I HAVE been there before, so arriving in Kathmandu that day was routine: landing, disembarking, clearing immigration and customs, turning over my luggage to the person sent to meet me, and, finally, a dusty ride into the city.

The person who met me said the vehicle was trapped at the airport. A wildcat strike took the entire city of Kathmandu by surprise that morning, forcing businesses, schools and everything else to close down, ordering all vehicles off the streets.

More flights arrived.

A large crowd of stranded travellers continued to build up in the waiting area. As tempers and mid-day heat soared, anger and sweat took over. Only tourists were ferried to the city in ancient, dusty buses bannered with Ministry of Tourism signs that allowed free passage through heavily guarded streets.

With no other transportation in sight, grumbling locals walked into town, pulling and dragging heavy luggage behind them. Only a few were lucky enough to find porters willing to walk heavy baggage into the city.

The first bus had just left. After waiting an hour and a half, I clawed my way into the second bus, only to be told to get off because the driver had to go for lunch.

He drove off and never returned.

An hour later, another Ministry bus came, unloading departing tourists and their luggage out of one narrow door, everyone simultaneously pushing and cursing their way into and out of the bus. With much shouting, baggage, children and boxes were shoved through open windows. It was two-way traffic forcing its way into the proverbial eye of a needle.

There was no way I would miss this bus.

I shoved my way in as if my life depended on this ride, and little did I know that it did. I was told later that afternoon when I was safely in town that buses suddenly stopped going to the airport without any warning.

The strike was called so opposing political parties could settle issues. Rallies and public meetings were scheduled in the evening. Until then, the city floated in a state of suspension. Reinforced by army presence everywhere, people were not going anywhere.

Surreal street scene

Kathmandu at a standstill was surreal. Streets usually filled with total chaos of people, rickshaws and horn-tooting vehicles all raising up clouds of dust were totally deserted that day. Quiet settled over the city, something I never imagined I would experience.

Normally polluted city air was once again high-altitude crisp, invigorating and breathable. Without pollution, the sky turned uncompromisingly blue, providing a magnificent, clear view of the mountains enclosing Kathmandu Valley normally hidden behind a cloud of gray pollution.

It was a rare opportunity, a great day for rediscovering Kathmandu without being assaulted by the usual traffic, dust and pollution, so out of my hotel

I went on foot, avoiding the packs of stray dogs that roamed Kathmandu streets, walking on the broad, cracked and uneven sidewalks of Durbar Marg, the wide boulevard at the center of the city leading to the former Royal Palace.

Today, in the total absence of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, I noticed for the first time that trees lined both sides of the short boulevard, trees having once provided a trace of urban elegance sadly swallowed up without warning in recent years by the heavy, unregulated sensory assault of everyday city life. Progress, in other words.

Urban elegance

Inspired by the trees on Durbar Marg, I set out to discover what urban elegance remained in chaotic Kathmandu.

The brave few who were out that day walked nonchalantly in the middle of streets, not on the sidewalks which were dangerously broken down that constant attention must be on the pavement to make sure the next step fell on safe ground.

While I was walking on the safe, flat center of the street pavement, the entire streetscape unfolded, an urban vista never seen in the constant swirl of traffic. What a great place to know the city from.

The low-key, imposing but unpretentious Western-style former Royal Palace, framed by scraggly gardens behind a tall grilled fence at the head of Durbar Marg, a royal ensemble, modest and provincial by Western standards, fit into the unassuming everyday low-rise Kathmandu urbanscape.

Walking away from the palace into the maze of twisting, narrow streets in the older section of central Kathmandu, strong architectural and social patterns emerge in the rundown, peeling, jumble of old and new buildings coexisting in various stages of benign decay along streets.

Handsome traditional three-story wooden buildings with wooden filigree windows on the upper levels, once residences, now haphazardly converted into commercial spaces, continued to maintain their long-established elegance despite crowding on all sides by newer buildings, jerrybuilt cheaply out of concrete within the last decade.

It was seeing at least two layers of Kathmandu lifestyle existing tenuously side by side. More importantly, it was seeing the writing on the wall, knowing at this early date which architectural layer would eventually give way to progress.

What would take quite a while, or maybe never give way to progress, was the amazing web of narrow lanes that fan out, bringing the pulse from the center of Kathmandu out to its main streets.

Unexpectedly, off from work, people slowly streamed out of their homes into the deep shade of narrow, stone-paved streets hemmed in by two- and three-story buildings.

Children played, men sipped cups of tea, people bought snacks from ambulant sellers. Everybody went to see what was available from the baskets of produce vendors set up on the pavement, and bargained for fresh vegetables to cook for that night’s dinner.

By late afternoon, the entire neighborhood was out on the street. Everyone knew each other, each had something to say to the other. So interesting to observe. My camera and I were intruders on this scene.

At irregular intervals, the network of narrow lanes opened out into little squares, some no larger than wide intersections where sometimes a small Hindu shrine, strewn with yellow flowers, stood against the blank brick wall of a house. The larger squares’ temples were always filled with devotees filing in and out.

Rare afternoon

The largest square of all is Kathmandu Durbar (royal) Square, the ceremonial center of the city where kings of Nepal once were crowned and legitimized. The original Royal Palace, residence of the kings before it moved north to Narayanhiti about a century ago, still stands.

Flanking three loosely linked squares, the series of traditional brick-and-wood and Western-style civic buildings and temples that make up Durbar Square mostly date from the 17th and 18th centuries. But the principal draw of the square is that the locals go there to watch the world go by, often seated on the high terraced platforms of the Maju Deval, a temple at the center of the square.

On a rare afternoon like this one, when Kathmandu was relaxing because of the strike, people-watching at Durbar Square was a special event.

More special was spending an afternoon on foot in quiet Kathmandu, without being harassed by tourists, traffic, pollution and the swirl of motorbikes on narrow lanes. Being able to navigate the city in comfort opens up the discovery that beneath the urban chaos of modern Kathmandu lies a layer of lost urban elegance, sustainable traditional urban practices, and a comfortable lifestyle.

All of that has now vanished with the current state of disarray of the Nepalese government, a state of disarray evident in the present lifestyle of the people.

Kathmandu returned to normal the next day. Totally gone was the peace I felt the day before.

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