Kathmandu – Swayambhunath Stupa
First trip to India, January 2015
I don’t know how it happens, but for some reason it’s getting harder and harder to write in my diary. Maybe because nothing particularly significant is happening that would be worth writing about.
In India, even with a pretty packed schedule, I managed to write in my diary almost every evening. But here time is slipping away like sand through my fingers… And there are more and more unwritten days, and it’s already barely possible to tell what happened yesterday and what happened the day before yesterday.
We spent the whole day in Kathmandu again.
In the morning, we decided to go see the Swayambhunath stupa. From our hotel, it was about a 30-minute walk there through narrow streets where the local people live. We saw Nepalis washing clothes in tubs on the street and then drying them right in the middle of the street, either on clotheslines or on the ground.
A steep stone staircase leads to the stupa.
Before the climb, we fortified ourselves with milk tea.
At the top there is a ticket office, and the ticket costs 200 rupees ($2) per person. Around the stupa are old little houses, with souvenir shops on the ground floors. The atmosphere is very pleasant, and music is playing.
Not only tourists come here, but also Nepalis, devout Buddhists — they perform a ritual, walking around the stupa clockwise.
From here, there is a beautiful view of the city. After the stupa and the area adjacent to it had been thoroughly explored by us, we continued on our way.
Not far from the stupa, we found a good little café-diner with delicious momos. My daughter and I immediately started making and boiling them. Actually, all the momos we ate were tasty in their own way. I liked the momos with cabbage filling the least.
After visiting the stupa, we returned to the hotel and had some tea.
Toward evening, we decided to take a walk, went beyond Thamel, and ended up at a local market. In one of the stalls, we bought yak milk cheese, hooray! I had been craving cheese so much. This one smells very delicious. It feels hard to the touch, like Italian Grana Padano.
We had dinner at some little diner with vermicelli, which they cook deliciously in Nepal — with vegetables and chicken.
