Kathmandu; creatures and cremations

Kathmandu, where we stayed was in the tourist area....not the ideal location for us in all honesty. Place we were staying is basic but comfortable, the surrounding streets are like an Indiana Jones set crossed with shops selling hiking gear. Constant traffic and people, we have been warned not to go out after 11pm as the area is notorious for "things"...lets just leave it at that. It seems the traffic is similar to India in that you can overtake at high speed on a blind corner or crest whilst talking on a mobile phone as long as you honk your horn enough!
There was a small gecko/lizard type thing in our room, I assured Karen that they are more interested in catching bugs than interacting with us. She wasn't convinced.
I drifted off to sleep and 30 minutes later woke up with the lizard on my face.
After jumping around and brushing it off we spent 20 minutes catching it and releasing it outside to it's friends.
Over breakfast we discussed the days sight seeing. No one else seemed to mind the ant infested sugar and table, I decided today was a good day to start my diet and refrained from having sugar in my coffee!!
We went to a few temples and palaces etc, interesting architecture and history of Hinduism and Buddhism, one of the temples was called the Monkey Temple and yes it had plenty of Monkeys, none attacked us though.
The final place is where bodies are cremated on the side of the river, we paid to get in and strolled along chatting to our guide. We didn't imagine we would actually see much but as we got to the first burning pile of wood on the platform we noticed two feet sticking out of the end of it. The next platforms had charred skulls and bones and were still smoking. Our guide talked us through what happened saying the fire is started in the corpses mouth and then the rest is burnt. We walked to where a large crowd was gathered and climbed higher to see what was going on. It was a different area where VIPs were burnt, a body was being prepared and it was obviously military as a Gurka unit played the last post as the fire was lit in the corpses mouth.
Pretty strange watching this as the family sits around the corpse, it would have made for an evocative photo but we were not prepared to invade the privacy of the family. That did not seem to worry others though who were videoing. It felt invasive being there and I don't really think it should be a public thing, or perhaps not a tourist thing at least.
Next is our flight to Pokhara from Kathmandu and our trek.

J&K