Url’s Internet Cafe asked Url Ratz (Cafe Manager/Self-proclaimed International Internet Icon) to share his comments and photos of his trip to Nepal and Thailand. His commentary is divided into three reports: (1) Freaky Kathmandu (2) Trekking in the Himalayan Foothills, and (3) Bangkok and Beyond.

Report One:

The Kathmandu airport seemed to have more than a dash of third-world atmosphere, but a quick glance around the terminal made it obvious that the International terminal was either under construction, or being remodeled.

The day we arrived, the second largest celebration of the year was just ending. Practically everyone had red stuff smeared on their foreheads in observance of a religious holiday.

We expected Nepal to be poor, but how poor can a city be that has an international airport? After all, we had landed in a luxurious Thai Airlines Boeing 747. We fully expected things to get a little weird several days from now, when we would start trekking from village to village in the Himalayan foothills. But Kathmandu is a city of two million people and we had just come from Bangkok, Thailand, another large Asian city. Bangkok was fascinating and exotic, but a city is a city, no matter where it is.

Unless it's in Nepal.

Our group’s bus was waiting for us at the airport and we climbed aboard, anxious to see our hotel and to get our first glimpse of the city. Too bad, I thought to myself, that the International Airport is located right next to the poorest, slummiest section of town. Thirty minutes later I was thinking, "Wow this is a really big slum section. I wonder when we'll get to the nice, modern part of town."

It slowly started dawning on me that the airport is in the nice part of town. The farther we got from the airport, the smaller the streets became. Suddenly the neighborhoods we’d just passed through seemed modern and affluent by comparison. Now the bus passed within a few feet of chickens being roasted over an open fire. Not with a George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine, nor with a Weber Grill. More like a man holding a chicken carcass by the feet while the rest of it sizzled over burning garbage. A local shop owner throws a bucket of water on the pool of blood in front of his shop where he just slaughtered an animal of some kind. An unattended toddler sits on a pile of garbage, scavenging for food. Monkeys scurry across the powerlines that hang at window level of our bus. It’s really quite lovely. But enough of this verbal description technique. I can give you a better idea of the situation if I show you a few of the 1000 photos I brought back on three CompactFlash digital memory cards.

Go to freaky page 2

Design notes:
The headline font is Regular Joe.

The repeating graphic is a Tibetan cymbal. Even though our story is about Nepal rather than Tibet, the Tibetans and their art have a significant presence and contributed substantially to our impressions of Nepal.

The photo and caption are in a two-row, one column nested table which has an align attribute of “Right” which forces the text to wrap around the left side of the table.

The photo caption is flush left and has a text indent assigned to it (a “blockquote” in HTML code).

Tilting the dog image creates a comfortable amount of space between the photo/caption and the HTML body copy.