but they sure do in nepal. i just finished a 4 day “trek” around the himalayan foothills. it definitely wasn’t camping since every night and every meal was in a tea house. however. it was exactly how nepalis have been getting around nepal for centuries and, given how many i encountered, how most of them still get around, walking for days carrying oranges, chickens and even refridgerators. my guide for the trek hadn’t even seen a car until he was 16. walking is definitely an integral part of nepali culture. the newspapers in kathmandu, which like any city has plenty of cars and roads, still talks of distances in terms of how many days of walking time it is. each morning i’d get to a village a walk for sometimes 2 hours with groups of children on their way to school carrying their books in the typical nepali backpack which hangs from their forehead instead of their shoulders. that’s just how they do shit every day in nepal. and it’s what i did for four, ate dal bhaat, walked, slept in a tea house, woke up and started it over again until i got where i was going.

apart from boiled eggs and oranges (which are all over the valleys of the foothills) dal bhaat seems like all nepalis eat. it’s a massive pile of white rice, some curry, a bowl of lentil soup, and “pickle”. there’s quite a bit of variation possible though. the entire time the only thing that was the same was the rice. i had fish head curry and spinach curry. once me and my guide, kaji, had dried beef curry.

“this is dried beef, very fresh.”
“wait, aren’t you hindu kaji?”
“i just pray beforehand. it’s okay.”

this pickle is also pretty variable. i’m not too good at figuring out what something is based on taste, but one time the taste of the pickle was really distinctive so i asked what was in it. “marijuana seeds.” an interesting not about prices in rural nepal. they are obviously directly proportional to how far some one had to carry it.

like i said there are no roads connection the villages and i don’t know how there could be. they’re called hills in nepal but anywhere else they’d be mountains. and they’re all incredibly steep. my trek was to visit the summit of poon hill in order to get a nice view of the annapurna range of the himalayas. this “hill” is over 3000 m high and the second day we hiked up 1500 of them. now, like i said this wasn’t at all like camping as nearly the entire route was paved with stone which was crucial as the majority of that second day was up inclines steeper than 45°. my calves are still somewhat sore.

but i made it. the view for the top of poon hill was as promised, spectacular. i’ve seen the rockies, the andes and the alps, but the himalayas are something else altogether. it reminded me of the first time i’d gotten flattened by a wave in the ocean.

the trek was based from pokhara which is 200 km west of kathmandu. about how i got there …

between kathmandu and pokhara is a town called gorkha. above gorkha is a preserved medieval palace with some interesting views of the countryside and the himalayas. it seemed like a good place to check out on the way to pokhara. i got to gorkha about noon and started the walk up to the palace as soon as i arrived. the palace was neat and the view was cool, but i decided to keep going up the ridge to try for an even better one. at the top of the ridge is a telecommunications tower which is guarded by not a small number of military personnel who decided that i was not going to be allowed through. so i hiked back down a bit and found a path the curved to the back side of the ridge facing the himalayas.

this is where i met tej. he approached me and we started talking. the view of the himalayas was obscured by clouds and he invited me to his house 50 ft away to wait an hour for it to clear. sounds good. i had some cookies with me and he made us some tea. i spent the entire afternoon with him. we talked a lot about rural life in nepal. he had a garden and a small millet field where he grew food for his family (a wife and 4 children). he earned money as a porter for treks and building houses like the one we were sitting in. it was a single 10×10x6 room which had one bed, shelves, a fire pit, 3 stools, mud walls and floor, with a thatched roof. he described how they, like “every rural person” in nepal, are eking out a living. we talked about his family. he was particularly proud of how far each of his children had gotten in school. he also bragged about having a intercaste love marriage to a buddhist. and he groaned about his teenage daughter’s insistence that he build them an outhouse.

we also talked about life between the maoists and the soldiers. he pointed across the valley and said that the “mao party people” occupied much of that area occasionally forcing villagers to give them money or food. right behind him was the telecommunications tower with all the soldiers. 3 of which, i believe, he quarters. he at least feeds them. while we were talking they walked right into his house and his wife prepared food for them. i asked if they paid for the food but he didn’t answer. he was reluctant to say much of anything about the soldiers in the area, but did tell me about the 8pm curfew.

kaji and i also talked about many of the same things. he also grew up in a rural village in the gorkha district. he was a bit more willing to talk about politics however. when i asked him about the government and the maoists he said that as long as the was no peach he won’t support the prime minister and about the maoists he said, “i don’t really know what they want.” then he added, “everywhere in the world it is poor people who fight and the rich people that tell them to.”

my conversations with kaji those four days and tej that afternoon have got to be the best conversations i’ve ever had while travelling. incidentally, i was the first american that tej, who is 40 years old, had ever met. neat!

the next morning i decided to head to pokhara. the guest house manager told me that there would be a bus for pokhara at 6am. i woke up early and headed to the bus station where i found out that there would be no 6am bus and that i needed to wait for the 9:30 one. so i did and then found out that there would also be no 9:30 bus and that i could wait until the next day. ugh. i was offered a bus to the main road from where i could catch a bus the rest of the way. fine by me.

on the way though, almost immediately in fact, the bus broke down. an hour later another bus came and we all had to pack into that one. now it was a beautiful morning, the valley around us was filled with a dense fog such that it looked as though it was a lake of cloud. this plus my reluctance to sit sardine style for 2 hours is how i ended up riding on the top of a bus in nepal with a goat! one the great travelling stereotypes is travelling with livestock. check! by the way, as romantic as a ride with livestock is, it should be pointed out that goats least feel no compulsion to “hold it” until the next stop. i realized this when brown hail started bouncing off my bag. i quickly shoved the goat’s ass away from my bag before it got christened.

it was a killer journey to say the least and i even made it to pokhara in the end.