Tansen

Well I went to Tansen for less than 24 hours and then came back to Pokhara. Quite frankly I wouldn't recommend Tansen to a traveller. Maybe it was a mixture of hunger, thurst, exhaustion, frustration, general annoyance and anxiety but I did not have a great time there.

I got a room for 100 rupees at The Bajra Hotel, one of the very few places in the town. Tansen is not centered around the tourist/traveller whatsoever. I'm not saying this is bad but it makes it quite difficult to get around and figure things out. The room I stayed in was stationed next to the shared bathroom so it had a stench of stale urine and feces. Not so pleasant. So for one night I shared this room with roaches and spiders and slept (more like tossed and turned) on a 1 inch thick foam mattress.

Reason why I was so frustrated in Tansen: Tansen is way off the tourist/traveller circuit. It is not "touristed" at all. No nice guest houses, no restaurants, no where to relax. This is not why I was frustrated. But because these people rarely if ever see a tourist or someone who looks different than they do they are extremely fastincated/intrigued. So EVERYWHERE I went I was intensely stared at. Absolutely everyone I walked past I could tell was staring, pointing, or saying something about me to their friends. There were times when I would walk by groups and they would look at me and say something to one another and I wanted to say "What are you STARING AT??" I had to say to myself, ok, this is their culture and I look different than everyone else and I need to not get so frustrated. No one was aggressive or rude but it can become quite annoying when people talk about you blatantly in another language and you have no idea what they are saying. I do not lavish amounts of attention so this was a major source of frustration. So, I went to the roof of my hotel which was the only place I could sit in peace and calmed down a bit. I decided why stay if I didn't like it? So back to Pokhara I went in the morning.

Tansen is a pretty big city for Nepal, about 16,000 people. If you don't mind the constant hassle and little time to relax then Tansen may be the place for you. It is like Kathmandu in that it has the hustle and bustle of a city. There are no beggars and no street children so that hassle is gone.

So that was my experience in Tansen.