I didn't go to Nepal to trek.
I went because my Indian visa had expired and the border was there. That's the honest version. But there's a version before that one.
Back home in Casablanca, I had never walked on a mountain in my life. Not once. My cousin — a serious trekker, the kind who owns things with straps — took me one day for a two-hour hike in the Atlas. We were barely at 2,000 metres. My lungs were destroyed within the first twenty minutes. I threatened to sue her in court if we didn't turn back immediately.
I meant it.
For years after that, I judged people who suffered while walking. I found it genuinely stupid. You are not being chased. You chose this. From my office in Casablanca, sitting in meetings that went nowhere, I looked at photos of people on mountain trails and thought: I will never understand these people.
I was missing something. I just didn't know it yet.
The Trek Is Not the Point
Most people who come to Nepal for the mountains focus on the elevation. The passes, the altitude sickness, the summit views. They train for months. They bring the right boots. They track their steps.
I understand that. There is something real in the physical challenge of treks in Nepal — the Annapurna Circuit, the Everest Base Camp trail, the quieter routes through Mustang or the Langtang valley. These are not easy walks. The body earns what it sees.
But the mountain is not what changes you.
What changes you is everything around the mountain. The woman who hands you tea at 4,800 metres without asking what you need. The child who runs alongside you for twenty minutes then disappears into a field. The silence at 5am when the only sound is the sound of your own breathing and you realise you haven't heard that clearly in years.
What the Annapurna Circuit Actually Is
The Annapurna Circuit is one of the great treks in Nepal — roughly 160 to 230 kilometres depending on where you start and finish, crossing the Thorong La pass at 5,416 metres.
I arrived at the trailhead with Jordan sneakers and a bag of random clothes. Not a single item that any sensible trekker would recognise as appropriate gear. I looked like someone who had taken a wrong turn on the way to a café.
I met a stranger on the first day. He looked at my feet, then at my face, with an expression that said everything without saying anything. He is one of my closest friends today. At the time, he gave me three days before I turned back.
Nobody thought I would keep pace.
The first trek was only three days. But I understood fast enough that I wanted more. Something had shifted — not dramatically, just permanently. I went to buy proper gear. Not because someone told me to, but because my heart had made a decision my wardrobe hadn't caught up with yet.
The circuit itself is a long conversation with yourself that you cannot walk away from because you are already walking. The first days are manageable. The villages are close together. There is wifi. There are other trekkers.
Then the trail thins. The villages get smaller. The wifi disappears.
And at some point — somewhere above 4,000 metres — you run out of distraction. That's when the trek begins.
The Hardest Night
The night before Thorong La pass was the hardest of my life.
Temperature dropped to -15. For a Moroccan who had spent the previous decade in air-conditioned offices, this was not weather — it was an argument. My girlfriend had a severe headache from the altitude. We lay there in the dark talking about going back, calculating whether we could, whether we should, whether the whole thing had been a mistake.
I am a little African. I was not built for this. This was not in the contract.
At some point we stopped talking and just waited for morning.
And then the sunrise came.
It felt like a shot of heroin. That immediate understanding that you will always be addicted to this feeling.
I have no photograph of that moment. I didn't reach for my camera. I just stood there in the silence — pure silence, the kind where not a single living thing is around you, where the world has temporarily stopped producing noise — and felt something I had no word for.
It felt like a shot of heroin. I say that not for effect but because it's the most accurate description I have. That immediate understanding that you will always be addicted to this feeling. That no matter how brutal the ascent, no matter how cold the night, no matter how many times you doubt what you are doing there — at the end, it is completely worth it.
The man who threatened his cousin with legal action at 2,000 metres in the Atlas stood at 5,416 metres and wanted to go higher.
Altitude and the Inner Conversation
There is something altitude does to the mind that nobody quite warns you about.
It slows things down. Not just physically — mentally. You cannot rush at 4,500 metres. Your body refuses. And in that enforced slowness, thoughts surface that you had been too busy to notice at sea level.
On the third day above Manang, I sat outside a teahouse at dusk watching the Annapurna range turn from white to pink to a dark grey I don't have a name for. I had been walking for eight days. I had spoken to almost no one in forty-eight hours.
I wasn't sad. I wasn't euphoric. I was just present in a way that felt unfamiliar. Like a frequency I had forgotten I could tune into.
The People Are the Landscape
Trekking guides will tell you about the Gurung villages, the Thakali hospitality, the Buddhist prayer flags strung between passes. They are right to mention it.
What they cannot convey is the specific quality of being welcomed by people who have very little and give generously anyway. Dal bhat twice a day, a blanket that smells of woodsmoke, a family eating together in the kitchen while you sit at the only table in the guestroom.
There is a woman in a village above Pisang whose name I never learned. She brought me hot lemon and ginger without my asking, sat down across from me, and watched the mountain for a while. Then she said something in Nepali, pointed at the peak, and laughed.
I don't know what she said. But I laughed too. That moment is more alive in me than any summit photo.
Everest Base Camp: The Trek Everyone Knows
The Everest Base Camp trek is the most famous of all treks in Nepal. Eleven to fourteen days from Lukla, through Namche Bazaar, past Tengboche monastery, up to the base of the highest mountain on earth.
It is crowded in season. It is commercial in places. The trail to Namche on a peak-season morning looks less like a mountain path and more like a very slow queue.
And yet. Tengboche monastery at dawn, incense rising in the cold air, monks chanting before the sun reaches the valley — that is not something the crowds erase. Khumbu glacier up close, vast and broken and ancient — that is not a tourist attraction. It is a fact of the earth that makes you feel briefly, correctly, very small.
The Everest Base Camp trek is worth doing. Not because of the destination — base camp itself is a field of rocks and tents — but because of the fourteen days it takes to get there.
The Trek Nobody Tells You to Do
The Langtang Valley trek is three hours from Kathmandu and receives a fraction of the visitors of the Annapurna or Everest routes. It was devastated by the 2015 earthquake. The villages were rebuilt by the people who survived.
Walking through Langtang now is walking through a place that decided to continue. There is something in that decision — visible in the new stone walls, the replanted fields, the children who were born after — that has nothing to do with altitude records or scenic views.
It is one of the most moving treks in Nepal precisely because it has nothing to prove.
What You Come Back With
I came down from the mountains after two weeks with dirty boots, a bad cough from the dust on the lower trails, and something that took me a long time to name.
Not peace exactly. Not clarity in the self-help sense. More like proportion. A recalibrated sense of what is large and what is small. The mountain is large. The meeting you were dreading is small. The silence at 5,000 metres is large. The opinion of someone who has never left their city is small.
That recalibration doesn't last forever. Life at sea level is very good at eroding it.
But for a while after Nepal, you carry it with you. And that while is worth every step of the climb.
A Note on Going with Someone Who Knows
I walked much of Nepal alone. That worked for me — I needed the solitude, I spoke enough Hindi to navigate, I was comfortable with uncertainty.
Most people are not, and there is no shame in that.
The difference between trekking Nepal with a good guide and trekking it without is the difference between passing through a landscape and being let into it. The villages, the monasteries, the families — these open differently when you arrive with someone who belongs to the place, or who has earned the right to introduce you.
At ROÛH, our Nepal journeys are designed exactly for that. Not guided tours in the conventional sense — but accompanied passage into something real.
I reached the top of Thorong La at sunrise on a Tuesday.
There was no one else there.
I sat for forty minutes and did not take a single photograph.
Some things you keep for yourself.
Our Nepal journeys are not trekking tours. They are accompanied passages into a landscape that changes the people who walk through it.