Kathmandu Now and Then

Vegetable market on a round about in central Kathmandu

Tonight our group visa for two to Tibet and China arrived and we have to leave at 5.50 in the morning for the Chinese border en route to Lhasa.

We're finally getting over the cramps and the runs although Christine is still waiting with baited breath to see if her entrails will begin working again. We have had a string of slap up meals and are feeling well nutrified to begin a leg where the food could well be lean on the ground.

Here follows a string of images of the streets and markets of Kathmandu and a few of the smaller temples you see wandering in the streets by day or by night.

The images follow four trips to Kathmandu, the first in 1969 when I first returned to New Zealand as a student to my job at University, the second in 1976 on my first sabbatical leave, the third in 2000 on my last sabbatical leave and the fourth on Christine's and my current 2006 intrepid Asia trip.

The large digital images are from the current trip, the small four-fold video images from 2000 and 2006 and those at the end and noted are digital camera images of projected Kodachrome slides from 1969 and 1976.

Markets near the Durbar Square

A small temple with a woman priestess 2006

The same temple at night in 2000

And here it is in 1976!

Video of the activities around the temples above and below

Video images from 2000 and 2006 of the commercial streets

Video of Street and Market Scenes

Tiny shops

Tanka shops 2000

Palace and pagodas around the Durbar Square

Spontaneous combined Shiva and Buddha worship in a cul-de-sac by the 2000 hotel

A Kali temple on the way to Pashupatinath

Durbar Square 1969

Kathmandu street 1969 (no billboard adverts)

A series of images of Kathmandu from 1976.

1976

Again the streets are little changed apart from there being almost no street adverts for shops

Another teeny tiny shop front

Above and below Freak Street right in the Hippie era

A series of images from 1976 of Tibetan refugee women in the Buddhist temple
in central Kathmandu photographed in the first Kathmandu blog.

Another Nepali festival in April-May 1976 involving carts with spires
pulled by rope gangs through the streets of Kathmandu

Here is a note about these festivals in Patan and Kathmandu

Red Machchhendranath Rath Jatra (May-June): This festival is the biggest socio-cultural event of Patan. The wheeled chariot of a deity known as bungdyo or Red Machchhendranath is made at Pulchowk and dragged through the city of Patan in several stages till it reaches the appointed destination (Lagankhel). The grand finale of the festival is called the 'Bhoto Dekhaune' or the "showing of a vest". A similar kind of chariot festival to Machchhendranath (white) is also held in Kathmandu city in the month of May-Jun.

An internet image of the 2003 festival in Patan (Life 2003).

Hundreds of Hindu worshippers pull a sixty-foot high chariot representing the god Machhendranath during the Nepalese Hindu festival of Machhendranath Raath Jaatra May 13, 2003 in Patan, a neighborhood of Kathmandu in Nepal. The chariot, a mobile temple, is pulled by hundreds of Hindu worshippers through the streets of the village on astrologically favorable days, taking four weeks or more to complete the journey of about two miles (4 km).

Here are the remnants of the corresponding festival in Patan in 1969