Ghorepani Trek Day 1: Nayapul to Ulleri

I came to Nepal for two reasons: the first is to spend time with my friends Kate and Mich, who no longer live in Tucson and who also have two adorable children. And the second is that it’s about as far away from anywhere I’ve ever been on this planet and certainly has a bunch of really different birds, butterflies, plants and other critters I’ve never seen. I’ve been planning on this trip for about two years.

A lot of foreigners travel to Nepal; it’s one of the most popular tourist destinations in Asia. But why? Since none of them know Kate and Mich, and virtually none of them are birders, what in the world are they doing here? I certainly wouldn’t have given Nepal a second thought without friends and birds. It turns out all those travelers come here to trek.

Apparently, travelers have been doing this for decades, but I wasn’t quite grasping the concept. You just go walking in the mountains because….the roads are too bumpy? Because you heard someone else did it, and it sounded exotic? Much of Nepal is extremely mountainous with very few roads, and local people have been traveling by foot to remote villages for centuries. I’m guessing a few decades ago the vanguard of world travelers found that they could walk the same trails and see some landscapes and cultures that few people had ever seen. Word got out, and now it’s just something you do.

My dear friend Andrew is here with me for a couple weeks. Also friends with Kate and Mich from Tucson, he has a very good excuse to be here for a visit, but he’s only mildly interested in birds. He’d been to Nepal three times, always stuck in the Kathmandu area, and this time he finally wanted to do what everyone has been clamoring about – a trek. “Whatever,” I said. If it goes through anything resembling natural habitat, it will have some amazing new birds for me. I’d rather not walk miles and miles through rice paddies and tea farms, but even there I’d probably see some new birds and different landscapes. Let’s see what this trekking thing is all about, I agreed.

Instead of doing one of the two- to three-week expeditions that circumnavigate one of the larger Himalayan massifs, we inquired at our Pokhara hotel about a simple four-day, three-night trek, hiring a guide to show us the way and a porter to carry our bags. Call it the Queens of the Andes trek. At what would amount to about $30/day for the entire four days, including all services, food, and accommodation, I thought that was a pretty good deal.

Our first day we departed around 8:30 by taxi for the 75-minute drive to the bustling village of Nayapul, along with our guide Resham, and his cousin Ananta, hired to carry our small bags. The first few kilometers were actually along a rather decent dirt road that any vehicle with some clearance could cover.

Our guide Resham was a cheerful guy.

We stored the bulk of our luggage in our Pokhara hotel and tried to pare down what we brought. We felt kind of bad even having much less than the 15 kilogram limit, as 20-year-old Ananta is a small guy.

My first lifer, in the rather scrubby lower slopes was this Striated Prinia.

Trekking tourism is huge business here, with all levels of government involved.

Little shops, restaurants, and hotels are everywhere.

We eventually passed through some nice patches of woods while still along the dirt road.

The hyper Crimson Sunbird is not a rare bird in these elevations.

We took a lunch break at a restaurant, where Andrew pointed out this pair of mating swallowtails. I didn’t have my butterfly book with me on the trek, so later I identified it as Papilio protenor, the Spangle.

We’re here near the end of the dry season, so there are few things in bloom, other than spring-blooming trees (we’re not quite tropical here, at the same latitude as Corpus Christi, Texas or Tampa, Florida). So it was a surprise to see a few of these orchids Dendrobium densiflorum in bloom while all other epiphytes were all shriveled up.

Birds are very responsive to pishing and owl imitations (Asian Barred and Collared Owlets are the species here), including this normally very secretive Red-billed Leiothrix (not a lifer; I had seen it on Hawaii).

This Mountain Bulbul was a lifer though, and it came in quite well to one of the mobs I stirred up.

We took another tea break along the way, and Andrew, departing from his usual reading of the Economist and The Week, decided to study my Birds of Nepal.

Finally, the jeep track came to an end after 9.8 kilometers of rather gradual ascent, and we finally felt like we were trekking on a real Himalayan trail.

The trail still ascended very gradually for another kilometer or so, but after we crossed this bridge, the steep part began, which Mich had warned us about.

Any excuse for a rest was welcome, and any butterfly would do. This looked like a metalmark, and I was right: Zemeros flegyas, the Punchinello. There relatively few metalmarks in the Old World, with only about 10 species in Nepal.

Gray Bushchat became common in open habitats up this high.

Andrew’s and my big gay trek got even gayer when we came across these humping billy goats.

Ananta turns out to be an amazing spotter of birds. I walked right past these Gray-hooded Warbler fledglings, and he rushed back down several dozen steps to show them to me (I usually lagged behind the group, trying to see birds and photograph butterflies).

One of the smallest birds in the area, and very difficult to get a photo of, is the Fire-breasted Flowerpecker.

We weren’t in very good forest yet, only with patches of woods in the ravines, but that was enough for a boisterous flock of  White-throated Laughingthrushes.

I pished and whistled in a big mob here, and Ananta thought it was hilarious how everything came to close to me. This is Verditer Flycatcher.

This looks shockingly similar to western Eurasia’s Great Tit, but it’s actually Green-backed Tit (the Cinereous Tit in my last blog is actually more closely related to Great Tit, having been split only recently).

The last bit of steep steps as we arrived in the village of Ulleri.

We had time to relax in the garden of Purnima Guest House, which Resham had chosen for our night, and we chatted with some of the other trekkers here, from Germany, Netherlands, and England.

A bumblebee in the roses, the only one I saw on the whole trek. There are probably a couple or three dozen species of Bombus in Nepal, so I didn’t even try to ID this one.

Here’s the day’s graph from my GPS – about 1070 meters of ascent over 13.28 kilometers (3500 feet in 8.2 miles).

A Weekend in Pokhara, Nepal

On the last full weekend in April, my second here in Nepal, we took a road trip to the touristy town of Pokhara. Andrew Broan arrived on Tuesday, not quite off his jet lag (we’re 11 hours and 45 minutes ahead of Tucson) but raring to see some more of Nepal; Kate spent much of the day packing and getting the babies ready; and Mich got off work at the embassy early to help load the car and start the drive. We then spent the next hour and a half in a long, slow line of traffic just getting to the outskirts of Kathmandu.

We didn’t quite make it to Pokhara. In fact, we made it halfway, traveling just 66 miles in 4 ¼ hours. Nepal clearly has the worst overall highway infrastructure of any country I’ve been to. We found a nice hotel right on the highway to spend the night, and it looked like there would be some habitat on the grounds for birds.

As usual, the next morning I was up before anyone else, and looked out over the highway from our balcony.

Red-vented Bulbuls were chattering and flying about, a Blue-throated Barbet chortled somewhere, and I heard lots of bird sounds I didn’t know.

Almost immediately, I saw a brown bird fly towards the hotel from across the highway. I rushed to get my camera and found this Asian Barred Owlet on his morning hunt.

It was a lazy start the morning, giving me and Mich some time (mostly with Mara, just under two years old) to see what was on the hotel grounds. My first Black-chinned Babbler, Gray-breasted Prinia, and Crimson Sunbird were here, and there were surely many more lifers calling unseen from the wooded slope behind the hotel. While I was looking over a grassy patch across a ravine, a pair of White-rumped Munias flew in. I thought these were also new for me, but it turns out I saw them on Lombok almost exactly three years ago.

While we were having breakfast, Mich noticed something like a Squirrel Cuckoo from high on the slope. They turned out to be four Sirkeer Malkohas, an oddly similar cuckoo, and a lifer for both of us.

We finally set off for Pokhara in the late morning. This leg of the trip was only about 60 miles, but it still took us 2 ½ hours of driving. My view from out the back of the Mahindra Scorpion.

There are dozens and dozens of hotels in Pokhara, and my friends settled on one of the pricier ones, Fishtail Lodge. And it was definitely overpriced, with watered-down alcohol and internet in the

rooms only if you paid extra (whereas hotels at a 10th of the price have free internet). But the grounds are lovely, the construction beautiful, and it seems clear from its location that this hotel is the best for birding, located against the forested hillside across a narrow arm of the long, skinny reservoir that makes Pokhara so famous.

You can get here only by this human-powered passenger ferry.

I spent a lot of time at the edge of the gardens, along the lake shore, and on trails-of-use on the steep slope behind the property. Here are the few I managed to photograph.

Gray-hooded Warbler

Cinereous Tit (formerly considered a subspecies of Great Tit)

Himalayan Bulbul

Gray Treepie (rhymes with magpie)

Asian Koel – a huge, noisy, and common cuckoo, but devilishly hard to see

I just barely managed to get a copy of the Illustrated Checklist of Nepal’s Butterflies by Colin Smith before I left home. It’s hard to use, with small, only ok-quality photos of specimens, but it’s been very helpful, and better than just the internet. Here are a few.

Parantica aglea, Glassy Tiger (a Monarch relative)

Petrelaea dana, Dingy Lineblue

Delias hyparete, Painted Jezebel

Heliophorus epicies, Purple Sapphire

Graphium sarpedon, Common Bluebottle

I had to rely upon the internet (and the moth experts who comment on photos) to ID this Gazalina sp., a notodontid in the subfamily Thaumetopoeinae.

The same goes for this mushroom, maybe Xerula species.

Mich is much more into mammals than I am, so he had already  identified this as Callosciurus pygerythrus, Hoary-bellied Squirrel.

We don’t have a herp book, but it didn’t take too much internet searching to ID this as Calotes versicolor, Oriental Garden Lizard.

The dragonflies here are abundant and gorgeous but have me totally stumped. In my next life…

On Sunday morning, Mich, Andrew, and I took a short drive to the back side of the mountain to one of Pokhara’s more famous tourist attractions, the World Peace Temple, on top of a ridge overlooking the part of Pokhara called Lakeside.

Mich’s birding contacts said we could find Nepal’s only endemic bird in the scrubby habitat here, Spiny Babbler. We scored big time, getting a photo and some good recording of its thrasher-like song.

Fishtail Lodge gets its name from the translation of the mountain Machhapuchhre, which we could just barely see through the smoky haze that has been dominating the atmosphere over Nepal for the past weeks. It’s the most prominent peak in the Annapurna range, one of the more famous groups of peaks in Nepal's Himal.

Mich, Kate, and the babies left for the long drive back to Kathmandu, while Andrew and I stayed in Pokhara, found a cheaper hotel at my request, and made plans to do a short trek towards those very mountains.