I was up at 6 a.m., thankful to have finally slept properly. My body clock seemed to have surrendered to local time, or at least stopped fighting quite so hard.
By 7:30 I was downstairs, stashing my airline hold luggage in storage and waiting for my guide. He’s from the Manaslu region, though based in Kathmandu now, and speaks only limited English. Which is fair—my Nepali vocabulary consists almost entirely of namaste and the numbers one through five.
I learned I’d be walking on the same schedule as another small group: a brother and sister from South Africa, plus the brother’s American wife. The brother and wife are currently “between jobs” (read: nomads), and had come straight from the Amazon rainforest. The sister works as a psychologist back home and, within about a minute of meeting me, informed me she had me pegged. Which is always comforting to hear before spending two weeks together in the Himalayas.
Around 8:30 we left Kathmandu, bouncing out of the city in a jeep bound for Machha Khola. The road climbed and fell in loops, winding past terraced rice fields and small villages, the Budhi Gandaki River often raging below us. It’s a wild river—wide, deep, and hammering downhill with the enthusiasm of something late for an appointment in India.
The first six hours were in a modern 4x4, which was just as well. The day began with four hours of decent asphalt, though “decent” is a relative term. The road was hot and humid - on a road side stop, my thermometer hit 115°F at 89% humidity, well above my estimated maximum. The roads swung up and down through valleys, folded with switchbacks so tight they seemed designed by a man with a grudge against steering columns.
We stopped for lunch around midday, my first of what I knew would be an endless sequence of dal bhat meals. To my surprise, it was excellent—simple, filling, and exactly what you want on the road. We also bought fresh fruit—pomegranates and apples—which the guides promptly divided up and added to their own loads. Each ended up carrying about a dozen pieces of fruit. If I’d known this was standard practice, I’d have protested. I certainly appreciate the gesture, but watching someone add 10 pounds of apples to a bag they’re already hauling up a mountain felt faintly criminal.
After lunch the asphalt gave way to gravel, then mud, then tracks that barely qualified as roads. Landslide repairs, axle-breaking ruts, and blind corners where buses appeared out of nowhere, blaring horns that sounded like church organs. It quickly became one of the worst roads I’ve ever traveled. Not even the roads back home are quite as bad as this. I was deeply grateful not to be behind the wheel. My guide, meanwhile, dozed peacefully, which I decided was either an act of faith in Nepali driving or a finely tuned survival mechanism.
By late afternoon we reached the final stretch, a section so torn up the jeep could go no further. We walked the last few hundred meters to Machha Khola, my guide and I sharing the weight of my bag. It already felt wrong that one man would be carrying this duffle solo for the next two weeks, and now I had proof: even splitting it made me uncomfortable.
The tea house turned out to be far better than I’d expected: a western toilet, wifi, a warm shower, and electricity—all en suite. This, I knew, would be one of the last nights with such luxury.
Dinner, predictably, was dal bhat. The rhythm ahead seemed clear: breakfasts of protein bars, roadside snacks of nuts and dried fruit, lunches of dal bhat, afternoon nibbles of what I call “wombat poop” (Clif Bloks), and dal bhat again for dinner. On days when gluten-free options disappeared, I’d be reduced to protein bars for breakfast, lunch, and dinner alike—a prospect both convenient and horrifying.
And with that, the trek had quietly begun. The roads were finally behind us, the river was running beside us, and the mountains were starting to rise in earnest. Tomorrow brings the first real walking—likely hot again, with the possibility of afternoon rain showers. I’m already looking forward to the cooler air that comes with altitude, even if it means trading heat and dust for thin oxygen and cold nights.
Note: image quality will be reduced while on the road - the wifi isn’t quite up to the job.