Kathmandu is an amazing city. All the time we wandered around it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had ended up in the last century. Here we came to a small square in the center of which stood a traditional little temple, and right on the asphalt vendors were selling vegetables – cabbage, tomatoes, peppers. The houses are all small – two- or three-story, with beautiful carved wooden windows. Many of the houses have beautiful antique carved wooden doors. Everything is a little dust-covered – Kathmandu is a very dusty city. Most of the local people walk around with face coverings – it’s unpleasant to breathe the dust.
There isn’t as much street food in Nepal as in India, but there are lots of mini-cafes where they cook momos in large vats – traditional Nepali dumplings, mostly with yak meat. Nepalis themselves really love places like this, and we came to love them too – the momos here are tasty and inexpensive.
We got our permit and trekking card quite quickly, and just as quickly had to part with 100 dollars – that’s how much all those papers cost for the two of us… Hiking in Nepal is not a cheap pleasure.
We extended our visa even faster; this isn’t Europe.
To be fair, we had prepared in advance by filling out the required form on the immigration center’s website.
On the way we needed to print this form – we went into a photo center where a woman in her forties was sitting. She was doing something on the computer. We asked her to print the document, and for a long time she couldn’t understand what we needed; in the end, she seemed to figure it out. For some reason she opened Photoshop and started trying to copy our document into it..
At that point Volchiy couldn’t stand it and said, let me explain it to you. She understood rather slowly, clicked around a bit – as a result, the form was printed not on the whole sheet, but only on a quarter of it. Volchiy took the initiative into his own hands – printed it properly, but the printer turned out to be some lousy one – it duplicated lines, printed everything unclearly and in an unpleasant blue color instead of black. So after paying the poor lady a little for her troubles, we went looking for another printer. We found one almost immediately around the corner, where a more quick-witted man printed everything correctly for us at once.
We had to spend money here too; a 15-day visa costs 30 dollars per person…
Today I was breaking in my new hiking boots. They turned out to be so heavy that while we were running around all these offices, I felt very tired and really wanted to eat.
We found a nice little place for locals, with a proper large vat for cooking momos, and ate one portion between the two of us. The day was in full swing, we were far from touristy Thamel, and decided we would look for a supermarket with no markup on cookies and nuts. On the way we ate momos again, and one portion for two quickly disappeared into our stomachs – right on the street, on a bench, but they were fresh and piping hot.
It got harder and harder to walk. We could barely drag our feet. We had covered a lot of ground today. Along the way we ate some more ice cream. We made it to the supermarket, which turned out to be lousy. But we still bought cookies there. Unfortunately, in Nepal, unlike in India, prices for cookies and for any goods are marked up just like at home – every shop has its own price, and in Thamel, where there are plenty of wealthy tourists, prices are accordingly marked up quite a bit.
At last we made it home.
