The Further Adventures of Lauren - Nepal

Lauren’s flight to Nepal left on the Fourth of July.

It’s a long way from Istanbul to Kathmandu, which sounds like the first line of a Cat Stevens song but is an actual geographic fact, so she didn’t arrive there until the following day. Although when exactly that happened is a bit of a puzzle to figure out since while Turkey’s time zone is eight hours ahead of Wisconsin and therefore fairly easy to calculate, for some reason Nepal’s time zone is ten hours and forty-five minutes ahead of Wisconsin which makes no sense whatsoever. I suppose the Nepalese are fine with and it is their time zone after all, but while Lauren was in Nepal we just rounded it to eleven hours and figured we’d be close enough.

It's not like we needed to be that exact anyway.

Her flight required an eight-hour layover in Dubai – or, as it turned out, the neighboring emirate of Sharjah – and that was fine except that for some reason Lauren’s phone insisted she was in Iran for the whole time and you look at that and think … maybe? Did the flight get diverted for some reason? Did international politics get stupider than usual and I missed something? But no, it’s just technology being technology and eventually she was off on the next flight.

Also, all flights on Air Arabia start with a travel prayer, which is an interesting thing to know.

Lauren spent her first day or so in Kathmandu on her own, just exploring the place and generally having a good time in a new city. There’s a lot to see there.

The larger plan for this part of Lauren’s travels was that our British friend Ginny – who is Lauren’s age – would fly out to join her there, and then they’d go up to the Annapurnas for an extended hike around the mountains together. They’d found a tour guide for the journey since you’re not allowed to do this sort of thing without one anymore and you wouldn’t want to anyway because the reason you’re not allowed to do this without a tour guide is that the Nepalese government got tired of cleaning the bodies of tourists off their mountains and now they want you to have at least one person in your party that they know for sure knows what they’re doing out there so they can make sure people will get back safely. And once safely off the mountains Lauren and Ginny would go back to Kathmandu and be joined by our friend Richard, Ginny’s dad, for a few days before everyone split off in different directions.

It has to be said that this plan worked out very well.

Lauren and Ginny spent a day gearing up for hiking around the mountains, which is apparently a fairly easy thing to do in Kathmandu. A lot of tourists come out to Nepal with all sorts of expensive gear that they use just once and then decide they don’t want to go to the expense and trouble of schlepping back home so they sell it to second-hand shops. You can get some great bargains on things if you’re willing to do a bit of exploring.

It has to be said that there was a bit of nervousness regarding tour guide companies and mountains, since Lauren and Arden had had a fairly unhappy experience with the one they’d found to take them up a mountain in Guatemala in 2024 – a very long story that Lauren wisely waited until after she was safely back in the US to tell us – but this one worked out really well. The company that Lauren and Ginny hired is called Travel Maker South Asia, and if you ever find yourself in Kathmandu looking for a guide to take you up into the mountains we can recommend them wholeheartedly. The guide who went with them called himself Uncle and took very good care of them, to the point of bringing along fruit from the lower altitudes to share with them. They even made a little video where they stitched together a pile of photos from the hike and set it to music, which was really kind of cool to see.

Uncle is the guy on the left, below.

It was good that it worked out so well, because they spent over a week together on this trip in some pretty close quarters and it would have been fairly uncomfortable otherwise.

It was just the three of them on this hike – Lauren, Ginny, and Uncle – mostly because it was monsoon season and the tourist crowds tend to thin out around then. The whole time they were out and about in the mountains they saw maybe three other hikers out there with them, in fact. So if you’re not a fan of crowds, monsoon season is your jam.

Their first task was to drive from Kathmandu to Chame, a journey of about ten hours according to the itinerary they gave her. From there they’d slowly hike around the Annapurnas – going up but not summiting them as the Annapurnas are statistically the most dangerous mountains in the world with about a 30% fatality rate among climbers. The plan was to go to Pisang, Manang, Yak Kharka, and Thorong Phedi, with the ultimate goal of crossing the Thorong La Pass and then working their way slowly back down. There’d be some acclimatization time built into this schedule as well to get used to the altitude, since by the time they got to the Thorong La Pass they’d be at 5416 meters elevation and doing that in a straight shot would have required some actual training. 5416 meters is nearly 18,000 feet in Bald Eagle Units, and that’s about as high as the travel insurance would cover.

The dividing line for travel insurance, by the way, is carabiners. They ask if you are going to need them, and if you say yes then your rates go up. There would be no carabiners on this trip.

It was a long hike, but fortunately the monsoons mostly stayed away while they were there. It did give them some interesting cloud cover, and they saw a lot of really gorgeous scenery out there in the mountains. 

In the photo below you can almost see Pisang peak, which is obscured by the clouds. But you can see Lauren clearly and that’s a very nice thing.

Not everything was pure nature, though. People build things there, and that’s worth seeing too.

Some of the things that people build are bridges, which you need to have in a place as mountainous as Nepal. And if you have bridges, chances are you will need to cross those bridges when you get to them. This can be scenic. Yes, scenic is a good word. We’ll stick with that.

Along the way they stayed in tea houses, which were fairly basic in most ways but which seemed to be comfortable if often cold. When you’re that high up in the mountains it doesn’t matter that it’s July in the northern hemisphere – it’s cold. The people they met in those tea houses were friendly, and the tea houses themselves were nestled in some of the most beautiful places on earth.

Lauren is pretty fit – she goes to the gym regularly and walks pretty much everywhere on campus the way college students do – but Ginny runs ultramarathons though mountains and sometimes it was hard to keep up with her on these hikes.

Uncle took good care of them.

After much hiking and more than a few tea houses, they made it up to the Thorong La Pass. The Travel Maker people gave them certificates for this accomplishment when they got back down and really, that feels right. It’s quite an accomplishment, and it’s good to recognize that.

From there it was a long hike back down to Chame, but it went smoothly.

When you’re on a journey like this you have to keep yourself amused however you can, and they found ways to do that as well.

My favorite example of this, though, was when they were at one of the tea houses, relaxing and browsing the web as one does when there is actually an internet connection, and found a very old photo of the two of them on Dartmoor in England from the blog archives here – they’re both about ten years old in the top photo below – and decided to recreate it. And that’s why I write these posts, so the stories get remembered and, perhaps obliquely, relived. 

It has to be said that Lauren was not very happy in that older picture – Dartmoor is very wet, which meant that by the time we got to this point so were her feet – but she persevered, and one dryer load later all was well again. Lauren was much happier in the mountains of Nepal, but you can’t pass up a photo opportunity like that, really.

The original itinerary that Lauren got had them flying back to Kathmandu once they got back down to Chame, but in the end they drove because, as Lauren pointed out, during the monsoon season the flight path from Chame to Kathmandu is one of the most dangerous in the world and they just weren’t in that much of a hurry anyway.

There were cows along the way, which is just music to a Wisconsinite’s ears.

They met Richard in Kathmandu and he treated them to an actual hotel instead of the hostels and tea houses they’d been staying in. Lauren called us while she was there and gave us a brief video tour of the place, noting the beds and western-style bathrooms as particularly luxurious. The three of them had a good time together from what we heard, and we really do need to get back to England to visit Richard, Ginny, and Magnus again. Soon!

Eventually the Brits would return back to the UK, but Lauren would press on with her adventure.

Lauren sent us a lot of photos from her time in Nepal and we loved seeing them. It’s a gorgeous place, and she was very happy there, and there is no better combination of things you can see in photographs if you’re a parent. I think my favorites were these two, because they’re just beautiful photographs in every way. These are the ones I’d show people when they asked how she was doing. It is a strange and lovely thing as a parent to see your child half a world away having marvelous adventures when you remember them being so little even though that was a very long time ago, and when I’d look at these pictures I could see the young kid she once was and the adult she is now. I think we’ll call that a win.