Bhaktapur Durbar square after the earthquake

After hearing a lot on social media and seeing pity videos of “Bhaktapur after earthquake” I decided to go take a short motorbike trip, with my friend and look around to check its authenticity. I wouldn't like to go on the contrary, as the videos were shot concurrently at the time for quake but would like to request the owners of the video should try and visit Bhaktapur and update the recent status of the periphery. Let me tell you my findings after walking and talking to the local authorities, locals and the vendors.

First thing the entrance of the Durbar square still has a huge pile of rubble left from the prehistoric mud and brick gate but once we enter the durbar square periphery you will see it clean and ready to welcome guests. Not to forget that this vicinity I am writing about at the moment dates back to over 300 years and making hypotheses about not seeing the distress is completely a hypothesis itself.

The museum suffered a major hit which is why only one of the buildings and only two stories are open and not much can be seen. Entering the museum itself is a big confront when you will see huge wooden logs nailed in the earth supporting the brittle infrastructure but we dug it. We went in and harked the childhood memories of field trips that my school had organized when I was in grade 4, this was the first time in almost 15 years. There were couple of temples which had been rooted off and they are Vatsala temple, Narayan temple and one another with a complicated newari name but other than that I found it very comparable to the ambiance to that of before earthquake.

After walking for almost an hour, we decided to take a break from one of the best yoghurt and Kulfi (traditional Nepalese ice-cream) stops. We had 2  each yoghurts and one each Kulfi’s and decided to chat with the owner as we didn’t see much traffic in the store as it usually used to be. Dinesh Babu Hada,51, the shop owner also known with the alias “the kulfi King” relayed “I don’t know what foreigners are afraid of and I though they are the adventurous one” and he laughed and shared his story of the day of quake. He had a huge smile on his face and was positive about the fact that he did not die and his customer will someday return to him, particularly his Chinese friends who loved his dry meat products.

After cooling off we headed to Nyatapole; 5 storied temple, which I had thought had fallen the first but luckily hadn’t. I saw young national visitors, not in huge number but remarkable, whereas on the other hand I as well saw an excavator cleaning the rubble. Despite the devastation, clogged alleys and shattered houses, the inhabitants have gotten back to regular life and have opened up their businesses on the divergent I was somehow concerned by worn out Chinese red cross tents. We were window shopping and suddenly a young man named Krishna Mohan Karmacharya, 36, painter invited us to his store hoping we would buy some of his paintings out of a hope but instead we offered him to ask some questions and he agreed. All we asked was “what do you want the world to know about Bhaktapur?” and he replied “come down here and see what is happening! It is absolutely normal and if it had not been I and all these people wouldn’t have been here and the houses that are annihilated are the ones which were not refurbished at the time of great earthquake century back”.

Pottery square was hit the hardest, that’s a personal perception but more than the devastation of quake what I saw was pretty amazing. A group of people making fresh clay pots, painting the ones that had been already given a shape and above all they were playing a local game called ‘pasa’. The instantaneous scars of earthquake is not immense the consequences are not the broken houses, deceased member in the family is not as prominent compared to the a economical toll they might face in the near future due to the false donation oriented, sorry looking campaigns.