The traffic is unbelievable - chaotic! Just too many cars. And they are enlarging the roads. Tearing down houses and making the road wider means just dust everywhere! We feel sorry for the police men taking care of the traffic: must be a frustrating and unhealthy job.
First we visit Swayambhunath, a Buddhist temple and World Heritag Site on top of a lofty hill. It is also called the „Monkey Temple“ and is a fascinating chaos jumble of Buddhist and Hindu iconography. The white stupa has painted eyes of Buddha. There is „Democracy Day“ today in Nepal so many local people are visiting the temple built 460 AD. The view over Kathmandu is fantastic and it is just unbelievable how big the city got. Nobody can give us exact figures of the population: we hear from 30’000 to 3 mio. Looks like nobody really knows...
Next stop is Durbar Square where the city’s kings were once crowned and from where they ruled. They royal family is gone in the meantime due to plots, murders and other stories over the last 10 years. People kicked them out. Durbar Sq area is actually made up of three loosely linked squares. We see Kasthamandap. Kathmandu owes its name to this ancient building. Local tradition says the three-roofed building was constructed around12th century from the wood of a single sal tree. There are tons of temples and the old royal palace to see - we enjoy it.
Pashupatinath is Nepal’s most important Hindu temple and stands on the banks of the holy Bagmati River. Non-Hindus cannot enter the main temple but we visit the surrounding buildings. Despite being clogged with garbage and black with pollution, the fetid Bagmati is actually an extremely saved river and Pashupatinath is the Nepali equivalent of Varanasi on the sacred River Ganges. We watch a funeral and see bodies being cremated on the river banks. Mr. Frey meets some of his colleagues; other holy men and Gurus!
We fight our way through to Bodnath, Asia’s largest stupa and one of the most holy places for Tibetan Buddhists. The first stupa at Bodhnath was built sortie after AD 600 by a Tibetan king. The first stupa was wrecked by Mughal invaders in the 14th century and the current stupa is a more recent construction. There are hundreds of people making the ritual circumnavigation of the dome, beneath the watchful eyes of the Buddha.
We have a good lunch at a nearby restaurant and hit a shop for some local Tibetan paintings. Unfortunately the new hotel is never as nice as the one before. And it even starts raining; Monsoon season is around the corner!

Nepal, the landlocked multiethnic, multilingual, multi-religious country, is situated north of India in the Himalayas, in the region where, about 40 to 50 million years ago, the Indian subcontinent has crashed into Asia. Because of that accident, Nepal has some of the world's highest mountains including Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest, 8848m, which it shares with Tibet. The highest mountain on Earth is towering above populated valleys and forested plains.
Somewhere here in the Kapilavastu district, there is a place called Lumbini where in about 500 B.C.E. Queen Mayadevi is said to have given birth to Siddhartha Gautama, better known as Buddha.
Nepal can be divided broadly into three ecological zones: the lowland, the midland and the highland. The altitude of the Himalayan Region (the highland) ranges between 4877 m - 8848 m, It includes 8 of the highest 14 summits in the world, which exceed altitude of 8000 meters including Mount Everest. The mountain region accounts for about 64 percent of total land area.