My life in Kathmandu revolves around my bicycle – it’s always been this way. When I learned I had been hired by Ullens School back in April of 2014, the first thing I did was buy a third-hand bicycle from a friend. She was a beautiful baby blue Commencal, which is a fairly fancy French mountain bike. I loved her, but I didn’t care properly for her. I replaced the tires and tubes with cheap things I found on the local market; when the chain snapped, I replaced it with a cheap one from the local market; when I got in a minor accident and damaged the crank, I, again, replaced the whole system with something cheap from the local market. Sensing a pattern here? She carried me around town faithfully – from home to school and back home every day, to the climbing gym (5.4 km, something I never imagined I could have done), and everywhere imaginable in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. With a couple of friends, I pedaled around the city collecting water purifiers from tourists who were rapidly evacuating; we then distributed the purifiers to people who live in ramshackle homes along the rivers. They’d reported spikes in diarrhea cases because the earthquake had disrupted water systems everywhere, and as some of the poorest people in the city, they didn’t have safe access.
Baby Blue and I took a break in the summer of 2015 when I went back to Minnesota to recuperate. A few months after I returned to Kathmandu, I locked her outside of a nice mid-range restaurant while I ate pad thai with my friends. There was nothing to lock her to, so I just locked the wheel to the frame and assumed the guards who stand outside the restaurant would watch out on my behalf. I was wrong, of course. The bike was gone by the time we finished eating, and the guards said they hadn’t noticed anything. I was furious, of course, and went on a many-months search to get her back. Even to this day, my eyes perk up when I see a baby blue cycle on the roads of this city, though in my heart I know she’s long gone.
I learned my lesson with Baby Blue and have since made an effort to care better for my bicycles, but my knowledge and caretaking of bicycles is inversely proportional to the quality of bicycle I own. I bought a mid-range Chinese Giant from a guy who gave up on biking as soon as the fuel crisis was over. After a few years, I sold that one to a colleague when I left Kathmandu for NYC. He very generously let me use it again when I returned for a few months in 2019. The next year, just before the pandemic, I bought another cheap Chinese mountain bike, this time a Fury – I quickly tired of how bulky and clunky it was, and gave it to a friend. Then in 2021, I bought a used GTA, an even cheaper brand; that too I gave to a friend. A few months ago when I arrived for this grant, I bought the ultimate downgrade: a Thai Jiebu mountain bike, supposedly used for just one or two months before being sold to the hustler who resells mountain bikes as his side gig. This little white dingy has required multiple replacements of tires and tubes, re-cabling of the brakes, an entirely new derailleur and chain, a new axel for the pedals, and a new saddle to boot. She’s not a great bike, but Jiebu and I are in it for the long haul now.
Biking in Kathmandu has changed my life forever. It taught me how to navigate the city on my own, how to understand the nuances of these non-linear, non-gridded medieval streets. It gave me the freedom to come and go whenever I please, without being tied to anyone who might want to split a cab or wait a bit longer for the bus to go. Biking has significantly improved my reflexes and spatial awareness; the small roads, dense traffic, constant potholes, and surprise pedestrians force my animal instincts to the surface. This puts me deeply in tune with my own body and keeps me fit – I swear it even keeps my hair looking better (and yes, I do wear a helmet)! Because I often get lost heading to new places on my two wheels, I’ve discovered new places, temples, and quirks of this city (including coming across the local zoo's elephant on his morning walk several times) that I wouldn’t be able to access from the back of a taxi.
(I know I said I wear a helmet - I do! Just not at the particular moment when this picture was taken...)
Though I feel it is a privilege to be a cyclist in Kathmandu, not everyone who bikes this city comes from privilege. There is a large human sector of the city whose entire income depends on the tall, heavy, single-gear bikes they pedal around. Most or perhaps all of these people come from the Terai, the southern plains of Nepal; they have limited opportunities to make money, so they buy one of these cheap bicycles and insert themselves into the undocumented, untaxable, hand-to-mouth economy. They sell and collect everything imaginable from their bikes, by rigging simple structures to the back and walking around the city all day, every day. Within a day in the city, you might see men with bikes selling fruits, 5-gallon jars of purified water, stacked trays of eggs, or entire shipments of boxes of Kwik’s cheesy crisps; you might also see men with bikes collecting old cardboard, plastic bottles, or piles of garbage; then of course there are the men who transport large things over short distances by bicycle-wagon, like bedframes or refrigerators. You can hear these men before you see them, because they call out the nature of their work with clear, sharp voices that pierce through the noises of the city.
I love biking around here so much that I even designed and commissioned a sweatshirt to prove it, in the style of the I <3 NYC t-shirts. Thanks to my friend who modeled the sweatshirt on a hilltop near Nalma!
Cycling around here is not always pretty or easy, of course. Though Kathmandu is a valley, it is a valley within the tallest mountains in the world, so some of the city streets are pretty steep. Most of them I can get up now if I'm in the lowest gear, but there are still a few that I always opt to walk up because the struggle just isn't worth it. I don't love the feeling that I might flip backwards off my bike... These days, in the monsoon season, it is also always a daily gamble to be a cyclist. Will there be a torrential downpour in the next twenty minutes even though the skies are crisp, clear, and blue? Most likely. Will the jeans I just washed end up with mud splattered up the butt because the roads are, on average, only 2/3 paved and 1/3 pothole? Definitely. Or, if it doesn't rain, I'm likely to show up just as wet, but salty also because I will have sweat through every inch of clothing from the swelteringly humid heat.
Even so, I truly would not have it any other way.
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