The Indigenous Peoples Trek – The Real Nepal

Updated June 2022.

It seems you can’t go to Nepal without doing a trek.  That’s the first question travelers ask…”did you trek Annapurna/Everest/Manaslu?”  Rather than arranging to do a mountain climbing expedition in the cold and extreme altitude in the mountains of Nepal, I chose to do a village to village trek of 6 days. After all, if I wanted to hike uphill and be cold, I could stay home in Colorado and hike one of our many infamous “14ers” right out my back door. Which I don’t.  Instead, I chose the “Indigenous Peoples Trek”, a rarely booked hike, as everyone else in town wants to summit and conquer the peaks here. From the Nepal Hidden Treks website, here’s a description of the trek:

“The ‘Indigenous Peoples Trail’ offers scenic trekking at relatively low elevations, below 3126 meters (10,255 ft).  Bound by Thulo Sailung peak in the North, the golden Sun Koshi flowing along the South and the Tama Koshi in the East, the ‘Indigenous Peoples Trail’ presents an incomparable and natural blend of cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity coupled with breathtaking Himalayan panoramas, stretching from Dhaulagiri and Annapurna in the West to Numburchuili, Gaurishanker, and Kanchenjunga in the East. Against a magnificent Himalayan backdrop, visitors gain invaluable insight into the culture and lifestyle of several local Indigenous Peoples including Tamang, Newars, Sherpa, Thamis, and Majhis. The two predominant religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, are ever present with the variety of gods and goddess, temples, stupas, and monasteries. “

A few nights after my arrival in Kathmandu, I met with Harka Gurung, the owner of the trekking company Nepal Hidden Treks .  Harka and this specific trail had been highly recommended to me by Bob and Rae, a couple from Australia I had met on my overnight trip to the Sahara while in Morocco last year and we had stayed in touch on Facebook.  That evening, Harka introduced me to Roger, my sole trekking companion for the next week.

Roger was a 69-year-old British fellow from Salisbury, England who regularly took a few weeks away from home (and his wife who was less than interested to travel in this way!) to visit places like Burma and Mandalay.  I was a bit leery about spending an entire week with him…as I’m sure he was about having to spend a solid week with me as well.  He was stuck with a crazy, loud, single ‘merican woman on a journey of self-discovery and travel.

Our guide, Jay, picked us up at the hotel at 5:30 in the morning and the three of us boarded a local bus to our first village – a 7-hour ride away, although the place was less than 60 miles from Kathmandu.  The roads. Oh my gawd.  The roads.  It took forever just to get out of the city.  Dirt roads, baked with ruts or swimming with mud. Rock roads, bumpy and jarring. Dusty roads, choking and coating your nose and throat with thick swirling soot and grit – Jay had been kind enough to give Roger and I mouth masks to wear while in the bus.  (Yes. IN the bus.) Hairpin turns. Sheer drops on either side. Close encounters with oncoming buses and trucks. Switchbacks. Tight turns that had to be backed up in order for our bus to make it.  The acrid ever-present smell of diesel. All the while, loud Nepalese music blared from the speakers on the bus. For Seven. Straight. Hours. Wow.  That in itself was an experience.  But my favorite thing was the bus horn.  Because of the tight turns and narrow roads, the driver blared the horn upon every turn to warn any oncoming traffic of his approach. The horn sounded like a circus or cartoon elephant bleating and trumpeting.  I LOVED IT!! I actually tried to find this distinctive and smile-inducing sound to use as a ringtone on my phone, to no avail.  🙁

We arrived in the tiny village of Dunge in the afternoon and were greeted by our hosts, who encouraged us to settle in to our homestay and to relax before dinner.  In the morning we would begin our journey.

All of our stays for the week were basic to the extreme. The beds were hard. Pillows weighed a ton. No such thing as sheets. Or pillowcases. Or heat. But they were all tidy and welcoming, and the hosts were smiling and happy to host us. We had rented sleeping bags for a dollar per day from a trekking supply shop that Jay took us to,  and slept inside those, grateful for a familiar place to rest our heads. Roger and I shared a room every night. You might think it was weird or awkward (and yes, it was a little bit the first night!)  but it turned out to be fine – after hiking all day together we got to be good friends. We even shared a morning reading out of my book “How to Walk” by the renowned Vietnamese monk, Thich Naht Hanh before setting off each day, using the words of Hanh as a meditation for the day.

 

The bathroom? No such thing as a “bathroom”. Everywhere we went, there was an outhouse with a squatter. None too clean in most places. Only one place had a shower, and no, it did not offer hot water.  So in seven days I had one ice-cold shower and got brain-freeze from trying to wash and rinse my hair.

Lunch and dinner were the same every day. Dal baht. Ask any trekker and they’ll laugh and say ”nooooo!!!.  No more dal baht!!!”  “Dal” is the lentil soup – usually pretty thin and lukewarm and  “baht” means rice. So a huge scoop of rice. Huge. A tin bowl of dal. Usually some kind of vegetable – cauliflower or carrot or potatoes or a mix. And “pickle” – a chutney type of preserved vegetable like tomato. It’s not that it’s bad – not at all!          It’s quite tasty and always a bit different depending on who cooked it – it’s just so darn repetitive. Once we got a chicken dal baht that was amazing,  but mostly we had vegetarian offerings. And breakfast was a flat round bread called chapati, served with fried eggs. Again, quite tasty but every day “same same”. Not different.  And tea. Milky super sweet tea full of sugar. Occasionally we were offered raksi with dinner – a strong liquor made from millet that I’m guessing would remove your nail polish.  Here’s a picture of fancy dal baht from a restaurant –

Jay would ask me every night what I’d like for dinner and I’d say mushroom and sausage pizza or fettuccine Alfredo. Ha ha. Guess what…it was dal baht. 🙂 Jay was funny like that.

Our hike? It was amazing – the first day was all uphill… and second day was completely downhill. The other days were a mix. We rolled into most of the villages around one or two pm and spent the rest of those days exploring or napping.  One afternoon, we hiked up to the elementary school nearby, where we could hear the children’s laughter floating through the air.  We popped our heads into the classrooms, where the children stared in surprise, then giggled and covered their mouth with their hand as they laughed at our awkwardness.

Two of our villages were pristine – the others, not so much. Oftentimes we had only solar electricity for maybe two hours, no internet, no WiFi, no hot water, and no indoor plumbing. It was an amazing and incredible experience. Rustic, to be sure! But actually quite refreshing.

The best part, and the reason I chose this trek, was to immerse myself in the culture and see the “real” Nepal. And I did. To walk through the breathtaking mountains of the Himalayans, meeting the people that lived and worked nearby was such a rare privilege.

Here are photos of the hardworking people of the villages we trekked through and the adorably shy dirty-faced children from Doramba, Surkey, Galba Bazaar, Khola Kharka and Dunge.  Nepalese people are busy! Hauling foliage for goats. Carrying bricks in baskets hanging from forehead straps. Slaughtering a buffalo. Using a chisel and hammer to chop rocks and boulders into smaller rocks and boulders for use in construction. Beating millet seed with large paddles to turn the millet into flour. And always – they graciously allowed Roger and I to take their picture and stumble through short conversations, with Jay as our interpreter.  It was quite like being in a movie.  It’s hard to believe this goes on in our modern day world but it most decidedly does.

I’m sure you’re not looking for details on the hike or the topography (although those of you who hike with me will be impressed that I did a few days of 100 flights of uphill according to my iPhone, while hauling my 60L backpack and in my Chacos sandals since my hiking boots succccccked – they were so uncomfortable I gifted them to Jay!)…so enjoy the photos.

Namaste. 

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                           See you there! 😉

A great traveler is a kind of introspective; as she covers the ground outwardly, so she advances fresh interpretations of herself inwardly.                  Lawrence Durrell