Overview of Kathmandu

Kathmandu is the capital and the largest metropolitan city of Nepal. The city is situated in Kathmandu Valley, which also contains two other cities - Lalitpur and Bhaktapur. Nepali language is spoken by most people of the city. English is understood by most of the educated population of the city. The city stands at an elevation of approximately 1400 m and is inhabited by about 7,000,000 people. Kathmandu is considered to have the most advanced infrastructure among urban areas in Nepal. For many people, stepping off a plane into Kathmandu is an exhilarating shock - the sights, sounds and smells can quickly lead to sensory overload. Whether it be buzzing around the crazy polluted traffic in a taxi, trundling down the narrow winding streets of the old town in a rickshaw, marvelling at Durbar Sq or dodging the tiger balm sellers and trekking touts in Thamel, Kathmandu can be an intoxicating, amazing and exhausting place. As the largest (and pretty much the only) city in the country, Kathmandu also feels like another developing-world city rushing into a modern era of concrete and traffic pollution. Take a walk in the backstreets, however, and the capital's amazing cultural and artistic heritage reveals itself in hidden temples overflowing with marigolds, courtyards full of drying chillis and rice, and tiny hobbit-sized workshops largely unchanged since the Middle Ages.