Sunday provided us with another moving day. Of interest, we moved to our 55th location (place of sleeping is how I will define that) since we sold our house at the end of February. We are averaging 4.8 nights in each location. Tika arranged a taxi to pick us up from the apartment at 7:15am and the driver was right on time. That put us at the airport in Pokhara a little after 7:30 for our scheduled 9am flight to Kathmandu. The Pokhara airport is relatively new, built by a Chinese company. It’s very nice but they haven’t yet been able to secure international flights directly into Pokhara, which was supposed to alleviate some of the Kathmandu airport’s congestion. It doesn’t seem like they do much business planning before embarking on certain projects. Check-in was very easy – as was security – and we boarded the shuttle to our plane right around 9, which led to a departure of closer to 9:45. We landed about 30 minutes later and our hotel arranged for a driver to pick us up. He took us in a comfortable mini-van to Bhaktapur where we checked into the Hotel Traditional.
Bhaktapur is one of the three city-states or kingdoms from back in the 1700s and it is probably the prettiest. The other two are Patan (formerly Lalitpur) and Kathmandu. From our journal around September 17th, we spent a few hours here with Sarah, while she was visiting, and we liked it enough that we knew we wanted to come back and spend a few days. We wish Sarah was here with us. The city retains its medieval feel quite well. There is very little traffic inside the old city, which is where we stayed. The structures are beautiful. It’s a place that really shouldn’t be missed and Lonely Planet is right when they say to make an effort to enjoy it with an overnight after all of the day tourists from Kathmandu have left.
We settled into our room and we were hungry so we headed out to get lunch at Café Harati. This is listed in Lonely Planet, but was also recommended by our friends, Jacinta and Nick, who traveled here within the last couple of years. The café is in one of the three main squares of the old city (this one is Taumadhi Tole) and is housed in a traditional pagoda with the upper floor having tables along the balcony overlooking the square. It’s hard to beat this atmosphere. We ended up coming back here each of our three days for Greek salads at lunch time. Loved it.
After lunch, we explored Taumadhi Tole and its temples and then walked back over to Durbar Square (the main square and home of the palace) – only a two-minute walk. We explored the temples and structures around Durbar Square and then took around an hour to walk through the National Art Museum (which used to be the Royal Palace), which has excellent displays of the stone-crafting, wood-crafting, painting, and brass-crafting skills from Bhaktapur’s history.
For dinner, we ate at Yomari Temple View where we both had chicken biryani. The restaurant is right next to our hotel and overlooks Durbar Square. We are pretty sure one of the servers tried to take some of our server’s tip money, so we ended up directly giving her quite a bit extra. She was the cutest older lady and didn’t speak a word of English.
Monday morning, I went downstairs to get a better internet signal and watched Florida State lose another game – they are now ranked 103 out of 134 teams according to The Athletic. I have no idea how there can be 31 teams ranked lower. Sandy came down and we had breakfast at 9:30. Very good breakfast – I don’t know why, but I thought the fried eggs were some of the best. The yogurt (they call it curds or JuJu Dhau here) is some of the best in the world. We also had toast, potatoes, juice, muesli, and lemon ginger honey tea; all included in the price of the room (which was $47 per night – that includes all fees/taxes).
We left the hotel around 11:30 and walked to our third square – Tachupal Tole, which was the original Royal Square and is in the oldest part of the city. The Lonely Planet guidebooks often include “walking tours” that take you down paths you may never discover on your own and they had a one-hour tour for Bhaktapur that we did, leaving from the Tachupal Tole and ending at Taumadhi Tole – they call it the Bhaktapur Backstreets Walking Tour and took us right into the very residential parts of the old city. Love those kinds of strolls and this one included a stop for JuJu Dhau (local yogurt) – we enjoy those a lot and this one was no different.
Back at the hotel, Sandy took a nap and read while I watched the Bucs lose another close game – this time to the 49ers. They are still one game ahead of how I thought they would be at this point. Still hoping they can finish the season at 9-8, although I don’t know if that will get them a playoff spot. Rajesh at our hotel (who is awesome) recommended Muglan Restaurant and that is where we went for dinner. They had nice live music and very good food. Sandy had grilled fish and I had Thai green curry with fish (wasn’t too spicy), and then we shared some chicken wings. With the signal pretty weak in our room, we didn’t watch our normal TV shows, but did find a fun video on YouTube called Buddhism Explained. We have wanted to learn more about Buddhism after spending so much time in Buddhist cultures. The video was a great overview.
Today was our last full day in Bhaktapur and we started with a fun four-mile cardio walk after breakfast. There are four ponds outside the old city walls that are rectangular in shape and were built hundreds of years ago as water sources for the city. We walked around each of the ponds twice and then headed back to the hotel.
I sat in the lobby and worked on our journal and had the chance to talk with an Israeli gentleman (Asher) who now lives in Ulaanbaatar and also met and talked with Phillip and Marla from Montreal. It was great conversation about travel options in Tibet and Mongolia, which are high on our Montreal friends’ list of places to visit. For dinner, we went to Ja Foodland because they had a great menu, but they ended up having almost nothing available from the menu. We left. I should mention that we did grab a brownie at the dessert place next door earlier in the afternoon and it was really good. More like a moist chocolate cake. Because we liked Muglan last night, we walked to it and it worked out perfectly because Phillip and Marla arrived right before we did. We all sat together and had a great dinner and great conversation. Sandy had the chicken sizzler for dinner and I had veggie alfredo pasta.
That’s it for our short stay in Bhaktapur. We are really happy to have had the chance to spend three days here and we’re also looking forward to our short transfer back to Kathmandu tomorrow and getting back to the apartment we spent almost a month in during our first Nepal stint.
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