A walk through waste, water, food, toilets and the things I carried back
Before the mountains, before the pass, before the clean story I wanted to tell about myself, there was a ziplock bag in the top pocket of my rucksack.
I had packed it with good intentions and a little vanity. Reusable bottle. Water filter. Pocket notebook. WAG bag. A separate bag for used wipes and toilet paper if needed. Another for wrappers, foil, fruit peels and the small, irritating scraps that travel writing rarely photographs. I was walking the Markha trail in July 2015, self-funded, with guide support, pony support, and a mix of homestays and camps. The route we followed ran from Chilling to Skiu, Sara, Markha, Hankar, Thachungtse, Nimaling, Kongmaru La and Chuskurmo.
I had arrived with the phrase “Leave No Trace” sitting neatly in my head. By the second day, the phrase had become less neat. Trekking leaves traces even when you are careful. A bottle is refilled somewhere. Food is cooked with fuel someone carried. A pony carries weight your shoulders do not. A homestay receives your appetite, your wet socks, your questions and your rubbish. A camp toilet exists because bodies remain inconvenient even at altitude.
The useful question was not whether I could leave literally nothing behind. I could not. The useful question was whether I could see more of the footprint I was already making, and reduce the part that was laziness.
Markha Valley
Walking into Markha
Chilling was all river light and beginning-of-trek confidence. Stanzin, my guide, watched me adjust my pack with the expression of a man who had seen many travellers try to look more prepared than they were. The trail moved towards Skiu, then onward through the valley, sometimes dusty, sometimes narrow, sometimes close enough to the river for water to become the loudest thing in the day.
I drank from a reusable bottle and treated water by boiling and filtering, depending on where we were and what was available. That sounds tidy in a sentence. On the trail, it meant waiting, asking, refilling carefully, not wasting boiled water, and not acting as if a stream existed only for my convenience. Water was never just water there. It was tea, cooking, fields, animals, washing, and then, if I behaved properly, drinking.
At Skiu and beyond, the first pieces of rubbish began to appear. Plastic water bottles flattened by boots. Foil glinting in dust. Snack wrappers caught under thorny scrub. Cigarette butts tucked into corners as if shame could make them disappear. None of it was dramatic enough to become a headline. That was the problem. The damage looked ordinary.
I also had my own waste growing steadily in the ziplock. Wrappers from things I had chosen to bring because they were light, quick and reassuring. Foil from food packets. Wet wipes I should have needed less. Fruit peels I did not leave behind just because they looked natural. The bag made a small crackling sound every time I opened the pack, like a reminder with bad manners.
Stanzin corrected me most often through small acts. He stayed on the path when shortcuts looked tempting. He kept us away from fragile slopes when a photograph would have been better from somewhere else. Once, when I drifted towards a line that was not the trail, he said, “We keep the path alive by walking it.” It was not a slogan. It was instruction.
Where things go
The homestays made waste harder to romanticise.
A dry toilet is a useful teacher because it does not let you pretend that things vanish. In villages, I used dry toilets where they existed. At camps, I used the camp toilets. I had carried a WAG bag, but the actual journey was less heroic and more practical: use the systems already in place, do not contaminate water, do not leave paper or wipes behind, and do not make someone else deal with what you were too delicate to carry.
At homestays, I saw bins, reuse, and organic matter being kept for manure. That part made sense. Food scraps had a place in the cycle. Plastic did not. Foil did not. Wet wipes certainly did not; wet wipes are the sort of modern convenience that pretend to be soft while behaving like bad news.
In Hankar, a woman held up a biscuit wrapper she had picked from near the trail. The moment has stayed with me because she did not perform anger. She looked tired of the smallness of the problem and the size of the work it created.
“Someone will come, and we will make tea for them, and they will leave this,” she said. “Tea is free; we do not charge for it. But wrappers are expensive.”
She put the wrapper aside. I do not remember what I said. Probably something useless and apologetic. What I remember is the wrapper in her hand, light as nothing and heavy as labour.
That evening, I looked at my own rubbish bag differently. It was no longer a private virtue. It was simply the part of the trek I had agreed to remain responsible for. Wrappers, foil, wet wipes, food packaging, fruit peels: all of it belonged to me until I could dispose of it somewhere better than a village field, a riverbank or someone’s stove.
Nimaling, noise and the pass
By the time we reached Thachungtse and moved towards Nimaling, the trek had become larger and more exposed. The valley widened. The wind had more room to organise itself. The campsite held the usual signs of people trying to be careful and comfortable at the same time: tents on already-used ground, kitchen work kept contained, water drawn and used with attention, dishwater strained away from flowing water, soap kept under control.
The camp kitchen was not a moral exhibit. It was work. Dal, rice, tea, utensils, water, fuel, cleanup, leftovers, packaging. A trail meal tastes simple only because someone else has carried the complexity for you. Pony support had done some of that for us. So had the guide, the cook, the homestays, and the people whose fields and rooms made the route possible.
There was beauty too, of course. Bharal on the slopes. Pika movement in the rocks. Ravens with the expression of judges. Sheep near the high meadows. A donkey finding something to disagree with. Snow leopard presence remained mostly in tracks and stories, which was enough. Wanting to see more is natural. Demanding it from a landscape is not.
On the climb towards Kongmaru La, another group ahead of us began playing music from a phone. The sound travelled badly in that thin air, all synthetic drama and no sense of place. I slowed down until the music moved away. There are times when silence is not a spiritual achievement; it is just basic manners.
At the pass, wind moved through the prayer flags with the dry, snapping sound of cloth being tested. I tied a ribbon someone had given me in Markha after asking whether it was appropriate. The older man at the gompa had said, “If you are praying, all places are appropriate. If you are decorating, none are.” I kept that distinction in mind and tied it without ceremony.
There was also litter at Kongmaru La. Small things tucked among stones. Bright plastic. Bits that looked too minor for anyone to feel guilty about and too permanent to belong there. I picked up what I could fit into my bags. Not all of it. That is another uncomfortable truth. There is always more than your pocket can hold, more than your patience wants to notice, more than one careful trekker can correct.
Coming down towards Chuskurmo, my knees were tired and the rubbish bag was no longer symbolic. It had weight, smell, edges and sound. It was proof that intention becomes meaningful only when it survives inconvenience.
Plastic-Free Paths: What Trekking in Nepal Taught Me About Waste
The bin at Gesmo
Leh received us in the usual post-trek state: dusty, hungry, sunburnt in odd places, full of sentences that would later prove exaggerated.
My first task was not poetic. I took the rubbish I had carried out and put it into a bin at Gesmo. It was not a perfect ending. I did not trace where the bin’s contents went after that. I did not solve Ladakh’s waste problem by carrying a few wrappers, wet wipes, foils, food packets and peels down from Markha. The bin simply marked the point at which my direct responsibility changed shape.
Still, I remember the sound of the bag going in.
Later, in my room, I unpacked. Dust came out of everything: socks, cuffs, notebook, the seam of the rucksack, the fold where a wrapper had hidden from me until the end. Markha dust has a fineness that makes it seem intentional. I shook some of it from my sleeping bag and, instead of brushing it all away, put a little into a jar.
It was not a souvenir exactly. More like evidence.
The jar sat on the table beside the empty water bottle, the filter, the pocket notebook and the now-quiet ziplock bag. I wrote one line before sleeping: everything sheds something.
Then I closed the jar.
