October 20th – 22nd, 2019
We rode the scooter back to Pokhara and had a day and a half to relax before taking the long bus ride back to Kathmandu for our next flight. This is our third time in Pokhara during this trip so it felt more like home than anywhere else in the last five months. The staff at Harvest Moon greeted us by name as we checked back in. We didn’t do much these couple of days. Just relaxed, enjoyed more dishes of dal makhani from my favorite café and walked around the lake.
Our bus to Kathmandu left early in the morning and was another very long and slow 10-hour journey. I promised myself I would never complain about another bus ride where I actually had a seat after the eight-hour hell ride on the bus stairs leaving the Annapurna Circuit. The traffic going back to Kathmandu where the driver just turns off the engine for long periods of time waiting for traffic to move makes it super drawn out. We finally arrived and walked a long way with all our stuff to get to the neighborhood our hotel was in. We grabbed some dinner and it was dark by the time we checked in.
My final thoughts about our month in Nepal… It’s hard for me to sum them up because on one hand it was completely amazing with some of the best scenery, friendliest people, great food, and incredible experiences that pushed us and made us stronger. On the other hand, Nepal broke my heart a little. I have mentioned before how it has been a place I dreamed about since I was little and was always fascinated with its incredible mountain landscape. It is home to eight out of the world’s ten highest mountains and has a unique culture that is a real blend between India and China. The thing that was heartbreaking was that this incredible place on our planet has absolutely been destroyed by trash and pollution. We were there one month and I could never see any of the mountains from anywhere else besides being at high elevation on the trek within them. I read how ‘back in the day’ you could see the snow-capped peaks from every rooftop in Kathmandu, and now you can almost never see them because of the dense smog. We could not see them from Pokhara or any other town we visited. I looked at pictures online of beautiful view points from some of the places we visited and now my pictures look nothing like that as you can barely see across the valleys through the haze.
The air quality is so bad that human life expectancy is four years shorter than other places due to respiratory illness, if they don’t smoke (and everyone smokes in Nepal as cigarettes are super cheap). The beautiful countryside is absolutely littered with garbage as all the locals throw everything on the ground. We traveled through quite a big section of Nepal by motorbike and I am not exaggerating when I say every single roadside is absolutely covered in trash.
When we applied for our permits for the Annapurna Circuit we were given printed material about “pack in and pack out” all your trash. Don’t litter, keep this place clean. There were also signs on the trail about it, but it was very disheartening because everyone on the local buses that run through this Annapurna conservation area just throw their trash out the window. They have zero consciousness about it and will do it in front of police or anyone else.
Obviously, there are people somewhere that know better as they advertise proper waste management for the tourist. But it is not the nature-loving tourists who spend all their vacation time and money for the year to come and hike in a beautiful area who are destroying it. It is the locals. And I can’t blame them and try to be really sympathetic because it is a lack of education and resources that have caused this. You can’t expect people to behave differently when they have only seen things being done one way and have not been anywhere else for different exposure. It was very sad for me. I am in the process of writing to the Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP) to try to get a better idea of what they need to start taking steps in the right direction starting from the bottom. We’ll see if I get anywhere with it. No doubt to make a change some big things need to happen in Nepal with policy and waste management systems, but there can be some movement starting from the ground up. People need to be educated and aware. There is no reason that throwing all your trash out the window should be an accepted cultural norm.
In my opinion, trekking in the mountains was definitely the best part of Nepal. That of course came with its own challenges and hardships but it was worth the reward of unrivaled scenery. I just hope some of the damage the country has seen can be reversed and steps can be taken to preserve this incredible part of the world.