- Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal and the largest city with approximately 846,000 people living in approximately 106,000 households. Kathmandu Valley has approximately four million people.
- It is known as the “City of Temples”. There are many Hindu temples of various gods and Buddhist monuments. Hinduism and Buddhism co-exist in Kathmandu Valley and residents make little distinction as they worship in both Hindu and Buddhist shrines.
- The traffic is chaotic, however relatively quiet (most horns are used for communicating, “I’m here”). We estimate 75% of the vehicles are motorbikes. Road lanes seem to only be suggestions. It is very difficult to cross streets, even at crosswalks, and you must be very careful (remember to look right first!). There are few traffic lights. The traffic police direct traffic by blowing their whistles and waving their arms. You need to watch where you are walking on sidewalks, many are uneven and have holes in the concrete.
- KFC, Pizza Hut, and Baskin Robbins have stores here.
- We found lots of restaurants that serve healthy food, with clean and appealing atmospheres.
- The overall air quality is poor. Businesses and homes have lots of plants in pots to help clean the air.
- I have not been to India, however, sections of town reminded me of what I imagine India to be like.
- There are monkeys in many areas of the city.
- We did not ride a local bus as it was easy for us to walk most places or get an inexpensive taxi. The buses looked crowded. A person hangs out the bus door and yells the destination for the bus and you wave it down, if you want to ride it. We used the Pathao app (similar to Uber) to order taxis. The app told us the price ahead of time, although it didn’t seem like a lot of taxi drivers fully understood how the process was intended to work. Most drivers called us after we ordered the taxi to ask where we were located (even though we had entered the pickup location into the app during our request).
- Obstacle courses are common in many stores…you can’t push your cart down many of the aisles. We paid 75 cents for five gallons of water, which included the tip for the person who brought it to our apartment and changed out the empty bottle. Many people used the public hitis (traditional stone water fountains that provide water from underground sources to basins below street level), as their main source of water. We saw several people filling water bottles, washing clothes or bathing in hitis across the city.
- We experienced the largest street festival, Indra Jatra, which lasts eight days and has 2.5 million attendees. It takes place to signify the end of the monsoon season, however the dates change every year based on the lunar calendar so it might still rain. The celebration is to pray for a good harvest and commemorate the deceased in the past year.
- The Kathmandu Valley experienced half of its annual rain fall within a 48-hour period while we were there the end of September. Sections of the town flooded, resulting in thirty-seven deaths (an additional 187 people died in other areas of Nepal).
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