Plan your trip with our routes

Pokhara, Nepal city facing Annapurna

We have been hardly travelling for a month and we have been convinced several times to wake up really early. The reason: to watch sunrise that promised to be exceptional. The result: if they weren’t the last ones, they will be, because we are not going to be fooled again to set the alarm clock at 4 in the morning. When you take a whole year vacation, you are not in the mood for this type of jokes. They only need the nearest mountain, a sign hanging on the door saying, “Sunrise Tour”, and, voilá, the business is set up. The sooner is the departure time, more people and, therefore, more money for them.

We might think that globalization is something new, but it is been around the tourist business for ages. And you wonder: if they don’t even have enough money to buy a soda, how in the world they learned the same marketing techniques here and there? In this corner of the world as long as in any other, we are recognized. We didn’t open our mouths yet, and they know where we are from and, of course, where we are going. Didn’t you ever notice the tone that beggars use in the London underground is the same tone other beggars use in Paris, Barcelona, or Berlin? And, I know they travel, because they go up and down, non-stop, using the red line, but if the travel card cannot be used to transfer from country to country, how is it possible that they have the same intonation?

Now, at least some of them have charm. Like the boy that this morning kept us company while we were seeing the sunset. After making us laugh for a while, he tried to get 100 rupees from us to buy a pump to inflate his ball.  Only so that you can get an idea of the situation, in Nepal, for a half of that amount, many people would climb up and down the Everest, barefoot. I am sure that if instead of talking to him about football, we had talked about ballet, he would have asked money to buy a sewing machine to sew his tutu.

For a moment we thought that the little boy was with us because he liked us. We thought that he was different, not like the others. He put an act to make the rip off more profitable. With the same wittiness, we sent him to pull the leg of the Japanese tourist next to us. He accepted his defeat with sportsmanship and, without losing one minute, he turned around to get another prey. And then, we saw him. The little boy, who was knee-high to a grasshopper, was walking around, at 6 in the morning and at an altitude of 4000 meters, wearing his pyjamas. They were so worn out that you could see not only that it was about to tear up on his butt, but it also had a big brown stain. The stain was as brown as the last look that he gave us. So full of shame as we feel now. A hundred rupees for a ball? If he had asked us at that moment, we would have made the entire field, right there, in the middle of the Himalaya, or wherever he wanted.