Kathmandu is more of a labyrinth than a city. There are cities within cities. The new city is built on top of the old. The old feels ancient and the new feels dated. Tiny doorways made for dwarfs lead to secret inner courtyards. Like a video game, the further you go and the more keys you hold, the more you unlock the hidden realms of this boxy maze.
Kathmandu retains the chaos of an Indian city, but with a more delicate balance.
Everyday life has a funny way of playing out just fine, despite a complete lack of order. Power lines are mixed and spliced like webs - power itself comes on and off at will. Urban cows, typical of the subcontinent, parade through the streets by day, while dogs roam the night as trash collectors. In a powerless city, street side fires light up the midnight dark.
Nepal isn't India. You can't compare the two - Nepalese won't let you.
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If there's one thing that every Nepali likes to reiterate, it's that he isn't an Indian. Nepalese are softer around the edges, less confrontational, more amiable - or so they say. They're more used to tourists. They cater to each generation's Cat Stevens wanabees and mountaineering hopefuls.
The old city of Kathmandu is fringed by a newer, more modern metropolis. Yet, even in this modern mix there's barely 14 hours of power a day and the ATM still cuts out when power is shifted to a different part of the city. Lose your card to the machine? "Come back tomorrow when the power's back," is the disheartening response.
For some reason, I always imagined Kathmandu to look something like Vail, Colo. - a quaint town dwarfed underneath behemoth mountains. It's not that there aren't mountains nearby (Nepal's got more than its share of those), but the haze of this incredibly polluted city doesn't allow for any noteworthy views. In fact, much of lower Nepal is a jumbled, overcrowded mess of human activity.
The tourist map Kathmandu is split in two sections.
The Gore-Tex crowd, preparing for their mountain escape, lounge away the afternoons with topographical maps along Thamel as countless travel agencies hawk their offers.
Back in Kathmandu's original tourist haunt Jochen Tole (aka "Freak Street"), the leftover, strung-out relics of a bygone era are found cloaked in local garb, sitting in circles and shaving their heads. This was, after all, the end of the hippie trail for many and the Shangri-la gushed about by the Beatles. Today, groups of tourists congregate outside of dingy cafes staring at each other with a distant, mildly euphoric, slightly empty look as they listen to their guru pluck the sitar.
Kathmandu is full of Western kids seeking to fix the problems of their perfect existence by diving into the very real problems of the East - reveling in a break from the monotony of Western perfection and seeking the antithesis of the "American Dream." These wanderers come to Nepal to escape predictability while subconsciously wishing that their life had more hardships, more to complain about, more guilt love. They voice all of their insecurities to the ears of eager Eastern magicians.
