30 minutes after taking off from Kathmandu, the tiny Yeti Airlines prop plane bumped to a stop in front of the Pokhara Airport, and I stepped back out into the rain. My cab driver swerved to miss cows in the middle of the road and marchers demonstrating for an international airport connection as we sped into town.
Before I knew it, I was greeting Ben, my hometown friend who I had last seen in April for Pi Mai Lao. In the intervening period, he had been traveling around Asia on a wild 6-month solo trip, from Laos to Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and India, and now to Nepal, capturing all of it in clever 90 second snippets on his travel website.
“So, it’s raining,” we both astutely observed. ”Didn’t count on that.” (Or maybe Ben did, but while in Laos packing for this trip in the sticky tropical heat, my mind was imagining idyllic Himalayan scenes complete with clear blue skies that revealed snow-capped mountains. The words “end of the monsoon season” had refused to implant themselves in my daydreaming mind).
But the rain kept coming, so we quickly decided that leaving the next day for a trek (as we had originally planned) didn’t seem such a good idea. So we retreated into soggy procession from tea shop, to lunch, to snack, to dinner, sipping on countless cups of hot spiced chai, our eyes begging the grey skies for some relief.
Pokhara is a lakeside backpacker hub–a misty lake surrounded by rolling countryside and a small city with all of the requisite backpacker characteristics. There are countless knockoff North Face shops (selling what seem to be pretty good quality goods), cafes with sluggish internet connections, and tour operators vying for backpackers’ rupees.
We were feeling pessimistic about the prospect of hiking for 4 days in relentless rain, having visions of leech-covered legs and putting on damp socks and boots again each morning. The first 2 days in Pokhara were thus spent trying to figure out an alternative hike to our original plan, but really nothing sounded ideal. In good weather, Nepal is a modern Shangri-La for travelers, where anything seems possible. In the rain, well, there’s not much to do. Inexplicably, after debating the inevitable misery of a soggy hike again and again, we decided to take a leap of faith, and slogged across town to the hiker’s permit office to get the necessary paperwork to go on our original trek.
“The rain might stop tomorrow,” the locals kept telling us. Apparently there was an important holiday coming, and the monsoon always had to continue until the festival, which this year was unluckily falling later than usual. On our second day in Pokhara, women around the town came out to celebrate Teej, dressed in glittering red and green saris. As we watched them descend upon the muddy carnival occurring lakeside, we realized the locals were right after all. Minute by minute the rain was getting lighter, and soon a bit of sun even parted the clouds.
Good thing we got those trekking permits. Jam jam…let’s go!