I accelerate...

It's a wonderful thing to be wheeled. After two weeks of walking, time enough to taste the contours of this jumbled city, I bought a bicycle for my 20-kilometre daily round trip commute. My new steed is a shiny craft of aluminum and plastic that would have mildly embarrassed me before the bicycling bourgeousie back home, but here it's the pinnacle of human-powered transport, and to me it's a genuine godsend. Uber-sophisticated it ain't, but it has brakes that appear to respond to pure thought, and fat, guileless tires that would grip and oilslick on an iceberg. It lets me outmaneuver the motorbikes and outrun the other bicycles. It's precisely what I need. The beast was costlier by a hefty margin than any of the others I found in a week of searching; indeed that's why I brought it home with me. The $300 price tag is a feeble midget next to the mighty expense a bent wheel would extract in blood and treasure. The gnashing maelstrom of Kathmandu traffic is not a place to entrust my sanity and endoskeleton to the wretched steel frames offered up by the lowest bidder. My colleagues with the dreaded "cheap Chinese bikes" begrugingly popular here have walked away from such potential mid-ride catastrophes as watching the handlebars or pedals abruptly detach from their trusted rides. I won't test my luck so.

That ominously said, Nepali traffic, for all its chaos and bluster, hides an odd tranquility. Lane markers are an absurd fever dream here, and stoplights an amusing suggestion. Traffic ostensibly moves on the left, but that's only a guideline, and shoulder checks are effectively a religious taboo, but somehow I don't feel my own mortality on Kathmandu roads the way I did in Chiang Mai. The overstuffed roads seem to naturally divide themselves into capillaries, admitting only one vessel at a time, and no one takes it personally if it's not their their turn. Nothing moves particularly fast, and my thin profile lets me weave through the nearly motionless traffic - I typically get places far faster than the car-bound. People actually slow down or (gasp!) stop rather than tear through me. It's busy, it's anarchic, it's noisier than anyone who hasn't been here could possibly comprehend, but in it all, I don't feel that anyone on the road is actively trying to end my life. Unlike Thailand.