Kathmandu brings out my inner nerd.

But then, so does everywhere else. Today’s geek spasm comes courtesy of Kathmandu’s incomprehensible traffic. Through the magic of queuing theory, a single taxi can pause to pick up a fare, and create an astonishing Gordian gnarl of outraged honks and stalled two-stroke engines that can easily take 10 minutes to untangle, during which time it will cheerfully paralyze traffic for kilometers in every direction. It’s absolutely fascinating, and it sets my mind abuzz with formulae I never really learned, the remnants of the queuing theory and game theory that I half-grasped in undergrad. (Econ 382, Applied Game Theory, is still the niftiest course I took at SFU, for those enrolled there now).

In a rational, well-ordered city, this would be impossible. Those two adjectives, however, are as likely to be applied to Kathmandu as “soothing” and “verdant”. This city is a mass of undifferentiated bloat, nourished by spontaneously-formed one-lane capillaries and gasping in cobalt-blue smoke, a vaguely benign urban tumour. But it offers me endless, tantalizing food for thought, filling my mind past capacity with tenuously-connected fragments of pop sociology, science, politics, and sheer (often aghast) wonder. And thus it reminds me why I travel.