Sensing Kathmandu

How can a location be overwhelming, foreign and new, but also familiar and in a handful of ways, comfortable?

Today I awoke in Kathmandu to the ringing of small bells and the smell of a distant, or nearby fire, it’s hard to tell. Our journey to this glamorized and mystified land was a long one, but traveling with Jes is easy like Sunday morning. I know because we traveled through Sunday morning together. Something like thirty hours of travel stacked with a suicidal (or homicidal) cab ride is the beginning of our artistic adventure.

Kathmandu is situated in a valley, at about 4500 feet above sea level, with mountains on all sides. The surrounding etched walls of the himalayas look hazy; I’m not sure if the view is eroded by precipitation or pollution. There appears to be little regard for the environment during scrambles of survival, not to mention the inversion layer.

Our room in Buddahnagar, the Buddhist region of Kathmandu, is serving as a halfway house until we find a permanent flat. The house is bordered by a creek which probably had clear, potable water in it at some historical point since Buddah gained enlightenment under the ficus. The black, sludgy fluid meanders along the refuse and litter strewn banks. In all my years of visiting porta potties, shoddy Mexican butchers, pit toilets, and sulfur springs, I’ve never encountered anything as repulsive as the creek I have to cross daily. The pungent trek is especially difficult after consuming too many momo.

Momo is similar to dim sum, pot stickers or ravioli- It’s a steamed packet of meat surrounded by a flour based, pasta-y wrap, and is served with a slightly spicy dipping sauce. Talk about luxury. These are packets of love.

In DC, there are diamond yellow signs saying “Share the Road” with a line graphic of a bicycle. On my bike I always felt a bit safer and sat up an inch taller when riding past these signs, knowing that there were laws superficially protecting me from being swiped by a hasty Hummer. Here in Kathmandu, children, men, women, cars, goats, tuk tuks, bicyles, rickshaws, motorbikes, buses, and any other imaginable form of transportation share the laneless, signless, lawless road. Many single geared bicycles are heavily clad with boxes and being pushed on foot by their exhausted driver. The boxes of cargo tower high above the driver’s head, precariously balanced on the precipice of disaster as buses scream past. The streets are black with smoke and exhaust, and many cyclists and pedestrians have face masks guarding their lungs from the smog.

More than air pollution, the streets are bombarding to nearly all the senses. People jostle each other in attempts to avoid getting hit by the cars and motorbikes, and I collided today with a boy carrying a huge stack of brambly vegetation. The nasal assault is comprehensive. Shit, incense, rotting meat, trash, fried sweets and fish all mingle in the streets like old men kickin’ it on the stoop. Horns are used here nearly constantly, creating a soundscape punctuated by screeches, honks, and bicycle bells. It’s a wonder anyone pays attention to a honk at all, like highlighting the entire page of a chemistry textbook.

As my senses are activated, my creativity is as well. Formulations of scenes and stories are coming into focus, and I’m regaining my intellectual footing through curiosity. Sparks are flying, and not just from those distant, or nearby fires, that I can positively tell.