This was also my first two day long trip that I
took alone, without any of the other volunteers. This was a challenge again to
get around in the chaos of Nepal all alone, which filled me with excitement and
satisfaction as well, after completing the trip without getting lost or
producing any bigger disaster. Also, it was really nice to get out of the city
little and have some autonomous time that now thinking about it, I’m missing a
little bit.
Anyway, finally on a Saturday morning (after
getting home pretty late because of trying to watch the football world cup that
is sometimes shown here at 1am...) I set off early to walk to one of
Kathmandu’s biggest bus park at Ratnapark. Finding a bus to Bhaktapur finally
wasn’t as easy as I expected, but after I was directed to the old bus park, a
pretty helpful bus driver pointed out a nice red bus to me, saying that that
would take me to Bhaktapur. So this is how after about another 45 minutes of
bus drive, I finally got to my first destination. Bhaktapur is a beautiful
Newari city, one of the three royal cities and former kingdoms in Kathmandu
valley, besides Kathmandu itself and Patan. It is also one of the world
heritage sites in Nepal. Well, getting there, first you have to pay an entrance
fee, which is pretty high (1500 Rs ~ around 12 Euros) but it is absolutely
worth it. The whole town looks like if you just stepped into another century,
full of beautiful temples and nice wooden decorations. It’s not only its Durbar
Square that is fascinating, but the whole town has a special atmosphere – with
all the nice buildings and the mountains in the background as well. As I’m
already getting used to it when I’m travelling alone, again I found my guides
for the city: first in a small Buddhist temple a monk started explaining to me
about their heritage while also putting a tikka on me (you know, the red spot
on the forehead which means blessing), and later another guy took me around
Durbar Square and offered to accompany me to my next destination in Nagarkot to
help me find the way and a cheap accommodation. Well, I didn’t take this offer,
but it was still nice to listen to his explanation about Bhakatapur.
After this I looked for another bus to get me
to Nagarkot. Well, this bus ride was an adventure again. Since the bus was
already kinda full when I got there, they told me to sit in the front, almost
by the bus driver. I don’t know if it was because of this, because I had a full
view of the road or the trip would have been crazy anyway, but finally it was
so far my scariest bus ride. Imagine an all the time bending road that looks
like to have been designed for one vehicle, turning continuously left and right
in the forest, while other vehicles are
coming from the other direction all the time, too, making the bus slow down,
stop, or just stay on the sides. The distance between Bhaktapur and Nagarkot is
not long, but because of these road conditions it took about one hour – which
actually was still shorten than what I expected.
Getting to Nagarkot there came the next
adventure: how to find a cheap accommodation. Since on the websites I could
only find terribly expensive options – at least in Nepalese measures – and
since I didn’t plan to spend the weekend in a fancy hotel anyway, I didn’t book
any accommodation in advance. When I got off the bus, I got ‘attacked’ by a man
from a hostel right away, who insisted on me looking at his rooms. Although he
was offering better prices than what I have found before, I wanted to go for
the cheapest option so I left him – even despite of the fact that it just
started raining pretty hard and looking for a cheap room while totally soaked
didn’t seem to be the best position for bargaining. Anyway, again this was the
moment when I kinda found my local guides: some guys who were just chatting by
a small cafe saw me walking up and then and started suggesting me the cheapest
hostels. Although these turned out to be already full, soon I found myself
picked up by one of them on a motorbike, riding to one of his friends, who was
supposed to have a just newly built small guesthouse. Getting there I found a
really local-looking place with a small room and a tiny Nepali style bathroom
included – very-very simple place, but cheap and perfect for spending there just
one night (Him Chuli Guesthouse). Well, after having a tea here together with
the owners and later with ‘my guide’ as well, at his place, and waiting for the
rain to stop, finally I took my first walks around the village.
Nagarkot itself seemed pretty much like a
double-sided place to me: on one side it’s full of very fancy hotels and lots
of foreigners, while on the other side it seems like a very simple, typical
Nepalese village as well, where villagers are living their daily life –
carrying grass, selling vegetables, going for water, getting their children
ready for school... – just right by all the foreigners. It seems like an
originally pretty poor village to me where they were clever enough to realize
the beautiful location of the village and starting building a tourism business
based on this creating this interesting, true faced image of the village.
After watching the sunset on the hillside in
the company of a group from India, and – just to refresh the memories of the
trekking – going to bed at 8 (!!!) o’clock, I woke up pretty early next morning
and started my about 6 km long walk to the view tower from which I was supposed
to see a beautiful sunrise. Although I saw some pretty nice views on the way,
facing the hills all around, and low clouds among them, by the time I got to
the view tower, I wasn’t so lucky to see anything: we were literally covered in
fog.
After the view tower, the plan for this way a
few hours hike (16 km – about 3-4 hours) to the world heritage temple, Changu
Narayan. The first part of the road, to Telkot village lead through all kinds
of small villages, with people sitting by their houses, goats wondering all
around and people carrying for example big piles of dray grass. Although
according to all the reviews, I read before, this part of the road was said to
be less fascinating, I enjoyed this part the most – saying ‘Namaste’ to all the
people, making contacts and asking for the right direction... In contrast with
this, the next part of the road lead through a beautiful, thick forest, where
although the way was pretty obvious, so there wasn’t a great danger of getting
lost, but still, you could walk for more than an hour without even meeting one
single person... It took me about 3 hours to finally get to the village of
Changu Narayan, which is actually famous for its ancient temple that was still
built in the 4th century. There were long stairs leading up to the temple,
surrounded with colourful shops and also for example thanka (traditional Tibetan)
painting schools. In the temple I again felt like a kinda star: I met a whole
school who were just on a field trip and had to answer all different kinds of
questions about the temple. Well, some of the students used the excuse of
asking for answers to come up to me, which finally resulted having all the
class and the teacher as well surrounding me, asking about me and taking pictures
together with me as well! I even got the contact number of the school and an
invitation to visit them somewhen! :)
Since after the visit in Changu Narayan, it was
still early afternoon, I finally decided to instead of taking a bus back to
Bhaktapur, follow the about another 6 km long highway back to Bhaktapur on
feet, from where (after some tasty samosa as a snack for lunch) I took my bus
back to Kathmandu. On the bus I had time for a rough calculation and realized
that together with my walk home within Kathmandu, I took more than 40 km on
feet just in one day which made it a bit more understandable, why my feet were
in a bit shaky condition.
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