Unplugged Travel, Trekking Nepal, and Pushing Past Your Comfort Zone with Tony Fletcher

Welcome Back, Tony Fletcher

Jason: You’re an honored guest, back on the podcast, my good buddy Tony Fletcher. Welcome back to the show, man.

Tony: Hey Jason, it’s so lovely to see you again. How are you?

Jason: I’m great. We were having some regular calls, we were actually talking about doing a project together, so we were getting used to seeing each other, and then it’s been a little while since we’ve connected. And then you sent me this email talking about your recent trip to Nepal, how you decided to unplug for the trip, and all of this. I said there was a lot to unpack, and we wanted to do it while it was fresh. So that’s why you’re here.

By the way, Tony, you’ve got a great Substack, if people want to follow it, TonyFletcher.Substack.com, we can link up to that. A lot of music stuff. You come from the music world, so that was a big thing we had in common. And this conversation could easily veer off into musical territory, but we’re going to do our best to keep it on travel.

Tony: Yeah, I think we can. When I was on before, and it was, gosh, it must have been at least three years back, maybe more than that, but you talked a lot about my writing career, my music career, and that was wonderful, and people got in touch with me after that show, and I was really, really happy to do it. I think you were like a really, really good interviewer. And this Nepal one, I just thought, you know, we were working on a project together that didn’t come off, but you’ve got your own project now, Smartphone Habits Reboot, and when I was reading your emails, which you’ve been sending to your regular listeners, I was like, he’s going to want to know about me switching off for two weeks. He really, really is. It’s perfect timing. So yeah, it’s great, it’s lovely to be back here.

Jason: I want you to share your experience for the listeners here, as maybe this is a framework for people who have a trip coming up relatively soon. First of all, you’re running your Substack, you’re doing different things. Everybody, whether they’re an employee or an entrepreneur or a solopreneur, they have their responsibilities, and that’s, I think, one of the things that really keeps us tethered to our phones and to our digital connections. It’s more than that, of course, you have people you want to stay in touch with, and then you have the logistics of travel, but a lot of times it’s the work stuff. It’s been harder and harder to step away from that.

So I think this is going to be a mix of, yeah, I want to hear about the mental health aspects of this unplugging, and how it affected your travel experience on the ground also. But I think within that we’re going to get some practical stuff for how to prepare for something like this. So first of all, you went to Nepal, give us the overview of the trip, and I want to hear about the unique way you approached this trek. But if you just give us some context for this, and then I want to talk about the unplugging aspect, and then we’ll talk a bit about the destination.

Tony: Sure, sure. The context of it: the reason I was really on your podcast last time around was to talk about the year of travel that I took in 2016, backpacking with my now ex-wife and our then eleven-year-old youngest son, where we spent ten and a half months backpacking around the world. And that was a life-changing experience, and I opened up to you about a lot of honest things on that, and how it actually did change my life in terms of no longer being married, and yet that being an incredibly positive trip, which sounds contradictory, but if somebody wants to go back and listen, they’ll understand why it actually wasn’t.

And we did go to Nepal during that time. We went in March of that year, and it was less than a year after the earthquake of 2015. There was still an awful lot of damage there, that the incompetence, and it is incompetence and dysfunction of the governments there, meant that there was a tent city in Boudhanath, the northeastern part of Kathmandu, where we were staying, where the big Buddhist stupa is. That tent city was about to go through its second monsoon, which was just awful. And there was also enormous, incredible pollution, which is a problem in Kathmandu anyway, it’s not all Nepal’s fault. There’s an enormous belt of pollution that comes up from this belt that extends from Pakistan through northern India and Bangladesh, and it sits in the Kathmandu Valley until the monsoon rains come. We sort of timed that badly, so the only time in ten and a half months we were physically sick was the day we landed in Kathmandu, and this pollution just hit us, just the smell of it, the toxic nature.

So it had always been, but we had this wonderful time because we got out of Kathmandu very quickly, went to Pokhara, the second city, very touristy, smaller city, a lot of people may know by name, and then we went on the Annapurna Base Camp trek, had the most incredible time. And before I went away, I actually had dinner with my ex-wife and now twenty-year-old kid, and we all agreed that was kind of the highlight, in more ways than one, of our year away. And I wanted to go back to Nepal.

Funnily enough, and I won’t get on too much of a tangent, I planned to go to Peru. I realized I finally had been able to, at the end of a difficult year, my mother passed away at the start of this year. I’ve been a parent for over thirty years, actively a parent for over thirty years, and I don’t take these long personal breaks. I go back to England, I’ll scoot off for a week or two somewhere at most, but I’ve never taken, literally at the age, in my sixties now, this sort of month-long trip on my own. And I had a manuscript, a book, to edit that’s coming out next year, it’s a second memoir, and I finally got the deal for it and needed to chisel it into better shape. I sort of realized I didn’t want to be at my desk, and I used that as the launching pad, as an excuse, to go away somewhere interesting at the end of a very major year.

And everything was pointing to Peru, except the cost of the airfares, which seemed to go up every time I thought about actually bringing a bag with me. And at the last minute I was like, what does it cost to go to Kathmandu right now? And I looked it up, and it was exactly the same price. I got two suitcases, I only used one, but I got to bring two suitcases. And the flights were sort of a straight shot, a layover in Doha of two hours, versus having to get out at Lima, completely different airlines, whatever. And so I suddenly said, this is it. And the other thing was, I looked up the weather, and whereas the weather in Cusco was going to be not ideal in November, the weather in Kathmandu, and in general in Nepal, for trekking is perfect in November, there is zero rain in November. There actually was rain when I landed because a cyclone came through, but it was gone by November 2nd. And that helped just convince me. I said, great, I’m actually going to go back and see this country nine years down the line. The weather will be better, there shouldn’t be pollution, there’s been no earthquake. There has been a revolution in the last couple of weeks, which probably explains why the airfares are low. And next I knew, off I went.

Returning to Boudhanath

Tony: And I went back to Boudhanath, or Boudha, depending, I’m not quite sure how you pronounce it. That was its own place for a long time, but like many cities, it’s been engulfed by Kathmandu, by a bigger capital city. There is this enormous, incredible, beautiful Buddhist stupa there, it’s a Tibetan Buddhist area. It’s one of seven UNESCO World Heritage sites in the Kathmandu Valley, which is more concentrated than any other country on Earth, any other area on Earth. We had stayed close to that before, but this time I stayed right on the circle that goes around the stupa. I spent my first week there and my last week there.

And then I had always thought, one reason I was looking at Cusco, I’m a runner, I’m a hiker, I wanted to climb mountains, get away. I thought in Cusco it might be day trips, but even before I got to Nepal, I got a book out of the library on trekking in Nepal and took it with me. And after being in Boudhanath for a week, I went and did a two-week trip into the Langtang Valley. And I did it in an interesting way.

Jason: Yeah, we’re going to talk about that.

Tony: Yeah, exactly. So that’s the basics. So then I came back and spent my last week in Boudha.

Jason: Okay, yeah, that stupa, isn’t it just wonderful to walk around? You fall into it. So you’ve been there, right?

Tony: Yeah, yeah. It’s such a peaceful feeling to just walk in circles around it, it is unbelievably peaceful. I met a couple of people, young people, on the trek. I met someone from Belgium who was really smart and interesting, and he had two days left when he got down from the trek, and I said, go over to the stupa. And as I was describing it, he said, well, I don’t want to be one of these sort of cultural, I don’t want to interfere. And I said, it’s not that, you’ll go there, there’s lots of different people. Young people come out for their Instagram photos these days, but you will find yourself just, everybody’s doing their own thing, and you just fall into this: let me walk around the stupa and spin some prayer wheels and put some positive thoughts out into the universe. And, ah, now I get this. Now it’s like you fall into it, and you’re right, it is so peaceful there, so spiritual. And the strange thing is, Jason, that main south entrance to it is like ten meters from the bow of the road, where it’s just horns and motorbikes, scooters, and you don’t hear any of that once you walk those ten meters. It’s not like there’s an on-off switch, but it’s like something spiritual switches on. And you wouldn’t know that you are that close to a traffic jam.

Jason: It’s amazing. Right, that’s true, yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. I mean, you hear that some of the peripheral chanting going on, and there’s a sort of sonic atmosphere that’s interesting as well.

Tony: The busy time at the stupa is dawn and dusk, and particularly at dawn you get the monasteries opening up. There’s two of them on the actual circle that goes around it, and they have services that you hear, they’re playing the horns, they’re playing their ritual music, they’re doing their chanting. And then in the evenings there’s often some kind of ceremony that, if you were a Tibetan Buddhist, you would know why it was this evening and not tomorrow evening. And similarly you get that right outside as well. There were even a couple of wedding marches that went around one day as well, which was enormous, brass bands. It was apparently the Tuesday I was back in Boudha was an auspicious day to get married, so all day long there were these brass bands and watching married couples walk around as well. So it was a very different vibe, it was sweet.

Jason: Oh, nice, man, that’s great. I mean, the stupa itself is so impressive when you walk in, but then it’s all of the other things too. You’re walking around with just groups of humans, and there is something magical about it. There is what do we call it, like a Zen euphoria, maybe? I don’t know.

Tony: Oh, Zen euphoria, that’s a great name for a band, Jason.

Jason: Zen Euphoria, I’ve been doing that a lot lately, we both play in bands, and sometimes I’m like, hey, that’s a good song title, that’s a good band name.

Tony: Yeah, I write down all my song titles now, I have a running list of those. Yeah, but Zen Euphoria is great. It’s a good way of putting it, because the euphoria is very internal, you’re actually being very Zen, it’s not a place to shout and make a fool of yourself. And it should be said, I’m sure most people wouldn’t know, because we didn’t when we got there nine years ago, you circumambulate the Buddhist stupas in a clockwise direction. You need to keep the spiritual symbol to your right. So that also applies at times when you’re on a trek and you’ve got maybe a prayer wall that has two ways around it, you want to keep it on your right as you go up and your right as you come down. But yeah, it’s very Zen in that it’s very quiet, apart from the chanting or what you might hear from the monasteries, but there is an inner something going on inside.

Similarly, I do want to say, when we were there nine years ago, the stupa was very badly damaged in the earthquake. The beautiful spire, the steeple at the top, the eyes of the Buddha that are symbolic and seen on lots of images of Nepal, it was badly damaged, and it actually got repaired, and it was the first major monument to reopen, because it was done privately without help from the government, basically. But it meant it had scaffolding around it when we were there nine years ago, and although you could access and walk around, there was a sort of mournful feeling, I felt, what with the pollution and the gray skies, that you had a sense that all was not right, which didn’t stop people, of course, circumambulating in prayer to make the world right. And so to see it restored to its glory in sunshine was just wonderful. I mean, the moment I got there I just felt like, oh my gosh, this is why I came to see this. And I had thought about staying in other places, just going off to Bhaktapur for a couple of nights, something like that, and I ended up spending that entire first and last week in Boudha, at two different guest houses on the stupa, because I was just so happy there. And at peace, very, very much at peace as well.

Jason: Definitely a place to check out. Isn’t circumambulation a great word?

Tony: Yeah, yeah, I had to, I think I was calling it circumambulate, I’m only the writer here.

Jason: It is a great word.

Tony: I learned more about it when I picked up a book from one of the little guest house libraries called How to Circumambulate a Stupa.

Jason: Okay, yeah, that’s a very practical, specific guide.

Tony: Yeah, really, really. There is so much Buddhist literature, I mean there really, really, really is. But yeah, that was an interesting one. It also got into the whys, but it was how-to about applying yourself and not being a tourist. But in fairness, I think that could be applied to many of the young Nepalis who, like I say, they come out on a beautiful evening and morning and daytime and weekend, they Instagram the hell out of themselves, or TikTok, whatever they’re doing. Whatever the kids are doing these days, Jason.

Jason: Yeah, now you sound old.

Tony: I do, don’t I?

A Funny Pokhara Memory

Jason: I want to talk about the unplugging in a second, but I will share a funny, my biggest Pokhara memory. In that city, that is where my wife got sick, and she sent me on what was perhaps the most difficult travel mission I have ever embarked on, I’m being sarcastic. But she wanted me to get her something very specific because of the way her stomach felt, and she wanted, I think, a pancake with Nutella and a Sprite. And I’m like, oh, that will be easy to find, maybe, I don’t know, I could hit one of those tourist spots. About two hours later, I ran all over town to look for these things and finally did find them, I think I came back two or three hours later. And then she just left it untouched, like her stomach, she didn’t want it at all. She’s not like a diva like that or anything, but it was just a funny story. We still talk about it today.

Tony: Yeah, I’m thinking pancakes are everywhere, but that’s very specific, Nutella. It was Nutella and a Sprite.

Jason: So yeah, maybe I should serve that to her on the next holiday meal or something, I don’t know.

Deciding to Switch Off

Jason: I don’t know if you did decide, you made the conscious decision to switch offline for two weeks, you said you planned it in the email. I don’t know how committed you were from a mindset perspective, I don’t know how you set yourself up for that. Why the decision, and what were some of the big lessons coming out of that? I’m really fishing for a mix of advice and perhaps inspiration for anybody listening that wants to unplug for a period of time while they’re traveling.

Tony: Sure, sure thing. Yeah, I gave you a couple of the reasons for coming away, going away. And there was another reason: I live in the States, and the States, and indeed the world, is going through a very, very, very difficult time. And the news is painful every day, it really feels dystopian, Orwellian, it’s horrible. And it feels worse here, but it’s pretty bad everywhere, it feels like difficult times, and every expert that I do read warns that we’re headed the wrong way, that we’re headed towards global conflicts and definitely ecological disaster, etc, etc.

And I’ve always been a newshound. I’ve been actively engaged at times in my life politically, I’ve always wanted to stay informed. And it’s so easy to get trapped into that negative news cycle. It is so different, I don’t mind showing my age, because there were a lot of things that struck me about going on this trip. I grew up at a time in a country, the UK, where we had three TV channels, and the news came on every few hours. And yes, my mother got a newspaper, but we weren’t being hit with news all the time, and news media gravitates to the bad news, you know, the old “man bites dog” versus “dog bites man,” one of those is a headline, one is not. So I’m not blaming the media, but I am blaming the surfeit of media and our ability to be connected worldwide, which obviously has so many advantages, but it also means we just get caught in what’s the new bad news, and then in particular, it’s a frustration of mine, but coming back from this trip I’m trying not to judge, and even on the trip I was trying not to judge, but really good people who go on, particularly of my crowd, on Facebook, and sort of just hourly and certainly daily unravel and pull out their thoughts on what’s going on. And I maintain you’re not going to change the world on Facebook.

This kind of commentary, and the way that something like Facebook brings out the road rage in people, that idea that people are really nice until they get behind the wheel of a car, I feel similarly about social media, and we all know it. There’s so many people that I know who are great people, but put them on social media and it’s like red rag to a bull, they’re suddenly shouting at people, and you’re like, this is not the same person. And I really, really wanted to get away from all of this. I’ve been growing increasingly, almost disappointed with myself for feeling I need social media, like I need it to promote my Substack, when in fact Facebook and Instagram have algorithms now built in to not promote external links to Substack. So I’m fighting a losing battle. And I felt the need to just switch off from that news cycle.

I did understand the irony of going to a country that just had a violent conflict in which school kids were shot dead and led to retribution attacks and the overthrowing or the resignation of the government. It’s been titled the Gen Z Revolution, though I again think that’s a media oversimplification. I understood that irony, but to be honest, I was more interested in being on the ground and talking to young Nepali people who might have been part of that movement than I was in reading the New York Times or Facebook or The Guardian.

And I also, what came to mind is there are countries that enforce you to take holidays. I don’t know if Norway is one of them, but certainly somewhere like Germany, where you get six, seven weeks of holiday a year, it’s now, as far as I know, become mandatory that you’re disconnected from your work email. And I get this a lot when I deal with the UK, I’m not in the office today, deal with somebody else. We are, particularly those of us who are self-employed, but it’s true of a lot of employed people, especially in the States, it’s just this idea you’re on call twenty-four hours a day and you never stop working. And I’m a workaholic, so I’m very prone to that. I just felt, you know, I want to go back to what it was like when I was younger, where you went on holiday and that was it. If you called your friend over the summer and you’re like, oh, is so-and-so around? And they’re like, no, no, they’ve gone to France for two weeks, it’s like, oh, when are they back? And you try and remember the date and you call them when you got back, when they got back. And we’ve lost that, we’ve really, really lost that.

And indeed, a lot of the people that I saw on the trek were on their phones in the tea houses in the evenings. And again, I’m not judging, there’s a multitude of their own reasons, and they may not be, they may be enjoying the experience. I wanted to switch off. And when I set up for the trek, I actually had got a different phone, I got my son’s iPhone to have a better camera, I basically bought it from him. And I did not install Facebook. And what I did do when I went on the trek, I didn’t box them, but I made sure that the front page of my phone was things I wanted to use. I would have been genuinely lost without my CalTopo map app, so it’s not like I didn’t use my phone. There is a funny story about how I very, very nearly lost that brand new iPhone for good, only one week into the trek, but I did use the phone, but I avoided everything, email, WhatsApp, I had my phone messages switched off because I was using a local SIM card. Absolutely no social media, no news of any kind.

And interestingly, I barely discussed the news with other trekkers, that’s a point we could follow up on. And the only exception was one week through the trek, which I thought was going to be the harder week, I said I’d let my partner know I got through it, because I was doing something a bit unusual. And interestingly, it was an evening when the Wi-Fi wasn’t working properly at this tea house, and it took me about an hour or two hours to be convinced I got one message through, and I was like, this is why I don’t want to be on my phone, I don’t want to be spending all this time having to get a message through and worrying if the message is through. I just want to switch off. So that was the extent.

So I did set that goal, and then it extended somewhat when I got back to Boudhanath, to be honest. I felt so refreshed and blessed by not being in this negative news cycle. I decided to only focus on the poor news for my last week, and I actually actively sought to avoid catching up on UK and US news for an additional week. I realized I couldn’t change what’s going on in those countries, and I understand the need to stay informed, I just said, I’m taking an extra week, I’m going to stay local. And when I get back to the States, then I’ll start catching up properly on what has or has not been going on in my absence.

Jason: Yeah, the whole idea, my opinion, at least of this, oh, we need to stay informed, you know, we need to be informed, we do, but do we need to stay informed at the rate that we’re informed? Even just the radio listener, like here in Norway, for example, the news comes on the national radio station like once every hour, and I just still argue, do we need to know the news even once every hour? I mean, big things happen, of course, and then you can understand why, hey, let’s all find out what’s going on, but there’s things happening all the time, and it’s just an endless deluge. I mean, again, this isn’t judging, it’s just that I feel like too much news for myself personally is not good for my mental health, but at the same time it is very clickable and very easy to find that news and to go to it, even though you know it’s bad.

Was there sort of a — they say like a digital detox for a reason, because like much like any addiction, you have to kind of detox, there’s like a detox period perhaps, and then you kind of enter maybe a different sort of state. Did you feel like there were sort of levels to this? Did you actually have to settle in and slow your brain down? What did that look like, how did you — it sounds like you felt great coming out of it, but then now it’s maybe creeping back in. What’s been the arc for you there?

Tony: That’s an important question. I did plan this reasonably well in the sense that I said I’m going to do work in Boudha for a week, and I was able to do it, and when I got to Boudha and around the stupa I actually did not feel the need — I thought during that first week, oh, let me go into Kathmandu and see what happened, what the damage is to these government buildings, all of that, waited until my last week. I was very comfortable, I felt like — I don’t want to make this too grandiose, but I did feel a sense of homecoming. I felt very at home around that stupa, like really at home. I found a place, lots of places where I could take my manuscript and work on it, and so a few hours’ work a day. I wasn’t doing the eight hours a day of work in Nepal, but I got the work done on the first and last weeks. And that first week allowed me to settle in, plan my trek, and start sort of just being, okay, this cycle of negativity, this horrible administration that we have in the States that’s committing harm to people and reveling in it, and is not the country I chose to move to, and not the country I thought would be going this way, that is now several thousand miles away, and like literally about the other side of the world. And I’m not seeing people devouring American news here, I don’t have to, they’re not talking about it, they’re not devouring it. So if I stay off social media, I don’t have to either. So that first week really helped me prep for the trek.

Preparing for the Trek

Tony: The trek obviously took a fair amount of online research, and I was, I think this is a human thing that probably so many of your listeners will identify with, and I’m sure other guests have talked about trying to battle it. By giving myself a week to plan the trek, I managed to talk myself out of it several times. Why don’t I just do what everybody else is doing? Why am I always choosing the hard way? And of course, as I found when we took that round-the-world trip, when you’re not on your trip, it looks daunting. Once you undertake the trip, and I’m talking about getting on the plane to go somewhere, but I’m also talking about leaving my hotel and starting the trek, once you actually get out and do that thing that you wanted to do, you realize you can do it. You can talk yourself out of it, and that was definitely going on.

It’s particularly, I had jet lag at both ends, because it is like almost a twelve-hour time difference, and I was waking in the middle of the night over for the first five nights over in Boudha, another reason I’m really glad I didn’t go straight on the trek. And during that couple of hours I’d be awake during the evening, the middle of the night, before getting back to sleep, I’d sort of be able to talk myself out of this trek, and then of course when I woke up properly, had my coffee, whatever, I’d get back into it. But on the detox and planning, I ended up detoxing in other ways I didn’t expect as well. A couple of nights in, I was like, there’s craft beer here in Nepal now, there wasn’t nine years ago, and there’s this little outdoor bar right next to the Sherpa kitchen right outside my little guest house, I’ll have a local beer, maybe I’ll sleep better. I had a local beer, it was fine, Jason, but I didn’t sleep better, so I was like, ah, it’s not that, I don’t need to have alcohol on this trip, definitely not on the trek. And then I found myself, the Nepali really love their coffee, and they train a lot of baristas, that’s a whole other conversation, but it’s becoming an export skill. So there’s like good coffee all the way around the stupa, and I was doing that because I’m a coffee hound. Once I got on the trek, I realized Nescafe or tea, I’ll have the tea, and then I’d be off trekking, and next I knew I’d given up coffee as well.

Jason: Giving up coffee? Let’s not get carried away here, Tony, come on.

Tony: I know, I had coffee this morning to prep for you, but it was really interesting. I think I scaled back on the caffeine on a level that’s probably really, really good for me. So there were unintended benefits, I hadn’t gone into the trip expecting that to happen. I mean, I knew I wouldn’t want to drink on the trek because you get up into altitude and it was going to be a lot of work, but I didn’t really expect that to happen. So it wasn’t a forever, it wasn’t a “oh right, this has reset me for life,” because it hasn’t, but it certainly knocked me back down, healthily back down the ladder in a really, really good way, and made me realize that when your goal is to get up in the morning and go out and walk in the beautiful Himalaya, one cup of tea, maybe two, that’s all you need. Then you’ve got sunshine and then you’re in a good mood, all’s good with the world.

Jason: Nice. Yeah, I mean there’s a lot of value in just that, the temporary reset even, or just the lessons, like you said, the snowball effect of, where is this detox from X, Y, or Z thing going to take me? There’s some unintended positive benefits to that as well, so it’s a worthwhile experiment to undertake, whether it’s from your telephone or something else. I feel like it does add to the travel experience. I mean, obviously you go to a different place, you’re completely changing your surroundings, and there’s all of that that comes with travel, but then if you add the layer of experimentation, and you break from your daily habit routine, which you do when you’re traveling, but you still have things you can incorporate, right? Like coffee, and you can get up and check your email, there’s still things that you can do on the road, but if you take those things away too, that just adds another layer to the exploration of self, I think, out on the road.

Tony: It really, really does. It really, really does. This extends in other ways that you may or may not be planning to ask me. Choosing to read a book in a tea house as opposed to being on your phone invites conversation, and then you get recommended other books, and then somebody’s talking about the books they’re reading, and maybe you’re showing each other your books. I would certainly advocate, I’m a writer, but I’m aware that people are reading less books these days, less literature, magazines in general, so obviously I’m going to advocate that. I also sort of loaded up, I figured that I’d be doing a lot of trekking on my own, because I did this solo and unsupported, meaning no guide, no porter, and I figured there would be large chunks of days when I wasn’t talking with other people, so I loaded up the podcasts, and I got five minutes through a podcast that I love that’s about my football team, my soccer team, and I was like, wrong place, wrong place. And I wasn’t going to be downloading new ones, because that would bring me back into the news cycle. So I made sure I had some downloaded, and I was just like, nah, I’m not going to be watching. I won’t know the scores while I’m away, so I don’t need to listen to the podcast.

I didn’t want to listen to music either. So for that two weeks, all I actually listened to were a few talks from the Zen Mountain Monastery, which I used to attend back in Mount Tremper in the Catskills, and there was a sense of familiarity. And even though that particular Zen tradition is more the Japanese, China, more the eastern tradition, and I was in a Tibetan Buddhist area, there was still enough connection, a couple of those talks made sense, but even there I listened to less of those than I expected. So there was a lot of golden silence, and a lot of really golden talking to people as well.

Jason: Nice, yeah, that’s interesting, specific example of the book versus the phone thing, which is, you’re still consuming, you’re still sitting in a cafe, it’s just one thing is changing, and that leads to a whole other chain reaction of experiences.

Choosing an Unconventional Route

Jason: The way you approached the trek was something I had fantasized about before I went to Nepal, was starting in Kathmandu, and rather than taking transportation to the trailhead, which most people do, just like, well, why don’t I just walk out of my hotel room and start trekking? And you can acclimatize, you can get a workout, you can walk through places most people aren’t walking through. I didn’t do it, maybe I regret it, I don’t know yet, I have to think about that, I try not to have any travel regrets. But you did do this, and we can talk about this specifically to Nepal, but there’s trekking and different things like this all over the world, and we think about bridging the gap, and a lot of times it’s just a time constraint, right? You’re on the ground in some base, city, town, whatever, and you want to do this excursion, and then there’s the physical gap in between that, which often involves, all right, well, we have to get all the tourists or the travelers there, so we’re going to transport them this way or whatever, by walking it. And I wanted to hear about that experience. What was it like — I mean, you basically walked out of your hotel room to go on your trek instead of going to the trailhead with everybody else.

Tony: I did. And I’m just trying to look here because it’s a book I got out of the library that had a nice tour of Nepal that maybe the library didn’t expect it to have while I was going. Oh, have I found it, I do believe. Good, I found it. So I want to give credit here to the book, it’s by Robin Boustead, Nepal Trekking and the Great Himalaya Trail, I think that’s the book. It was really a book for trekkers, it wasn’t a guidebook that says, hey, you can go on the Langtang trek and you can go to Annapurna Base Camp or Everest Base Camp, and maybe I can also give you reasons I chose not to do other treks and why, as much as why I chose Langtang. So I’ve got those other books, and some of those other books are not great for the trekking, this was like, it had layouts of elevation gains and daily routes.

And I felt like, okay, this is a good book to take with me. And early in the book it said, you know, that you can even walk out of your hotel in Kathmandu and start the Langtang trek. And that stuck with me. And when I read these chapters about it, it’s sort of the Helambu trek as well, where you start at the national park on the northeastern end of the city, where the city sort of gives up, where it’s flat and starts climbing.

Well, what most people do, Jason, and by most people, I’m talking about probably 99.9% of Western trekkers, they take a bus from Kathmandu at six in the morning or so, up to a place called either Dhunche or further up, Syabrubesi. And that’s like a direct northern eight-hour bus journey, and doesn’t cover what you would cover in eight hours in the States or Norway, but anyway, it is a long bus journey. And you then join the Langtang trek and you go from west to east and you start climbing, and you get to a point on the east, a place called Kyanjin Gompa, which I went to, which is actually quite a big place, more like a small town than just a few tea houses or a large village. And if you want to continue from there, you need to be an expert, you need tents, you’re not going to do that on your own. But the Langtang trek, that part is very doable.

And so what a lot of people do to make more of it is, when they come back and come back west, they diverge south, it’s a bit more angular than that, it kind of goes from northwest down to southeast. And they come down over the Gosaikunda Lake, which are sacred lakes at four thousand plus meters, and then over the Laurebina Pass and down towards Kathmandu, towards this national park. And some of them skip out, at the moment there’s a road and they get a jeep back to Kathmandu, that’s really, really popular, and I think it’s beautiful. And the reason most people do it coming down is because going up involves an awful lot of climbing.

And I instead read this book, and the idea that I could walk out of the hotel and be at the national park, a taxi would have cost me like five dollars at most, maybe three dollars to get to the national park, that wasn’t the point. On a Saturday morning, I got up, put my backpack on, circumambulated the stupa once, which was great because I remembered the things I’d forgotten, went back, picked those up, and headed off. Because I was in the northeast of the city already, I didn’t have to deal with the worst of the traffic, and headed up sort of relatively quiet streets to the national park, it was only two hours for me. And then I started climbing. And I was the only Westerner I met doing that, all the way up to the Laurebina Pass.

So there are people who do that Helambu trek, I may have mispronounced that, I’m sorry, which kind of goes up the first three days I did and then sort of takes a loop and comes back down. So I had plenty of company for the first three days, but then from there to going over the Laurebina Pass to Gosaikunda, nobody from the West does it that way, and I did feel very unique doing that.

Jason: Yeah, okay, well, that’s a great, yeah, overarching principle for travelers, that there are, even in popular places and on popular excursions, there are unique ways to do it where it’s still off the beaten track, so to speak.

Choosing a Trek in Nepal

Jason: Yeah. Do you want to give us your advice for choosing a trek in Nepal? Sounds like you did some research on several.

Tony: Absolutely, absolutely. The three most popular are Annapurna Base Camp, Everest Base Camp, and Langtang. Annapurna Base Camp, you go from Pokhara, and it’s very attractive because Pokhara is lovely, and I seem to remember it’s a short bus ride to the start of the trek. The trek’s not that hard, our eleven-year-old kid did it, I mean it is hard, I shouldn’t underplay that, the trekking is hard, particularly when you get confronted with those bloody steps, and as a trail runner I’m like, give me slippery rocks any day, just the endless going up steps where you can’t choose your footstep, it’s chosen for you. None of them are easy, but Annapurna and Langtang, having done them both, my eleven-year-old could probably have done the west-to-east part, the part that most people do.

And Langtang, it’s that bus ride from Kathmandu, and people do it, or they take a jeep, which is marketed now as an electric vehicle, so that seems attractive, so they take that, although it’s not much quicker. And in terms of my choosing, I have no interest in climbing Mount Everest itself, quite apart from the fact I don’t have a hundred grand to drop on it, I just see it as vainglorious, ruining the planet, like everything that’s bucket-list wrong with society, and excuse me, I am judging, but I’ll leave the mountains to the mountaineers.

Everest Base Camp, I got the impression that it’s just like what people want to do, they can say they went to Everest Base Camp, and that was sort of confirmed to me, and I did meet a lovely English woman on my first night at my guest house who was having dinner on the terrace roof, and she was sort of recommending it. As it turned out, that cyclone I mentioned earlier on did some really major damage to the treks, and it closed the airport that most people fly into from Kathmandu to start the Everest Base Camp trek for four whole days right when I got there, stranding, understandably, hundreds if not thousands of trekkers, people had to be rescued off the Annapurna Circuit trek, and there were two avalanches that killed mountaineers. So I arrived in the middle of some unexpected serious weather, so Everest was discounted anyway. And although this English person said, you know, you can actually also walk to where that airport is, it’ll take you four or five days, but if you want to walk the whole thing you can, and there was a different route to go where I wouldn’t end up at Everest Base Camp, and like, that’s too much, that’s just, it’s not what’s calling me.

I’ve done Annapurna, I felt that to redo it would be risky based on how much we loved it in 2016, and I liked the idea of doing something new. And then I just got sold on the idea of, am I crazy enough to put on an enormously overweight backpack, and if people want advice, don’t do what I did, I mean there are items you can leave behind, and I’ve actually made a list of them and weighed them, and they ended up being six or seven pounds, that was an enormous amount of extra weight to be carrying when you’re climbing. But I just thought, am I mad enough to go do this? Yes, I am, let’s do it. But I do believe that Langtang, if somebody is like, okay, this guy’s crazy, I’m not going to do that climbing, but taking that bus and either choosing to go with a guide or a porter or both, you can easily do Langtang and you will thoroughly enjoy it.

In the entire time I was on the trek, and I’m very chatty, as listeners might realize, I talked to so many people. I’d always be asking, I’d say, Namaste, you always say Namaste to people you greet, and I would typically ask them what country they were from, I was just genuinely interested. I only met one grumpy person the entire trip, unfortunately I seemed to get landed with them for a couple of days because we were on the same route. Everybody else just looked radiant, even if they looked physically tired, they looked radiant.

Jason: Nice, okay. I will also plug the trek I did, the Manaslu trek, which was a great walk, and we did it in like 2014, I believe. Yes, we have a whole podcast about it I can link to if people are curious about that. Yeah, I mean trekking in Nepal, of course, one of the big life-list things for a lot of people, so I just thought that was worth touching on.

Life on the Trail

Jason: I mean, I know you did this, you were there solo, it sounds like you’re kind of, let’s say, settling back into society, if you will, coming off of a trip like this, transitioning from being on the road and being disconnected and all those things. But now that you’re kind of looking back, what are some of the other lessons? Was there anything else from that trip that you wanted to share here, that you thought would be worthwhile for people listening, whether they’re planning a trip to Nepal specifically, or just travel advice or life advice or anything like that that you want to share?

Tony: I think I mentioned the aspects that are so familiar, which is you’re going to worry about a trip in advance, you’re going to worry about a trek in advance, you’re going to second-guess yourself about what you brought with you, per me bringing things I didn’t need to bring. You’re going to wonder if you should have hired that guide, if they’re as good as they could be, ditto with the porter, or if you go unsupported. And I need to give a caveat in a minute that’s important and tells a lovely story as well. But the bottom line is start, and once you start, it all falls into place. And I was really trying to do this living in the moment, as in, you know, what’s past is past, and you learn from it, like every day you just sort of learned, did that food work with me, was the cup of tea better than the coffee, you apply that to the next day. But once you’re in the moment you’re like, I’ll get to my destination today, and there’s going to be another destination, there’s always going to be a tea house to stay at.

People who don’t know Nepal, these treks, all of them, there were tea houses all over these mountains and rural areas, and you just sort of walk until you get to another little, it might only be two tea houses, that might be the village. So you’re looking on your map and it’s like, oh, I’m coming to a village, and the village is two tea houses next to each other that both want you to stay over.

There are some things I want to mention that may be attractive to people, without getting into economy of scale and why, a Coca-Cola, I tend to use that as a good example because it’s universal, might cost X dollars, is it krona in Norway?

Jason: Yeah, oh good, I got that.

Tony: And then it will cost like one-quarter in Nepali rupees, even though ostensibly it’s the same drink. But it is very inexpensive once you pay that flight to be in Nepal. I was staying in beautiful accommodation for twenty, twenty-five dollars a night. I love Nepali food, that’s another reason to go, I was just in love with the food, and I ate so clean and healthy there. I sort of found a place off the stupa that I did not find when we were there nine years ago, probably weren’t there enough, called Utpala, that is an outdoor vegetarian, vegan place that’s really quite large, welcomes you to work there during the day, has this amazing food. And only on the last night, when I was like, there’s still items on the menu I haven’t tried and I’ve got to have momos again, did I get over a thousand rupees for my meal, and that’s $7.50, and that was like a four-course meal.

And on the trek itself, you barely pay for your accommodation, they make their money on just the fact that you’re doing food with them, so the understanding is, you get to a tea house, you check how much they want to charge you for a room, I did not pay more than a thousand rupees for a room at any of these treks, that’s again only about $7.50, $8 sorry, convert if you can. And the food would generally be between, I’m looking here, between about 1,500 and 3,000 rupees. So again, I’m only paying, over the entire trek, per day, $25 or so. And I did actually do a spreadsheet that included all my elevation and my daily trekking because I wanted to. Over the cost of the trek, now this includes hiring a porter to get me over the pass, and that was a big expense, and including a couple of national park fees, and including the bus back from Syabrubesi, because I came down the way most people would go up on that bus, averaged out to just about $30 a day, and I was having the time of my life.

So I do want to say, although Nepal is a poor country and people should be earning more, etc, etc, if you can afford the airfare, which is a big if, a massive if, then this is a very inexpensive place to be, and you will eat so well. And the people as well, it’s a very standard traveler tourist trope to be like “and the people are so friendly,” but if you’ve been to a lot of places, and I genuinely and generally think most people are good and most people will want to look after a traveler and just make sure they’re comfortable, but it’s on another level in Nepal, people are just astonishingly friendly, they’re very hard to anger, which makes the actions of September and the revolution more interesting. But I got into just, Nepali people often would gravitate to me, especially young people, I got into lots of great conversations. So I’m advocating that in general, I’m advocating to start your trip in general, just do it, it’ll fall into place. And Nepal in particular, if you want to go trekking.

And all those, like you mentioned Manaslu, I met people who come every year, people who like, yeah, it’s my fifteenth time in Nepal, and they do different treks. I’d love to go to Dolpo, to Manaslu, to all these different places, and I suspect I probably will in years to come.

And I also met on my very last day coming down, almost as if he was put there by fate, an English guy, and I guess probably about seventy now, who spends six months of a year just living at this one tea house, it’s like a farm stay, because he was there when the earthquake hit and he bonded with the family. And now he’s spending half his year, he’s just hanging out there, he just had a hip replacement and he’s just hanging out there, being at peace with the world.

Jason: It’s beautiful, I love that. It’s always special when you find a place in the world that you feel so strongly about that you feel like you could come to and it resonates with you and it feels like some version of home on some level, and when you find those places it’s a gift. And I love to hear that people, these random people out in the world, some guy that’s bonded with a family that’s just living in some village for half the year, this is like, there’s all these people that, if they’re not talking about it on social media or whatever, you never hear about them, and that’s, I just love that.

Tony: I love it as well. It’s a little like climbing a mountain and found a yogi sitting at the top, you know, meditating. It was coming down, but it was indeed a sort of beautiful thing.

Tea Houses, Blankets, and Comfort on the Trail

Tony: And maybe people who’ve been on these treks will know the tea houses are not glamorous, that’s the reason they only charge you like five bucks to stay there. One good thing about traveling solo is that every single night I get given a twin room and I could steal the blanket from the other bed, which saved me, I did not bring a sleeping bag with me, which most people advise because it gets so cold at night. Only one place on my second night did the owner not let me use that second blanket, else it was just like, yeah, the room is yours. And very few of them have really functional showers, the higher up you get the less functional they get, but there were exceptions.

When I stayed in the new Langtang village, because I should absolutely mention this, I wouldn’t want to not mention this, the actual village of Langtang was destroyed in the 2015 earthquake, hundreds of people lost their lives, including dozens of trekkers, ten soldiers, hundreds of locals. There was a Netflix movie, I think called Aftershock, or documentary, about what happened to some of those people, the trekkers, some mistakes they made trying to come out of that. There’s a new Langtang village now, and so the buildings are new. And Langtang would have been my penultimate stop, heading east up that west-to-east trek, and I loved the place so much, and my backpack was doing my head in so much, that I stayed there three nights, and for the next two days I walked, and unbelievably, the next day I actually jogged up to Kyanjin Gompa and came back again in the evening.

Now, maybe I’ve got, you know, I’m an ultra runner, so I’ve got extra miles available on my legs, but that worked for me. It’s nice to have an in-room shower that actually has hot water, so sometimes you are, it looks unbelievably rough, but you’re only really in there to sleep. Because you spend your evening in the warm dining room where there’s a fire raging and talking to other people, and then you run out and quickly get under the bed covers, and in the morning you kind of get up, it’s super cold, and you run in and get a cup of hot tea, and all’s okay with the world. And if you can bury yourself under the extra blanket during the night, you’ll probably get to sleep.

Jason: Love it. Where can everybody find your stuff? We can remind them one more time, invite people to get in touch if they have more questions about traveling in Nepal or anything.

Tony: Yeah, just absolutely, I’ve really tried to focus myself now away from social media, and I gave up my own website, it is TonyFletcher.Substack.com, that’s pretty easy to remember. I think most people are aware of Substack, which started out as a newsletter distribution where people with followings can earn from their subscribers, it’s turning more social media, which is disappointing a lot of us, but at the bottom line, come on over, please hit the subscribe button, I only post twice a week, and that will land in your email box, and there are free subscriptions. Every now and then I’ll put something up that’s like an interview transcript from one of the books I’ve written that I think is for the paid subscribers, but there’s lots there. I do write about my travels, and that is where people can find me.

The Lost Phone

Tony: There was a couple of things you asked that I didn’t quite answer. There is one tip I want to give people when they’re on a trek.

Jason: Okay.

Tony: Never stand on the cliffside of a donkey train, like a mule train.

Jason: Good advice.

Tony: Particularly, don’t do that, you will notice the guides don’t do that and the other porters don’t do that. Particularly, don’t get your phone out to film them, which is pointless anyway, already said you’re not going to post on social media, and you’ve seen donkey trains before, because one week into my trek I decided to do that, and one of the donkeys went “no photos today please,” swished its tail and knocked my phone out of my hand and over the edge of the trail.

Jason: Oh my gosh.

Tony: And I did not find it after an hour, and I had at that point got cut up badly by bamboo, I had all these sticky things, this weird little plant that sticks to every item of clothing, your phone was taking the “no phone” thing literally. And I believe me, when I was trying to look for it, I was like, when I said I was switching off, I didn’t intend to lose this phone I just bought from my son quite so quickly, and how am I going to get through the rest of the week? I had actually given up. When I came back out of this, I mean it wasn’t a cliff edge but it was a hill, I came back up one more time, I was always checking my backpack was okay and putting gloves on, a father and daughter from Israel came by with a young guy, he actually asked me what the problem was, asked them if they would mind if he spent a few minutes trying to help me, he found it in two minutes and saved my — and the best part about it is, when the phone landed, you would assume it landed on its face or its back, it actually landed upright, in between a couple of branches. I managed to film me looking for it for an hour, like, I’m here — it was five gigs worth, it took up 80% of my battery, but it is a pretty hilarious film.

Jason: Oh my gosh, you’ve got to put a time-lapse of that on your Substack.

Tony: Yeah, maybe the time-lapse is the way to do it, with that sort of piano, old-timey music.

Jason: Yeah, it’s your phone was not to be denied, it was like, no, you must use me, I’m now going to shoot video that you’re going to use somewhere.

Tony: Yeah, well, there was that as well, I mean I was really having to think how I was going to deal with this, and I was trying to just be in terms of looking for it as well, and obviously I was looking in the wrong place, I thought it had gone further downhill, which is ironic. So that’s the risk you take when you go solo and unsupported, because if I’d had a guide, they would have said, we always stand on the uphill side of the mule trains and give them space, and also if I was traveling with anybody else I suspect they would have gone, no, no, I saw it, your phone’s there, you know, two eyes are better than one. So it was just me, and so that’s mildly understandable.

Easing Back Into the World

Tony: And you also asked about the easing back in, and like I say, I found it personally fascinating that last week in Boudha, I was back on email, but I got back on a Friday evening, and I said, if I take this holiday thing seriously, I don’t need to be on email till Monday. And I was sort of worried about all this work stuff I may have missed, and there was almost none, which maybe says I’m not working enough, or that I told people I was going away. And I got email headers with my New York Times that sort of told me, Trump hadn’t died in the meantime, and I figured I’d have known that, and I was like, okay, there’s the same old. But I did decide that last week, I’m not going to do the news thing, and I’m just going to enjoy this last week, do my emails, make sure I get my work done. And then coming back to New York, it’s like, well, I can’t avoid it now, but I can reduce it.

And I have, I’m really glad you caught me now, a few weeks after the trek, I am planning on writing about this, in not Substack form as much as hopefully some kind of book form, there’s a lot I learned on this trip, and I have really, really scaled back. I came back a changed person, and the news is still terrible, whether it’s Bondi’s speech, whether it’s Brown, whether it’s people murdering their parents, the news is, and that’s not counting the politicians, even the news remains negative. And we have to have some engagement to be able to affect that, but it’s not probably coincidental that I found myself coming back with a quite well-known book called What Makes You Not a Buddhist, which actually refers to that, the extent to which one should be informed, but your Buddha nature would be better used spreading the compassion and kindness than joining in the shouting and this equal cycle of negative anger that we’re demonstrating a lot in society at the moment.

Jason: Well, I think that CTA is a good place to finish. Tony, thanks for your time, we’ll link up to all the things, look forward to staying in touch.

Tony: Oh, absolutely, Jason, thanks so much for having me on again, I really appreciate it, I love the show. Cheers.

Closing

Jason: There you have it, thank you to Tony Fletcher for stopping by the show. Check out his Substack. And I also want to thank Airwave Media, we’re part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network now, which is super exciting, you can go to AirwaveMedia.com to check out some of the awesome shows they have over there.

Now I’m going to leave you with this quote, from Thomas Edison, who said, if we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves. Wanted to leave you with that one. I like that, I really like that. Astound ourselves. I sometimes tend to underestimate what I can do, and I have to remind myself of the things that I have accomplished and not knock myself down about the things that I haven’t.

Coming out of this one, maybe a good way to remind ourselves what we’re capable of is taking a moment to reflect on some of the accomplishments that we’ve had in our lives, the things that we’ve been able to do. We’re often underestimating ourselves and we forget what we’ve done already, how far we’ve come. And when we take a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come, and some of the things we’ve done, we can say, wow, I can do hard things, as they say, I’m capable of a lot, maybe even more than I think. And that’s why I wanted to finish with that. I think that’s a way into going and tackling the next thing with some confidence, by reflecting on what you’ve done and remembering, hey, I am a person who has had accomplishments and has gotten things done, and has been able to get out of my comfort zone and overcome things, and I can do it again.

So, we can finish with that unplanned rant. I’ll read the quote one more time, by Thomas Edison: if we did all the things we’re capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.

Thanks for listening, I’ll see you next time. Peace and love to you. Cheers.