I arrived at about 3pm and it is quite overwhelming! It's not like anywhere I've been before. There are just so many people and cars and motorbikes and rickshaws all driving at about 4 miles an hour because it’s so busy. The roads are atrocious. I have yet to see a pavement and cars drive down the narrowest of lanes.
The descent into Kathmandu was amazing. It’s a bit hard to make out from the photos but where it looks like the clouds ending before the sky, is actually the skyline of the Annapurna mountain range. It looked better from the plane! There was an awful lot of banking and twisting to land in the valley. Once the clouds clear the city itself is vast, sprawling for miles. Apparently the infrastructure is intended to support 500,000 but the owners of the hotel where I am tonight (which is gorgeous, with a lovely garden courtyard) reckoned that there were now about 4 million residents. I had a little snooze then went for a quick explore and something to eat. It was dark by this point and I’m in the middle of the tourist district so just streets and streets of shops and stalls really. But everyone seems really friendly and I had a delicious, if lonely, meal. I’m going over to one of the refuges tomorrow where the children are putting on a musical show, not in my honour I’m afraid but for the festival of Dasain.
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