The journal
Notes from higher up.
Places I walked to, and what they were like when I got there.
Bells on a ridge
Every ridge in this country has a temple on it. Most are not on any map and have no visitors and are looked after anyway. That, more than the famous ones, is what Nepal actually looks like.
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Six hundred kilometres for a cup of tea
Nepal is about eight hundred kilometres end to end, and on a motorbike you feel every one of them. We rode most of that to stand in a field of tea in the cold.
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Where the country starts
Gorkha is a modest town on a ridge in the middle hills. It is also the place a small kingdom set out from in 1743 and did not stop until it had become the country I live in.
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Where the green gives out
You ride north up the deepest gorge on earth and somewhere past Ghasa the green simply gives out. Nobody announces it. The trees thin, then stop, and the country you have been riding through all morning is replaced by another one.
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The reserve nobody goes to
Dhorpatan is the only hunting reserve in Nepal, which makes it sound dramatic. It is actually a wide flat valley of grass and old trees where horses wander loose and almost nobody comes.
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The mountain that is not allowed
Pokhara sits at 820 metres. Annapurna I is 8,091 metres and about thirty kilometres away. There is almost nowhere else on earth where a town looks up at that much mountain from that close.
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5,364
The number is painted on a rock in red, and people queue to stand beside it. What nobody tells you before you go is that from Everest Base Camp you cannot see Everest at all.
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