First Glimpses of Kathmandu

Well we made it through the first few days of settling in, survived jet lag, filled in a million different forms and encountered the minor difficulties of the newly arrived. What’s it like everyone is asking me? So to illustrate, here are a few pictures taken from our three rooftop terraces showing the area around our home:

From our upper rooftop….I’m so glad that we have some views of the mountains. I hear they get better later in the year.

Not so many trees but little pockets here and there….and occassionally open views to the distant countryside that remind you that Kathmandu is not so big

View from my lower rooftop. Crumbling house next door is still occupied. Note the broken satellite dish with pieces missing on the roof and the newer, smaller one alongside. Abandoned yard behind has overloaded persimmon tree and a pomelo tree.

There’s some smarter looking homes in the other direction. But generally speaking our central location is a mish-mash of old and new, rich and poor, all thrown in together. As far as I can tell there isn’t really a smarter area of town.

View of a neighbour’s yard. What is that? Well I think it is sort of a ostentatious temple to wealth. I guess you could throw garden parties in it….but talk about incongruous.

Outside the gate things there’s plenty going on. After Manila, the traffic volume doesn’t seem nearly so constantly high, but I’ve been here for five days now and have yet to see a traffic light anywhere. You can imagine what that does to intersections. Here are some snaps around Kathmandu from the car as we take our first drives around the city:

Driving with motorcycles. There’s a lot of them. Not as heavy as Jakarta (Kathmandu doesn’t have the road infrastructure) but they are everywhere and fearless…

Crazy wiring is everywhere. You should see the route of our internet cabling over other people’s rooftops…

Typical street scene. There are a few main arterial streets and a ring road but most streets are smaller like these.

Lots of produce loaded bikes around. I think these guys had picked up produce from the nearby wholesale to sell at the their own stands.

Although the river water’s polluted, it still looked like a river which you could imagine flowing to a cleaner place. It was full of garbage but still cleaner than rivers I have seen in provincial areas of the Philippines.

…and finally, stray cows. I had been warned but saw none for days. Today they were everywhere. Three brown cows walked three abreast today in the middle of the road outside my gate. Of course, I didn’t have my camera, so these garbage-eating cows at a local market will have to do.