Nepal

Panorama from Nepal’s Island Peak

In 2011, an Embark group climbed Imja Tse, also known as Island Peak, a 20,305-foot Himalayan “trekking peak.” This doesn’t mean it’s a strict “walk-up,” but it is a challenging but safe summit that can be climbed in just five days. It has a reputation for attracting beginner and expert climbers alike.

Our very own Jim Ronning shot a 360-degree panorama from the summit of Island Peak, so here it is for inspiration. If you love trekking and climbing — if you want to visit Everest Base Camp and climb a Himalayan peak on the same trip — consider climbing Island Peak.

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Female Trekking Guides in Nepal

A big hat tip to the Chhetri sisters of Nepal, pioneer women in the field of Nepalese trekking guides.

It’s a lot of work to haul loads and guide clients up and down the Himalayas — work that has long been reserved for men. One of the sisters heard a story about female trekking clients being harassed by their drunken male guides, so they started the Chhetri Sisters Trekking Company, operated by women and offering services to female travelers.

As this story tells us, the sisters were led, eventually, to the founding of Empowering Women of Nepal, which offers free trekking guide training to women. EWN has trained more 16,000 women to be guides so far. They are also in the business of rescuing children from forced-labor situations.

So please read the story for their inspiring tale, and let’s all support the ladies of Nepal trekking!

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Mustang Trekking:
Remote, Rare, and Radiant

Trekking in Mustang is like being at sea, only with more dust. There’s an endless spaciousness, punctuated by cathedral columns, crumbling cliffs and towers of rock.

In the rain shadow of the Himalayas, north of the Annapurna range and south of the Tibetan Plateau, Mustang has been part of Nepal since the late 18th century but has more in common with Tibet, which surrounds it on three sides.

Alluring, no? We found these lovely descriptions in this article from an Australian newspaper, describing a two-week trek to Upper Mustang. It goes on to say that only about 2,000 trekkers visit Upper Mustang each year, which it calls “a drop in the ocean of 70,000 trekkers visiting Nepal every year.”

Read on, and you’ll come across more fine prose like this:

Then there are the villages – green and lovely oases such as Ghami, where we stop for lunch on day four, which is all autumn-leafed poplars, white-walled courtyards, fluttering prayer flags and pink hollyhocks.

At Embark, we dream of places like Mustang – wild, remote places with fascinating culture and history, not to mention amazing beauty and fantastic trekking opportunities. Our Mustang trek “More Tibetan Than Tibet” is a perfect introduction to this high, lonesome place.

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Homestays in Nepal: Our Kind of Travel

The Toronto Sun has a story that captures the essence of how we like to travel in Nepal: Homestays in a local village.

We at Embark love adventure, of course, but a big part of what we do is interacting with the locals on a level most tourists only dream of. We also believe in the places we visit and make every effort to give back to the local community.

In this case, homestays give visitors a chance to, as the story puts it, “stay with locals, eat locally grown food in their kitchen and even cook meals yourself.”

“We live like a family sitting and eating together with the guests. We discuss even personal matters and crack jokes with them as friends,” one man said.

Their motto is ”‘Come as guests, go as friends.” Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

The best part is, in the village profiled in the story, only 400 of the 11,000 homestay guests last year were non-Nepali. What an opportunity to really see the local culture on a personal level!

So good for the folks in Ghalegaun, and thanks to the folks at the Sun for telling is about this.

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Photo Talent + Nepal = Bliss

We do love sitting around looking at pictures of beautiful places like Nepal. If we can’t be off climbing or trekking in the Himalayas, at least we can lose ourselves in images of that beautiful country.

In fact, here’s a stupendous collection of photos of Nepal right here. Scroll down a bit, click on “Launch Slideshow,” kick back, and prepare to be amazed.

But let’s say you want to travel to Nepal and take your own pictures. A fine idea, we say. We can help with traveling to Nepal, and this fantastic website has advice for photographers going there. We’re not necessarily photography experts, but if that site can help you take photos like the ones on there, you’ll be good to go.

Just make sure you share some with us when you get back. We do love pictures of Nepal …

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The “Vanishing Culture” of Mustang

We at Embark believe that the best reason to travel is to experience other cultures. We think it promotes understanding among people, gives us perspectives on ourselves and the world, and — if done right — can even help the cultures we visit.

That’s why we love places like Mustang, a former Tibetan kingdom, now part of Nepal, that’s about a 12-day walk from anything like a road. And it’s why we dream of trekking in Mustang before modernization has a major effect.

Not that we’re against modernization. It’s just, as this article from Business Insider points out, there are risks: given more “exciting” options, young people can forget the old ways, and cultures can vanish.

So we applaud the Vanishing Cultures Project, a nonprofit dedicated to “assisting indigenous, traditional groups worldwide preserve their culture by documenting their lifestyle through photography, research, and media, educating the public about these groups, and funding indigenous preservation initiatives.”

They published a book about Mustang, filled with amazing photographs, and give the proceeds to grassroots efforts in the country to help support their culture-saving efforts. And when we say amazing photographs, we mean it; check out these amazing photos of Mustang!

So we encourage everyone who can to trek in Mustang; we can’t wait to start offering trips there as early as 2013. Meanwhile, let’s all buy the book, or some prints, support a great cause, and feed our dreams of visiting the lost Tibetan kingdom.

 

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Stories from Everest Base Camp

Everest Base Camp, and the amazing high country around it, are high on the bucket list of hikers everywhere. Embark led a fantastic trip there in 2011, and here trip leader Jim Ronning narrates a series of amazing photographs from the trip.

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