A World Heritage Tour of Kathmandu

The Boudhanath Stupa.

Making lunch at the Sisterhood of Survivors.

A two wheel shop.

Look closely at the front of the cart, she is cooking corn over an open flame right behind her child.

You can almost smell this.

Street scenes.

Some of the earthquake damage at Kathmandu's Durbar Square.

The remains of one of the pagoda temples.

 The propped up walls of the Kumari Ghar or palace.

 A couple of sadhus who charge money for photos. Are they really religious or conmen?

 Cremations at Pashupatinath Temple.

Monday, May 7^th.

I woke up early and didn’t realize the real time as I had forgotten to put my iPod clock back to Nepalese time. Rob and I had a leisurely morning and breakfast before we met up with BK and the group in the lobby.

BK had arranged for us to be picked up by a van and taken to the Boudhanath Stupa which is the largest stupa in Nepal and the holiest Tibetan Buddhist temple outside Tibet. It is the centre of Tibetan culture in Kathmandu and rich in Buddhist symbolism. It is 100 m in diameter, 43 m tall and has an area of 6756 sq m. It was listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979.

After that we drove to have lunch at an organization that GAdventures sponsors, called the Sisterhood of Survivors. They won a $25000 grant from G and G brings all their tours through here. We had a short lesson there on how to make a local dish called momos and then they served us lunch and showed us a presentation. The organization rescues, councils and educates women and girls who live in rural areas who have been lured by false promises of work or education in a better place and sold into the forced labour or sex trade. This is a huge problem in Nepal and every year 7000 girls are bought or sold and about 50 disappear every day. Many of them are from very poor, uneducated families who cannot afford them and when told that there is a better place for their daughters, gladly give them up for promises or money. This organization runs a community out-reach program, an education program training girls with high school diplomas to be para-legals and helps others to fit back into family and society and help them train for jobs in the tourist industry. A very worthy cause.

Then we returned through the crazy, dirty dusty streets to the hotel. We had the rest of the day free to do what we wanted. Rob and I teamed up with Eileen and Andrew and walked to the Kathmandu Durbar Square. This is the square that received the heaviest damage during the 2015 earthquake and I wanted to see how much it had changed. I had heard that there was massive damage and that the 11^th century pagoda temples had been levelled. PK also told us that very little had been done to restore them as there is an ongoing power struggle about how to do it. We walked there through the narrow, bustling streets of the city. When we got there, the damage although bad was not as severe as I had been led to believe. 

We walked around exploring and came across the palace of the goddess Kumari. The palace was damaged as well and the inner walls were being propped up with wooden braces. The Kumari, or Living Goddess, is revered and worshipped by some of the country's Hindus. In Nepal it is the tradition to worship young pre-pubescent girls as manifestations of the divine female energy in Hindu religious traditions. The Kumari is selected from the Shakya caste or Bajacharya clan of the Nepalese Newari community. The word Kumari is derived from the Sanskrit Kaumarya, meaning "princess". While there are several Kumaris throughout Nepal, with some cities having several, the best known is the Royal Kumari of Kathmandu, and she lives in the Kumari Ghar, a palace in the centre of the city. The selection process for her is especially rigorous. As of September 2017, the Royal Kumari is Trishna Shakya, aged three who replaced the one I had seen in 2011. Our timing was perfect and we were the last into the inner courtyard of her palace to see her come up to her window on the second floor and grace us with a view of her for about two minutes. Then she was gone.

After that we hired a taxi for the four of us to go to Pashupatinath Temple. This was a challenge as the taxis are small and Rob and Andrew are both good sized men, but we managed. The temple is a famous and sacred Hindu temple complex in the suburbs of Kathmandu where the faithful are cremated on the banks of the Bagmati River. We walked around watching the process as they prepared bodies, people milled around as in a viewing, and other bodies were fully engulfed in flames. We also saw several sadhus here, numerous monkeys, cows, dogs, and boys trying to fish coins out of the river with magnets tied to string. The coins were thrown there for good luck by grieving people.

We hired another cab to take us back at sunset. The traffic was horrific and it took us an hour to get back to the hotel while jammed into a sardine can. Luckily the driver was quite funny and entertained us with us with the few words he knew in about ten different languages.

Back at the hotel Rob, Andrew and I went for dinner at the Gaia Restaurant at the end of our street. Then we returned to our rooms. It was a long and busy day and although I had been to all three of the sites when I was here in 2011, I still found them very interesting to revisit. Plus, when I knew I would be here with this trip I wanted to see the earthquake damage for myself.