Moving to the next Level

While Jytte & Ole have to leave their hotel at 4am to catch their flight to Kathmandu – which will turn out to be delayed 2 hours - mine is at the more humane hour of 1.40pm. I wake up at 5am, though, which gives me time to work on my photos. At 8.15 I decide I must try the hotel pool, where an attendant immediately brings me a mineral water and 2 fluffy white towels. After a swim I return to the room, where suddenly the remaining time seems short for getting everything ready. Immaculate in a freshly ironed shirt and yet another pair of cool shades Raj picks me up at 10 and we are off to the airport. It has only been 3 busy days, but it seems we have known each other for a long time and we make plans for a merry future trip through Rajastan with Oswaldo and Victor. ‘We are family now,’ says Raj.
Air France have put me on Business Class for this short flight, so having passed the extremely sullen and not very efficient Indian military security guards , I retreat to the relative splendor of the ‘Maharajah’ lounge, which, oddly, you reach by climbing a long set of stairs lugging your carry-on luggage. I get a frothy coffee with milk and type away at my blog. In front of me a tall Westerner, who must have travelled throughout the night, removes his shoes and places his feet on the cool marble floor, too tired to fix his glance on anything. When it is time I descend to my gate and get my 1A seat. An immaculately groomed lady swathed in a peach sari sits next to me. Her face is beautiful and calm with the red dot on her forehead. She reminds me of Claudia Cardinale. When we both get the vegetarian selection for lunch we start chatting – and never stop – children, politics, arranged marriages…. We are sorry to say good-bye. I have to join the long line for getting visas, and then feel my heart beat nervously as my luggage takes a really long time to appear, Outside waits a cheery little tourist agent with a MountainKingdom sign, and he takes over from there. I get seated in van and we drive through Kathmandu, aged, culturally so different from anything I have ever seen, and which makes me feel I’m in an Indiana Jones movie. The traffic moves in a similar manner to that in India, only with much narrower streets. It is an interesting question to ponder why these contemplative counties should have such ferocious drivers. We press on though a chaotic and tantalizing city scenery until we reach the Shangri-La Hotel, where I am shown to my room and immediately plop down on my bed, suddenly totally exhausted. J & O return from a trip down memory lane – they were here 30 years ago – and we decide on the need for a rest, followed by dinner at the hotel. There are no streetlights, and any wish to venture out anyway has been quenched by a recent tale of a tourist being robbed by about 10 Indian youths – this is broad daylight. We finish of the evening with the hotel’s grill night, where I – avoiding the meat of course – head for the stir-fry table, where an ample cook, his black hair in a net under the cook’s hat, sweats over a very large almost flat wok and makes divine stir-fries with a variety of ingredients, which we assemble ourselves at his station. We wash this down with the included Carlsberg beer and then go on to a local brand, The weather has changed to a cool drizzle and a band sits under an overhang a bit away, singing 60s and 70s hits in immaculate English, although they are obviously local. We wonder about the choice of music – is it because it is from the youth of most of the guests
present, or does it signify the glorious hippie years, when Kathmandu must have been ‘jammin’?

Here are a mere 20 photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/schateaubriand/TheImperialPoolAndKathmandu#