As Yanmei mentioned the first thing we noticed about Kathmandu was the dust. Although the AQI of Kathmandu is slightly better than Delhi, it feels worse on the street because of the dust. The first night we walked around a bit and the headlights were forming beams through the dust like spotlights through fog.
Nepal suffered a devastating 7.8 earthquake in 2015, and the effects are still very visible with piles of rubble here and there and many damaged buildings. Unfortunately many of their UNESCO heritage sites are damaged too. We walked to Kathmandu Durbar square, which is a heritage site. They wanted to charge us 1000 rupees to enter but we could see it just looked like fenced off piles of rubble, which is too bad. I get that they are trying to raise money to rebuild, but we decided to pass.
A damaged temple held together with braces. This doesn’t look safe if there is another quake.
On the bright side the people here seem friendly and honest. They also don’t pester you like they do some of the other countries we’ve visited. Another interesting thing about Nepal is one of very few places to have a 45 minute time zone offset. So for example 7:00am in San Francisco is 8:45pm here, 13:45 difference.
Anyway as mentioned in the previous post I booked a Himalayan flight tour. I figure if I’m in Nepal I should take the chance to see Mount Everest. You can trek to Everest Base Camp, which I’m sure would be spectacular, but it is a 6-7 day trek. You can also fly in a helicopter to EBC, but that is very expensive. Also something like 35 people have died at EBC alone in the last five years (not including people who died while climbing the summit), so it’s not exactly a safe location. I figured the best alternative was to take an airplane fly by. Yanmei decided to pass.
I had to get up at 5am for the flight since mornings are the most likely to have clear weather. This wasn’t great considering I’m still battling a cold.
The airplane. It had 3 seats per row, but they only sold 2 so everyone had a window.
We took off, and to be honest it was pretty disappointing. Maybe it is the nagging cold or I’m too jaded, but I just didn’t feel the majesty I was expecting. Maybe the perspective from a plane at cruising altitude shrinks the mountains. This is what it looked like:
That’s not Everest by the way. The flight attendant would come along and point out various mountains as we passed them. Then at one point she suggested I switch to a seat on the other side of the plane. I didn’t really get it since there wasn’t much to see, then the guy asked for his seat back, so I moved again and couldn’t see anything so after a minute I moved back to my original seat. The flight attendant came by and pointed out another mountain. I asked “what about Everest?”, she said “you didn’t see Everest? We passed it already.” She points out every lesser peak, but doesn’t bother to mention when we are at Everest? I missed it. W. T. F. This put me in an extremely foul mood. We landed safely and I got back to the hotel by about 8:45am, in time to have breakfast with Yanmei who wisely skipped the flight and slept in.
I feel like this is a sign that it’s time to go home. If I can’t get excited or enjoy the Himalayas then I’m getting exhausted of travel.
That was yesterday. Today when thinking about this post I flipped through my photos and I found one that looked familiar. After comparing to google images of Everest I found it matches. So apparently I did see it and snapped a shot, but I just didn’t know it was Everest at the time.
Everest on the left and Lhotse (4th highest mountain) on the right. Now I feel a little better about it, but I’m still feeling burned out on traveling.
David