Home » Nepal » News from Nepal - Jiri to Namche

Nepal is far from Montreal. Excluding stop-over: 6 hours to Los Angeles, 17 hours to Bangkok then 4 hours to Kathmandu adds up to 27 hours worth of leg cramp, and not much sleep.

News from Nepal - Jiri to Namche

Mark Morin
2007-04-21 21:55:44

Displayed times (last time: )

and the occasional trekker. A typical tea-house is small, dark and smoky; smoky because all meals are prepared on an indoor open fire (photo), often without the benefit of a chimney. Smoke just oozes out from beneath the eaves (photo). Lodges, larger and therefore somewhat less smoky, offer multiple guest rooms. Both types of establishment are unheated, uninsulated and necessarily draughty. It takes some courage to crawl out of the warm sleeping bag in the morning when it's 5 C in the room. Lodge room prices have ranged from a low of $0.75 per night when I shared a room with 2 others, to a high of $2.00 per night for a private room. I once bought a bottle of beer at a lodge that cost 6 times the price of my room! But of course the beer had to be carried for days on a porter's back.

My daily routine starts by getting up at 6 AM and having a breakfast of porridge and pancakes before hitting the trail for about 3 hours. Lunch takes an hour and a half because there's no such thing as fast food here. I trudge for another 3 hours in the afternoon, have supper at 7 PM and I'm fast asleep by 8. Some days I climbed 1000 to 1300m in the morning only to descend almost as much in the afternoon. Other days, the order is reversed but flat terrain is nonexistent.

There are no roads at all in this part of Nepal
but yet houses cling to steep slopes everywhere. Anything that cannot be produced locally must be carried by streams of porters that flow along a network of steep mountain the footpaths. These porters are surprisingly small for the enormous loads they carry. Most are in their teens and some are even younger. Child labour among porters (photo) is an issue that aid organizations are attempting to discourage.

Porters take orders in various villages and then walk for days to supply points such as Jiri before hauling these huge loads back. They are paid by distance and weight carried. From Jiri to Namche Bazaar (the ...