Village Trekking in Nepal

Out-of-town tourists are a welcome distraction: a chance to trade cigarettes, Marlboros for Yak Filters. Every once in a while a shepherd gets up, takes a stool and sits down by his buffalo. He moistens the teats and starts milking with slow, deliberate movements. Out of hospitality, they offer the strangers a drink from the bucket.

What is merely a sip of milk for the tourists is the most precious commodity the cattle-holders own. Nevertheless they are willing to share it. They obviously get a lot of enjoyment out of watching the changing faces of unsuspecting travelers during the milk tasting session. Fresh buffalo milk is a unique, acquired and for most of us, probably a once-in-a-lifetime taste. In the early evening the day's yield, a 3-liter jug (not quite a gallon) of milk from each animal, is brought to the communal dairy where it is traded in for 20 rupees. That is exactly the price of a small bottle of Coca Cola, an extravagance tourists enjoy several times daily without giving it a second thought.

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the Himalayas. Schools, quality-of-life, qualified jobs are exotic terms or distant dreams. The villages can raise their standard of living through their own initiative and by their own guidelines to aid in the fight against crop failures and child labor, which are bitter fixtures of everyday life in Nepal.

Raising the community's consciousness, improving the village infrastructure and income-generating solutions are the cornerstones of the paradigm. "Village Treks" are just one of several options to generate income sources and prospects: however, it is an option that is of great use to the villagers even aside from any commercial considerations."

One of the greatest experiences for any trekker is to get talking with the sociable Nepalese. You may, for instance, run into someone wandering home along a mountain path of an evening, past irrigated palms and potato fields.

The women get water from the river in buckets and pass them along a human conveyor belt to the fields.

Meanwhile, most of the villages equipped with the infrastructure required for community-based tourism. The villagers have had very little contact with outsiders before, and visitors will be hard pushed to find a place that has had less impact from the negative influence of ethno-tourism. Thus, a sense of the exceptional is present on both sides.

The trekking paths wind through hilly country and the towering peaks of Annapurna and Ganesh himal are visible in the distance. Blessed with clear views, October is the best time to travel. The itinerary calls for six hours of trekking a day and so by the end of the tour (10 days), your legs are weary, your muscles sore and your lungs are tired of processing the pure mountain air, but you're a lot fitter.

Meetings with the native Nepalese, so rare on conventional travel tours, happen again and again.The trekkers are put up in simple tents or the houses of host families. The kitchen is steeped in the flickering light of oil-lamps, the tiny butane stove won't work so the lady of the house resorts to the old wood oven. She cooks a standard Nepalese meal: Dal Bat, rice with lentil soup and various vegetables. Following local custom, we eat with our fingers. Three fingers and the thumb of the right hand are used to mix and pick up the rice and sauce and bring it to the mouth, where the food is flicked in with the back of the thumb.

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