Kathmandu is a bustling Capital City. The roads are a constant conveyor belt of, unusually, modern motor bikes and old battered dusty cars, vans and small trucks. Horns blast continually and traffic police man the main junctions, creating organised chaos from absolute chaos. There’s a layer of smog that sits over the city obscuring the white tipped Himalaya that shimmer in the distance. The city dwellers, which appear to be mainly twenty somethings, go about their daily business, anonymously behind black face masks. I don’t think the masks have anything to do with Covid, just poor air quality created by the constant traffic. Many of the streets are littered with rubbish, the paths are uneven and broken, there are building that have been left unfinished for what looks like years and electricity cables by the tens hanging aimlessly from over burdened electricity poles. Yet it’s a city I’ve come to love, it has more World Heritage Sites than anywhere in the world, it’s people are friendly and generous and amongst all of this lies The Garden of Dreams!

The garden sits on the edge of the main tourist area of Thamel. It’s a place that’s at odds with its immediate surroundings. You enter the gardens and the cities mayhem dies and only peace is left. There are blooms of every colour and greens of every shade and plants and trees of every type. It’s a place to relax and unwind, almost surreal, a place of someone’s imagination a place where Dillion and Florence would have felt right at home! I come here at the end of nearly every trip, it relaxes me ready for that journey back to reality.

Today the garden is full of beautiful people, late teenagers and twenty somethings. Phones in hand, facing inwards towards themselves, ignoring the vibrant real life colours of Mother Nature right in front of their eyes and instead looking at the over saturated colours and false filters that the selfie phone and the Silicon Valley programmers have concocted! They too, I’m sure have found their own peace in these gardens , as I have!

Oh to be old and cynical!!!