I’ve been to a lot of countries and I’ve done my share of adventure activities, but the three-week trek along the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal still tops them all. It’s an experience I still remember vividly and something I want to do again someday when my daughter is old enough to appreciate it.
So it saddened me to write on here in 2004 and then in 2006 that people might want to avoid the area . The Maoist rebels were robbing tourists, bombing hotels, and killing policemen, destroying the idyllic nature of what brought visitors here to start with. Then a peace process led to a power-sharing agreement and the Maoists got part of what they wanted: the end of monarchy. There’s no longer a king on the currency and some of the former rebels are now power brokers in the national government. They have matured and gotten wise though, realizing that turning on the communism tap will turn off the hard currency from tourism that feeds the treasury.
Now there are even some ambitious projects in the works to expand the networks of hiking trails, as you can see in the current edition of National Geographic Adventure. That magazine can’t decide if it likes this newfangled internet thingy though, so you can only find one little portion of it online here: hiking Nepal’s great Himalaya Trail .
Reading that feels a bit like hearing the punchline without the rest of the joke, so here’s what you missed. There’s a linkage of trails going on now that will allow you to potentially hike across Nepal, seeing different vistas as you move across nine distinct regions—including the Annapurna and the Everest treks, but also a few that have had very few visitors before. It’s 1,100 miles (1,600 kilometers) if you do the entire thing, which some people surely will just to say they did. But you can pick and choose parts of it instead, which brings us to the call-outs in that NatGeo story. Thankfully there’s a site to give you a more comprehensive picture, the official site of the Great Himalayan Trail . It’s a really good resource site, with photos that will make you want to hit REI and then book a flight for next week. Here’s how it looks on the GHT’s map, with the Annapurna Circuit looking pretty tiny in that big scheme of things.
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