FAMILY TREK NOTES

I Run a Nepal Trekking Agency — Here’s What I Tell My Own Family Before They Trek

A field note from the desk of a Kathmandu trekking guide

My cousin Sunita called me in April, three days before she was supposed to fly into Kathmandu with her husband and two teenage sons. She wanted to know if she should bring a second pair of hiking boots, just in case. I told her the boots didn’t matter nearly as much as she thought. What mattered was whether she’d walked for four hours straight, even once, in the six weeks before the flight. She hadn’t. So we spent twenty minutes on the phone rearranging their itinerary instead of talking about gear, because gear was never the real question.

I’ve been running treks in the Everest, Annapurna, and Langtang regions for eleven years now, and somewhere around year four I stopped giving clients the polished version of my advice and started giving them the version I actually believe. The two are not the same thing.

The polished version sells packages, reassures nervous first-timers, and fits neatly on a website. The honest version is messier, occasionally unflattering to my own industry, and it’s what I tell my own family, my staff’s families, and increasingly, anyone who asks me a real question instead of a checklist question.

This is that version, written down for once.

I should say clearly that none of this is meant to scare anyone off. My family keeps trekking, year after year, and most of them come back changed in some small good way. But I’ve also sat in enough teahouses at 2 am with a relative who ignored something I told them, and I’d rather write it down properly than keep repeating it in fragments over phone calls at odd hours.

IT’S NOT A FITNESS TEST. IT’S A PATIENCE TEST.

Every year I get at least one relative who trains like they’re preparing for a marathon and then struggles on day three of Poon Hill, which is, frankly, one of the gentler treks we run.

Meanwhile I’ve watched sixty-two-year-old grandmothers from Pokhara summit Kalapatthar because they understood something the marathoner didn’t: trekking in Nepal is mostly about pacing yourself against the mountain’s schedule, not your own.

The single sentence I repeat most often to family before a trek is this.

Walk slower than feels natural for the first two days.

I don’t mean slow as in weak. I mean slow as in deliberate, because your body needs those two days to figure out what altitude is doing to it before you ask it to work hard.

My own brother, who plays football twice a week and considers himself fit, ignored this on his first Annapurna Base Camp trek and spent an entire night in Deurali with a headache that scared his wife more than it needed to. He wasn’t unfit. He was fast on day one, and the mountain punished him for it on day three.

ALTITUDE DOESN’T CARE HOW STRONG YOU ARE

This is the one piece of advice that costs me business, and I give it anyway.

Fitness helps with stamina, with sore knees, with carrying your own daypack comfortably. Fitness does almost nothing to protect you from altitude sickness.

I’ve guided professional athletes who got hit hard above 4,000 meters and untrained office workers who sailed through Everest Base Camp without a headache. The difference usually comes down to ascent rate, hydration, and whether someone is honest with themselves about symptoms, not how many kilometers they can run at sea level.

Nobody collapses out of nowhere. They ignore two days of small warnings first.

So when my nephew Prakash asked me last year if he needed to “get in shape” before Gokyo Lakes, I told him yes, a little, but what he really needed was to promise me he’d tell our guide the moment he felt off, even a mild headache, even something he could easily explain away as tiredness.

Altitude sickness in its early stages is boring and easy to dismiss. That’s exactly what makes it dangerous.

WHAT I ACTUALLY PACK, AND WHAT I DON’T

Clients ask me for gear lists constantly, and I give them one, but the list I give family is shorter and more specific because I know exactly what they’ll actually use.

Three things I insist on.

A proper down jacket rated for at least minus fifteen, not the fashionable urban kind that looks warm but isn’t.

A headlamp with spare batteries, because teahouse electricity is unreliable and nobody wants to find the outdoor toilet at 2 am using their phone flashlight.

And broken-in boots, meaning boots that have already walked at least forty kilometers before Nepal, not boots bought the week before the flight because they looked good in the shop.

Things I Tell People to Stop Worrying About

Trekking poles are useful but not sacred; you can rent them in Kathmandu or Namche for almost nothing.

Fancy moisture-wicking everything is nice, but a few cotton layers for lower altitudes won’t ruin your trek.

And please, stop packing seven days of protein bars. The dal bhat at altitude is often better fuel than anything you carried from home, and teahouses genuinely want to feed you well because a well-fed trekker is a trekker who keeps walking and keeps paying for meals.

THE GUIDE IS NOT YOUR PORTER, AND YOUR PORTER IS NOT INVISIBLE

This one is less about safety and more about how I want my family to treat the people they’ll spend two weeks with.

I always tell them the same thing before they go.

Learn your guide’s name properly, not just “guide,” and use it. Learn your porter’s name too. These men and women are not part of the scenery. They know this mountain the way you know your own street, and the trip goes better in every sense- safer, warmer, more interesting- when you treat them as the experts they are rather than staff who carry things.

I also tell family members something that surprises them.

Tip generously if you can, but respect is worth more than money to most of our guides. Ask them about their village, their family, why they chose this work. Some of the best conversations I’ve had on these trails happened at 4,800 meters with a guide who’d walked the same route two hundred times and still lit up talking about the yaks he grew up herding.

THE WEATHER WILL CHANGE YOUR PLANS. LET IT.

I tell every family member the same uncomfortable truth before they leave.

Somewhere in your trip, weather or a flight delay or a closed pass will rearrange your schedule, and fighting that rearrangement will ruin more of your trip than the delay itself ever could.

My aunt was supposed to fly out of Lukla on a Tuesday last October and got stuck for three extra days because of fog, which grounds flights constantly in that valley. She spent those three days furious on the phone with the airline instead of exploring Namche Bazaar properly, which she’d rushed through on the way up.

By the time she flew out, she’d missed a monastery visit she’d wanted for years, not because of the fog, but because of how she chose to spend the waiting.

Now I tell everyone before they go: build one or two buffer days into your itinerary if you can afford the time, and if you can’t, at least build the mental buffer. Decide in advance that a delay is part of the trek, not an interruption to it.

FOOD, WATER, AND THE THINGS THAT ACTUALLY MAKE PEOPLE SICK

Most stomach trouble on the trail has nothing to do with altitude and everything to do with water. I am strict about this with family in a way I’m not always strict about with clients, because family listens less to the client version.

Always treat your water, every time, even when a teahouse owner tells you the tap is fine, because sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t, and you can’t tell by looking.

I carry a small UV purifier and iodine drops as backup, and I’ve told my own siblings to do the same rather than relying entirely on bottled water, which is expensive at altitude and creates a genuine plastic waste problem on these trails that we’re all trying to fix.

On food, I tell family to eat what the local staff eats when possible. Dal bhat, thukpa, simple noodle dishes.

Avoid meat at higher elevations, not because it’s unsafe exactly, but because it’s often been carried up for days without proper refrigeration, and there are better ways to get protein at 4,000 meters than a chicken that walked further to get there than you did.

THE MENTAL PART NOBODY WARNS YOU ABOUT

Here’s what I think most trekking companies underplay, including sometimes my own marketing.

The hardest part of a two-week trek is rarely the physical climbing. It’s the boredom of a rest day in a cold teahouse with nothing to do, the homesickness that shows up around day eight for no clear reason, the moment you realize you still have four days left, and your legs are tired, and the summit still looks impossibly far away.

I tell my family to bring a book, a journal, cards, something that has nothing to do with walking.

I tell them the low point almost always passes within a day, and that almost everyone who’s ever trekked with our agency has hit one and pushed through it and been glad afterward.

Knowing that in advance changes how you experience it in the moment. It stops feeling like proof you can’t do this and starts feeling like a normal Tuesday on the trail.

THE INSURANCE CONVERSATION NOBODY WANTS TO HAVE

There’s one conversation I have with every family member that feels a little morbid in the moment and that I have anyway, every single time.

Before you fly, buy travel insurance that specifically covers high-altitude trekking and helicopter evacuation, and check the altitude ceiling written into the policy, because plenty of cheap policies quietly cap out at 3,000 meters, which is barely past Namche Bazaar.

I sat with my own mother two years ago and made her read the fine print on her policy line by line before her Langtang trek, and she rolled her eyes at me the entire time.

Then a woman in her group needed a helicopter evacuation from Kyanjin Gompa after a bad fall, and my mother watched the paperwork happen in real time, watched how fast it moved because the policy was right, and she never rolled her eyes about insurance again.

Nothing happened to her personally. She just understood, finally, what that piece of paper was actually for.

I also tell family the practical side of this.

Save the emergency contact numbers for both the insurance company and our agency somewhere that doesn’t depend on your phone having signal, because at altitude it often won’t. Write them on paper.

It sounds old-fashioned until it’s the only thing that works.

WHY I STILL SEND THEM ANYWAY

People sometimes ask why, given everything that can go wrong, I keep encouraging my own family to trek at all.

The answer is simple, and it’s the same reason I chose this work in the first place.

There is a particular kind of quiet above 4,000 meters, when the wind drops and the light hits the ridgeline just right, that I have never found anywhere else, and I want the people I love to stand inside that quiet at least once.

So yes, I tell them about altitude sickness and delayed flights and bad water and homesickness on day eight.

I tell them all of it honestly because I’d rather they go in prepared than go in starry-eyed and get blindsided.

But I tell them all of it while booking their permits, because underneath the warnings, what I’m really saying is this.

Go. It’s worth every one of those uncomfortable moments, and then some.

My cousin Sunita made it to Poon Hill for sunrise that April, slower than her husband, faster than her sons expected, and she called me from the ridge before I’d even had my morning tea.

She didn’t mention the boots again.