We arrive very late in Kathmandu and we don’t immediately find a place to sleep. Eventually we find something in the slums of Kathmandu. We browse in our travel apps and we leave the next morning to the tourist area, Thamel. We find a quiet, small hotel in the crowded city of Kathmandu. It’s quieter than anywhere else we have been in Nepal. In the morning there’s no honking, no barking dogs and no shouting...fantastic! The hotel has a beautiful garden which we share with four other cottages. The garden is also full of lights of which in the meantime we know the meaning.

Diwali in our Hotel

The Hindu's celebrate the five-day festival of lights, called Diwali. They also put decorations on the street, at their front door. In the restaurant where we eat, it was as if they had made a track for the spirits leading to the kitchen of which the door stood ajar.

Welcoming the Spirits

Children also go door to door, singing for money, like Epiphany with us. We take two days to explore Kathmandu. This means visiting temples and the three old city centres: Durbar Squares. To visit the Durbar Squares, you have to pay an entrance fee, but you can work around this easily: look for small incursion alleys where there is no register, which we did. We also take a ride with a rikshaw.

Enjoying a Rikshaw

For Good Luck

God is Watching

The small shopping streets are very cosy. Here we also eat the best burgers ever at Crazy Burger. We eat here every day before leaving for the remote areas where there will only be rice again. Today is the last day in Kathmandu. We get some rest and prepare for our journey to the Chinese border, via the Friendship Highway (highway between Nepal and Tibet).

The Durbar Squares

More info on www.wijzijnweg.org