looking west from our hotel in Kathmandu with Swayambhunath (monkey temple) on the hillside
Kvz. I have a memory of when I was quite a young girl singing a Bob Seger song at the top of my lungs..”I’m going to Kathmandu!” when my friend Neena (whose parents were from India) interrupted me and asked if I knew where Kathmandu was. I blinked. It was a real place? She told me it was in Nepal…which was close to India. I decided I must go there someday. Well, by golly, here I am. Thanks for the seed Neena, though I doubt you ever remember planting it! It wasn’t easy getting here either…3 hours of classic red tape and numerous lines at the Varanasi airport for just a 1 hour flight, but we just went through the motions. We’d actually expected Kathmandu to be a big, noisy city which we’d want to leave quickly but we were all quite pleased to find that we loved it! It was such a change of pace from India that I think we needed at that time….fellow tourists everywhere! Tourist shops galore! International food! Toilet paper for sale on every street corner! No cows in the streets! (Well, only a few per block) and the place looked so clean! Almost Switzerland clean! They even pick up the trash off the streets! Of course, we were only seeing one particular area of Kathmandu which is called Thamel and is of course the designated tourist zone…almost like a Disneyland for tourists. I remember feeling this same almost embarrassed surprise in Agua Calientes in Peru. Everyone slammed the place, but hey…when you’ve been in the sticks or non-tourist areas for weeks, a cozy internet cafe, a cappuccino, and a good bookstore can do your soul wonders. Thamel district kind of reminds me of my town of Leucadia..or what Leucadia would like to be. It’s full of laid-back tea houses, quaint bookstores with incense wafting out of the doors, restaurants with hanging paper lanterns and veggie menus which are a mixture of Nepalese and Tibetan cuisines, patchwork and embroidered cottons and silks, felted purses, silver shops, and camping store after camping store. The shop vendors are laid back too and don’t harass you constantly to come into their stores, leaving you to wander aimlessly in and out.
drumb shop in Kathmandu
Durbar Square in Kathmandu with the Kasthamandap (house of wood) in the background that Kathmandu derived its present name from
Holi Festival celebrants take a break
Drew reloads with plastic bags and color dye (he got nailed a few times on this mission)
So there’s always a catch, right? Our hotel seemed wonderful, with cable TV, AC, lots of outlets for our electronics, wireless internet…all for only $40 bucks a night. What more could anyone ask for? Well, electricity actually. Turns out the power is out for 16 hours a day in Kathmandu- yep, you heard me right. And half of the 8 hours it is turned on is usually in the dead of night. So while the hotels tout TV and internet, the truth is that what you’re really paying for is a bed. Then we found out about the festival. Remember that Holi Color Festival that we thankfully just missed in India? The one where they throw paint and colored powder on unsuspecting passerbys? Well, alas…it’s been reincarnated in Nepal as the “Holy” festival…alive and kicking. Of course we didn’t realize it until we were right in the middle of town center. Luckily, few people here can afford expensive paint to arm themselves with, so they settle for little plastic bags which they fill up with water and twist the tops, essentially making a water balloon which they hurl from the endless rooftops and upper-floor apartment building which top the street-level shops. No one is safe. It’s all done in humor, but I noticed that it’s done sneakily as well. No one wants you to know where the weapon is coming from so they wait till you’re not looking. Many of the shop owners are in on it as well. They hide in their shop till you’ve passed by, then nail you from behind. I found that if I maintained eye contact and watched my back as much as possible, I seemed to stay dry. But I resigned myself to getting wet and eventually did get nailed. I didn’t mind so much until I noticed that they had particular targets…lone, young women. Then I noticed that almost all of the attackers where young men who seemed to be using the holiday as more of an excuse to behave badly than anything else. The more I noticed this the more it pissed me off. The poor women were obviously just trying to get to work or home from it, when 4 or 5 men would all hurl balloons at them at once, completely soaking them. They would try to laugh it off, but you could see they were also annoyed. Then the inevitable happened…the armed and dangerous spotted Becca. She was just a little too far ahead of us, and when the first one hit she panicked and started to run because she had several brand new books in her backpack, along with her precious journals. When she ran, the balloons really started to fly. When she cowered and started to cry, I just snapped. I heard myself yelling on them to pick on someone their own size…she’s just a little girl for God’s sake! They stopped..I’m sure in fear for their lives. We emptied out her soggy books as quickly as possible and helpful, sympathetic shop owners handed us plastic bags and advised us to “please be careful” and to head on back to our hotel. We succumbed.
this guy was lobbing balloons onto our rooftop from a good distance away
Drew and Becca help our hotel’s staff re-load for an assault on the guys shown below
But the best answer to being a victim is revenge, right? The next day was the actual “day” (yesterday being the runner up day) where people would actually use coloring powder as well as water. We saw several tourist deliberately go out on the town, dressed in white t-shirts for the occasion. They came back completely covered in paint, like one of those “blue men” from that Las Vegas show. We decided to stay put. Then we happened to go up onto the rooftop to see the entire hotel cleaning staff (mostly all women) filling water balloons with the speed of a civil war cannon loader and hurling them at the enemy; the people on the neighboring rooftops. Every now and then there’d be some sort of mutiny and they’d start hurling them at each other. Then the would throw them at the hotel guests watching, and we’d all scurry for cover. No one was safe. Drew begged Tim to go out and buy some balloons so off they went. They came back well-supplied and rather wet. Then the three of them (Becca included) proceeded to engage in the warfare for the next couple of hours while I enjoyed my novel in the safety of the hotel courtyard. They even nailed pedestrians below! Becca let one drop and accidently (to everyone’s horror) hit a motorcycle who just happened to have a dad in the front, the mom in the back, and their infant held in the middle. Of course it landed right on the infant’s head. The infant was ok evidently, but they all felt horrible and Becca was reduced to tears once again. (I felt a little less sorry for Becca upon hearing this story…I figure it was Karma in reverse). I was glad when the whole thing was over, and I can guarantee you that if I was a local, I wouldn’t venture out on those 2 days either. A “holy” festival? More of a survival of the fittest…the fittest being the ones who can afford shops, and apartments on the top floors and the weakest being those poor schmucks who are stuck on the ground!
our room did not get cleaned this day as the hotel staff was busy defending their turf
Drew and Becca hanging out in the hotel’s courtyard the day after the Holi Festival
Durbar Square (above and below)
Drew trying out his new Nepalese horns.
