Out of the Valley

People say that you haven’t seen Nepal until you leave Kathmandu. So while Nepali families were celebrating the Dassain festival, we spent two weeks doing our best to see the best of Nepal.

First stop – Lukla. A few tense moments with the flights, including several hours of delays with the weather and the mechanical integrity of our plane (!), but an absolutely spectacular journey, flying through the valleys and past long stretches of the Himalaya. It was worth going to Lukla just for that flight, but the town itself is also lovely – one main, stone paved street edged with whitewashed buildings perched on the side of a mountain, looking down the valley on one side and up to snowy peaks on the other. Not much bustle, hardly any rubbish and a distinctly Tibetan flavour that’s embraced and even touted by local tourism elements. And long lines of Tzopke, half cattle half yaks bred especially for carrying loads, jostling with people for position on the narrow roads. The other small towns along the trail to Mt Everest Base Camp follow the same trend, materialising out of nowhere in between scarily stunning cliffs and forests and summits to offer out of breath hikers sleep and sustenance in their clusters of tea houses. We walked for two days to Namche Bazaar and were blessed with awesome views of Everest before heading back to Lukla and Kathmandu.

But not for long. The next day we headed off to Pokhara, on a bus through winding mountain roads, past roadside shacks serving deep fried delicacies and bare bottomed children teasing dogs. Pokhara is a beautiful city, set on a wide blue lake and ringed by the famous Annapurna mountain range. Tourists have been going there for decades and it shows in the great selection of cheap hotels and easy availability of good food for Western bellies. Somehow though, Pokhara has managed to stay removed from the more seedy elements that tourism usually brings, possibly because most visitors there go trekking and are too tired for causing trouble by the time they get back. It has all the convenience of Kathmandu, but with its own special, relaxed, holiday feeling.

We wound up our Nepal highlights tour in Chitwan National Park, which before the political violence of the last few years received 80% of Nepal’s international visitors. Recent trouble in the Terai has bitten into the statistics, but it’s an amazing look at a very different side of Nepal to the mountains. The steamy jungles of Chitwan are home to one of the world’s biggest wild populations of Bengal tigers as well as elephants, rhinos, deer, crocodiles and a wide array of birds. We paddled down the river in a carved tree canoe to see crocs and rode on elephant back to see rhinos and deer in the wild. We even joined the elephants in their bath and were squirted with water from their trunks, which despite being a touristy display was unmissable fun.

So there is a lot more to Nepal than Kathmandu, and lots of it’s awesome. But now Kathmandu feels like home and that’s amazing too.