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 some mountain biking in the nearby hills this morning. 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 option, kicked off with a 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
Map of the route “Pokhara MTB”: 27,838 m, 744 m of climbing and 750 m of descent, elevation between 807 m and 1,320 m, time 03:01:27. It is a loop that starts and ends at 28.21401, 83.95783 (latitude, longitude).
I don’t know why, 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 than 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 ran tours for tourists and charged fees high enough to buy good bikes for club members, who would ride them the rest of the time.
