Are all cities in Asia the same?

There seems to be this conventional wisdom among travellers that all Asian cities are the same.

A typical exchange:

-"Oh, you've been to [some Asian city]! How did you like it?"
-"Oh, you know. It's just like all the other cities in Asia."

Every time I heard a variation on this exchange, I would shake my head and wonder how anyone could think Chiang Mai, Thailand was like Dalat, Vietnam. Now, on my third day in Kathmandu (the eleventh city in Asia I've visited) I'm beginning to see where they might be coming from. I'm going to spoil the implied conclusion right now: No, Asian cities are not all the same. However, many of them seem to share at least a few conspicuous qualities.

I arrived in Kathmandu on Wednesday afternoon after an overnight stay on Khao San Road in Bangkok. The first time Emily and I stayed there, I remember it for its crazy Westernized exoticism. This time felt very different. I'm sure there were a few objective differences, but the biggest difference seems to be that it felt normal. I was also struck by how courteous the Thai are. Cambodians and Vietnamese may be nice, but they are not always that polite. The Thai seem to be always pleasant.

Kathmandu, on the other hand, does not feel normal or polite. From the moment I stepped into the virtual riot of touts advertising cab rides and hotels until the moment I closed the door of my hotel room, I was surrounded by advertisement and coercion. I took a government sponsored taxi into town because I thought it would protect me from touts. Then, at the airport exit, the taxi driver stopped and picked up anther man who proceeded to give me a sales pitch about good hotels and his trekking agency.

Kathmandu is much poorer than most of the places I saw in Vietnam--not quite as bad off as Cambodia, but maybe close. It was hard to get much perspective on the city on the short ride from the airport. I saw street after dirty street until we reached the Thamel neighborhood, which is a bit of a backpacker's district, when everything changed to hotels, souvenir shops, internet cafes, and restaurants.

This is apparently not the season for panoramic views in the Kathmandu Valley. There are large mountains in all directions from the city, but in the morning a thick fog hides them and by the time the sun clears the fog an impenetrable haze has taken over. It is partially due to that haze, I think, that my throat is perpetually sore and the color of my phlegm is somewhat peculiar.

So, that's been a lot of complaining so far. Let me round it out and then focus on some things I actually enjoy about this place:

1) Beggars - I had a child lean on me for the entire walk from the supermarket back to my hotel, perhaps a quarter mile, repeating, "Please, sir. Five rupees. Please, sir."
2) Holy men who overcharge for a five second service - Today a man wanted the equivalent of USD2.85 for placing a flower blossom on my head and painting my forehead with his thumb. "God's blessing, very lucky, 200 rupees," he said nodding and smiling. I was trying to give him something more like fifty cents, which he finally accepted after I tried to walk away.

3) No good pictures - The jumble of buildings all promiscuously on top of one another makes walking the streets always surprising and somewhat mystical. It also means that you can never get far enough away from anything moderately large to get a well-framed picture.

4) Hashish? Hashish? - How many times have I been offered drugs? Probably twenty.

Phew. Alright. If some of you are asking how the heck I'll survive India if these things bother me now, rest assured, I'm asking myself the same thing. A friend of mine once said, "Nepal is like India Light," which is a good argument for being here first, I think.

So, aside from all that, Kathmandu can be charming. My hotel room is on the fifth and highest floor and gives a nice view both north and south over the Thamel neighborhood. It's a relief sometimes to look down into the street and watch from a safe distance. Thamel is also not a domain of early risers. The streets stay almost deserted until almost nine o'clock in the morning.

On Thursday, I caught up on some email and then walked a few blocks south to Durbar Square, which is a collection of over thirty temples within a few city blocks. The temples have been constructed and augmented over a period of several hundred years. There are a few predominant styles but each edifice is unique and independent of the other structures. South from Durbar Square runs Freak Street, which apparently housed a large community of hippies in the sixties and seventies, doing what hippies did back then. After exploring the Durbar Square area, I walked east on New Road to the unmaintained park Tundinkel and then back to Thamel through a bunch of street markets. New Road is lined with a wide variety of upscale boutiques (upscale being a relative term comparing them to the other venues I've seen here) selling nice clothes, watches, and electronics. The street markets reek of character. Incense, vegetables, baked goods, pots, pans, and everything else anyone needs to live are conveniently repeated for blocks and blocks--some of the streets so narrow that two people barely fit walking opposite directions until a motorcycle comes barrelling down the center.

Today, I rented a bicycle and got out of the city. I biked north over heavily potholed roads on the west side of Thamel, across the Bisnumati River, and up to the entrance of the Nagarjun Reserved Forest. Leaving my bike at the entrance, I hiked the five kilometer trail to the summit, Jamacho, at seven thousand feet. I met no one until the strange scene at the temple. The views on the ascent were not what I'd hoped because of the midday haze, but perhaps seeing only forested ridges instead of the city stretching across the valley floor was a good thing.

The stupa and watchtower at the summit are adorned with strings of prayer flags that stretch from their pinacles down into the trees, sometimes hundreds of feet long. A group of three men were throwing rice and hundreds of small prayer sheets from the watchtower, carpeting the top of the hill in small pieces of paper. Some monks sat in a shelter facing the stupa chanting and playing musical instruments while laypeople lit candles. A large group of young monks seemed to be taking a lunch break in the grass.

I took a detour on my way to return the bicycle along the western edge of Kathmandu to see Swayambhu, sometimes called the Monkey Temple. Swayambhu is also at the summit of a hill, but is much more accessible with a staircase leading from the gate to the top. Swayambhu has been a site of worship for over fifteen hundred years although the buildings are more recent. The centerpiece is a huge gilded stupa with Buddha statues around its base facing each of the cardinal directions.

After a peaceful ramble through the extensive network of brick terraces, I biked back into town, and returned my bike. Now, I'm hungry and I think it's time to eat.