So you want to go trekking in Nepal, eh?

Ok, so despite my best efforts to dissuade all but the most serious of professional mountain climbers, you still want to visit Nepal. What do you need to make the trip as comfortable, safe, and fun as possible? a guide – $7 a day, make sure that they agree to feed and bed themselves a porter – around the same as a guide, same agreements. The little, skinny guy who came with me on the second half of my trek could eat FIVE heaping plates of rice and dahl four times a day! a sleeping bag – you can rent one in Jomsum a small electric heater with an adapter plug – wow. It would have been a totally different trip with one of these. Way more pleasant. You would have to pick one up stateside or in Europe. This is part of the reason you need a porter ;^) I’ve seen really small, light weight ones. You can just leave it with your guide/porter after… I would get up around 8 am eat, trek, try and get somewhere by 5 or 6 pm, eat again, and then get in bed (under the smelly covers), and wait for the next day. It was so cold I couldn’t even type, or read! My hands would freeze in minutes… warm clothes – yes, warm clothes. I used my super light weight, fast drying, travel clothes. Yes, stupid. So stupid. The Himalayas you say? Yes. So stupid… You can rent some of these in Jomsum as well. Trek for short periods. I think 3 – 4 days would be better than 10. You could do small ones to a bunch of different places, and take breaks in between to recover. Allow some time to acclimate to the altitude. Smart trekkers go DOWN first for a few days when they get to a high altitude location. Unlike me, who went UP… Know that the food is uniformly bad (and you're getting the good stuff!) September, October is prime time with 4,500 people arriving in Jomsum each month. All the hotels, no matter how crappy, are completely booked by 2 pm. That means you have to be done walking every day by that time. The least busy time is now, January and February. The day I arrived there was only one other person, which explains why I got lost all the time – there was no one to follow.