Kathmandu, and the last destination we all share

This is the last destination we all share, and it is the same for all. We all know it, but we do not realise it in action.

I wrote that in Kathmandu, and I have not been able to shake it since.

The valley is not the price of admission

I reached Nepal in the middle of a three-week run — the Doon Valley first, then here, then Bhutan — and I had half-planned the Kathmandu valley as the hinge between two better things. Most itineraries do the same: a night on the way in, a night on the way out, and the real trip happening somewhere higher.

Five days later I thought that was backwards. The valley is the most interesting thing on most Nepal itineraries, and it is the part almost everyone schedules around.

Where that thought comes from

On the cremation ghats beside Pashupatinath, on the Bagmati, it happens in the open. All day, in full view, a few metres from people having an ordinary afternoon. Nothing about it is staged for visitors, and nothing is hidden from them either.

You do not need anyone to explain what you are looking at, and you do not get to hold it at a distance. That is the whole of it — the absence of any barrier between the fact and you. Every culture I have grown up around handles this behind a door. Here the door is not there.

If you go, go early and go quietly. Stay on the far bank. Keep the camera down. Somebody's family is having the worst day of their life four metres away, and the difference between witnessing something and consuming it costs you nothing.

Slow is the only way it works

The valley is small and the traffic is not. Two temples in a day is a reasonable ambition; four is a day spent in a car being annoyed.

Boudhanath at dusk, walking the circuit with everyone else rather than photographing it from the edge, was worth more than any three things I could have added to the list.

What I took out of it

Travelling gives you a broader perspective towards people and life.

That is a sentence I would have found trite if somebody else had written it, and I wrote it anyway, because it was the plainest true thing available.

Attachments are frightening precisely because they end. The valley does not argue with that. It just declines to pretend otherwise, in public, every single day — and then you go and get lunch.