the flight from bkk to katmandu is only three hours and the time difference is only one hour and fifteen minutes, but it’s a totally different world. it’s interesting how much geography and distance changes places, here it is more visually obvious but even in usa, changing a state or two can bring a radical cultural shift. back when i lived in san francisco, we were all convinced that going over the bridge to oakland was a whole new world (come to think of it, it is).

when i first flew into bangalore two years ago after being in a plane for 36+ hours, the heat and mass of people was beyond unsettling. they bum-rush you once you leave the airport, trying to get you into a taxi, often grabbing and pulling at your clothes to make it happen. katmandu is kinda like a slimmed down version of all of this, made much more bearable because the flight is shorter.

we only spent two days in katmandu at the start of our trip, did some touristy stuff and had a meeting with a pashmina manufacturer. the meeting was rather interesting, the guy showed us around, let us look at samples and the manufacturing process and kept evading questions about price. every time we asked he would just say “ohh, don’t worry about price it will be cheap”. when he finally gave us a price sheat, it was actually rather expensive. zak is still over there and has had some more meetings which i guess went well.

the streets of katmandu sort of meander around and are filled with shops that all sell the same thing so getting anywhere can be rather tricky. our first night out, zak and i found this really chill jazz bar but when we left at 12:30 we had no idea how to get home. first we gave a rickshaw driver a map to our hotel and spend 45 minutes driving around in circles with him while he promised he knew exactly where he was going. finally we got out, found a taxi who called our hotel and then had the hotel manager come meet the taxi and take us home. i think it took about an hour to go 10 blocks.

other than that we just ate lots of rice and dal, saw this temple filled with monkeys, got dust up our noses and planned the rest of the trip. pics are in image galleries.