I have read about it. I have heard friends mentioned about it. I have seen beautiful pictures of it.
But I have never planned a trip to it. Yet, I have finally made my way there.
Most people go to Nepal for trekking the Himalayas. That made up the main bulk of travellers I saw on planes. I was there for business meetings.
Lucky for me that the local host was very warm and showed us around and outside the main city, including Bhaktapur Palace.
Until we saw Bhaktapur Palace, my impression of Kathmandu had been one made up by dusty bumpy roads, irrational driving behaviours, reasonably good local beer and overcrowded public transport – quite literary ‘car squeeze’ which is a game other cities hold during fun fairs, except it is a daily chore here.
But Bhaktapur Palace changed that. It gave the city a sense of a past, likely a glorious one. Even with army of tourists around and touristic cafes set up, the palace has a quiet solemnity.
With the huge number of tourists going there for trekking (they had to start a ‘clean the Everest base camp’ exercise recently) and aids from countries consider Nepal strategic, there are money in this land. But judging from people I observed outside window of the car I was ferried in, I was inclined to think that there are certainly rooms for improvement when it comes to wealth distribution.
Yet, when I checked the pictures I snapped using my iPhone camera along the car drive, the Nepalese through my incidental lens appear somewhat calm and contended (though I was told that most taxi drivers would try to take foreign passengers for a ride).
A city which worth many looks.
But one thing I would certainly like to find out more, if I do get a chance to go back there, is the custom clearing procedure when leaving the country. Between the doorstep of the international departure hall and the seat on a plane, every passenger had to go through 2 scans on hand luggage, 2 detailed manual search over hand luggage, numerous check on luggage for tags as evidence that it had been scanned and manually searched, and 2 to 3 body search. It was the first time I encountered a luggage/body search being conducted at the foot of the staircase leading up to the plane.
