Kathmandu (Robertson) – Angus, Robertson

Katmandu
is a new kind of Colin Simpson travel book. It is about a place instead of a country or countries. And, as the American says at the book’s end, “What a place is Katmandu!”
Shangri-la could have been in Nepal or in next-door Tibet, and that fictional valley was hardly more inaccessible than was the valley of Katmandu, the capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal that stayed medieval until the middle of the twentieth century. Westerners were unwelcome during the feudal rule of the extra- ordinary Rana family of potentates, whose puppet and prisoner the King was-until he broke out in 1950 and led a revolution.
Katmandu has become accessible by air, and very “in” with off-track tourists. It is still so uncommon a place-stacked with pagoda temples wonderfully (and often erotically) carved; ornamented with fine Newar images of gods and gilded kings sitting on pillars; frenetic with Hindu festivals; bizarre with towering strange-eyed Buddhas like the one pictured on the jacket. Colin Simpson had to use his cameras almost as much as his skill of words to convey Katmandu, and its environ cities of Patan and Bhatgaon, and the Arcady that is Pokhara.
As backdrop to the Katmandu drama are the Himalayas, the world’s highest mountains, the “Third Pole” with peaks the author found much more spectacular than Everest. Fascinating, too, is the sociological scenery, from King Mahendra’s Panchayat Democracy to the temple choir that smoked marihuana.
As one would expect, Colin Simpson is informative, perceptive, entertaining, evocative-and, as ever, alluringly readable. He has written a book that, while it is far from being uncritical, makes us want to go to Katmandu, and tells us what we need to know if we do. What he mainly does, though, is to provide the majority of his readers (who have bought nearly 400,000 copies of his other books) with an armchair journey that is quite fascinating: and, of course, with a specially handsome gift book.
Kathmandu (Robertson) – Angus, Robertson