From Patna the aircraft makes a diagonal bee-line north-northwestwards to Kathmandu. This orientates for the runway scores of kilometres in advance of landing. With the Himalayas as a gorgeous backdrop it touches down and deposits its passengers in the terminal, a dull red-brick structure with low roofs and an air of neglect. Outside is the great, sprawling city, or rather the city that has become great and sprawling as a result of the fear and dispossession that have driven people from the hills and mountains into the metropolis. In such cities, airport terminals are transitional places, the point of entry but also a small means of acclimatising oneself to the sharp shock of contact with what lies outside.
Once through the doors of the customs exit, the city starts. It is a welter of small Suzukis, beaten-up buses, drivers touting for custom, and people emigrating who are towing in their wake vast boxes of possessions tied up with string and tape. A car ferries me into the city centre along dusty roads and dirt tracks lined with scenes of frenetic activity. On mounds of rubbish bullocks graze and tiny children search for cans and bottles to recycle. Women in saris trudge through the dust, trucks blast their horns; garishly adorned shops spill out their wares like shoe-boxes full of trinkets. The air is warm but not hot. The sun is veiled by scraps of cloud, but its rays are penetrating. The thin atmosphere hangs heavy with moisture and dust.
Kathmandu has many of the attributes of the typical Asian city. Advertising slogans in English and Nepali blaze and blink from tall buildings: "buy Elegant Whisky and impress your girlfriend", 'fashion parade', Savings Bank, Toyota, an endless series of gaudy commercial messages. The urban landscape is wildly variegated, the streets clogged with people, vehicles and motorcycles. It hums and buzzes with frenetic activity. The urban profile is copiously detailed: no two buildings match each other, indeed no two square metres are the same. It makes impossible demands on the western eye, trained as it is to appreciate spareness. What must it do to the emigres from the mountain hinterlands who have known nothing but the Spartan landscapes of the high peaks?
My hotel is a venerable guest house encapsulated in the heart of the old city, where the streets are hardly wide enough for a Suzuki taxi to pass a Honda motorbike without one knocking the other into some wayside shop. My room is Spartan but clean and it smells heavily of floor polish in a rather institutional way. The ceiling lights glow feebly and the plumbing unleashes a tintinnabulation that no amount of juggling with the taps can suppress. On the washstand there are tiny bars of black Indian soap that smell of carbolic acid.
I am in Thamel, the heart of old Kathmandu but a place that has sold out to international tourism. This is hippy-land, and the hippies are now sexagenarians who are nostalgically reliving their past. For most of them the intervening forty years have taught them nothing about aesthetics and their scruffiness is everywhere apparent. In a self-aggrandising little shop called the Pokhara Embroidery Company I buy a tee-shirt with the logo 'Hardrock Café Kathmandu'. I don't believe there is such a place, but in any case the Thamel quarter lives on its illusions.
Kathmandu city hall is an imposing white building in the Asian colonial style, the motifs part Doric and part reverse curve, thus giving a nod to both the Classical antiquity of Europe and the Mughal dynasties of old India. It is surrounded by a rising tide of modern commercial buildings and apartment blocks, all crammed in around the surviving vestiges of its ornamental park. The flower beds are awash in water, but the muddy yellow colour and powerful smell proclaim that it comes straight from the drains. Amid this miasma the plants are dying dramatically, a herbal version of Custer's Last Stand.
Inside there is dust and decay. The corridors are long and crammed with broken desks, chairs with red leatherette seats, faded notices in Nepali script. The offices are sparsely furnished and electrical wires loop from the ceilings. Girls in saris carry trays of teacups from one office to another. A workman gravely chips plaster off a wall. I sit in an empty office with a faded grey carpet and three broken down sofas. I discuss the city's seismic hazard with the five members of the local government who are responsible for emergency planning. In 1934 Kathmandu had a magnitude 8 earthquake, and this is expected to repeat itself after an interval of 70-80 years--in other words about now. In the 1930s it was a vasty different city, with huge open spaces and a population that was tiny by modern standards. It is now a vast, high-density collection of buildings waiting to collapse into the narrow streets and it is growing bigger by the day. My five colleagues have sophisticated plans, written by foreign consultants, but all they seem to have in the way of equipment is a megaphone with which they will try to direct the activities of 1.6 million citizens.
We walk back to Thamel through the city centre and the squares full of pagodas, temples and stupas. There in the midst is the city fire station. It has three relatively modern fire trucks and three that are museum pieces which would be roundly coveted by western collectors, were they for sale rather than still being used to fight fires.
I walk along the streets pick-up trucks overladen with Maoists pass noisily by with their occupants hanging over the sides and shouting noisy political protests. Going the other way is a wailing motorcade of government ministers, grim-faced bearded men in suits and sack-like Nepalese hats. Today it is safer to sit in a hotel bar and drink bottles of cold Everest beer.
The aircraft takes off from Tribhuwan International Airport and circles around to gain height. The sun glints off Anapurna, a magnificent spectacle. Asia is a continent of sharp contrasts and here is one of the sharpest: the serene, pristine beauty of one of the world's highest mountains in contrast with the grubby stain of human activity that spreads up the Kathmandu valley in a long heterogeneous carpet of urban development topped by a low-lying tobacco-yellow pall of pollution.
So many deep impressions to carry with me: the fierce territoriality of the monkeys on Swayambhunath Stupa hill; the deep red of the blood of animals butchered in the mud next to the heaps of rubbish; the grey skin of the street children who have never washed, and the thinness of their limbs.
Once through the doors of the customs exit, the city starts. It is a welter of small Suzukis, beaten-up buses, drivers touting for custom, and people emigrating who are towing in their wake vast boxes of possessions tied up with string and tape. A car ferries me into the city centre along dusty roads and dirt tracks lined with scenes of frenetic activity. On mounds of rubbish bullocks graze and tiny children search for cans and bottles to recycle. Women in saris trudge through the dust, trucks blast their horns; garishly adorned shops spill out their wares like shoe-boxes full of trinkets. The air is warm but not hot. The sun is veiled by scraps of cloud, but its rays are penetrating. The thin atmosphere hangs heavy with moisture and dust.
Kathmandu has many of the attributes of the typical Asian city. Advertising slogans in English and Nepali blaze and blink from tall buildings: "buy Elegant Whisky and impress your girlfriend", 'fashion parade', Savings Bank, Toyota, an endless series of gaudy commercial messages. The urban landscape is wildly variegated, the streets clogged with people, vehicles and motorcycles. It hums and buzzes with frenetic activity. The urban profile is copiously detailed: no two buildings match each other, indeed no two square metres are the same. It makes impossible demands on the western eye, trained as it is to appreciate spareness. What must it do to the emigres from the mountain hinterlands who have known nothing but the Spartan landscapes of the high peaks?
My hotel is a venerable guest house encapsulated in the heart of the old city, where the streets are hardly wide enough for a Suzuki taxi to pass a Honda motorbike without one knocking the other into some wayside shop. My room is Spartan but clean and it smells heavily of floor polish in a rather institutional way. The ceiling lights glow feebly and the plumbing unleashes a tintinnabulation that no amount of juggling with the taps can suppress. On the washstand there are tiny bars of black Indian soap that smell of carbolic acid.
I am in Thamel, the heart of old Kathmandu but a place that has sold out to international tourism. This is hippy-land, and the hippies are now sexagenarians who are nostalgically reliving their past. For most of them the intervening forty years have taught them nothing about aesthetics and their scruffiness is everywhere apparent. In a self-aggrandising little shop called the Pokhara Embroidery Company I buy a tee-shirt with the logo 'Hardrock Café Kathmandu'. I don't believe there is such a place, but in any case the Thamel quarter lives on its illusions.
Kathmandu city hall is an imposing white building in the Asian colonial style, the motifs part Doric and part reverse curve, thus giving a nod to both the Classical antiquity of Europe and the Mughal dynasties of old India. It is surrounded by a rising tide of modern commercial buildings and apartment blocks, all crammed in around the surviving vestiges of its ornamental park. The flower beds are awash in water, but the muddy yellow colour and powerful smell proclaim that it comes straight from the drains. Amid this miasma the plants are dying dramatically, a herbal version of Custer's Last Stand.
Inside there is dust and decay. The corridors are long and crammed with broken desks, chairs with red leatherette seats, faded notices in Nepali script. The offices are sparsely furnished and electrical wires loop from the ceilings. Girls in saris carry trays of teacups from one office to another. A workman gravely chips plaster off a wall. I sit in an empty office with a faded grey carpet and three broken down sofas. I discuss the city's seismic hazard with the five members of the local government who are responsible for emergency planning. In 1934 Kathmandu had a magnitude 8 earthquake, and this is expected to repeat itself after an interval of 70-80 years--in other words about now. In the 1930s it was a vasty different city, with huge open spaces and a population that was tiny by modern standards. It is now a vast, high-density collection of buildings waiting to collapse into the narrow streets and it is growing bigger by the day. My five colleagues have sophisticated plans, written by foreign consultants, but all they seem to have in the way of equipment is a megaphone with which they will try to direct the activities of 1.6 million citizens.
We walk back to Thamel through the city centre and the squares full of pagodas, temples and stupas. There in the midst is the city fire station. It has three relatively modern fire trucks and three that are museum pieces which would be roundly coveted by western collectors, were they for sale rather than still being used to fight fires.
I walk along the streets pick-up trucks overladen with Maoists pass noisily by with their occupants hanging over the sides and shouting noisy political protests. Going the other way is a wailing motorcade of government ministers, grim-faced bearded men in suits and sack-like Nepalese hats. Today it is safer to sit in a hotel bar and drink bottles of cold Everest beer.
The aircraft takes off from Tribhuwan International Airport and circles around to gain height. The sun glints off Anapurna, a magnificent spectacle. Asia is a continent of sharp contrasts and here is one of the sharpest: the serene, pristine beauty of one of the world's highest mountains in contrast with the grubby stain of human activity that spreads up the Kathmandu valley in a long heterogeneous carpet of urban development topped by a low-lying tobacco-yellow pall of pollution.
So many deep impressions to carry with me: the fierce territoriality of the monkeys on Swayambhunath Stupa hill; the deep red of the blood of animals butchered in the mud next to the heaps of rubbish; the grey skin of the street children who have never washed, and the thinness of their limbs.
