Nepal: Voluntourist.

Before our trek, we spent a week volunteering at a rural orphanage in the Chitwan region with an organisation called RCDP.

Voluntourism has a bad rap, and I was as cynical as any about it - children are not tourist attraction, I thought, and poverty is not some romantic ideal to be sought after and paid for to experience. And yet, with my Duke of Ed “residential project” still not organised for the year, I decided to leave my cynicism aside and give voluntourism a go.

The verdict?

I didn’t change the world. I didn’t leave a mark. But I’m pretty sure I did no harm.

We were placed in a village away from the tourist sites of Chitwan. The living conditions were trying: meals were served twice a day, always involving some form of lentils and potatoes; every trip to the “toilet” warranted courage and BYO toilet paper; snails crawled up the walls of the dark concrete box with a tap that was our “shower”; a buffalo lived outside our window, and a faint smell of shit permeated the air wherever we walked.

And yet, after three days of life in Chitwan, we stopped thinking about these inconveniences of everyday life, and started to notice the remarkable community that we found ourselves in - the idyllic rice paddocks that surrounded our host family on all sides, the croaking of frogs at night, the well-loved stray dogs that came and went whenever they pleased, the women who harvested rice at dawn and dusk.

Every day, school children, neatly dressed in their school uniforms, bid us good day as they cycled past on their bikes - the girls with white ribbons in their braids, and the boys with stiff collars and straight ties, their heads bobbing up over the rice fields as they make their way to school every morning. The children at the orphanage were so hard-working and well-behaved they put memories of myself at their age to shame.

No. I didn’t change the world. I didn’t leave a mark on these people’s lives. But I’m beginning to think that perhaps it isn’t about any of that. It’s about opening yourself to be changed, about allowing others to leave a mark on you.

It’s about understanding that as a tourist, sometimes the best thing you can do for a community is to tread lightly, to open your heart and mind, and ultimately to pass through, leaving with nothing but a different perspective of the world.



Our bedroom at the host family







The orphanage

Nepal: Trekking Day 4 - Ghandruk to Nayapul

We woke up to our last day on the trek to a view of the Annapurna ranges looming over our cottage. Yesterday afternoon had been overcast, so it came as a shock that the mountains had been so close to us all along. That’s a funny thing about the mountains: the weather is so changeable that sometimes a single cloud moves and an entire peak is revealed, glistening white and on top of the world.





From Ghandruk, we took a very steep descent down the side of a valley, and the scenery on our way down was probably the best of the trek. We passed by numerous villages and terraces, half hidden in wisps of clouds. Bare bottomed children ran around, their faces covered in snot and tears. Women quietly harvested rice. Teenagers in neat high school uniforms headed off to school, skipping lightly down stony steps that trekkers struggle to navigate. Goats tied to poles gazed at us, their faces an inherent smile. Ponies ambled past us, their bells echoing faintly in the distance long after our encounter.

I was in photographic overdrive, trying to catch every snippet of this other world tucked away in the mountains before I have to leave. But there are things you cannot take with you, things that eyes can’t see: like the smell of grass and horse shit, the dampness of a cloud as it embraces you, that moment as you turn around a bend and face a snowy peak, so beautiful and rugged it literally tugs at your heartstrings.

And when we finally reached the bottom, when we turned the final bend, we have come full circle to our starting point. The city awaits.

xx doots

Nepal: Trekking Day 3 - Ghorepani to Ghandruk

Day 3 was our longest day by far, and it was all about mountains, mountains and mountains. We got out of bed at 4:45am to climb to the summit of Poon Hill (only in Nepal would a 3210m mountain be referred to as a “hill”).

Why so early? It was alleged that the sunrise over a panoramic view of the Annapurna and Dhaugiri ranges is quite something to behold.

And it was.

Apparently hundreds of other trekkers thought the same. We had two head torches among the three of us for trekking in the dark, but it turned out to be wholly unnecessary: the way up to the top of Poon Hill was lit up with tiny moving head lamps, eager to get to the top before sun rise.

By the time we got to the top after a 45 minute climb, there was already some light, although the sun was still lurking behind one of the mountains to the east. In total, we stayed at the top of Poon Hill for about half an hour, just taking it all in.

It was a surreal feeling, to be so high up that you stood over a sea of clouds, surrounded by some of the highest masses of land on this planet. Often when you’re in a plane, you’re told that the aircraft is flying however many thousands of feet above sea level. Those numbers don’t mean anything, they are just a series of zeros that separate you and solid Earth. Yet being up on top of Poon Hill meant something, because I had made it there step by step myself .





















If Poon Hill was the high point of the day, then all the rest of Day 3 was one long, frustrating low. We spent an hour or so in the morning literally walking at cloud level along a ridge, seeing nothing but a dense white.

Around noon, we started to descend … and descend … and descend … a neverending descent through the forrest, down wet, slippery stoney stairs, with our knees wobbling, and our clothes wet from the sweat and the damp permeating cold.

Finally at around 4:30pm in the afternoon, after almost 12 hours of trekking, we got to our destination for the night - Ghandruk, a sizeable village with a sizeable tourist presence, as it happens to be located both on the Poon Hill circuit and the Annapurna Base Camp route.

Unfortunately, one of downsides to having a sizeable tourist population meant that the children in the village gathered around anyone who looked foreign, demanded lollies, often sticking their hands openly into your pockets. As someone who has been travelling more and more in the past two years, it has been important to me to tread lightly and leave as little trace of my passing by as possible. Seems like other tourists could do with a bit of the same philosophy: don’t give local children lollies or money and encourage a begging mentality in the future generation of a developing country.

Nepal: Trekking Day 2 - Hile to Ghorepani

Day 2 was the beginning of our nightmare.

As we made our way up thousands of steps over the course of the morning, it became painfully obvious to us that we had underestimated the sheer steepness of the terrain in Nepal. To add insult to injury, local children would hop up the stairs between us wearing thongs (flip flops), while we struggled for breath in our Goretex hiking boots and state-of-the-art trekking poles. Our porter, who was carrying both of our luggage in one pack, barely broke a sweat as he leisurely made his way up the mountain while texting his friends.

Around noon, we reached the forrest part of the trek, where the route levelled off to a more reasonable incline. From there on, the afternoon became marginally easier as we were mostly walking in the shade, accompanied by a soundtrack of passing streams and waterfalls until we got to Ghorepani late in the afternoon.

At the altitude of 2775m above sea level, Ghorepani is the highest town on the Poon Hill circuit, and the ideal spot to rest the night before climbing up to the Poon Hill summit the next morning to watch the sun rise.

People can be rather divided about Ghorepani and Poon Hill. Some find it beautiful, and the highlight of the trip. Others find it too rowdy, too touristy, or lacking in authenticity.

I didn’t care. We were some 2700 metres above sea level, higher than the entire continent of Australia. We were surrounded by the snowy peaks of the Himalayas. We had a working hot shower, and a fire heated dining hall, in which we spent a merry night eating dhal bhat, drinking hot tea, and debating the best of Australian rock with perfect strangers. Touristy is good.

xx doots







Annapurna South peeking out in the morning. 





Reaching the shadier part of the trek. 





The gate to Ghorepani



Main street in town. There was even phone reception and wifi. HEAVEN. 

Nepal: Trekking Day 1 - Nayapul to Hile

In October, I went to Nepal with a friend. We did some volunteering at an orphanage in rural Chitwan, near the Indian border. After our short stint at the orphanage, we headed north into the mountains near Pokhara for the Ghorepani/Poon Hill trek. 

Poon Hill is one of the most popular short treks in Nepal, generally done over four to five days. We did ours in four, and hired a guide and a porter to save us the trouble of organising transportation, accommodation and meals along the way. I won’t go through a shopping list of the places we stayed at or the villages we passed along the way. Photos speak louder than words. 

But looking back, it’s amazing to consider how far I’ve come this year. I’ve never been an outdoors kind of person. Never had a great appreciation of nature. And yet this is my third trek of the year, a personal record.

Despite all physical challenges along the way, I found myself enjoying the simplicity of waking up every morning with nothing to do but walk. I loved the mindless physicality of the act, the ability to really think and hear yourself as you walked, and the fact that happiness can be nothing more than arriving at your destination each night, taking a hot shower (where possible), eating dhal bhat, and writing your travel journal in the kitchen with a hot cup of masala tea. 

The village of Nayapul, starting point of the trek.

In the warmer parts of the country, rice harvest was already in full swing. But here in the cooler mountains, the terraces were still fields of gold. 

Our room at the guest house: non-sound proof, no blankets, no fresh linen, no phone reception. One couldn’t look at the pillow too closely without feeling a sense of revulsion.

But after our stint in Chitwan, we were just grateful for a flush toilet. 

Oh. And the view wasn’t too bad.