Category: Pokhara

My last full day in Pokhara saw the thick haze return to obstruct most of the views of the Himalayas, so I thought I should go check out the International Mountain Museum. Getting there became the usual drama in places like this. All you want is a simple taxi ride to the museum and everyone’s eyes light up like it’s a potential sales opportunity for a day-long chauffeur job. It makes you think twice before going anywhere that requires a cab!

None of the cab drivers around here want to use their meters, so you need to negotiate a price before you get in. Then on the way there they try to entice you into seeing all the sights around town you haven’t been to yet. Then they insist on a round trip fare and say they will wait for you while you see the museum. “Half hour?” they ask. “Um, actually, how about 2 hours. I like to take my time.” I read the museum was quite large. They look at you like your crazy and I’m sure the financial appeal of the deal suddenly doesn’t sound so good. I send him off telling him to come back in 2 hours and not wait so he has the opportunity to earn from others, but I’m not sure he ever left.

Anyway, the museum was quite interesting and it actually did take me a few hours to get through it. There was information on each of the world’s highest 20 peaks (even more interesting after hiking past some of them) and who were the first to climb them. There was information on all the local plants and animals of Nepal, as well as Yeti(!) There was gear donated to the museum that had been used to get to some of the summits. It was interesting to see how rudimentary some of it was by today’s standards. Most of the gear seemed to be donated by Asian expeditions and not from the West. There were also displays on each of the native groups prominent in different regions of the country, like the Sherpas of the Everest area.

It seemed as though the 1950’s were the big years to conquer all the summits. There is still one left in Nepal that has never been successfully climbed, but the Nepalese government stopped letting people try back in 1963. It’s called Fishtail and it is very steep and difficult to ascend.

One of the most interesting displays was of all the garbage they have cleaned up from Mount Everest. One climber who eventually made it to the top was so dismayed by all the things left by previous climbers that he organised a regular cleaning campaign to collect the waste and fly it out. Among the debris were pieces of broken ladders (used to get across crevices in the ice), big piles of cooking stove gas canisters (some flattened by ice pressure over time), old ripped up tent fragments, and big piles of oxygen tanks – some dating back to the 1960’s.

With just a few days left in Pokhara, I’ve taken a day to rest and recover from endless Annapurna stair climbs and descents, and I’ve lined up a bit of mountain biking for this morning in the nearby hills. As with all my other pursuits here, I’ve found a personal guide to show me around. Or at least I did initially. An Australian guy from Victoria came and joined us at the last minute. It certainly seems a bit slow here this time of year, but that is good for me. Nepal seemed pretty busy with Chinese tourists when I first arrived, but that was because of the Chinese New Year holiday period in China, which is over now.

Hills? More like mountains! The mountain bike circuit, which was supposed to be their least hilly, kicked off with. 500-meter climb up to the top of a ridge overlooking the city of Pokhara and its neighbouring lake. Too bad the place has become so hazy again – the views would have been quite spectacular otherwise. From the top, it ran along a gentle, roller-coaster, ridge-hugging track for a while before a quick descent to a huge plateau of rice paddies next to the lake. From there the ride was fairly flat all the way back into town. About 700 meters of climbing in all and 30 km in length. Our guide offered to take us up another mountain on the other side of the lake, but we both politely declined.

Pokhara Mountain Biking Circuit

I don’t know what it is, but every time I’ve rented a bike overseas, the seat post has kept sliding down until the bike became too hard to pedal, and I had to stop and raise it again. This has happened to me in Fiji, Egypt, and now Nepal. Otherwise, it was a much nicer bike that I have been able to rent in the past.

The bike tour operator was actually a front for a local mountain bike club. Good mountain bikes are prohibitively expensive for many Nepalese, so the club would conduct tours for tourists and get the tourists to pay fees that were high enough to finance good bikes for the club members who would ride them the rest of the time.