Trekking in the off-season has its positives and negatives. On the upside, I didn’t see what I can only assume from the quantity of guesthouses must be an army of trekkers during peak season. But off-season trekkers pay for the peace and quiet by dealing with cloudy skies and heavy muggy air. We were spectacularly lucky not to get rained on, but the clouds rolled in every day around 10am – a good reason, in addition to the heat, to get up and start hiking at 6am. On my second day, I woke up pleasantly surprised to find that our guesthouse had a breathtaking view of the snowy peaks behind those clouds. Who knew?
On Day Two we stopped in Jhinu and visited what is now on my list of Best Hot Springs in the World, right on the edge of a rushing river – just what I needed after a day of walking up and down steep stone steps looking at beautiful mountain views.
We started hiking on Day Three and were soon joined by a handful of middle school-aged girls in school uniforms. I gasped for breath and struggled to keep as I watched them sprint up the steep trails in their cheap plastic shoes, even offering to carry my guide’s bag for a while. My lazy-American feeling was reinforced when my guide told me they were going to school in Gandruk, our destination for the day, and at the end of the day they would hike all the way back. But I felt better about myself when they gave me some berries they picked on the trail and I was able to say they were delicious and ask the girls their names.
I think these girls were the first people we interacted with on the trail. It’s interesting, hiking in an area that gets so many trekkers, how uninteresting we are. Here I am, hiking around in what feels like pretty remote rural Nepal, with my transparent skin and funny boots, and everyone pretty much ignores me unless I walk into their restaurant and ask for a dal bhat. From what I can see, it seems that trekkers are the primary economic support for the region, so it’s not like a white person with a backpack walking through your village is anything new or exciting.
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