Nepal Humbled Me: Here’s How

My guidebook had a photo of Kathmandu on page one. Prayer flags, smiling monks, mountains so clean they looked like someone had pressed them. I spent the 10.5-hour flight from Narita eating Oreo knockoffs from the World Club Lounge and convincing myself I was ready. The voice in the back of my head — the one that sounds like every reasonable person who’s ever asked why you’d leave a good couch for this — was still running its mouth, but I’d made peace with it somewhere over the Pacific. I was going to Nepal. I was prepared. I had a guidebook.

Within 24 hours, I had a $40 visa bill, a chest full of Kathmandu pollution, and was white-knuckling it through a full panic attack in a hotel room at 10PM, mentally pricing flights home. That’s the short version. Here’s the long one.

I Thought Kathmandu Would Be Chaotic in a Charming Way

My man Jyoti met me at the airport holding a sign with my name on it — small miracle, given that immigration had already extracted $40 from me in visa fees and photo costs before I’d properly arrived. He got me into a car and we drove into the Thamel district and I want to be precise about what I encountered: pure, undiluted, sensory-overload chaos. Not charming chaos. Not the kind of chaos that looks good in photos. Dirty. Polluted. Hovels stacked against hovels. Cars and motorcycles playing constant chicken with each other and with any human foolish enough to be on foot. The pollution wasn’t just in the air — it was in everything. The shops, the restaurants, the light. It’s like the city is coated in a layer of itself that you can’t wipe off.

I had genuine trouble breathing. That’s not a metaphor.

Jyoti and his colleague Kazi sorted my trekking permit and got me to Hotel Dynasty, which was down three back alleys and around a corner and was, somehow, legitimately nice. We walked up 360 stairs to Swayambhunath — the Monkey Temple — where a Buddhist monastery sits at the top and actual monkeys run the whole operation like furry little landlords. It was worth every step. I came back down, had a chicken dinner at the Everest Steak House, bargained aggressively for pants, changed cash with a black market vendor who dealt only in cash (sensibly), and then went back to the hotel and passed out.

And then woke up at 10PM in a full panic attack. If there had been a flight home available in that moment, I would have been on it. No hesitation. I am not dramatizing this.

What I wish I’d known: budget a full buffer day in Kathmandu before anything else. Don’t land and immediately try to process it. The city is overwhelming in ways that compound fatigue into something uglier. Get your permits sorted through a reputable agency — Eco-Trek handled mine efficiently — but then go sleep for twelve hours before you try to engage with any of it. The permit itself runs around 2,000 NPR (roughly $25 USD in 2002 money, scaled for current rates) depending on the zone and duration.

I Thought the Trek Would Be Primarily About Going Up

We started at Birethanti. The stairs go on forever — not metaphorically, literally, structurally. These people built infinite stairs into the side of a mountain and called it a trail. Kazi, our guide, moved through it with the calm of a man who has done this eight hundred times, which he probably has. I moved through it with the determination of a man who is absolutely not going to admit he’s struggling.

Lunch came a few hours in: fresh veggie noodle soup with fried potatoes at a tea house whose name I never caught. Probably the best thing I’d eaten since the fake Oreos in Tokyo. Simple, hot, made by actual hands, eaten on burning legs. We made it to Ghandruk by evening, where a bucket of warm water felt like a spa treatment and the clouds rolled in over the mountains just to remind you who’s in charge.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about trekking Nepal: you are not just going up. You go up and down and up and down, and the descents are quietly destroying your quads while your ego stays focused on the elevation gain. Gregg — an Australian I’d met on the bus to Pokhara, a man who once woke up to find a woman going through his belongings and somehow also knew a guy from my lake back home in Michigan (8,000 miles from home and the six-degrees game is just functioning at full capacity) — caught up with us on one of those descents and blew our doors off completely. Just walked past us like gravity was his personal assistant.

The trail has a way of collecting people. We picked up Helen and Sarah — both Irish, one based in Chicago working for Motorola, one based in Sydney and between jobs — over dal bhat at Kaji’s tea house. Megitte, a French woman we’d first met in Ghandruk, kept reappearing. The Moonlight Tea House brought an actual hot shower (pressure and everything, I stood in it long enough to be slightly embarrassed). Kazi showed us the next day’s plan over dinner and said it with the calm of a man who has watched many people’s legs get destroyed by this mountain. I believed him completely.

What I wish I’d known: train your descents as hard as your ascents. Your knees and quads will quit on the downhills, not the uphills. And build in an extra day between major stages if you can — tea house breakfasts take forever in the best possible way (once you adjust to it, this is a feature) and the altitude does things to your sense of time.

I Thought Altitude Sickness Was Something That Happened to Other People

Annapurna Base Camp is at 4,130 meters. We arrived with about thirty minutes of daylight left, temperature dropping like something that hates you, and me feeling genuinely unwell. Nausea, dizziness, balance gone sideways — the full package. Kazi, unbothered, told me to drink garlic soup.

I had zero faith in garlic soup. It sounded like something your grandmother tells you when she doesn’t know what else to say. But I drank it because Kazi told me to drink it, and Kazi had not been wrong yet about anything.

The nausea stopped. The dizziness faded. I was left with a dull, manageable headache and a new and sincere respect for garlic. I don’t need to understand why it works. It works.

The night before base camp — at Machapuchre Base Camp, the days blur a bit at altitude — I’d met Arielle and Jo, two women from Holland who were six months into traveling the world with Burma and New Zealand still ahead of them. We played Bullshit and a dice game I only half understood but committed to fully. Rum with hot water. Christmas carols. They requested Mariah Carey and George Michael. I drew a line. But it was the best night of the trek, and those sentences about Burma and New Zealand are the kind that make you question every life decision that put you in a position where you can’t just go to Burma for a month.

What I wish I’d known: take altitude sickness seriously before you need to. Ascend slowly — the standard rule is no more than 300-500 meters of elevation gain per day above 3,000 meters. Drink more water than you think you need. And yes — drink the garlic soup. I’m a convert. It’s sold at every tea house above Machapuchre and costs almost nothing. Just drink it.

I Thought the Trek Was the Whole Story

It wasn’t. Coming down from base camp — ten hours of descent from Birethanti to Nayapul, my quads filing formal complaints I’d agreed to review later — we hit Poon Hill for sunrise. I’ve been trying not to gush in these pages and I’m not going to start now. But: do it. Get up early. Walk the forty-five minutes up from Ghorepani in the dark. Watch the Himalayas turn colors at dawn. That’s all I’ll say.

At Nayapul, Pat — my traveling companion, a man with stories the way Cliff Clavin has stories — decided to bargain the taxi drivers down on price. The taxi drivers had a number. They were going to have that number. The number was not negotiating. Pat bargained with the conviction of a man who has read about bargaining; the drivers accepted his performance with the patience of people who do this every day. We paid the number. Good effort, Pat.

Back in Pokhara, I ran into Arielle and Jo again. What followed was one of those nights that happen maybe twice in a decade of travel — dinner at Fewa Park by the lake (the spaghetti carbonara was a disaster; Jo’s recommendation, and I say this with love), an overcrowded dance floor, a twisted ankle that the beer helped, and then Arielle and I standing outside her hotel, the Hotel Glacier, talking until 2AM about her father and my mom and the things that actually matter. I jumped a fence to get back into my guesthouse at 4AM because the gate was locked and I had made choices. I am not apologizing for this.

The next morning was December 5th — Sinterklaas. The Dutch Christmas. She’d told me about it the night before: the Dutch Santa lives in Spain, rides a white horse across rooftops, kids leave shoes by the door. So I woke up, bought Snickers and Mars bars, and dropped them off at her hotel before she was awake. I am a 30-something grown man. I own this completely.

She said perhaps when I asked if I’d see her again. She was being honest, and it was the right answer, and I hated it. She’s got six months of world left. I was going back to Michigan. Amsterdam is a long weekend away — not impossible. Burma is very impossible. Kazi was standing right there at the actual goodbye, which — Kazi, I love you man, but you absolutely screwed the pooch on that one.

At the airport, Kazi and Jyoti both gave me white scarves — Khata, I looked it up later. Tibetan Buddhist blessing scarves. Offered at arrivals and departures, at important meetings, at moments that matter. Kazi gave me one. I didn’t know what it meant in the moment. I do now. The scarves are in my bag. The mountains are very large. I turned out to be the right size for them after all — barely, and not without garlic soup, bucket showers that felt like five-star spas, infinite stairs, one panic attack, one Australian with impeccable timing on a downhill, and a Dutch woman who watches Monty Python and likes to hike and said perhaps.

Nepal will not be what you expect. Bring that as your only expectation and you’ll be fine.

Got specific questions about the Annapurna Circuit, tea house logistics, altitude prep, or what to actually expect in Kathmandu before you go? Drop them to Ask WildWilliam — I answer everything, and this is the trip I’d talk about at a bar for hours.