Nowhere can teach you a lesson in the virtues of opening up and slowing down quite like Nepal. Life in Nepal happens outside: you are always surrounded by it. People sit on plastic stools to drink tea and talk with their friends. Street vendors sell fresh fruit, vegetables and spices, dotting the cities with colour. People know their neighbours, and stop to chat when they pass each other. Morning announces itself through crowing roosters, ringing ghantas and the calls of cycle hawkers collecting people’s waste. Street dogs run in packs, and are usually dodging the stream of honking motorcycles pouring through city streets, or lazing around shops hoping to get scraps or pets. One dog can start a chain-reaction of barking and howling, echoing through the otherwise quiet streets for hours at night. In winter, which is when I was there this time, people eagerly wait for the monsoon rains to clean the air now filled with the smell of smoke and dust. All your senses are alert. Anywhere you direct your attention to is buzzing with energy. It’s what I’ve found myself missing the most since moving to Canada: how critical public space is to city life; the many different types of people, occupations, cultures, you see in an average neighbourhood. Minimal stratification: everyone is everywhere. It took me a second to readjust to that textured and dynamic quality to public life here, after spending the better part of the last two years in the manicured (and beautiful) suburbs of Vancouver. It was also the first time since I first moved to Nepal in 2016 that I really felt like a tourist. Like a fish out of water. I could feel a wariness in my body. I was guarded, closed off, uncomfortable in my own skin. It felt like a first date: I was trying to figure Nepal out again, and my place in it. What probably contributed to this feeling is the fact that I came on this trip with no real plan or purpose, just a strong desire to see this beautiful country again and a need for rest and solitude. 

Over and over again, the defences I put up were obliterated by the kindness, openness and generosity of people, locals and foreigners alike. On my first night in Kathmandu, after sleeping for most of the day, I left my hotel with the vague plan of strolling through the city to find a place to eat. I wandered through the narrow cobbled streets of old Patan and ended up at the Golden Temple, one of my favourite spots in the city and the place where, six years earlier, I met Shyam. Back then, Shyam had caught my attention with his rockabilly attitude, bright red leather shoes and hip sense of style. Oh, and because he spoke to me in fluent Italian (much better than mine). He offered to take me on a beautiful and informative tour of old Patan, which ended with him showing me his shop, a treasure trove of gorgeous thangkas painted by Shyam himself. What really makes this shop special though, is that it is a little gem teaming with history dating back to the Freak Street days. In the middle of the first floor sits a glass-top table, covered in photos, business cards and letters from travellers-turned-friends, which Shyam has carefully collected and kept safe for decades. I gave him one of the passport photos I’d just printed for my visa extension, and he ceremoniously placed it on the table with the others. So there I was, six years later, reminiscing about that lovely chance encounter and wishing I’d remembered where to find Shyam’s shop in labyrinthian old Patan. Just a few minutes later, I nearly trip over Shyam himself, who is sitting on the stoop of his shop - turns out, it’s very close to the Golden Temple. I do a double take, as does he, and before I have the chance to say anything, he calls out “You’re back!”. And so, six years and six days after I first met him, Shyam and I caught up, talked about life, and promised to see each other again tomorrow. The next morning, we sat around the glass table which still contained my old passport photo, drank sugary tea and told each other stories. He showed me his photo albums, which contained the entire history of his shop: the friend he started the business with but who ultimately betrayed him; the British girl he dated in the 70s and whose texts to him always ended with ‘XXX’; the 13 year old boy who would guide tourists to his shop and died of a drug overdose at 15; the Belgian man who filled his house in Namur with Shyam’s art. He told me about meeting Keanu Reeves (incredibly nice), Johnny Depp (friendly but has too many girlfriends), Al Pacino (so old now but still so fit) and Bryan Adams (hero of Nepal). I feel so grateful that I could share this moment with him, and that I was open to receiving it.

My old passport photo, still there after 6 years.

Left: Shyam in 2017 ft. famous red shoes. Right: Shyam in 2024.

I have always half-jokingly referred to those types of experiences as “Nepal magic”. Really though, it’s probably just what happens when you go through life curious and open to the potential of each day to bring a new discovery, connection or experience. That attitude is so critical to living a fulfilling life, a life in which you feel connected to the world around you and conscious of your impact on others. It is also very difficult to do in societies which are individualistic, siloed or fast-paced, and I think my biggest personal takeaway from this trip has been realizing how challenging I find this aspect of life in Canada. To get there though, I had to experience two more instances of that sweet sweet magic. 

Pokhara is one of my favourite places on earth, and it deserves a dedicated journal entry. For now, let’s just say I arrived in Pokhara filled with something akin to anticipatory anxiety, fearing that the place I loved so much would have changed beyond recognition in the two years I was gone (a selfish fear, I know). If I dig a little deeper, I was anticipating a sense of loss. I was attaching too much importance to my experience of Nepal on this trip, expecting it to be a certain way and fearing that, if it wasn’t that, it would pull into question my connection with the country. I probably also attach too much importance to this connection, but that’s a big one to unpack. On the first day, I settled awkwardly into a mostly empty, somewhat soulless hostel and ambled around Lakeside. I felt too shy to address people in Nepali, despite language being such an important connector. I couldn’t really remember where my favourite spots were, or how to avoid the big commercial bars and restaurants catering exclusively to foreign tourists. After an evening of feeling tired and self-conscious, I decided tomorrow would be different: I would head to the new bouldering gym in town, and go from there. I first got into bouldering in Kathmandu years ago, and it changed my relationship with my body. I loved the independence of it, showing up at the gym whenever I could and spending hours quieting down my mind and solving problems. Bouldering helped me realize what my body can do and opened up a new world of movement, strength and mindfulness for me. I am still intimidated by bouldering gyms though, and don’t always feel like I belong. I think that’s a pretty common experience, and I felt it as I showed up, sheepishly, at this unfamiliar gym. I’m so glad that I didn’t let that stop me, because that decision to head to the gym set off a chain of events that ultimately deepened my relationship with Nepal, with others and with myself.

When I got to the gym, the only other climber there (aside from staff) was PK. PK is from Poland, has a permanent smile on his face (in more ways than one: he has a smiley face tattooed on his shaved head), and loves telling long and hilarious stories that meander along a series of seemingly unrelated events to a conclusion that is usually equal parts surprising, delightful and enlightening. We bonded over getting humbled by a particularly tricky overhanging boulder, and exchanged numbers to come back and tackle the beast tomorrow. A friend! The next day, I arrived at the bouldering gym at the same time as a delightful man whose name I’ve forgotten but who seemed to be on a perma-trip, tumbling off the wall like a high ballet dancer and ending each climb with a dramatic roly poly. PK was there too, of course, and the three of us smoked some of his weed. PK and I exchanged stories inbetween climbs, while Roly Poly air-drummed to the Nirvana blasting on the speakers. It’s hard to put into words the moment a person transforms from a friend of convenience (there are so many when travelling) to a person you genuinely feel connected to. The shift was palpable to me though, and I think to PK too. I was, however, still stubbornly committed to my desire to be alone, and told PK my plan for the day was to sit on the lake on a boat and read a book. We vaguely talked about him giving me some of his weed, but had both forgotten about that by the time we reached the restaurant where I’d have lunch and we’d go our separate ways. I sat at that restaurant for about twenty minutes, thinking about how glad I was to have met PK and regretting not making an effort to spend more time together, and who should show up but PK! “I was just thinking how nice your plan of sitting on a boat with a book sounded, and realized I never gave you my weed, so I walked back”. He rolled me a joint and we made plans to go for dinner later that night. I was so touched by that small gesture, making sure it was a good day. And it was - a great day, hazily rowing around the lake and listening to music. That evening, I met PK and he showed me his stomping grounds north of Lakeside, where he’d lived during the pandemic and formed relationships with many of the families in the area. We went from place to place, visiting his various Nepali friends, drinking, laughing and listening to Nepali music I’d never heard before. PK taught me new things about life in Pokhara, specifically the pressures young men are under to be recruited as Gorkha soldiers, a lucrative but highly competitive job. Last year, just 205 out of 25,000 applicants were recruited by the British Army. He told me about the devastating impact rejection has on their economic prospects and mental health. PK’s friend, who kindly served us shisha and very strong hot rum punch in his home, shared that his best friend committed suicide after he couldn’t proceed with recruitment because he couldn’t afford to pay the fees, which can reach up to NRs. 80,000. There is, and should be, something uncomfortable about coming to rest in a country where most people are either earning precariously, or willing to risk their lives or invest all their savings to leave in the pursuit of better opportunities. The very least you can do as a visitor to Nepal is be interested in the actual people that live there, and their actual lives, and this evening was a powerful reminder of that. It ripped me right out of my navel-gazey approach to this trip that I was so incredibly lucky to be on, and refocused my attention outward, to the people and the place I was surrounded by. If I’d closed myself off to that friendship with PK, like I thoughtlessly considered doing for a few hours, I would have robbed myself of that precious lesson. 

PK is also the reason I, two days later, set off to Makwanpur, a village I’d never been to before but where PK knew an organic farm with views on the mountains. I didn’t really know what to expect, but assumed the spot would be a somewhat touristy but understated hotel with sunset views, similar to the many hotels on the popular trekking destination and neighbouring hill Panchase. I happily fell back into my old hiking rhythm while climbing the steps that connected the small villages just above the Ghatichhina bus park to Makwanpur, which sits about 600 steep meters higher on a beautiful plateau facing the Annapurnas. It felt good to be away from touristy Lakeside, and to move my body up the never-ending but very efficient steps, being greeted by “Namaste” and “Kaahaa jaane?” and “Eklai jaane?” and “Tapaaiko desh kun ho?” along the way. Eventually, I passed by a banyan tree, where two hippie-looking foreigners were chatting (don’t like to label or put people in boxes, but this is the quickest way I can describe them). I said hi but kept walking, keen to keep hiking alone. We bumped into each other again a little later, and they asked if I was heading to Panchase. When I told them I was heading to Makwanpur, they said they were too. When I said I was heading to this particular farm, they said they were too. Turns out, they knew PK, and had been going to this farm regularly for the last three months. I think we all felt a little uneasy. I might be projecting, but I felt like they were keen to keep this spot, which was clearly special to them, to themselves. I felt anxious at the prospect of socializing when what I really wanted was to quietly read my book in front of the mountains. If I’m very honest, I sometimes feel a little shy around hippies. I worry that they’ll see right through me and sniff out the square within me. I trucked on ahead. This time of year, mountains are harder to see (unless you are in them) due to the dust and clouds. I wasn’t really expecting to see them aside from at sunrise, when the dust hasn’t had time to settle yet. Suddenly though, there was a small opening in the clouds and haze, and Macchapuchhre poked through. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this particular mountain, and understand why she carries such spiritual importance in Nepal (it is illegal to summit the mountain). It feels like everything surrounding her - the other mountains, the hills, the villages, the rivers, Pokhara - has moulded itself around her presence. It felt like seeing an old friend again, and, of course, I cried. When I got to Makwanpur, it took me a while to find the farm. I followed maps.me down a small path to a traditional village home, where I was aggressively barked at by several dogs. I was about to turn around when I was greeted by a woman who asked me whether I was looking for Santoshko ghar, and that this was it! 

Visualize: a place where every nook and cranny has been given love and attention. A place that is entirely in tune with the seasons, and where fresh food grows all year round. A place where the home-grown honey can only be described as nectar, the pumpkin isn’t like any pumpkin I’ve ever tasted (it was much better), and a soft and loving energy radiates from every living thing that covers this beautiful land. I played badminton with the kind and hilarious Saru, hills and mountains as my backdrop. I cried with laughter for an hour straight around a warm fire with Santosh and the two hippies, who quickly became friends. It is a jawdropping, breathtaking place. And again, making the effort to open up to the people around me paid off in a way I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams. Once the hippie couple (I’ll refer to them as E, the girl, and M, the guy) and I had all reached the farm, we engaged in small talk and then did our own thing for a bit. I ended up sitting outside of my room, taking in the beautiful valley in front of me. A few meters to my right, E was doing the same. Slowly slowly, we started getting to know each other, and ended up having a beautiful conversation about how calm we felt here, how soft. E and M would be moving back to Denmark in a few weeks, and E shared my fear of returning home and losing touch with how we felt here, what we were learning. We agreed to listen to our bodies more - what they needed, how they responded to their surroundings. So much of that is about slowing down, being mindful, which is the exact opposite pace many societies are built for. I realized that I’ve taken for granted how often I feel stressed, tired and anxious. Talking to E was therapeutic, a breath of fresh air, a reminder to proactively, but gently, forge a life in which it is easier for me to feel at ease. E told me she had always sung, but was now trying to let go of the socially conditioned desire to sing pretty, and to instead sing what was inside of her, raw and real. As she told me that, birds in the nearby trees started chattering loudly, and we gasped and laughed and sat in silence listening to their song together. E is a beautiful soul. She is always entirely present, and listens intently to her surroundings with both her mind and her heart. She chooses her words carefully and radiates spiritual clarity. I told her I like looking at old trees and big mountains because they stand there while the world around them changes, and its a visual reminder for me of what being in tune with yourself might look like. I always feel a little silly saying stuff like that, because it’s really how I feel, and I am protective of those feelings, and I also know that they are feelings which are easy to dismiss as naive or simple (note: reading Didion’s essay about Joan Baez recently made me think about this a lot, must remember to journal about this). Instead, it resonated with E, and she said she would take that mental image home with her. She is kind. I ended up jotting down the gist of our conversation and giving her the piece of paper, so we could stay connected as we both embarked on our journeys home, on other sides of the world.

That evening, the three of us had a nourishing meal, and E and M kindly shared their weed with me. They built a fire which we sat around for hours, M regaling us with stories that made me laugh so hard - medicine, pure release. M is so down to earth, so funny and so, so, deep, without ever being pretentious. He fully embodies his ethos of living an authentic life, free from fear about how others might perceive you, of expressing yourself freely. It is M who, through his storytelling, helped me realize how severely this fear dictates all aspects of my life, and how damaging this is. Don’t get me wrong, this is something I’ve known and have been thinking about for about a decade, but I don’t think it ever connected quite so clearly as it did in these two days we spent together. I think I thought I could get healthy without making drastic changes to how I live my life; while staying within the boundaries outlined by society, even if they don’t align with who I am within. And man, that’s damaging, and alienating. In these short two days, I got a taste of what life would be like if I drew outside the lines a little, sketched out a different way of living for myself. It felt so good that I think it might have profoundly changed how I live (we’ll see how it goes in Canada, when I’m not on a cruisy holiday). That night, I lay on my back and looked at the stars blending in with the village lights sprinkled across the dark hills in front of us, my entire horizon a galaxy. The next morning, we watched the sunrise over the mountains, which were completely visible now. We drank weed-infused buffalo milk and spent the morning meditating and laughing on the edge of the rice field, nothing but open air separating us from the mountains ahead. E created a short and playful meditation for us where we softly gazed in front of us and let our hands dance in front of our eyes, letting them come in and out of focus with the mountains as their backdrop. M taught me how to play his didgeridoo and, once it clicked, I fell in love with connecting to my breath so consciously, feeling this beautiful instrument vibrate with the air coming out of my lungs, producing these guttural and organic sounds. M and E told me how traditional didgeridoos were hollowed out by termites; how the sound emitted by them is formed by the interaction between the termites and the wood. M guided us through a meditation and my favourite part was when he got us to close our eyes and, very very slowly, open them, like a curtain lifting gently. In front of my eyeballs was, of course, the entire Annapurna range, and I swear it felt like I was being reborn in that moment, a baby coming out of the womb and witnessing this planet for the first time, tabula rasa. I’m going to choose to believe that I was. Surely any moment is as good as any to decide to live more in line with yourself. I asked M how one liberates themselves from that constant fear, that desire to be accepted. He explained that he recently turned 36, which means that he was now closer to death than to his birth. He proceeded to describe the beauty of being alive, and how he was now learning to grapple with the reality that it will at some point come to an end. There is no escaping it, there is nothing afterwards. Worrying about these things is just not worth it. He believes most people are good, and so what’s the worst that can happen by just being yourself?

I spent the rest of the day with Saru. She showed me around the farm, cut sugarcane for us which we ate sloppily outside of the farm gates (lots of slurping and sugar water dripping down our chins), and gave me a secret handful of lapsi for the road. Life in villages like these is hard, repetitive and precarious, and I know it is easy for me to romanticize a place when I don’t have to lift a finger; when I can leave whenever I want. I can choose to go anywhere tomorrow, like I chose to come here on a whim. That mobility is such a privilege, and I don’t want to just ‘feel grateful’ that I have it. I want to face the discomfort of inequality and let it guide my politics, my actions and my behaviour towards others (respect, compassion, curiosity). 

When the time came to say goodbye, I didn’t really know how to put it all into words. I wish I’d taken a second to slow down, let myself feel what I was feeling, and express to these four people how grateful I was to have met them. How much it meant to me. Instead, I rushed through it somewhat sheepishly. Seems to be a bit of a theme hey. I arrived in Chitwan the next day were I took in the view and feverishly jotted down my takeaways from this trip to Pokhara (see below - back on my navel-gazey shit), terrified the magic of those days would wear off and I’d forget.