The reserve nobody goes to

Dhorpatan is the only hunting reserve in Nepal. There is exactly one, it was set aside in 1987, it covers about thirteen hundred square kilometres of Baglung, Myagdi and Rukum, and licensed trophy hunting for blue sheep and Himalayan tahr happens there under quota. All of which makes it sound like somewhere with a gate and a fee and a man in a uniform.

What it actually is, when you finally get there, is a wide flat valley at around 2,900 metres, full of grass and standing water and old bent trees, with horses wandering around loose because there is nowhere for them to wander to. It is one of the quietest places I have been.

The road is the trip

Getting in is the whole thing. You go up through Baglung and Burtibang and then the road stops being a road in any sense you would recognise from a map. It is loose rock and river crossings and long stretches where the surface is just whatever the hillside last dropped. On a bike, loaded, it takes as long as it takes. We went with two — mine and a friend's — because going in there alone is a bad idea and because a lot of the trip was the part where one of us was pushing.

You do not do this stretch for the destination. You do it because there is a particular kind of attention that a bad road demands, where you cannot think about anything else at all — not work, not a deadline, not a bug you left open on Friday — because the next thirty seconds are genuinely load-bearing. I have never found that anywhere else. It is the closest thing I know to being switched off while fully awake.

The valley

Then the ground opens out and levels and you are riding on grass. After a day of rock the silence is almost rude. There are marshy pools with the sky in them and dead pale trees standing in the water, and horses that look up at the engine and then go back to eating. There was a Tibetan settlement here from the sixties, and the place still has that feeling of somewhere people arrived at rather than somewhere people are from.

The evening did the thing that high open valleys do. The sun went off the floor of it long before it went off the ridges, so we were sitting in blue shadow watching the tops turn orange and then pink and then a kind of dull ember, while mist came up off the river below and filled the gap between us and everything else. Nobody said anything for a while, which between two people on a motorbike trip is unusual and is how you know it was worth it.

It is a hunting reserve. We didn't see anyone hunting. We saw horses, and grass, and one very good sunset, and we had the whole thing more or less to ourselves, and the road out the next morning was exactly as bad as the road in.