Nepal Journal — Wednesday, 11/20/96

First day in Kathmandu:
In search of trekking permits

We have a pretty good first day here in Kathmandu. We start with breakfast at a little coffee shop in our hotel, the Hotel de L'Annapurna, then head out to get our trekking permits.

The hotel is walking distance from a city district called Thamel, where all the tourist stuff is, including an immigration office where you can get permits. The immigration office has the usual small-time government scam going where you need to submit several passport photos: if you don't have passport photos on you, a passport photographer just happens to be right there--how convenient! We submit to the passport photo scam, and after getting our pictures, we're herded into through a door. It takes us a while to realize the office is actually a private travel agency next to the immigration office, not the real immigration office itself. The enterprising travel agency can get us permits, though, and it seems worth the few extra bucks to avoid having to stand in the permit line for hours at the immigration office next door. The travel agent also arranges flights to the Annapurna area for us, including only a modest fee for some mysterious tax they never really explain to us.

My trekking permit and lovely photo

With out ticket and permit reservations underway, we stroll through Thamel, browsing through the stalls selling tourist trinkets. Like every newly touristed third-world area, the vendors in Thamel have latched onto the whole capitalism idea, but missed the bit about actually selling something different than everyone else. The result is that everyone sells exactly the same trinkets. In Nepal's case, the ubiquitous trinkets are T-shirts, little flutes, some kind of screechy mandolin, wooden chess sets, wooden sets of a local game called Tigers and Goats, brass sets of Tigers and Goats, and--the specialty--imitation khukri knives, which are big scary curved dangers used by the Gorkha soldiers in the Nepalese army. Fortunately, Thamel also has pizza, so we have some for lunch. We figure we'll get enough Nepalese food on the trek.

In the afternoon, we walk through the fascinating town square of a neighboring town called Patan. The buildings in the square have this beautiful architecture that mixes red brick walls with intricately carved wooden doors and windows. While wandering around, we totally luck out and come across some sort of Hindu religious procession in full swing. We stay long enough to see a number of people carry a statue of a god down the street to the front of a temple, then carry it inside.

City square in Patan

We head back to the hotel, then dine at the Hotel Annapurna's attached Indian restaurant, Ghar-E-Kabob. It's actually not by coincidence that we're staying at the hotel with the best Indian food in Kathmandu: this was the reason I had booked reservations at this hotel in the first place. It seemed to be as good a reason to pick a hotel as any.