Poon Hill Trek Day 1 - Pokhara to Ulleri

One thing we were looking forward to the most was doing a trek in the Himalayas. Tom and I lived in Nepal for three years and never took the time to do a multi-day trek. So, now that our kids were old enough, we figured it was time. 

We hired Empact Adventures (formerly Five14 Nepal) to handle the details.

https://www.empactadventures.com/

We chose the Poon Hill trek out of Pokhara because it’s didn’t go too high (only a little more than 10,000 feet) and we had heard that other kids had done it. You can do the trek in as few as three days or stretch it out to five. We chose the latter since we are inexperienced trekkers and had young kids.

The green line is our basic route for Poon Hill.

A word about our physical condition before the trek: while we are generally active people, we had not been "working out" during our travels. It was while we were in Malaysia that I realized that we might want to consider doing a bit of “training” for the trek. We spent about ten minutes one day doing some lunges, squats and a few push-ups and then did nothing more… 

So, in other words, we did not train for this trek at all. 

On day 1 of our five day Poon HIll trek we woke up refreshed in Pokhara (we had flown in from Kathmandu the day before). We all had showers and then a big breakfast on the garden terrace. 

While we waited for our driver and porter to arrive, Ethan, our trekking guide, showed Sammy how to use a Tibetan signing bowl.

Then we met up with Sohm, our local porter, who would carry most of our belongings. We loaded all the people and bags into the jeep and Ashish drove us three hours into the hills to our drop off point in Hille. The last hour of driving was not paved and pretty rough going. Ashish called them dancing roads because they made everyone dance in the car.

All loaded up and ready to go. We are looking less nervous than we feel!

Goodbye to roads, to Ashish, and all cars for a few days.

Once at Hille, we began days of stone stairs. The first day, we went up around 3000 of them. 

After about an hour of nature’s stair master, we stopped for lunch at Tikhedhungga where we all had Veg Daal Bhat. This is Nepal’s national dish of rice, lentils, and stir-fried vegetables in spices. It’s delicious and also excellent hiking food. Sammy also learned about the game of Carom.

We continued on our hike through mountain villages, crossing bridges, climbing stairs, meeting dogs and pack horses. It was only a few more hours of hiking and we arrived at our tea house for the night in Ulleri.

This was our first tea house. Simple rooms with toilet/shower are on the left and the dinning room is on the right.

Where Lucy and I slept. It's simple, but this is waaaaay easier than camping in a tent.

This was one of our shorter hiking days, but since it was all uphill, we were covered in sweat. 

We changed into dry clothing and spent some time journaling before dinner. 

It was misty when we got there, but was still beautiful.

This is the dining room. A number of other guests trickled in as they finished their hike. The cylinder on the right is a wood fireplace. We could dry our clothing on the rack around it. Most tea houses had a similar set-up.

Everyone is feeling much better about the trek after finishing Day 1.