history of an era now long gone in Kathmandu.

This is the Snowman Café, the last lone relic of Freak Street’s glory days,

a roughly 10-year period starting

in the mid-1960s, when hippies from all over the world invaded Kathmandu seeking peace, spiritualism, and easy-to-access hashish.

“[The hippies] were everywhere,” recalls Ram Prasad Manandhar, Snowman’s founder and current owner. “Always high. Sometimes naked. Smoking charas all the time—inside the café, out on the street, everywhere. There were so many hippies on the street that cars couldn’t get through.”

Established in 1965, a time when social revolution and political unease overwhelmed the West, Snowman welcomed the first flocks of flower children off the Hippie Trail, the overland journey from Europe to Asia made by thousands of disaffected youth in the ‘60s and ‘70s. With a reputation as the Haight-Ashbury of the East, Freak Street

lured hippies with its myriad hashish shops, some of which, to the delight

of peacenik potheads and the chagrin

of confectionary purists, baked

their mind-altering substances into cakes and cookies.

“There was a lot of demand for hashish cake,” says Ram Prasad. “Because we were a cake shop, people expected it. But I refused to make it. I told them, I’ll make you regular cake—you can put your own marijuana in it.”

Today’s customers seem plenty satisfied with just the cakes; at any given moment you can see dozens chowing down on such mouth watering varieties as chocolate banana, chocolate apple crumble, cream caramel, coconut, carrot, cheese, coffee, fruit, or black forest. But it’s the Chocolate Love cake—a moist, spongy dessert topped with a light-as-air chocolate frosting, honed to perfection over nearly 50 years—that’s the undisputed favourite among Snowman’s customers.

“I come here almost every day,” says Nabin Dhakal, 25, who grew up near Snowman. “It’s the best chocolate cake in Kathmandu.”

For nearly half a century, Mathura Devi, the wife of Ram Prasad, has single-handedly crafted every confection to emerge from Snowman’s oven; every morning before sunrise she can be found patiently cracking eggs and mixing batter in the third floor kitchen above the café.

“We use the top ingredients,” explains Mathura Devi, a small, gray-haired woman in her late sixties. “And I make every cake perfect.”

Business at Snowman wasn’t always booming: in the 1970s, two major setbacks pushed the café to the brink of closure. First, in an effort to crack down on the invading counterculture, Kathmandu’s government de-legalised marijuana and instituted the 15-day visa, forcing most of Freak Street’s residents and clientele back to their home countries. In 1979 came the second blow: as the Islamic Revolution broke out in Iran (a country that lay along the vagabonds’ overland route), the Hippie Trail came to an abrupt end.

“All of a sudden the hippies were gone,” says Ram Prasad’s son, Raju, who runs Snowman’s register most days. “It happened very quickly.”

But as the other cafés on Freak Street closed one by one, Snowman’s doors stayed open, adapting to the changing environment by catering more to Nepalis than to Westerners. Music by bands such as the Beatles and Pink Floyd, which once blared overhead on a perpetual loop, gave way to local Nepali music, and hot teas were promoted over fruit juice, a hippie favourite.

“We were always able to adapt,” explains Ram Prasad. “That is why we are still able to be around.”

According to Ram Prasad, today, local customers outnumber foreigners three to one. And thus, Snowman strikes that rare balance sought after by all conscientious tourists: equal parts historical significance and local authenticity.

Now 68 years old, Ram Prasad sports a peppery white beatnik beard and a full mop of silvery hair. As he hunches over his cash register, a cigarette dangles between his bony fingers; he had quit for 30 years, only to revive the habit three years ago. (“Eh, I’m old enough to start back up again,” he casually explains.) His intermittent exhalations add to a tobacco cloud that forever hovers over the café, testament to a smoking culture that has been characteristic of Snowman since the beginning.

In fact, it’s tobacco—not cakes—that represents the true heritage of Snowman. Before the café’s opening in 1965, Ram Prasad ran the storefront as a tobacco shop. As a teenage tobacco trader, Ram Prasad had helped his father deliver rickshaw-loads of tobacco leaves from nearby villages into Kathmandu. When he finally saved up enough money to open his own shop, he bought the building, moved his family upstairs, and peddled tobacco from the ground floor.

“We lived on the second and third floor,” recalls Ram Prasad,“and we sold tobacco right here, right where you and I are sitting.”

Today, the dingy, low-lit walls of the first floor are stained with tobacco soot, symbolic of Snowman’s earliest days. In a funky contrast, vibrant, psychedelic murals have been painted directly on top, emblematic of a subsequent era. The second floor, a recently opened annex, has meanwhile become a graffiti free-for-all, thick with the high wisdom and low ramblings of any tourist with a pen. (One wall scrawl reads, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve always imagined.” Another reads, “Metal Rules.”)

And so, with every era that comes to pass at Snowman, the building absorbs it, contains it, layers it into its walls like stratifications of rock that mark the passing of time,the evolution of a city.

Since 1999, Snowman Café has seen a gradual return of its Western clientele. But today it’s the descendants of the hippies—the trekkers and backpackers—who have rediscovered it, carving their own trail this time, from the hostels of Thamel through Durbar Square and down to Freak Street, arriving at Snowman hungry and curious.

“My friend told me about this place,” says Caitlyn Walsh, a 23-year-old Canadian and a first-timer at Snowman. “I like the atmosphere. It feels like a weird time warp.”

Yet, even as Snowman enters its latest era of existence, uncertain what people and music it will bring, it’s clear that the past, though distant,is never really too far behind.

“Last week an American woman came in for a slice of Chocolate Love,” says Raju. “The last time she was here was 1970.”