Exit Kathmandu

But I was happy. Happy happy, joy joy. The pills cost about 1 rupi a piece, that is about 3 American cents. This was quite a bit cheaper than seeing a Western doctor in Kathmandu, at US$30. So, being well again, relatively speaking, I could spend my last days in Kathmandu exploring what I hadn't seen there during my last visit. I also went on a safe diet, meaning burgers and French fries from Wimpy's, the only fast food place in town. It resembled what I might have eaten home enough for my stomach to be willing to accept it.

I wanted to go to Nagarkhot, a smaller village outside Kathmandu, with a great view towards Mount Everest and the surrounding mountains. An additional attraction of Nagarkhot is that you can find "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" there, which is a treat for readers of Douglas Adams. But I couldn't. Just as I was ready for some peace and tranquility, Nepal decided to have a huge festival, the Dasain. This is a week-long occasion for everyone to stay home with their families to play with kites, beheading all kinds of animals as a sacrifice to the goddess Durga. Everybody puts on new clothes and go to their local temple to receive large red tikas of vermilion paste on their foreheads. In the following days the people generally eat the dead animals and drink a lot of alcohol. This of course includes the bus drivers, who therefore are too drunk to drive. And if they hadn't been drunk it wouldn't have mattered, as they would have crashed with all the other drunk people on the roads during this week anyway. So I was destined to stay in Kathmandu.

This put me in a rather bad mood, which I got rid of by spending a whole day walking through Thamel, the part of Kathmandu with most tourists and hassles, yelling at all the people that tried to sell me something. I felt really good after having done that, and for the next two days, noone stopped me in the streets. Bliss!

I also spent a day rearranging the contents of my backpack. It had turned pretty bad after a few feverish days of throw-it-in-and-compress-it packing while being sick. To catch up with what the world looked like a week ago, I went to the British Council and read the English newspapers there. It's your best bet for news in Kathmandu, unless you can afford to stay in a hotel with CNN.

Another daytrip was for Patan, the second largest of the three cities in the Kathmandu valley (Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur). Another heap of temples, of course, but I also went to the zoo there. That was really, really depressing. And not only because they charged foreigners 50 rupis, while Nepalis paid only 10 rupis. Luckily my stomach hadn't stabilized completely yet, so I got my revenge through non-deliberately missing on the hole in the floor in the bathroom in a real jet-burst. I don't know if this was the reason, but that happened just two hours after I had lunch at "The Third World Restaurant". It was a 1cm deep pan pizza. Anyway, the zoo was a sad sight, with all the animals cramped into small boxes or fences, looking apathetic at nothing particular, while people where throwing things, spitting and yelling at them, to try and invoke some kind of reaction. And that was not the kids, but the grown-ups... Sad place. Green lake.

On my way home I had to take a 2 kilometer detour (walking), as a large part of the city center was closed down, due to the King, Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, participating in a ceremony at the stadium, in connection with the ongoing festival. It is surprising how such a popular king, if one is to believe the plaques in the king's museum (basically a collection of photos and replicas of the animals the king has killed, and the guns he used) and the newspaper, needs to be protected from the people in a manner like that. Noone could get within several hundred meters distance of him. Sometimes you kinda get the feeling that the officials know that the people know that the Royal family is part of the huge corruption problem in Nepal.

A bucket of flowers, 8 buffaloes and 108 goats later, the huge sacrificing ceremony was just about over. Nepalese bullfighting is really, really impressive. One slash, and the head falls to the ground looking rather puzzled, while the body stays up with a bad case of trembling. And then it's dead.

The off-with-their-heads ceremony even took place at the airport. Before boarding, a goat gave its head to ensure our plane a safe flight to Bangkok. I found it a bit uhm... too much, but it seemed to work. I made it to Bangkok!

So, I guess I should sum up my thoughts concerning Nepal. Hm... It's a really, really, really bad country, with, obviously, great scenery and very comfortable prices on just about everything that isn't imported from Australia, and, mostly hidden to visitors, a rich and "different" culture. However, there is a bad mood lying all over the country as a shadow, caused by a number of factors that just don't exist on a similar level most other places on this planet:

• Children working, about 5.5 million of them all in all (in a country with just over 20 million people in it). You don't find "Men at work" signs along the roads of Nepal. I don't know if that is because they generally have no signs, but most often when you see roadwork, it will be children doing hard work, whether it is hammering asphalt onto the road, or crushing stones by hammering them to pieces, to create landfill.
• Corruption everywhere. Policemen are paid by drug dealers, so that tourists can buy everything they need and quite a bit more. This may be bad, but I consider the enormous amounts of money that disappears into the pockets of the politicians a larger problem. Nepal has been the country receiving most foreign aid per capita for about 20 years now, with no visible effects. The money just don't go to the people that need it the most. The country has a lot of resources, mostly in the shape of water flowing, ready to be made energy of, or to make fertile gardens, but the money available is so poorly managed that few projects are realized. It is unclear whether the king actually runs the country, but after the recent introduction of the concept of elections, thousands of communists have disappeared. This has made people very sceptical about the government, and the democracy replacing the monarchy hasn't meant anything but a "change of shirts" to the people so far. If the situation doesn't improve fairly soon, I for one wouldn't be surprised to see a civil war break out among frustrated citizens.
• The general hygiene, especially in the cities, is at a very poor level. All the visitors to Nepal I've spoken to, has at some stage become sick, most often struck by food poisoning, while in Nepal. Fresh food can be seen everywhere in the streets, almost covered by flies, ready to be bought and eaten. Tap water is NOT for drinking, but most people can't afford bottled water.
• Hasslers. In the beginning of a visit to Nepal you may feel that people are very friendly, saying "Namaste" and smiling at you all the time. Sadly, you soon discover that in more than 90 percent of the cases, the friendly people are just after your money, in one way or another. It's really, really annoying after you discover it. The only way to get rid of this problem in the long term, is to stick to buying your souvenirs at fixed-price shops. There are a few of them, and you'll most often end up paying just a little bit more than what an hour of bargaining might have gotten you on the street.
• The traffic. It's dirty and dangerous. The bus between Besi Sahar and Dumre went over a cliff two weeks after I took a similar bus. With 28 seats in the bus, it was a bit surprising to read that there were about 50 dead after that accident. The accident itself wasn't surprising to me at all.
• Pollution. This only goes for the largest cities in Nepal. Kathmandu in particular is a hell filled with noise and air pollution, and there are no traffic or industry regulations whatsoever. People don't seem to care about trash lying around, and just throw the garbage out onto the streets. To their justice, shop keepers sweep the sidewalk outside their shops.
• Stray dogs and other animals. People own dogs, but don't care for them, resulting in a strange situation in the streets. There are dogs walking around, ignoring people totally, while people ignore them totally back. In the day you have to be careful not to step on the dogs that are sleeping in the middle of the road or on the sidewalks, and during the night you're lucky to get any sleep, as the dogs are howling at the moon and fighting each other. A lot of the dogs are very clearly sick and scarred, some of the dogs had open wounds where you could see straight to the inside of their head, or their intestines were hanging out. Noone treats them, they just walk around, getting thinner and weaker, losing their fur and teeth, until they finally dies, and are eaten by other animals.

Still, I'm glad I came. Almost as glad as I was to leave for Thailand.