Three days before his birthday, a Kathmandu writer stood on a stool hammering a nail into the wall and felt something like a blast of wind hit his right temple. Within minutes his face had contorted in the mirror and his speech had slurred. His wife, calling from the Indra Jatra festival, took one look at him on a video call and told him to get to a hospital immediately.
What followed was an intensive care stay in a Nepali hospital: no visitors allowed, machines beeping, doctors and nurses moving between patients on the edge of life and death. The next morning his head was shaved for tests in a cath lab, where four doctors crowded around an 80-inch monitor and masked nurses in blue moved around the equipment. He describes watching it all from the patient's low angle — the photojournalist in him, he admits, still thinking about composition and negative space.
But the part of the story that stays with you is what happened in his head. As anaesthesia took hold, he slipped into a meditative trance, reciting mantras his guru had taught him, and felt what he calls a blissful resignation settle over him. When he described it afterwards, his teacher told him he had experienced the bardo — the Tibetan Buddhist term for the gap or transition between states, most famously the in-between zone between death and rebirth. Western medicine would call it a near-death experience; his tradition gave it a different vocabulary and, arguably, a more useful frame.
The writer came back. He describes the return as surfacing from a great adventure through eternity, and says proximity to mortality had a purifying effect. There is a quieter point too: every 1 October birthday had become an annual audit of unfinished goals, a weight rather than a celebration. A brush with death rearranged that arithmetic.
Why should a traveller care? Because this is the texture of Kathmandu that guidebooks rarely capture — a city where a Hindu festival fills the streets one evening and a Buddhist framework for death and impermanence is ordinary conversation the next day. Nepal is one of the few places where concepts like the bardo are not exotic trivia but part of how people around you understand a hospital bed, a stroke, a second chance. For anyone travelling with an interest in meditation, retreats or Buddhist teaching, it is a reminder that the region's spiritual life is lived, not performed. And for everyone else, it is a nudge towards the same conclusion the writer reached: go, but go without the luggage of unfinished to-do lists. Impermanence is the lesson; the mountains just teach it faster.
