4 SEPTEMBER, 2013 - KATHMANDU CITY TOUR

In Kathmandu, we spent the entire next day sight seeing. We went to the monkey temple.  It was covered with monkeys, hence the name.  We could get extremely close to some of them…perhaps too close.

Monkey at Swyambhunath

Kathmandu Skyline

From the monkey temple, we had a great view of Kathmandu Valley.  Picture below of one side:

Our tour guide was pretty amazing.  He was a very spiritual Hindu man so he took great pride in teaching us about his religion and culture. We meditated with him in one of the temples, and learned about Nepalese singing bowls (we’ll show you what these are when we get back).

Kathmandu Traffic in Local Market

But the most incredible, or shocking thing we saw in Kathmandu were the public cremations (not sure if I’m spelling this correctly) of individuals who recently died.  Near the river, they have platforms where family members would bring their recently deceased relatives, stack up a pile of logs, place the body on the logs, place more logs on the body, then light the stack on fire.  They had other rituals before the burning like bathing the body in the river and covering it with seeds and flowers.  Below is a picture of several of the stacks.