The mountain that is not allowed

Here is the fact about Pokhara that I think should be better known. The town sits at about 820 metres — low, humid, subtropical, the kind of place where things grow on other things. Annapurna I is 8,091 metres and roughly thirty kilometres away. That is a vertical gain of more than seven kilometres over a horizontal distance you could cycle in an afternoon if the ground were flat.

There is almost nowhere else on the planet where a settlement this low looks up at something this high from this close. It is why the mountains here do not look like a range on the horizon. They look like a wall someone has put up at the end of the street.

Machhapuchhre

And the one everybody looks at is not even the big one. Machhapuchhre is 6,993 metres, which in this neighbourhood barely registers, but it is directly in front and it is a perfect blade, and from the lake in the right light it is the only thing in the sky. Fishtail, because from certain angles the summit is twin-peaked.

Nobody has stood on it. In 1957 a British expedition under Jimmy Roberts got within about fifty metres of the top and stopped, by agreement, because the mountain is sacred to Shiva and permission had been given on that condition. It has been closed to climbing ever since. In a range where every significant summit has been measured, queued for and monetised, there is one directly above the most touristed town in Nepal that has simply been left alone. I like that more than I can properly justify.

The lake

Phewa is the second largest lake in the country and on a still morning it does the obvious thing and holds the whole range upside down. Tal Barahi sits on an island in the middle of it, a small pagoda temple you get to by rowboat, and boats go back and forth all day full of people who have come to make an offering and people who have come to look at the people making an offering.

I spent a fair amount of that trip on a paddleboard in the middle of it. It is the most pleasant possible way to be completely useless. Above me, more or less constantly, there were paragliders coming off Sarangkot — Pokhara is one of the best places in the world for it, because the ridge behind the town catches morning thermals and the lake gives you somewhere soft to think about landing — so you lie on a board on the water and watch people fall very slowly out of the sky for an hour.

Pokhara is the easy one. I am aware of that. It is the trip you take when you do not want a trip to cost you anything, and the mountains do all of the work while you sit at 820 metres and drink something cold. Not everything has to be a bad road.