Walking Light in the Land of Mountains

What Nepal’s Trails Taught Me About Waste, Wonder, and the Weight of What We Carry

“When you carry only what you need, the world around you grows lighter and suddenly you notice what you and it could leave behind.”

  The Unwritten Road

 

Mountains, Meaning, & Mistakes

I didn’t travel to Nepal to learn about waste.

I chased altitude. Quiet. The kind described in old books and heard in places between wind slapping prayer flags on the Himalayas. I went, as most do, in search of something I couldn’t define some combination of quiet and show, that snow-capped ranges and thin air can provide.

 

I was prepared for sore muscles, altitude sickness, perhaps a couple spiritual cliches.

What I didn’t anticipate was running into my garbage.

Not simply in wrappings or in plastic bottles but in habits, in assumptions, in the easy conveniences that creep up without anyone noticing. I didn’t imagine a water bottle would haunt me, or that a Snickers wrapper would make me feel guilty. But somewhere between a waterfall in Ghandruk and the tea houses of Annapurna Base Camp, it hit me: the trail wasn’t just showing me nature. It was reflecting the parts of myself I’d tried to ignore.

Because at 6,000 feet, every ounce counts. You notice the weight of your pack. You notice the weight of your breathing. You notice the weight of your decisions, particularly the ones that can’t be abandoned.

That’s plastic: the decision that matters.

What started as a trek turned into a gradual shedding, not only of physical weight, but also of mental baggage. I learned to replenish rather than replace. To inquire rather than presume. To see rather than turn a blind eye.

I had trekked before over Spiti’s cracked roads and dust-scoured switchbacks but Nepal? Nepal did not merely challenge my endurance. It challenged my values. It presented a mirror and asked:

What are you leaving behind?

This is not a rant about being sustainable.

This is not a plea for ideal behavior.

It’s a narrative. A personal one.

About the trash I brought in, the lessons I enforced, and the weird alchemy that occurs when you attempt, however imperfectly, to walk lighter.

Because occasionally, all it requires is one plastic bottle on a holy trail to bring you back to:

You’re not alone.

And what you are leaving behind can outlast your footprints.

 

Kathmandu – The Plastic Mirage

Where Convenience Meets Consequence

“Water in Thamel is traded in flecks of plastic crushed, ignored, and out of sight until it isn’t.”

  The Unwritten Road

Kathmandu does not make an entrance it bursts.

From the moment I stepped out of Tribhuvan Airport, the city felt like a storm that had learned rhythm. Tuktuks wheezed past with mechanical wheeze and chaotic grace. Wires drooped overhead like tangled prayers. The scent of masala, diesel, incense, and dust was thick enough to chew.

It was beautiful and bruised. Reverent and reckless.

And everywhere I looked, there was plastic.

Not only in the glaring locations bottled water in every store, crisp packets stuffed into pavement cracks but also in the subtle, less noticeable locations. The crevices of shrines. The lip of gutters. Even in the oblations: a plastic flower inserted into a marigold garland, a disposable spoon deposited next to a butter lamp. It wasn’t hostile. It was routine.

I walked through Thamel on my first morning, Kathmandu’s crazy backpacker soul. I pulled over at a stand for a bottle of water habit, not hunger. I spun the cap open and gulped. And then I saw them.

Six more bottles, identical to mine, in rows on a shelf behind the vendor. Another dozen or so across the street. A small boy kicked one into the drain like a football. And all of a sudden the sip did not feel clean. It felt complicit.

Nepal’s glaciers are melting. Everyone knows this. But I could not help thinking: long after the snow is gone, the plastic may remain. A different kind of permanence. Less noble. Less poetic.

In the late afternoon, I also met up with a friend, Arjun, for tea at a street stall. Perched on small red stools, observing people weaving around potholes and pedestrians, I mentioned to him that I didn’t like the sheer volume of plastic here.

He sipped slowly from a metal cup and shrugged.

“Here we don’t hesitate,” he told me, his words not bitter. “Water in bottles. Rice in plastic bags. Even candles these days. It’s just… the way things are.”

He stood there for a moment, then turned to me.

“But you tourists arrive with your filters and your flasks, lecturing us not to purchase. You think you’re doing the mountain good. But the glacier doesn’t take lectures.”

It wasn’t a complaint. It was fact.

A reminder that sustainability like spirituality can’t be packaged in bite-sized mantras.

That evening, I glanced at the crumpled bottle on my floor the first of dozens I’d once mindlessly drunk. It was heavier than it should have been. Not in terms of weight. In terms of consequence.

Kathmandu had already started its work on me.

Not through temples or sights.

But through the subtle shame that accompanied each cap I twisted.

The mountain, I came to understand, wasn’t inviting me to climb.

It was requesting me to glance downwards at what I was bringing.

And what I was relinquishing.

 

The Trail Begins – Thamel to Syabrubesi

Water, Waste, and the First Ripple

“Karibu pani?”   Come, drink water   smiling, once I had returned with a bottle. I departed with insight instead.

  The Unwritten Road

The trip to Syabrubesi started much before the mountains appeared on the horizon.

It began with a creaky green bus parked outside a corner tea stall in Thamel. Bags tied on top as an afterthought. Chickens pecking in the aisle. A dashboard shrine flickering with weary LED gods. The driver blessed the steering wheel before cranking the ignition. I blessed my knees too.

Eight hours. That’s what they told me. It took almost twelve.

Across Bhaktapur’s sprawl, into hills that were woven together with waterfalls and telephone wires, the bus made its way through valleys like a reluctant idea. Around each bend was a new stillness of green, a new view of snow in the distance. And at each dusty road stall, there was water for sale, in one-use plastic.

I had prepared or at least I thought. A tin bottle hung from my back. Filtration tablets. The smug pleasure of one who had “done their homework.” I wasn’t going to be that hiker. The one who pollutes with good intentions.

But somewhere beyond Dhunche, the bus died just short of a tea shack overhanging a gorge. My legs were numb. My throat was parched. The sun, low now, felt like a gentle insult.

An old man came out from behind the shack, beaming so hard it creased the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

“Karibu pani?” he asked, pulling a chilled bottle from a crate as if it contained gold.

I stopped.

My metal flask poked out of my pack, half full of warm water.

But this bottle, glistening with condensation, was beckoning.

I picked it up.

I paid the plastic tax.

And in so doing, I purchased convenience wrapped in contradiction.

The water was fresh. The guilt, instant.

That night, I hiked a short path at the village’s edge. Pines bent like monks in gossip. Birds flashed through mist. I unscrewed my bottle to pour what was left and stopped.

The label glared white against the green. It didn’t belong here.

But then again did I?

I turned the bottle upside down. The water spilled in curves onto the earth.

The bottle remained in my hand. Empty, but louder than it had been.

Plastic moves silently. It doesn’t herald its presence.

It finds the crevices of beauty and remains to be forgotten.

That evening, I slept in a wooden lodge beneath a rusty tin roof, hearing rain tap out an uneven beat. My bottle was on the floor next to my boots. And I remembered that man’s smile.

He wasn’t peddling pollution.

He was providing hospitality in the language of the new world.

And I, self-proclaimed conscious traveler, gratefully accepted it because I was parched and human.

The lesson wasn’t to never fall.

It was to notice the weight when you do.

To bear it. To alter what you’re able.

Because the trail had only just started.

And already I was bearing more than my backpack.

Chapter 3: Village Lessons – The First Bottled Water Encounter

Where Expectations Flow Louder Than Rivers

“In the villages, they pour rice with two hands. With plastic, they pour care with none.”

  The Unwritten Road

The path to Chandanbari climbs gradually at first stone steps lined with moss, prayer flags rustling over rhododendron limbs. By the time I had learned how to walk more slowly. How to allow silence settle into my bones like steam into cold metal.

But it was the Mugling River that gave me my first real test. Not of altitude or stamina. But of intention.

We pulled over at a tea house that sat atop the curve, where the water hummed a melody ancient enough to be confused with memory. Children ran through the scrub, following goats with an intensity only children can muster. Women laid out lentils to dry in the noonday sun. Life proceeded without haste but not without cadence.

I sat at a wooden bench outside, stripping off my pack, sweat dripping beneath my shirt. My metal canteen clinked gently against the bench. I headed towards the stream in the back of the house, ready to refill it, secure in my iodine tablets and wary optimism.

The water was clear. Cold. Alive. I stooped down, cupping it initially in my hands, savoring it the way you’d taste the edge of a secret.

 

Then a voice called out kind, but firm.

 

“You can drink,” said the owner of the tea house, coming down from the porch, rubbing his hands on his lungi. “But few do. Tourists prefer a bottle.”

I turned to look at him. His smile wasn’t contemptuous. Just resigned.

 

“They say it’s safer,” he continued, gesturing to a blue box packed with sealed bottles. “We carry more now. Less difficult to sell.”

 

I gazed back out at the river. It didn’t complain. It just kept flowing, patient, untouched, unknowingly replaced.

 

There it was: the silent paradox of the trek.

Here, in a village where rice was still poured with reverent care and lentils spread by hand under a sky scrubbed clean of ambition, plastic had become hospitality. Not because it was better, but because we had taught them to believe it was.

I hesitated. I could see other hikers drinking from their neat, store-bought salvation. I pulled out my metal bottle anyway. Unscrewed the top. Dipped it into the stream.

The man eyed me, then nodded once, not approbation, but comprehension.

 

“You will feel better drinking from here,” he said.

He wasn’t mistaken. The water was cold as forgiveness.

But as I made my way back to the bench, bottle in hand, I sensed a subtle tension in the air. The other partygoers looked on. One even hissed something I couldn’t quite hear. Their glance didn’t hurt. But it served as a reminder: here, sustainability wasn’t merely a habit. It was an exception.

 

I wasn’t drinking from a stream.

I was swimming upstream against habit, systems, fear.

 

And I learned something sobering:

When you attempt to do what’s right in a convenience-made world, discomfort isn’t just from the act. It is from doing it while being observed.

 

Later, on my departure from Chandanbari, I walked past a tiny store at the trailhead. A young lad was sitting outside, constructing towers out of old plastic bottles. I saw one fall, catching the late afternoon sun as it fell.

There was no fall lesson.

Just a silence echo of decisions.

 

I continued walking, the stream’s flavor still fresh on my tongue.

And in my pocket: the top from the bottle I never purchased.

 

Not as a prize.

As a reminder.

 

 

 

A Plastic-Free Experiment – Refilling, Reusing, Resisting

 

Dawn, Rock Cruise, and the Gentle Art of Saying No

“Every refill was like a mini-revolt. A silent rebellion against letting convenience determine the kind of host I’d be.”

  The Unwritten Road

By the time I arrived at Dharapani, the experiment had started not as theory, but as practice.

I had less to carry now. My pack was slightly lighter, my conscience slightly heavier. The trekking rhythm had settled in walk, breathe, take a sip, repeat. But something new was developing alongside the blisters: a commitment. Not audible. Not showy. Just a stubborn insistence on proving to myself that I could hike this trail without dumping a trail of trash behind me.

The rule was easy: no single-use plastic.

No bottled water. No cookies wrapped in cling film. No “just this once.”

Every refill from a stream or tap, filtered through tablets or my pen with UV light, was like a small triumph. And not for the planet, although that was part of it, but for the version of myself I was gradually rendezvousing up here, bereft of shortcuts. Humbled.

In Chame, I replenished from a communal spout painted blue with chipped white letters that said “Safe Drinking Water.” An old woman washing spinach alongside it watched as I added purification drops to my metal bottle. She laughed not in mockery, but in sweetness as if entertained by my finicky behavior.

“You trust this?” she asked in broken English, gesturing to the drops.

“I trust you more,” I replied, smiling.

She cackled and gave me a boiled potato wrapped in a banana leaf. No plastic. No price. Only shared simplicity.

When I arrived at Upper Pisang, I had an extra cloth bag I’d cobbled together with the aid of a lodge owner’s daughter. She provided me with rags of retired lungi cloth, a rusty needle, and a tale of how her father used to carry rice in such pouches on long treks to Manang.

That bag contained my trail mix, paper-wrapped mints, and surprisingly pride.

Because fighting plastic wasn’t simply a matter of waste, it was about presence.

I had to deliberate in order to replenish. I had to clarify myself. I had to request hot water rather than take a bottle out of a cooler.

Occasionally, it made me spectacle.

Occasionally, it made me friends.

In the high village of Ghyaru, I slept in the same room as a Belgian trekker called Jonas who had a GoPro camera for a third eye and three bottles of mineral water lying on the floor.

“You’re doing that refill thing?” he said, noticing me fill my bottle with boiled water before dinner.

“Trying to,” I replied.

He gave a nod, then picked up one of his empties. “I’ll reuse this one, at least. For karma points.”

We chuckled. But that night, I caught him dumping it and cracking open a new one.

It hurt a little. Not from him, but because I knew that could’ve been me.

Plastic’s allure lies in how ordinary it is.

You remind yourself it’s just a bottle, just this once, just because I’m tired.

And all of a sudden, it’s not just anything.

It’s the default.

So I continued to resist not flawlessly, but consciously.

At the lodge in Ngawal, the kitchen staff poured me water in a plastic bottle “for free because you’re a nice guest.” I thanked them. And declined.

They were bewildered.

One of them asked, “You don’t want to be clean?

That was the hardest part not the offer itself, but the suggestion that declining plastic equated to declining health, or trust.

I didn’t protest. I simply raised my metal bottle and said, “I brought my kind of clean.”

Eventually, even the trail came to seem complicit.

Plastic wrappers twirled in the breeze like abandoned prayers.

Moldy bottles bobbed in mountain springs too pristine to complain.

But there were moments of pushback too.

Kids in Braga picked up garbage for rupees. Volunteers had painted cans with bold mantras:

“Leave only footprints.”

“Trash is not a souvenir.”

“Respect is reusable.”

One can had a sticker that said: “Your waste isn’t welcome, but you still are.”

It lingered with me.

Because the mountains weren’t demanding perfection.

They were demanding a pause.

For the interval between impulse and action, where a decision becomes made.

And if that was the sacrifice of boiling water, turning down snacks, sewing cloth bags out of scraps, or defining myself repeatedly, then perhaps that was pilgrimage in fact.

Not up.

But in.

A peak of intention.

 

High Altitude Clarity – Reflections at Helambu Pass

 

Gravity Meets Gratitude

“Above the tree line, waste doesn’t vanish it manifests as remorse.”

  The Unwritten Road

The ascent to Helambu Pass is a slow conversation between burden and breath.

Every step was slow, pulled from the air by heavy consideration. The trees were gone a long time ago. All that was left was battered rocks, patches of tenacious grass, and my pulse thrumming like a muted drum in my ears. I was somewhere over 4,000 meters now, where land turns to sky and everything intimate makes itself excruciatingly plain.

This is where you encounter yourself.

And the specters of decisions you never realized you’d made.

I came to rest beside a crumbling stupa covered in tattered prayer flags. Their colors had faded to almost pastels red to pink, green to eerie. But they still fluttered, like the wind needed something to cling to.

And that’s when I noticed it.

A flash of blue, trapped between a rock and a patch of snow.

I was thinking it was a piece of fabric. Or was it a sweet packet. But as I approached the hill closer, my heart was down. It was a bottle half-hidden, crushed, weathered by the rain but unmistakable in shape.

It wasn’t mine. But it was ours.

Because no one climbs alone not here. All visitors are part of an unseen chain, and what one abandons, another takes. Some we pass down. Others we pass by, looking the other way.

But it’s harder to avoid here.

Beyond the tree line, trash doesn’t get lost in ambient sound. It remains. It gapes. It is accusatory without shouting.

I sat there for a bit, the bottle sandwiched between my boots, not knowing what to do with it.

There wasn’t a bin to be seen. No caretaker. No collection point. Just rock, wind, and silence. And yet, somehow, this one piece of plastic carried the burden of a hundred bad habits mine among them.

So I picked it up.

Stuffed it into the side pocket of my pack.

Not as a savior.

As a student.

Helambu didn’t merely test my legs.

It tested my lens.

All this time, I’d been gauging success on altitude: how high I went, how far I could walk, how alone I could be. But this experience taught me something new:

There is no top if you leave your shame at the base.

As I went further, I came to notice them more the lonely detritus of thoughtlessness. A crumpled candy wrapper blowing under a cairn. A crushed noodle packet stuck in the fissures of a rock. A plastic spoon trapped in the base of a prayer wheel.

And so I took an oath not monumental, not dramatic. Simply a silent agreement between myself and the earth:

To carry not only my trash, but whatever else I could.

Back down.

Back home.

Gravity, as it happens, isn’t physical.

It’s moral.

With each fall, I learned a little more small acts of redemption in an area too holy to continue ignoring. Locals nodded but didn’t say anything. I believe they’d seen it before visitors with ideals and good intentions. But I hoped my silence was a louder scream than my slogans.

When I arrived at the final ridge before the trail descended once more towards Melamchi, I discovered a small rock inscribed with one line of text in the Nepali language. I saw a passing porter later and he translated it to me:

“The gods walk with those who walk lightly.”

I don’t know if I do believe in gods who wander mountain passes.

But I do believe in footprints.

And I believe we get to choose what we leave behind.

 

That night, in a cold stone teahouse lit by a single bulb and a smoky fire, I emptied my pockets onto the floor. Bottle caps. Chocolate wrappers. A strip of foil from someone’s painkillers. Tiny things. Forgettable things.

But not up here.

Not anymore.

 

 

Chapter 6: Cultural Conversations – Sherpa Wisdom on Waste

Tea with Tenzing at a Hand-Painted Lodge

“Plastic is not Nepali. It is the noise of another world.”

  Tenzing, lodge owner at Ghat.

If the mountains were my teachers, the people dwelling in their shadows were my mirrors.

By the time I arrived at the tiny village of Ghat locked between forest and rock, just beyond the rhododendron ridges I was grubby, exhausted, and moving more slowly than normal. A drizzle had begun to fall, and prayer flags stuck to the air like damp streamers.

It was here I met Tenzing.

Or rather, he met me.

His lodge was unlike the others I’d seen on the trail its walls painted with scenes of birds, yaks, and spiraling mandalas. Outside, two copper pots steamed over a clay hearth, sending up tendrils of smoke into the gray sky. Inside, it was warm. Dim. Wooden shelves stacked with jars of herbs and biscuits. A single bulb glowed like a tired moon above the dining table.

You require tea,” Tenzing advised before I could query. “And sitting.”

I nodded.

We communicated slowly, in stammering English and pauses of mutual understanding, as he poured ginger tea into mismatched cups. I told him about my attempt to trek plastic-free, and he smiled not the triumphant sort, but the variety that becomes wrinkles forged by two decades of observing tourists try their best.

“You’re not the first,” he told me softly. “But you might recall it longer.”

He got up and took me to a side wall in the lodge a hand-painted mural he’d done more than twenty years before. There were etchings of snow leopards, mountain spirits, and old Bon symbols. One corner of the wall, however, appeared off dull and faintly stained.

“This section I would repaint annually,” he informed me, patting the wall. “But after the plastics arrived, I cannot. Color will not adhere. The oil present in the air from wasteburning degrades the wall.”

He sat silent for a moment.

“Plastic does not remain on the ground. It remains in the air. In our prayers.”

His words hung more heavily than the tea.

After, I observed him sweeping the yard. Not with a plastic push broom, but a cluster of dried stalks bound with rope. He swept with purpose, not effort. Each wrist-flick contained care, not urgency.

We talked again before supper this time of tourism, of power lines that flash in monsoon, of how plastic bottles accumulate behind lodges in off-season.

“Traveler water bottle is arrogance in his valley,” he said, sipping slowly. “They don’t ask if the water can be boiled. They bring their bottle. They leave it here. They think that’s polite.”

He wasn’t bitter just exhausted. Of explaining. Of cleaning. Of being polite in return.

I asked if the village had thought of banning plastic altogether. He shook his head.

“If we say no, they go somewhere else. If we say yes, we live with trash. So we decide which part of our dignity we lose.”

His eyes didn’t skip a beat when he said it.

I slept that night in one of his rooms one painted deep red, with woolen blankets and a window over the valley below. The silence wasn’t hollow. It was carved, ancient, and wise.

I dreamed of wrappers drifting like prayer flags. I awoke embarrassed.

As I left the next morning, I volunteered to take down a little bag of trash to Lukla plastic wrappers Tenzing had broomed from the back of his lodge. He handed me the bag with a nod of thanks, but otherwise did not speak.

Except, as I stepped out into the morning, he said:

“Next time, come with nothing. But bring someone else who hears.”

 

Chapter 7: The Weight and Delight of Conscious Trekking

Counting Not Steps, But Choices

“I paid more in discomfort than in cash but the weight of plastic was the heaviest on my soul.”

  The Unwritten Road.

There’s a quiet arithmetic to trekking plastic-free.

It starts quietly: a change in what you carry, what you order, what you decline. But the more you walk, the louder that math gets not merely in grams, but in impact.

At some point between Namche and Tengboche, I came to understand: this wasn’t merely a walk in mountains. It was a negotiation with hunger, with exhaustion, and with the uncomfortable luxury of choice.

₹200 for Boiled Water

That’s what it was in one of the more expensive tea houses.

Not all inflation. It was a labor somebody had climbed that fuel up, somebody had boiled it an hour up high. And yet, in the next house, I saw a pack of trekkers purchasing six plastic bottles for less cheaper, colder, faster.

But here’s what they didn’t pay for:

The mule that bore that case.

The porter who stacked them.

The mountain that would deliver their bottles long after they were gone.

I used the boiled water.

Not because it tasted better.

Because it sat better on my conscience.

Pasta, Not Packets

Trail menus are quaintly strange. You’ll have pizzas sitting alongside dal bhat, yak curry alongside Snickers pie. Most of them, however from instant noodles to cookies to chips arrive wrapped, sealed, imported, and headed for a landfill that will perhaps never exist.

I was famished one day in Dingboche. Cold. Shivering. A package of Wai Wai noodles beckoned from a shelf at the back of the counter like an old pal.

But I had ordered the pasta instead.

It was longer to come. It was tasteless. It came cold.

But it came without a side of guilt.

Cloth Over Convenience

My dry foods were wrapped in a drawstring cloth bag sewn in Kathmandu. In it: fried fox nuts, almonds salted, apricots dried, jaggery. Local. Unwrapped. Labor-intensive.

Was it sufficient? Nope. There were days when I coveted the sugar high of a KitKat. But I brought myself back to focus I wasn’t hiking for flavor. I was hiking for alignment.

My pack felt more substantial with this purpose.

But I walked lighter.

The Hidden Cost of “Cheap”

Cheapness is revered in cities. A bargain. A discount. A hack.

But out in the hills, I saw what cheapness costs:

The owner of the lodge burning wrappers because there is no pickup truck.

The river strangling on bottles that won’t biodegrade.

The kid playing with a packet rather than a toy.

What we term affordable is frequently merely subsidized by another’s cost.

And when I chose differently, the expense arrived  not in receipts, but in discomfort:

I bypassed the Snickers.

I requested refills.

I took wrappers down that weren’t mine.

It wasn’t glamorous.

It was tiring, inconvenient, and some days irksome.

But joy resides in odd places.

In the smile of a tea stall vendor who saw my bottle and said, “no charge.”

In the wink of a porter who witnessed me pick up another person’s biscuit wrapper and nodded silently.

In the manner a kid laughed when I took out my pouch of jaggery and shared a piece.

That’s the secret no one tells you:

When you trek consciously, the burden is real.But so is the beauty.More raw.More personal.More earned.

So yes, I paid more.

Not just in rupees.But in patience, practice, and small sacrifices.

But the view at the top?

It wasn’t just Annapurna.It was knowing I hadn’t stained the very thing I came to revere.

 

 

 

 

Returning Changed – Kathmandu Revisited

Where Littered Conscience Meets Littered Streets

“I returned quieter, and noisier   in protest at the convenience that accompanies us home.”

  The Unwritten Road.

I had returned to Kathmandu not as the individual who had departed there three weeks before with a fresh pair of trekking boots and a go-plastic-free ideal.

I had returned battered, blistered, and keenly conscious.

Of the burden of wrappers.

Of the insidious dictatorship of convenience single-use.

Of the ease with which we remain unmindful of our consequences when someone else is left to tidy up.

Thamel was equally cacophonous   perhaps more so.

Buses spluttered. Horns wailed. Street vendors brushed flies off pyramids of tacky souvenirs. And the plastic? It was omnipresent.

Bags bobbing in puddles.Cups flattened by tuk-tuk wheels.PET bottles fitted into cracks like weeds.

But this time, I didn’t pass by it.

A River, a Rake, and a Reckoning

On my second day return, I learned about a local cleanup along the Bagmati River. A friend of a friend forwarded a WhatsApp PIN. Not a formal invite. Just a text message:”We gather at 6 AM. If you have gloves, bring gloves. If not, bring intention.”

So I went.

The river was heartbreaking   not in the poetic sense, but in the real, undeniable way that stings when you’ve seen its purer cousin up in the Himalayas.Bagmati wasn’t flowing   it was laboring.

Plastic had cinched it at the waist like a belt pulled too tight. The smell was. sharp.But what hit harder was the silence of the volunteers.

No one performed.

No one recorded themselves.

We just knelt down and started   with little rakes, bare hands, and bags that filled too quickly.

One man, older, wiry, with a faded Namaste Nepal cap on his head, saw my hiking boots and smiled:

“Mountains bring down dust. And sometimes, wisdom.”

I laughed, chastened.

We cleaned for three hours.

It didn’t alter the city.

But it altered me.

The New Way I Walked

The remainder of my time in Kathmandu, I moved slower.

Not in pace, but in presence.

I paused to observe how tea sellers recycled old bottles for masala mixes.

I observed children constructing a kite from newspaper and string.

I watched a monk collect three plastic wrappers and tuck them into his robe pocket, unseen and unspoken.

These weren’t gestures of grand size.

They were cultural darning   threads of silent duty in a cloth most of us handle like tissue.

I started carrying a piece of cloth again, declining plastic at every store.

One vendor nodded in silent approval.

Another laughed and said, “Ah! Mountain person now!”

And perhaps I was.

Not merely someone who had been to the mountains, but someone who had heard them.

Protest by Habit

It wasn’t righteousness. Or perfection.

It was a matter of making a choice again and again not to forget.

Because that’s the actual danger of descending from the mountains. Not the high altitude.

Not exhaustion.

But the forgetfulness.

The ease insinuates itself again.

The shortcuts tempt.

The quiet voice within that once howled, “This is important,” becomes one that whispers in fluorescent lighting and takeout containers.

So I vowed:

To continue saying no.

To continue paying attention.

To continue scrubbing, even if no one applauds.

Because protest does not always manifest in the form of signs or slogans, at times, it appears to be the hand extended to grab a wrapper on a crowded Kathmandu street.

 

Epilogue: Carrying the Mountain’s Lesson

How to Be Lighter, Longer

“I didn’t leave the mountain behind. I left lighter footprints and heavier intentions.”  The Unwritten Road.

It’s been weeks since I descended.

The boots are cleaned. The backpack lies beneath my bed, with the scent of cedar, sweat, and some unseen determination I hadn’t brought along when I originally departed.

Something remained, though. Not Annapurna’s vista. Not even prayer flags or the frozen path.

The silence. The quiet, moral echo that accompanies you after you’ve moved through an area with presence rather than greed.

Nepal didn’t merely reveal its summits.

It revealed to me what we carry and what we leave behind.

And now, back in the city, in a place where water runs from faucets and plastic is an afterthought, I feel that tug again.

The one that questions: “Are you still listening?”

Daily Life, Rewritten

I now carry:

• A steel straw, hidden like a charm in my sling bag.
• A water filter, since the earth has already paid sufficiently for our thirst.
• A collection of cloth bags, folded with awe like antique maps, leading me to improved habits.
• And a denial soft, but firm to accept what I am unable to offer in return.

In cafes, I decline plastic utensils. In airports, I refill rather than buy. In the home, I sweep with a coconut husk broom and compost with the rigor of vocation.

Not for the claps. For alignment.

I want what I live to reflect how I walked slow, deliberate, and with an awareness that transcends the summit selfie.

The Smallest Protest

I’ve learned something:

In a convenience-addicted world, slowness is protest.

Refusal is resistance.

Simplicity is spiritual.

Each time I refuse a bag of chips or a can of soda, I recall the mule I encountered on the Annapurna trail burdened with cartons of bottled water, hooves fighting the ice.

Each time I hear plastic rustling, I see the Bagmati river, choking under it.

And whenever I am frustrated or weary or inclined to slip, I remember the butter tea served me by a novice monk in Mustang. No labels. No packaging. Only heat.

It’s not perfect. It never was. It’s remembrance.

Footprints as Offerings

The mountain demands nothing. It offers air, sky, silence, and lets you figure out what to keep and what to leave.

And so I attempt to leave:

• Fewer garbage.
• Fewer sounds.
• More tenderness.

Not only in Nepal. But everywhere.

Because plastic-free is not a campaign, it’s a compass. A gentle pointer to not only sustainability, but to humility.

We speak so much about leaving no trace. But what if we left the correct kind of trace?

Not the kind that strangles rivers and lasts longer than coral reefs,

but the kind that speaks quietly, “Someone cared here. Someone listened.”

A Final Thought

Folks ask me all the time what I learned in Nepal.

I used to say: courage, or simplicity, or the holiness of stillness.

But I know now the truth.

Nepal taught me to bear mountains without hurting them.

Not just with boots,

but with decisions.

Every bottle was declined.

Every wrapper was gathered.

Every thoughtful step…

It is a non-verbal prayer.

A lingering thank you.

Because the path never forgets.

And neither should we.