Nepal's growing on me. Chris and I haven't seen much of the mountains yet, but the city of Kathmandu is a pleasant enough place, with culture by the bucketload. One of the things about Nepal which I didn't really appreciate until I got here is the country's ethnic and cultural diversity. This is where India collides with the rest of Asia, in terms of religion, language and ethnicity: the place where Hinduism meets Buddhism, where Indo-European meets Sino-Tibetan, where Caucasoid meets Mongoloid.

Religion is a particularly complex issue in Nepal: this is where the 330 million gods of Hinduism meet, and overlap with, Tibetan Buddhism, which itself seems to have collected an assortment of obscure tantric gods and goddesses. The mix can come up with some rather odd results. This morning I had the honour of meeting a goddess. Well, not exactly of meeting her. The Kumari is a seven-year-old girl believed to be an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga, and who lives in her own palace, Kumari Chowk, in central Kathmandu, and is treated, well, as a goddess. As we entered the palace's small inner courtyard, a guide was telling a small tour group that as non-Hindus the closest they could get to the Kumari would be a glimpse through a window, and reminding them that photography was absolutely forbidden and that a small donation might be appropriate. He then called to somebody on an upper floor, and the Kumari herself stuck her head out of a tiny window on the top floor. She was wearing a red dress, had a red ribbon in her hair, and looked out at us disinterestedly for a few seconds, and then went back inside. The absurd theatricality of it all made it hard for me to contain my laughter, although had I laughed I don't think it would have offended her. Kumaris have to be fairly thick-skinned: the selection process for a new Kumari includes the girl being locked in a darkened room full of freshly severed buffalo heads.

By contrast, this afternoon Chris and I visited Boudha, a centuries-old Buddhist stupa, or dome-shaped shrine, on the edge of the Kathmandu valley, and home to a few of Nepal's many thousands of Tibetan refugees. Here, red-robed monks and highland women with long woollen dresses and weather-beaten Asiatic faces turned prayer wheels as they made slow circuits of the stupa. Chris pointed out that these people, at least at first sight, seemed to have more in common with the hill tribes of northern Thailand than with Indians only a hundred miles or so away.

The political situation in Nepal isn't looking good. The strike imposed by the Maoists continues. There are armed police in large numbers on many of Kathmandu's streets; ordinary Nepalis ignore them, as if it was nothing unusual to see ten policemen armed with assault rifles striding through a city street. The day before yesterday, the same day we arrived in Kathmandu, was National Democracy Day. The Himalayan Times reported that the government's telecommunications agency had marked the day by shutting down Kathmandu's telephone network for a few hours to prevent activists from organising any demonstrations against the king's autocratic rule. So far, I haven't met anyone willing to discuss what's been going on politically, other than platitudes such as, 'it's not good for tourism'. To be honest, I haven't felt comfortable asking, and perhaps they don't yet feel comfortable enough to tell me.

The strike poses more serious logistical problems for us: the road to Pokhara, the town we had planned to use as a base for trekking in the Annapurna massif, is closed and no buses are running. As things stand, we're faced with the choice of waiting in Kathmandu, possibly indefinitely, for the situation to improve, or flying to Pokhara and back and then taking a taxi to the trailhead.