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10. Post, phone & email
10.1 Post
The GPO (at the south end of town, by
the white Bhimsen tower) is the most reliable place to
send post. There are a few private postboxes in
some of the Thamel bookshops but they charge for the
service and, whatever they tell you, your letters might
hang around for a week or so before they get taken to the
GPO. Buy your stamps at the GPO and make sure you
see them being franked before you leave. Mail takes
between 3 days and 3 weeks to get to the UK but most of
mine got home within a week.
Poste Restante is very
efficient and by far the most reliable way of getting
mail in Kathmandu - don’t have mail sent to your
hotel or raft company as it can wait in the GPO for
ages. Letters can take as little as 3 days or as
long as a month to arrive. Most take 9-10 days.
10.2 Phone
There are loads of private phone
offices around Kathmandu, look for the
"IDD/ISD" signs. Shop around to find what
the best rate is. There isn’t a
"cheap" time to call the UK. Most places
allow incoming calls, sometimes they charge for
this. Calling from the UK is (00 977) for Nepal, it
isn’t cheap but your lurved ones can save a lot of
money using a Swiftcall card or similar.
The cheapest place to
make and receive calls is the Central Telegraph Office
which is down by the soccer stadium at the south end of
town, about 40 minutes walk from Thamel. There is a
3-minute minimum charge, and if you plan to make calls
this long then it’s definitely worth taking a
rickshaw down there.
10.3 email
There are now loads of email offices
in Thamel. You can normally use the office’s
own email address, in which case you pay per kB to send
and receive mail from their account. Charges are
Rs. 10-15 per kB. Alternatively, plenty of places
offer web access, to use hotmail or similar, in which
case you pay per minute, Rs. 8-15 was the going rate last
year. If you have a unix account somewhere, several
offices offer a telnet connection. There are email
offices in Pokhara too but the charges are considerably
higher for some reason.
When the
email offices are quiet you can often use the PCs offline
for a very cheap rate (or, better still, ask to use your
mate’s PC in one of the rafting company
offices): then you can write huge swathes of email
and save it to a disk, then go on-line very briefly and
cut-and-paste the whole caboodle into hotmail.
next
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1. Disclaimer 2. Guidebooks
3.
Flying with your kayak
4.
Arrival
5.
Staying in Kathmandu
6.
Hey, friend, youwanna changemoney?
7.
Food & drink
8.
Health
9.
Bureaucracy
10.
Post, Phone & email
11.
Getting "work" boating
12.
Some Rivers
13.
Getting around
14.
Stuff to do when you’re not on the river
15.
Things you will need…
16.
Photography
17.
Psst! Hashhash? marijuana?
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