Probably not even relevant anymore but here’s “My tips for backpacking Nepal”

Teddy Smile
May 10, 2020
13 min read

uhh bet that ain’t gonna happen soon ehh

I wrote most of this post a while ago, and by now we all know that in times when we’re happy to travel to the supermarket because it’s further than the kitchen, ain’t no one goin to Nepal. But we’ll live to be 100, so they’ll be a month of our long lives to visit or return to this wild place.

And MYANNN how I love this place, today and always!!

We’re all catching different moods at the moment, one of them is I believe a hopeful one,in which we’re looking forward to a time, any time, when the world will be ours to go to again.

Traveling this way while being 19 is only the start, like many I’ve also grown VERY fond of this small backpack, no plan kind of traveling. You heard me right, emphasis on small: don’t freaking overpack!

I had heard often from people saying at least a quarter of what they took was useless, I tried to listen, took a quarter away from what I had planned to take, and guess what, I still ended up only wearing ¾ of that. Your understanding of what it means to need something will definitely be tested while you travel, but it’s useful to question it before you leave as well, it might make your bag some kilos lighter.

Another golden rule, is to take as little valuables as possible. I really only had my camera that was new and very precious to me. Of course, there was also my second hand Iphone 6 with a broken Home button that had a certain value, but I was still a bit more chill than everyone who's carrying brand-new 700 euro thingies in their pockets 24/7. It really sucks when you have to be so constantly worried about somebody stealing what you have, to the extent that I feel like it stands in the way of you being open to some people.

I took my Yuppi-run shirt from 2009 and that was slowly developed into a real thing of value for me. I’m telling you, once you’ve climbed up to 3000m in a shirt , you’ll be treating it like it’s Gucci. Plus, I looked like a 12 year old homeless skater boy from Sweden in it (I styled it with an orange fleece and adilettes most of the time), so that’s not exactly the “most likely to be robbed” style.

Let’s get to it then, my ten tips for anyone who might sometime do something like I did:

1. Don't be an idiot - just ask the locals

You know, throw yourself out there! This is a whole lot easier if you’re young and flexible so while you are go, with the flow, have some sort of plan in your head, though stay aware that often you can’t find things or they don’t actually exist or are blocked or closed. But then some guy might know some guy, and another thing ends up to be much easier to do, I say do that instead. Accessibility is everything, some cool things might not be available when you’re there that day, but some weird-sounding other thing is praised by the guy from the corner store, try that ( Nike style just do it).

Nepal doesn't really have addresses, meaning you can get a good laugh while looking at foreigners being confused while staring at their feed, because google maps led them into the middle of nowhere. If you’re not used to asking around the shops and passers-by you’ll become it after some time in Kathmandu. Might as well not use Google maps and put some trust in what the stranger said. Nepalis are very straightforward and helpful people, take a step towards them and you'll have an authentic experience of Nepali culture in no time. Sometimes, no one will understand you, then the people call their cousin who will translate for you on the phone. You'll take a taxi with the brother of a sister and also get a number of another brother who has a travel agency, just in case you want to do paragliding. Very soon you'll have 10 new contacts all saved under names like "paras' brother that owns a bakery and that I should call if I ...". You'll have a "guy" or sister to help you out for all kinds of things.

So my tip here is that if you meet a nice taxi driver for example, just take his number. Chances are he has a brother for anything you might need.

Nepalis love calling each other about 10 times a day, hearing their conversations was one of the funniest things, usually they’re made up of ⅓ Greetings like "good morning dai, namasté,...” then ⅓ of some random questions that are some kind of version of our “how are you”, mostly its “where are you? Have you eaten? Are you sleeping?” and the last third is basically just using 10 different words of saying ok “Huncha, Hass, Tik, La, Hazur,...”

2. Ditch your western ways and dive in as much as you dare too

If you understand the name of the food you’re ordering, you’re way off. What I’m talking about is taking local basses about 50 years old and bumpy roads in weird weather, where you meet an old auntie offering you to meet all her 2343 relatives ,each one of them smiling at you holding let's say “special” food, looking at you like “ you don’t want to know what happens if you don’t eat” - Yeah that’s more like it.

In the more touristy places, it’s quite easy to stick with what you know, but that is just not the local way, why travel across the world to complain about how many things are not how you expect- did you honestly want them to be similar to home? What use is coming all the way then?

Prepare for chaos a little bit, prepare to be flexible as if there was no tomorrow, or as if your life depended on it. Don’t waste time complaining about how things didn’t go “as planned”, there is no plan, don’t pretend you can make one.

3. Beware of Nepali-Time

Laughing while writing this, about how incredibly pisssseeeddd all westerners get with this hahaha

I probably was for the entire first month there, I kept on being late because others were late too and that was a big deal for me because I really didn’t want to keep anyone waiting. After a while, you get used to this entirely stress-free conception of time, in Nepal, no one takes estimations seriously, and as a foreigner, you really shouldn’t either. Saying for example that it takes “about one hour” to get to a place, is the go-to phrase of everybody. It’s probably three, on a good day. For the Bus from Kathmandu to Pokhara they’ll tell you it’s 5 hours, truth is, sometimes it is 12 , jokes on youuuu

The trick here is really to plan to rest in the time that you have to spent waiting for something or someone. If someone says 1h, think three, then you‘ll be glad as that means they‘ll probably be 2 hours for tea.

4. Buy local

It’s not a myth that locals see foreigners secretly as walking wallets. Of course, we do spend a lot, and therefore have a certain weight as a collective to push the development of some businesses and not others. In a developing country, where you spent your money matters. So, for example, the tourist areas often have supermarkets, but the biggest chains of which are not Nepali, they’re Indian. So a big share of the money you spent there will go to an Indian billionaire and not to the kids of the cashier. If you feel a certain social responsibility towards the Nepalese society, then be careful to support the right development. Instead of the supermarket, go to the corner store, things might be a little harder to get or more expensive, but at least the right people will benefit from your expenditure.

To fuel positive development I also recommend a whole bunch of Social Businesses (sometimes called Women shops or happy houses) created by Nepalis. They sell very very pretty handicrafts, jewelry, and clothing, produced by marginalized and vulnerable communities that are typically hard to reach out for. I bought a bunch of souvenirs from there and had so much fun checking all the shops out in Kupondole.

5. Use apps

I found these apps to be absolutely gold on big travels:

maps.me

lets you download maps and search for sites/streets offline. Also while trekking, it shows all the paths and the position is spot-on. This is by far the most useful of all!

pathao and tootle

Are bike taxi apps that make it very easy to get around Kathmandu(they exist under other names in India as well I believe). You book a ride and hop on a motorbike, which is so much quicker in Nepal. The good thing is also that they the prices are set, which is good for foreigners but not all Nepalis like that (they can manage a cheaper rate of course).

Currency

This is self-explaining: to compare euro and Rupee. The value of the Rupee changes a lot by the day and therefore it can be useful whenever you might want to exchange or spend bigger sums, to first check how good the rate of that day os, it can save you up to 20€ sometimes.

Local

Is an app that shows and lets you mark facebook events nearby very easily. This is useful when you want to search for markets, concerts, or festivals when you haven’t got any connections. I’ve been on 2-3 of these events, them being posted on Fb is a sign that they’re not typically local, so chances are high there are lots of foreigners and expats, it was usually quite nice to mix up with them. Around Christmas time, they were also a lot of handicraft markets up on Local, and all those we went to were really great. I also saw a whole bunch of other things, free art classes, running clubs, hiking trips…, I checked them out but couldn’t do them because I was always too far away.

Rome2Rio

Is I believe the best app ever to use for transport. It catches my local bus line from Luxembourg city to home, and I always used it to get around in a new city on the Interrail. Obviously, it’s quite useless in Kathmandu as there are no trains or trams anywhere, but for other Asian cities, I’m sure it’ll work perfectly. Damn easy to use, I love it.

Drive

absolute lifesaver! it stands for any cloud really, but I couldn’t figure out iCloud, and Wecloud was also confusing. So I stuck with Google.I double saved my pictures on Drive, and found that quite fast ( nothing bet the Samsung upload speed though!). Obviously, my pictures were ( and ARE) soooooo valuable to me, so I felt much better double-saving them. I opened up a separate account as I had so many it exceeded the 15GB free storage space you get.

Also very important: DOUBLE SAVE YOUR TRAVEL DOCUMENTS meaning Passport (double-sided), vaccines, visas, health insurance, flight details & co. You can send them to yourself, an extra password for that is always a good idea. It’s quite reassuring to know that even if you lost everything, you only need an internet connection to access your documents.

Ibooks or Kindle

You may remember that I took a bunch of books, needless to say, that was unnecessary hehe. I spent the first month not reading at all because I was falling asleep just trying to write 2 sentences about how my day was. It was only when I started going on long bus rides that I began to go through books in record time again. I red a lot on my phone, I’m 100% guilty of reading off of downloaded PDFs. But I also read a whole bunch of the free books on iBooks, and you can download the Kindle app, which lets you access all of the books you downloaded with your account (or in my case, my moms).

Travelspent

I planned to use that one once I was to be back on the road. In my village, I sometimes went a whole week without buying anything but some fruits on the market for 1 Euro, so it was easy peasy for me to keep track of expenses. For those always moving, it’s important to make money work best for you,on travelspent you write down what you spent on what, and it shows you how you’re managing money, it’s incredibly useful to keep track because chances are you’ll spend more than you expect and at times forget what for.

Whatsapp

Lastly, I mention Whatsapp because it's the easiest to use. If you plan to meet someone, many prefer to write on WA. I used it all the time to chat with friends, guides or people from work.

6. If you’re staying longer than 2 weeks - get a sim

It’s free and still works with recharge cards, you just have to figure out how to buy packages and then 5 Euros easily last 2 weeks even if you use loads of data. I got my sim from Ncell, which apparently works best in Kathmandu Valley. If you’re coming for a trek, I heard Nepal Telecom has more masts in the mountains, but chances are you’ll have a poor connection no matter which distributor, I’d say don’t rely on your phone if you don’t have to.

7. Pack these things:

I’m not jet-setting enough to make a full post on what to pack but I do know what I found useful :

water bottle good chance you’ll be in places where you can cook your water (homestays or touristy places often have big canisters available). Nepalis drink hot water all the time, so it’s really no hassle to ask. You’ll love that bottle every day I promise because if I had to buy plastic in the areas where there are no bins and everything is burned, I’d cry, not even joking hehe.
good power bank , on which you will dependant as if it was your heartbeat. My Iphone’s battery was shit (bet that comes as a surprise) so I used it every day. Mine was solar so on the trek, I could tie it to my backpack, it was fully charged in about 4 hours, which was above dope. Definitely worth the investment (mine was 40 I think).
thermoclothes self-explanatory if you know the no-heating situation in both the plains and the mountains of Nepal. At night it is freezing, don’t spare on two pairs of bottom and top. These where the two pieces of clothing I had worn the most by far. They might seem weird at the beginning amidst your shirts and stuff, but you’ll thank me later, I promise.
flowy pants Nepalis always dress modestly, and even if foreigners might be feeling the heat more than them, it’s no reason to not be apprehensive about their culture. Cultural appropriation is definitely in the air, so it’s good to be aware of it. My advice here is the flowy pants, quite good in the heat and positively uncontroversial. You can and probably will want to buy them in many places, they’ve got very cool styles mixing new and traditional cuts.
flip flops are your best friends, but you don’t know that yet. You’ll only realize what they do for you if you start tackling Nepali bathrooms together. Actually, I wore about three pairs: one for the bathroom, the other for around the house, and the third one at work whenever they’d be a lot of mud and stuff. Friends forever
Scarf I used it all the time, to sleep on the bus, to cover my bare arms, to tie around my head like the farming ladies do when you work on the fields, or you won’t believe it, as an actual scarf(wow I know!). If you ask me, brownish colour big and light is best.
Toilet paper you know who you usually always take car keys or something, well in Nepal that something is always toilet paper. Yeah
Immodium and insect repellant spray always good to have with you if only to know you don’t have to go to the hospital if you know you just have a minor condition, you just feel more safe taking what you know. In Nepal they prescribe antibiotics like candy, but it won’t be so sweet for your body I can tell you that. It was only when I arrived in my village that I heard that Dengue fever had been around not long ago, even if the whole time I was there it was winter, I was still glad to have the spray on me cause ain’t nobody want to catch no dengue bruh.
Isomat or an Inliner that might be a good idea if you have trouble sleeping, you can buy one that can be packed super small and use it whenever there’s only the very thin mattresses. I for my part had my back hurt for the first month and that was super annoying.
comfortable sneakers, if you have them you might not even need hiking shoes really. I’d go with a pair of solid sneakers, running shoes and flip flops.

8. Pack light!! -don't pack these things:

Your phone allows you to ditch so many things: you don’t have to print documents, bring many books, a separate music player, for some: no camera even. I can assure it feels SO good to pack light!

too many jackets, rainjacket, cardigan, and fleece BASTA Jackets take up so much space and get really annoying after a while, you can use the scarf instead
too many jeans or anything that is uncomfortable, ain’t nobody gonna check your runway-readiness, so fool no one and put comfort over fashion
too many books (:/), guilty again oopsi. In hostels, you can often change books with others or you’ll get so many new recommendations chances are you’ll not want to read what you have anymore

9. Read all about it, And Listen and Watch!

Here are some of my favorite things you can look into if you want to know more about Nepal before going there:)

Clips made by the Luxembourgish NGO that send me, explaining authentically what our partners are doing and why:

RAJANI, the story of a good friend of mine

https://vimeo.com/344795621

OUT OF NEPAL, presentation of some of our partners and their beneficiaries, SCLC is also in it!:)

https://vimeo.com/302438665

A glimpse of what you’re in for if you choose to come by ;)

https://vimeo.com/180182803

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89s6vHB6_Gw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD5PHRwNvvM

Really really good shortfilm!!

https://vimeo.com/201695311

The problem of Chitwan, tourism and enslaved elephant hotspot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz5zEZFBi6A

About Everest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3VMW6fxK6Y&t=428s

What is definitely best to understand more of the social dynamics in the Nepali culture is to take a look at Bollywood movies emerging from Indian culture, which is in many ways very similar. I watched a bunch of these and liked them a lot here are my absolute favourites (If you know others, I’d love to hear about them!):

3 idiots (100% favourite)
Taare Zameen Par (cried a WHOLEE bunch)
Mere Pyare Prime Minister ( with ringtone aka favorite movie character of all time)
Pad man (issue very incomprehensible to me personally, but therefore ever more so important)
Article 15 (even more shocking if you know that more than half of the population belong to Dalit castes)
PK (this one might be among most useful as it looks critically at faith, which plays a huge role in Nepal and we know almost nothing of it)