Namaste, Thamel.

Reached Kathmandu’s Airport by ridding Malindo Airline as it was the only budget choice to ride since the day when airasia has suspended operation this route since early of this year. My thought of my first experience to ride this new flight is much better than airasia; more space for legs, with complementary foods with choice of chicken or vegetable, infoentertainment. I barely watch the movies as they are quite out to date, but it may get passenger to spend their boring time on it.

The most regret decision ever made is that I should proceed the counter offer made to cab drive immediately without getting taxi driver to wait us to setup our local sim card initially. As a result, they tend to grab another new passenger instead.

Setting up new local simcard is rather more time consumption and complicated; they need your passport photo for registration (I’m not quite sure whether it is an exception for other call operator, FYI, I have taken namaste sim card for free), and yet their service is offline and can’t proceed topup credit into sim card. In the end, we decide to seek for help on topping up the credit, found a guy named “lovyus”, purchase the credits and get him for assistance in addition for simcard activation.

Seeking for taxi upon arrival at Kathmandu terminal is easy due to lots of drivers for competition, however, the fare offered by each of them has no standard, ranging from 500npr to 800npr. We tend to walk out the street to look for taxi to get better offer.

Talking about communication encountered with napaleses duirng my first day in Kathmandu. I can tell less than 15 percent of people are fluent well in English but the slang has drove me abit crazy; taking sometime to digest what they are talking. While the rest, you just need combined language of body language + English to make them understand what we are talking :D. The funny part goes like that: taxi driver of mine don’t even know the hostel we stayed, and lucky thing is that I get to download Kathmandu offline map into Google map which is big help for him to send us to the location, and he is still confusing the direction of left and right without showing my body language lol.

Dirty, dusty and crowded with cars can be defined for thamel environment. If you prefer a clean place, probably this is not a suitable vacation place for you. As a street photographer, lots of hidden gems you may found. Need to be wary on belonging, reduce lens changing all the times to minimise the dust sticked into camera sensor. I got my mobile phone covered with dust not even 10 seconds along my taxi ride.

As for transportation system, most of streets are jammed with traffic since every morning, regardless the day in weekends.

The whole entire journey on our first day rely on arranging our journey for next couple of days. Indeed, we managed to book the first day hostel in Thamel before heading to Nepal, and looking toward for alternative for next stay when the time we reached back from pokhara. Although the hostel we have stayed located 15 mins walking distance to the heart of Thamel Town area, they are friendly, but it’s doesn’t cool to walk over the dusty street during the winter season.

Oh yeah. I almost forgot to tell about my fastination regarding sightview of entire Kathmandu. The buildings are constructed block by block, does it look like building made on the monopoly’s board? 😀