Upon Arrival - Kathmandu Edition

An occasional series of initial thoughts, misunderstandings, and (sometimes) funny stories from new places

Imagine the exhaustion of 24 hours of multimodal travel.

• The first 3 and a half hours in the car (the last hour and a half in standard NYC-metro area congestion) where you spend at least an hour contemplating what item you forgot on this much-anticipated life changing trip to Nepal.

• Followed by the unwelcome, but necessary, rigors of TSA screening and the waiting game for a night flight to Doha.

• Fourteen hours in the air, crammed next to perfect strangers, near constant interruptions for poorly timed and poor-quality meals… and don’t forget the person in front of you is going to reduce your already cramped space, by reclining.

• You arrive in Doha, grateful just to stand up and breathe unrecycled air for 90 minutes. A quick stop at a Starbucks (judge if you must, but it was a final comfort before heading into the unknown), and you board another flight, this time a quick four-hour jaunt to Kathmandu. 

• You arrive in Kathmandu, at about 1 a.m. local time. Nepal is 10 hours and 45 minutes ahead of Eastern time, so it has been a full 24 hours from when you left your house the day before. You feel:

  • Relief – you’ve arrived.

  • Delirium – you are tired.

  • Confused - different airport customs.

  • Maybe even hungry – *See poorly timed and unsatisfying meals.

  • Excited – you’re embarking on another adventure.  

This is not the road we drove on when we arrived in Nepal. It was too dark and I was too nauseous to take any photos, but this is a representation of some Nepali infrastructure.

After going through security (yes, you go through a metal detector when you arrive in Nepal), grabbing our hikers’ backpacks from the luggage carousel (which had more plastic-wrapped boxes than actual luggage), we exited the airport and met Raj (who we later would learn was our tour’s assistant guide).

Raj led us to the van that would carry us on the final leg of our initial journey. It would take about an hour to get to Nagarkot. It was a 10-day tour, and we were arriving on Day 3.

The roads outside the airport weren’t completely empty, but they were dark. The buildings were not tall and had the same kind of retail operations as you expect in the less cosmopolitan part of any city. There were some billboards advertising alcohol, calling cards and opportunities to study in Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. Also, no traffic lights. NOTE: There are none – in the entire country.  After driving for 15 minutes or so, my husband said the urban landscape reminded him of Baghdad. He surely meant that in the nicest way possible.

After about 20 minutes, we took a left off the main street, no retail shops, no billboards.  Raj mentioned the trip would be getting bumpier. And it did. And windier.

This made perfect sense. We had gone to Nepal to hike in the Himalayas (**NOTE: not Everest or basecamp, we never had any plan for those two milestones). So, ascending to the first mountain resort, would naturally require driving uphill from the Kathmandu valley, and naturally those roads would be winding around the mountain.

But these roads were also desolate, no streetlights, no lights at the modest cement or tin homes that dotted sides of the mountain, only the two headlights of our van. Also, many of the roads climbing the mountains between towns have seen better days. Disrepair is a nice way to describe the near constant potholes, large and small, and areas where the road has disintegrated into the earth below.

Our driver did his best to navigate these obstacles using the limited light available and his own experience on the roads. But that made the winding roads even more jerky.

Now did I mention I sometimes suffer from motion sickness? This ride was an exercise in self-determination. I was determined not to puke on myself. The jerkiness of the driving, the windiness of the roadway, and having no idea how long this misery was going to last nearly did me in.

The view of the valley we had transited the night we arrived. This is from our hotel balcony.

Finally, we arrived at our lodge in Nagarkot. It was about 3 a.m.  I was thankful to arrive and stand on solid ground. We checked in, met our tour guide, went to our room exhausted, and set the alarm for 7:30 a.m. so we could eat before we embarked on our first hike.