Travel Day 1002-04 – Kathmandu, NEPAL
After roaming around the area for a couple of days, it seemed like a good idea to try to focus again and sort things out in busy Thamel…
Sign Madness of all Thamel Shops
So far I had hopelessly tried to organize some cheap tours to destinations that really interested me, but slowly the awareness that not everything was working out to my liking, was taking over. And with that, the first final decision I had to make was to wave good-bye to the thought of visiting Bhutan cheaply. It was simply impossible to join a group and even if I liked the idea of visiting a preserved and restricted country, this privilege seemed to be reserved for luxury tourists only…
On the other hand, my second dream had been to visit the restricted area of Upper Mustang, the former Kingdom of Lo and the fulfillment of that wish seemed to be much more within reach. Even if Mustang did not have the glamour as visiting a fully closed country, at least it seemed to be a preserved piece of Tibet within Nepal that could be visited rather easily and needed to be visited right now since a new road construction project was promising the end of it’s so far sheltered and preserved existence…
Signs, Shops and Agencies in Thamel
The second big advantage of visiting Mustang over Bhutan was that I had actually found one travel agent in Thamel who had another customer, interested in visiting the restricted Tibetan kingdom. Rules had it that one needed to be at least a group of two people in order to get an access permit to Upper Mustang, or one person had to pay for two extremely expensive permits instead. Since we were two people now, it all seemed to work out well and I started to kick off all necessary formalities…
It was funny, but all other travel agents I had spoken to in Thamel had of course something to say about the topic of restricted areas and some offered rather “creative” solutions, but in the end it felt that I had made the right decision. Now I was only left to hope that everything would work out well with the other person who was not to arrive in Nepal until next month, but thinking positively seemed to be the only real solution here…
Endless Shops and Agencies in Thamel
So, since I had all of a sudden a plan for next month, the other question arose how to use my time in Nepal until then. Well, Thamel had a lot of suggestions to offer and while I personally seemed quite fixed on the idea of just doing some day trips around Kathmandu and the valley, seeing all the hiking and trekking posters every day also gave me another thought: maybe I had enough time to do a little trek in the area and the word Langtang was sounding better and better the more I thought about it… : )
Leave a Reply