Nepal day one!

We arrived in Tribhuvan Airport in the Capital city of Nepal Kathmandu.  We arrived at 9.am in the Morning and were really tired from the flight. We decided that on our first day we would go somewhere close by to the Airport and the hotel we were staying in Potala Tourist Home.

                           The Pashupatinath Temple was the perfect place to spend our first day as it was close by and is one of the most significant Hindu temples of Shiva in the world as well as being a huge tourist attraction in Nepal. It's located in Kathmandu on the banks of the Bagmati River.

                         While we were there we learned about all the different legends assocaited with the temple. My favourite was The Cow Legend i.e Lord Shiva once took the form of an antelope and went to the forest on Bagmati river's east bank. The gods later caught up with him grabbed him by the horn and forced him to resume his divine form. The broken horn was worshiped as a linga but overtime it was buried and lost. Centuries later an astonished herdsmen found one of his cows showering the earth with milk. Digging deep at the site, he discovered the divine linga of Pashupatinath. We also learned that The priests of Pashaputinath are called Bhattas.

I fell in love with the architecture as the temple is in the Nepalese pagoda style of architecture (cubic constructions). The temple itself is a square, it's two tiered and built on a single-tier plinth with beautifully carved wooden rafters. Both roofs are covered in copper and gold. The western door has a statue of large bull in plated in bronze. The Temple is in the middle of an open courtyard in the town of Deopatan. Richly ornamented gilt and silver-plated doors are on all sides. On both sides of each door are niches with gold-painted images of guardian deities. Inside the temple itself is a narrow ambulatory around the sanctum. The sanctum contains a linga with four faces (chaturmukha) representing Pashupati, as well as images of Vishnu, Surya, Devi and Ganesh.The struts under the roofs are decorated with wood carvings of members of Shiva's family such as Parvati, Ganesh, Kumar or the Yoginis, as well as Hanuman, Rama, Sita, Lakshman and other gods and goddesses from the Ramayana. On the south side of Pashupati temple is the Dharmashila which is a stone where sacred oaths are taken and pillars with statues of various Shah kings. In the northeast corner of the temple courtyard is the small temple of Vasuki (King of the Nagas) . Vasuki has the form of a Naga (mythical snake) from the waist upwards, while the lower parts are an intricate tangle of snakes' bodies.

We had so much fun going around the temple and finding out about it. It was such a good day, I'm in love with Nepal already and cannot wait to see what else this gorgeous country has to offer!