since Sarah comes through this airport so many times, I followed her, but I had to ask why we were standing in the diplomats line. I figured she had some special clearance due to her clinic. For some reason right about then we moved to the regular tourist line, while she quietly giggled.

There are lots of forms that they review. Who knows if they actually make any use of them. But a few minutes later we were through. Either Thai recognizes me as a very special person or I just got lucky, but my bag was the second off the plane. My sister, who gives so much to this country in the form of free health care to many of its people towards its east had to wait a while. A long while. Last time I was here, John panicked when I told him in Portland that the gate agent at JFK could only check my bags to Tokyo. The agent was apparently supposed to be able to check them all the way to Kathmandu. I heard for much of the flight about how I would have to shop for clothes in Nepal since I would not be seeing my bag. At Narita, a small Japanese flight attendant scribbled some notes on the back of a napkin with a pencil and assured me the bag would make it. Just like this time, my bag was among the first off. John, the Nepal expert waited…till there was no one else left in the terminal. They left his bag in Tokyo. A few days later it arrived, but not before he had to pick up a few clothing items in Kathmandu.

Fortunately her bag did arrive. They do weigh your bags in Bangkok but apparently if you have only a suitcase or two, they have no problem with it. The reason for that was obvious looking at the baggage belt. Sony, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung. Box after box of electronics went round. Some boxes just held smaller radios, others were 42-inch TVs. Bangkok is much cheaper for these kinds of electronics and it is a popular quick trip for the locals.

At the airport, Pravesh picked us up and drove us to the hotel. We had just a few hours before a meeting she had with another colleague. So we walked to Thamel, stopping off at a money changer. This particular money changer on the right from the Radisson has some of the best rates in case you are looking. Sometime around then the “walk” turned into a quick taxi ride due to the heat. And there we were, in Thamel. This is a place filled with trekker shops, artist shops, and more. It seems a bit more touristy than last time. Pilgrims Bookstore is still there, filled with interesting books and crafts at a fixed price. Go there to figure out what the slightly expensive price is for something, then venture elsewhere to practice your haggling skills. Or just cave in on paying 50 cents too much and buy it there.

At another store I found some of those wonderful prayer flags that you so often see everywhere. Just over a Euro for 25 flags on a string. Sold! I may need some more later. Sarah had to make her usual stop at her favorite Thamel jeweler. She has been coming here every time for years and trusts the proprietor to not scam her. That said, there was plenty of haggling to bring the price down…sometimes below half the initial asking price. She has practiced this skill quite a bit. For my patience, I was given a beautiful crystal spire for my desk at home.

And then it was time for her meeting, so we headed back to the hotel. This gave me a chance to review the photos and again I am pretty pleased. Dinner was up at the top of the hotel. There aren’t many tall buildings in Kathmandu, and at 5 stories, the Radisson peaks out over most. The rooftop cafe was a wonderful place for the sunset, but I heard of some changes to our travel plans. Apparently the Maoist groups will occasionally call a bandh. When this happens nothing is allowed to move on the roads. These can last a day or a week. If we head out to Jiri, we could easily be stuck and miss our flights. We are thinking of heading out to the west instead for a few days (not to Chitwan since that is apparently very dangerous right now), and maybe a couple more at a monkey colony. That means I also have a bit more time in Kathmandu to see all I want to see. Unfortunately this also means that much of the trip becomes a personal trip rather than a business trip for my sister.

After dinner, I was able to get my packages from her. Before the trip I had a few items shipped to her in the US which she brought along to me here. So the final components of my photo bag are complete: A Really Right Stuff BH-25 QR ballhead, an L-plate for the D700, the PCL-1 panning clamp and the MPR-CL II nodal slide. This stuff is amazing. I hope to get some great pano’s with this and the ballhead is much lighter than the Gitzo head I have now. Plus, I can leave it on the tripod and it almost folds up completely. 

Well, the day is over now, and its off to bed. 10PM and my eyes are drooping…goodnight.

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