Pokhara is mellow compare to Kathmandu. It has spacious sidewalks, fewer scooters/cars/busses, and generally a slower pace of living. We enjoyed walking 8+ miles/day, eating delicious vegetarian meals, taking the Annapurna cable car just in time for a rain storm so we didn’t see anything, missing the shuttle bus by a couple of minutes and waking back in the rain, and Mia getting henna.
Our second day, we had quite the serendipitous day. We set out to see the World Peace Pagoda, which was built by a Japanese monk and donated by Japan to Nepal.
As we made our way around the lake, it seemed we wouldn’t make it because it was too far. We’d already walked about an hour, and we still had over 2 hrs to go just to get there. The humid heat was winning the battle, and we were quickly losing momentum. We decided to check out the Queen’s Forest that Patchen remembered riding in 30 years ago.
On our way, a local guy came up the path, started chatting with us, and showed us a shortcut thru the forest. Granted, we didn’t ask him to and we knew he’d want money for it, but we went with him. He showed us a cinnamon tree, camphor tree, a leech, and an ant’s net in a tree! It turned out to be cool and exactly what we needed. It took about 1/2 the time to get to the pagoda than it would have taken us. Since I’m in charge of the finances, about 1/2 way thru our hike I was contemplating how much to give him. This is tricky in a foreign country because you don’t have a base for what’s appropriate. I was thinking 500 rupees, but when we stopped I offered him 1000 rupees (about $7.50), thinking he’d be happy. However, he asked for more 😳. For perspective, guides on the Everest Basecamp Trek get about $10-15/day, and this guy was with us for about 20 min. I was like WHAT?!? I said sorry no more, and we continued on the path to the pagoda.
About 30 minutes later, we climbed some stairs and popped out of the forest, and there was a teahouse where we got 2 Coke Zeros. Exactly what we all needed. It was 85° with 99% humidity 🥵🥵🥵, we’d been walking 2 hours, up about 800’, and we were sweaty! As we were sitting there, I saw a leech inching (like an inchworm) across the concrete closest Patchen. We discovered that it had fallen off his foot below his big toe (where the toe meets the ball of his foot) 😵💫😵💫.
Since nothing about leeches hurts, we took off for the last 10 min of our hike to the pagoda which consisted of about 200 stairs. We hung out there for a while and Mia was sitting on this low wall in the shade when one of the guards sat and was chatting with her. I joined them and Patch followed too. We found out (I think from what we understood) he has a daughter named Mia, which is strange because it’s not a Nepali name!
Then it was time to head back. Instead of retracing our steps and ending up lost in the forest and leeched to death, we took a steeper but mostly rock-path back to the lake where we hired a canoe and “driver” (dude who paddles us across the river) back. Patch help paddle 🤭. Then we walked another hour to a delicious Turkish restaurant for dinner. All in all it was such a great day.
More pics here.
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