Kathmandu, Nepal

Latitude: 27°41'60.00"N
Longitude: 85°19'60.00"E

          The clock on my nightstand says 10 PM, but the time difference between here and Bellevue is almost exactly 12 hours. I write this now, because there's no way I'm getting any sleep anytime soon.

          When you have lived your life - your entire life of 67 years - amongst orderly rows of houses, pruned trees, and roads and roads of cars, then board a plane for 16 hours and arrive at Kathmandu...
          You can't even...
          I can't even...

          Sitting for 2/3 of a day stiffened my knees something awful, but I quickly forgot about that as I hobbled out the airport and hired a bicycle taxi to take me to the hotel, because this city is just so different. No sleek skyscrapers or tidy homes rose up to greet me, but wooden apartments with laundry hanging from the balconies and street vendors in stalls shouting in Nepali. The roads are truly a hazard, a mass of pedestrians, cyclists, carriages, and trolleys sharing a single strip of cement and fighting for their right of passage. We passed majestic stone pagodas on the banks of a river - the temple of Pashupatinath, the cyclist explained in broken English, one of the most sacred in the country. Everything was simply exotic beyond belief.
          At the same time, the taxi cyclist, who looked a little old for this kind of work, was wearing a baggy sleeveless shirt. I saw alleys piled with litter and the homeless, and children, tiny, barefoot, skinny street urchins with eyes too large for their faces. I realized certain apartment buildings had walls that were thin and shoddy, and were packed with far too many family members.
          Kathmandu, after all, is the capital of Nepal, and Nepal is a developing country.

          Checking into the hotel (Kathmandu Hyatt Regency - I don't know what I was thinking!) was entering a portal into the West in the middle of the Orient. Shiny leather sofas, perfectly moderate temperature, a receptionist with a lipsticked smile welcoming me in English with a high, professional voice. She was young; she may not have to spend her whole life behind that desk. I was given a card key and directed to room 214, a room with a freshly vacuumed carpet, fluffy white towels, and plush beds.
          By the time I had finished unpacking the necessities from my suitcase, the sun was sinking low, casting rusty light over the bustling city. And looming on the horizon, knifing into the sky, were rugged snow-capped peaks, lofty, majestic, monstrous.
          The Himalayas.


© 2013 Trip Advisor

          This is what Kathmandu has to do with tectonic boundaries. Ready for a bit of geology? The rocky surface of the Earth is called the crust, and it is about 60 miles deep. It is also broken up into numerous "plates". There are continental plates and oceanic plates, generally forming land masses and ocean floors, and they are moving, though at a really slow rate. Once, all land was melded together in one giant continent called Pangaea.
          About 80 million years ago, when Pangaea had broken up but the pieces had yet to assume the shapes we know today, the Indo-Australian plate began moving towards the larger Eurasian plate. As they slammed together, the Indo-Australian plate welded into the Eurasian plate, and the border of the latter sort of crumpled and folded, forming the Himalayas. This is how the land mass of modern-day India was joined with the Asian continent.


© 2011 John Henson

          Because of the phenomenal initial speed of the Indo-Australian plate (a whopping 20 cm per year), this collision was quite forceful, and thus the Himalayas are the tallest mountains in the world. Even now, India is still elbowing its way into Asia, and the Himalayas grow about 2 cm per year. And such areas, where plates are crashing into each other, are called convergent boundaries. But to be more specific, here in Kathmandu it would be called a collision boundary.

          Unfortunately, the movement at these boundaries often cause a lot of seismic activity. Earthquakes, not only in Kathmandu but throughout Nepal, are not uncommon; in fact, weak ones are pretty frequent. They cause little trouble - the taxi cyclist told me he was used to the ground jolting and trembling every now and then - but he also recounted the story of a massive quake that pretty much flattened the city back when his own father was a boy. "People screamed and cried," he said. "Houses crumbled - Father lived on streets for months." I've just done some research, and discovered that this calamity was none other than the famous 1934 Bihar earthquake, a disaster that measured 8.1 on the Richter scale, and didn't even have its epicenter in Nepal, but in India.

          Plates crash, mountains build. We humans think we are so great, but the Earth sneezes and our mightiness collapses like dominoes.