First Impressions of Nepal - Kathmandu Day 1 🇳🇵

So I just arrived in Nepal and in this video I'm going to show you my first impressions of Kathmandu and the beautiful country of Nepal. It's half past noon and I just arrived in Kathmandu airport in Nepal. This is actually my second time here but the last time I was here was like when I was three years old. I just got some money out of the ATM. They did charge me a hefty fee, like 500 rupees to get the money out, which is like 3 or 4 dollars. And now I'm going to try to get like a prepaid taxi to go straight to my hotel. So it's fully paid? Yeah, it's fully paid. But I was in Sri Lanka. Thank you brother. So I just got a prepaid taxi for 800 rupees that's going to take me to my hotel that's like 6 kilometers away. How do I say thank you in Nepalese? Dhanyavaad. Dhanyavaad, oh. In Bangla it's Dhanyavaad. So it's like all very similar, yeah, yeah. Took about 20 minutes but I've arrived at my hotel. Okay so this is the hotel that my parents booked for me, definitely looks fancier than I expected. Hi, I have a reservation for another year. Oh, nice. Thank you. So this looks like a really cool like European style hotel. Nice common area. Do you have a menu for the coffees? Can I get an iced latte please? Dhanyavaad. Alright, so just left my stuff in my room. Now it's time to go exploring the city. You know sometimes I forget how difficult traveling can be without a working SIM card. Then I go for a walk without Google Maps and remember it straight away. So I just went to like a telecom store to get a SIM card and they were telling me I need to get a passport photo. So I'm out here right now looking for a place to get a quick passport photo taken. It's interesting how that works in different countries like in India and Nepal apparently you need a passport photo and some other stuff usually to get a SIM card and there's a lot of formalities. Whereas when you go to a country like Serbia, you just go to like a newspaper stand and buy it from there, from any kiosk. Someone on a bike was waving to me. Hello. How much for a passport photo? Five minutes? Okay. That was quick. That was actually really cool. They did some retouching to remove the strands of hair from the back. So that SIM card cost like a thousand Nepalese rupees which is eight dollars and for that I get like 40 gigabytes of data for one month. Usually that's a lot for most people but sometimes I need to emergency upload stuff and the Wi-Fi is not always great so it's good to have some extra data. So I'm at this hotel right now called Kathmandu Guesthouse basically and I'm here because I read online that this is where you find the only ATMs that doesn't charge a massive transaction fee. And speaking of transaction fees and getting money out of the country, if you're ever trying to send money from the US, UK, Canada, or Europe to Bangladesh, there's this really cool app called TapTapSend that you can use that really simplifies the process of sending money from abroad back home. There's a lot of perks to using TapTapSend. First of all there's like no transaction fee on any money that you're sending. Number two, the exchange rates are pretty great. Number three, the transaction times are pretty fast compared to the competitors. Number four, you can send the money directly to a bank account or to a Bcash account if you want to. And number five, I've been talking to the guys there and they've offered a promo code for my viewers which is OTG based on on the go, not the on the go me. And if you use that promo code on your first transaction you get 10 credits back on the first transaction. So if you're sending from the US, that's $10 back. If you're sending from the UK, that's 10 pounds back. If you're sending from Canada, 10 Canadian dollars. If you're sending from Europe, 10 Euros back. So make the most of that offer if you need to send money from abroad to Bangladesh. Okay so I am a little bit hungry but everything around where I was was just like international chains like KFC and Baskin Robbins. So I'm gonna walk a little bit to find some local food. One paneer butter masala and I'll get tangoori roti, like two pieces. Okay so I got some paneer butter masala which is like one of my favorite foods from this freaking subcontinent. Haven't had this since India back in January like five months ago so I'm excited to try this. And this costs I think 230 rupees in total which is less than two dollars. So walking through this very crowded street in Kathmandu, this feels a lot like Bangladesh and India but still feels kind of different. So the audio for this part was like completely destroyed because of a mic malfunction so I'm recording this again. So right now I'm in Darbar Square and this place is in front of the old palace of the kingdom of Kathmandu. You can probably tell all the buildings here look really old. Kathmandu is actually one of the most oldest inhabited places in Asia. People have been living here for more than 2000 years straight. Unfortunately there was this huge earthquake in 2015 that completely destroyed a lot of the historic buildings over here. So you can still see that there's a lot of reconstruction that's still going on. A lot of the buildings have been completely rebuilt now and they're like functioning again. Okay this part was interesting. I didn't know that this was going to be still a very active religious place which clearly is from what you're seeing. A little plot twist in the vlog. My family is about to join me right now. So my family joined me last night and now they're going to be together with me for the rest of the week at least in Nepal. So today we're running around Kathmandu doing some errands and buying some stuff. So I was having some trouble with my drone for the last couple of days. Connecting it to my phone and all. But this gentleman over here behind me was I think able to fix it. Hopefully the drone is going to work now. It just started raining out of the blue and we didn't bring any umbrellas so we're kind of stuck in the shade until it stops drizzling. Weird thing is that there's no tuk-tuks or autorickshaws in Kathmandu as well as far as I've seen for the last 2-3 days. And not a lot of taxis. I've tried like one of the ride sharing apps and that's not been working. Like nothing shows up ever. It stopped pouring so we're just walking to the next spot because we can't find any taxis. My dad is trying to use Google Maps for the first time. I'm trying to teach them how to use Google Maps. So he's trying to navigate us. Okay it's starting to rain again. We might need to stop and get some shade. So yesterday was so rainy. We really ended up doing almost nothing for the whole day and just went out and got some food. But today is like my last day in Kathmandu before I go somewhere else. I'll come back later but I wanted to get some shots in the morning. So right now I'm heading to probably one of the most iconic places in Nepal. I'm using a ride sharing service called Patau. It's basically Uber on a scooter. The numbers on any license plate over here are not in English. It's in Nepalese so it's hard for me to recognize the vehicle. I probably just need to learn the Nepalese numbers for the next month or so to make life easier. So I'm at Swayambhunath Temple which is on top of a hill in the middle of the Kathmandu valley. This place, like I said, is one of the most iconic spots in Nepal. And it's been a place of worship since like more than 1500 years from what records show. And right now it's one of the most sacred pilgrimage sites for Buddhists and especially Buddhists from Tibet. So there's multiple entrances to this temple and if you pay a little extra you can go all the way to the top. Otherwise you have to climb like 200 meters I think for like half an hour or more to get all the way to the top. There's a golden statue behind me and this pond is called the World Peace Pond. The moment you walk into this temple what you're going to see is what looks like hundreds and hundreds of monkeys. Like the ones behind me. And these monkeys are supposed to be holy monkeys from the temple. There's like some story behind it. So they're protected and they're fed by the temple. There's so many monkeys here that this place is often just called Monkey Temple. They might look very cute but they might have rabies so you definitely don't want to get too close and get bitten by them. One of the many things that you'll see in the Swayamunath temple are all these stupas. Which are these like religious structures with always a dome at the bottom. And on top of that there's like a cube with eyes on each side. Which represent the all-seeing eyes of the Buddha looking in every direction. Super interesting I just found some fans when I was filming downstairs. They want to take a picture of me. This stuff almost never happened in Sri Lanka like once a month. But it's happening almost every day in Nepal. So there's not just a lot of monkeys but there's a lot of dogs around here too. On the way to the top there's all these like souvenir shops with Buddhist souvenirs. And I can't imagine a better place to have your shop for doing good business. And there's also this little cafe called Cafe de Stupa that's playing like a rap music behind me. This part is really cool I haven't really seen anything like it since that one temple in Bangkok I went to four years ago. So the middle of the temple complex is the biggest stupa of them all. I think this is like three stories in height. It has the exact same symbolism as all the little mini stupas on the way. And right in front of me on the other side is what I think is probably one of the best views of the city of Kathmandu. It's super bright right now because it's almost the middle of the day but I'm pretty sure this looks sick at sunrise or sunset. I'm not really sure what's going on here but they seem to be burning something behind me. Must have some sort of religious significance. So behind me these stairs are the other way to climb up here that I mentioned earlier. And this is a really long way if you want to take it or make it really hard for yourself to get up here. And a lot of people actually consider this a pilgrimage to go up the stairs around sunrise. So for the last stop of the video I'm in this place called Freak Street which is like I think technically in Darbar Square. But it's important for a very different reason than Buddhism I guess. So this was a very important stop for travelers back in the days. There was this thing called the Hippie Trail where a lot of broke backpackers used to travel back until the 70s. And these would mostly be western backpackers from like Europe, sometimes maybe from other places. They would make this journey from Europe all the way to Asia. And they would usually start in Istanbul and they would meet up at this place called Pudding Shop. Which is actually right next to the Hagia Sophia, next to the hostel where I was staying. And then they would go in different routes but usually some very common routes to like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India. And they would often end right here on this street in Nepal as the last stop. Some people went on to other places, went on to like Sri Lanka, went on to Bangkok. Unfortunately the Hippie Trail is not a thing anymore. Ever since a lot of ---- went down in the late 70s and 80s in some of those countries in the middle and became less safe. This idea of the Hippie Trail traveling by land for as cheap as possible still really fascinates me. And hopefully someday I can do that route. Hopefully. Let's see. Alright that's it for this video. If you like this video don't forget to hit the like button. If you want to see more videos like this feel free to subscribe to my channel or follow my page if you're watching this on Facebook. And if you want to follow my travel updates on real-time feel free to follow me on Instagram at mudhironthego. I'll catch you guys in the next video definitely from Nepal.