I’ve spent reasonable time here in Nepal, almost 2 months now. I’m not intending on listing all the things I’ve done, rather I’d prefer having a look at my head and current impressions of the country, people, and the ways of it all here.
Maybe if anecdotes pop up, I might share some.
This is my first travel going beyond the home encircling countries, and therefor I took my first flight going to Nepal. What an amazing experience, scary and thrilling. The funny thing was that everyone except me looked bored to the limit. They started sleeping and playing with the little screens before the plane even took off! We were gonna fly.. For them of course it was daily business, what for me was an experiential miracle. Being above the clouds was just unreachable by words. Suddenly all maps made more sense, and the world felt huge and small at the same time.
I decided not to sleep the night before the flight, in order to make the two flights, 7 and 4 hours, more easy and/or enjoyable. Mistake. I was so thrilled by the act of flying that I didn’t sleep for more than 15 minutes on the first flight. After landing in Doha, I had to wait for 6 hours to catch my next plane. Having met the person in the seat next to me and being to scared to miss the second plane, I didn’t sleep again. Long story short, when I landed in Kathmandu, I hadn’t slept for about 40 hours, asides from the few minutes losing consciousness when possible.
I landed in Kathmandu (flying so close to the hills almost gave me a heart attack), and there the friend awaited me, the friend I’ve known from Skyping during long night videogaming sessions. This was the first real life dimension encounter! A marvellous way of meeting.
So in that tired state, I immediately received a nice piece of Nepalese tourist life: being swarmed by taxi drivers. Out of all of them, 2 seemed to be more understanding and friendly than the others, and we hopped in a taxi to get to the guest house area.
…
That’s where I started getting some wrong feelings and perhaps uncertainties about the tourism and such. The very next day -I was still pretty exhausted- we were in this guy’s office, while he was pushing offers in our face and trying to rush us with making decisions to go and do tourist things, of which all prices suspiciously were in USD, not the national Nepalese rupee! His convincing skills and smoothtalking were just about as professional as they were extreme, he must have followed some kind of persuasion course.. Before not too long me and my friend were convinced we wanted to go trekking and we had to go fast because of the incoming monsoon, as we were already tanking money out of the atm. At that time, all we had was a vague conversion rate to check how the prices panned out. It was an ok deal in terms of european prices, but of course, as I know now, they shamelessly asked up to 10 times too much for every item on the packing list.
As we had already payed, we started feeling a bit rushed down.. We’d go trekking after less than a week in the country, a little bit crazy, since we still had shaky hands and weren’t fully rested.
So, especially I felt not so good about this whole package rush deal, and my friend could understand, even though he thought the price was not that bad. And it wasn’t, by European or American standards. We decided to cancel the whole thing. Getting a horrible refund rate, I lost a bit over 100 euro’s. It still hurts thinking about it. And so I learned, from the very moments after landing in this beautiful country, the ways and rates of the tourism. So I learned that I should haggle, and also not let someone else decide what I spend my money on, since I’ll be broke in days like that. A good lesson swiftly learned!
So we took it by our own pace, and started heading to Pokhara, away from the pollution and busyness of Kathmandu.
There, we relaxed, at the nice street called Lakeside. We unknowingly payed ridiculous prices for food and drinks, the normal tourist prices, converting it into ‘just a few euros’. Of course it were just a few euro’s, but after my time here, I realised we payed about ten times the price. When locals came to Lakeside, they had their eyes wide open out of amazement, I didn’t really understand. Now I know an average day salary would be 200-400Rs (rupees), which is about 2-3 Euros. I’ve also met a teacher earning 15000Rs per month, about 110 euros, and that’s well over average. So, since I’ve been doing my math not with Western currency rates, but with Nepalese local salary rates, I’ve been in awe and some sadness for a while. Once I knew what the money is worth to them, I was shocked with all prices in Lakeside and tourist areas, and with the discrepancy between tourist and non tourist areas.
So, now I do my math like this, instead of thinking of 260 rupees as 2 euros, I think of it as a small day loan, relative value about 30 euros, 400 rupees wouls be a day salary, so relatively, in Europe, that would be around 50 euros.
They charge 400rs for a meal here. It’s the same as back at home, going to the fancy places for a day salary for a high class meal, but here it’s not ‘just 3 euros’ anymore for me.
And if you pay a thousand rupees for a book, no wonder locals are shocked! It would be like paying 150 or 200 euros…
So yeah, I’ve drifted off pretty far from my story here, but it’s more about these sorts of contemplations anyway. These insights in how the money works here, have come to me pretty recently. The shameless overpricing of rich, tourist fed Nepalese people, who are not that hard working but rely on the ignorance of new tourists, has hit me in the face pretty hard and made me feel quite sad for quite a lengthy period.
The most sickening example is the taxi driver. They just stand there all day, doing nothing, chatting with locals and giving the occasional pushy ‘taxi!’ utterance, until one tourist takes the bite for 400Rs to the bus station, which is a 20-30Rs drive with the meter, or a 1500Rs drive of one hour. That is relatively a 300euro taxi ride. They need 3 or 4 rides like that per month to make their living. So they stand there all day, hoping to get one ride every 10 days of an hour, which they charge more than 10 times too much for, and all they earn more is free money, and way too much!
The dear reader here might sense some of my anger and resentment towards this system, of making the rich richer, creating a blindfold paradise place for tourists that’s merely a fraction of the real city. And I was caught as well, of course, how could I have known. This might also be one of the greatest lessons. I’m also pretty sure that India works exactly the same, so I’ll walk an hour upon arrival in any city, to hopefully find more reasonable places, spending my money so that people earn it who actually need it more and work harder for it. Of course, there’s never the way to know, and learning happens just afterwards.
I’ll continue the story shortly, even though words can’t touch the experiences I was fortunate to receive, and I will only downgrade them by swiftly stating their events in this short blog. However, I’ll gladly continue picking out what comes to the foreground of my head, as that’s probably the retrospectively most important memory to keep or share.
Arrived in Pokhara, Lakeside, we took it easy and relaxed a lot. We started preparing for a trek, buying the ever famous fake North face Chinese Gore Tex equipment, gathering more information. We decided to take a small hike first, as a warmup. Looking on the intrernet, and advised to me by an awesome person close to me who visited the country 3 years ago, there was a short trek called Panchase. The problem? Every guide on the internet gave different instructions and ways, with some names of villages returning, and some being completally different.
We went for the most thrustworthy looking guide, didn’t know there were local busses there, so took a very expensive taxi.
We arrived in a small village, named both Khare and Kande, and started walking. We climbed steep stairs for maybe 2 hours or more, in the burning sun, tongue rapidly hanging on the floor, to reach a place which had nothing to do with the originally planned trek, ‘Àustalian Camp’. It had a clear viewpoint sticking out of the hill and there were I think 3 or 4 guest house/restaurants there. We stayed for the night, and got op at 5.30 in the morning to catch an incredibly amazing sunrise, a painting of orange and red with a snow white peak surrounded by cloud rings background.
Then we heard from 2 travelers there, we needed an entry permit to continue, and the price would be double if we didn’t get it in advance. So we went back down, took the bus back to Pokhara for 1/10th of the taxi price, and got the permit fixed during some more chilling.
When it was all sorted a few days later, we got on the bus, the goal Annapurna base camp! We first aimed for a nice viewpoint detour, called Poon Hill, after which we could loop back to the base camp.
It was a nice trek through valleys and green mountains, with a LOT of stairs, which didn’t care to sometimes go all the way down to just go back up. We stayed at a guest house of a man named Di Pac, the most awesome Nepalese person we met. He explained that his name meant ‘shimmering of light’ and that he worked also as a farmer. He told jokes where he himself just bursted out laughing.
When we had the o so famous national all you can eat Dal Bhat, he proudly came in and started pooring more food on our plate, even after us friendily trying to say we were full.
At night, I asked him if he maybe had a guitar, and he sadly had to respond negatively. He said he had a drum, and invited us inside, to were his shop was.
He started playing the double sided djembe and, together with his daughter, sang so joyously and fully, shortly every guest in the lodge was present in the room.
After going through all of the local Nepalese anthems, the daughter disappeared in the back, only to be followed with the event of maximised volume Nepalese chanted beats.
Di Pac and his daughter, smilingly referring to his customers as ‘my king’, grabbed us by the hand to pull us on the dance floor.
We all danced for multiple hours in the greatest silliness, and went, fully exhausted, to bed.
The next day was a day of more stairs, straight up the only way.
At night we reached Gorepani, from where we could get up to Poon Hill.
That’s when we realised we hadn’t tanked up on mony before going. I had just enough money to probably just make it, but my friend was all out. On top of this himalaya hill, no ATMÂ anywhere nearby, we brainstormed about a plan. The wildest options came to mind, but none of them were really appealing. One of us could maybe go back without backpack, get money and come back, but then we would need a new permit for that.. or we could skip a meal or 2 each day and maybe make it.. We decided to continue our trek and hope to meet a traveler who would, in some miraculous event, give us some money and trust us to bank transfer it back.
So we went up to Poon Hill at around 5 in the morning, a steep climb of a small hour, to arrive in the midst of a cloud.
We were there with a hoard of people, about 50 maybe, who, in the next hour, all disappointedly went back down. Me and my friend, together with 2 guys from Bangladesh and a girl from Sweden, believed.
We stayed for a bit longer than 3 hours up the hill, and suddenly and magically, the clouds all flied to out of sight. We had a beautiful view of multiple snow peaks in a 180 degree in front of us. Pictures were taken and screeches of joy were made. We continued.
We sadly had to acknowledge there was noone we could really even ask for the money plan, and had to give up on the idea of reaching Annapurna Base Camp.
We made a nice detour and turned back to Pokhara.
After some more resting, I got invited by a traveler to share a taxi ride in the early morning, to Sarangkot hill. And so I went to catch another magnificent Himalayan range sunrise, undescribable in words, unexpressible beauty. After that I went back to bed around 7.
Now almost a month has passed, my friend and I said goodbye as we split our ways, he returing home, me going towards the Annapurna Circuit trek.
At this time, I had really loved Nepal, although the slightest expectation was not really met. I didn’t expect the niceness of guest houses, restaurants and shops. The tourist side was really unexpected, the industry aiming at people with no time and plenty of money. The fake friendliness only there for an eventual sale. The overpricing with no shame or mercy.
All this, the shadow side, only sipped through after a while. It’s just a part of what it all is, the good and the bad are mere terms to simplify the complexity of this reality, its history and the peoples minds.
Of course the things I personally dislike don’t matter, and they come next to all I still find lovable about the country. The beauty of the land, the helpfulness of the most random stranger, the mountains, the simplicity and purity of living, the little, sometimes tucked away temples, the fresh and delicious food, the awesomeness of the travelers, the nicest things in the stores, … the list goes on.
I guess I have been anecdoting more than I tended to, and so there will be some nice memory management in this little blog as well.
And so I look back on a nice first month of traveling, with a now good and awesome friend, in a marvellous and magical country, it didn’t take long before I got the attitude of learning something each day, broadening what I know in every piece of beauty, in every failure and dissappointment, in every encounter and meeting, every search, boredom, excitement. It feels like life has been quadrupled, squared.
The loudest noise and madness all around, directly chained by the emptiest silence. The inability to run from selfconfrontation and facing everything head on.
Decisions and river flowings, restful calmness in a chaos of unknown, feeling home in new places, .. the travel so far is an incredible experience and enhancer of all things. The country interesting beyond expectations in the most unexpected ways.
That’s how I’ll probably conclude this chapter, with a true gratefulness of receiving all these experiences, and it has just been the very beginning…
Posted from my phone, apologies for typing mistakes – Happy reading!
