Kathmandu, Nepal With Sacred Rides

The woman was angry, really getting her gut into whatever it was she was screaming in Nepali. Mountain bikers are used to airborne abuse. It's part of sharing trails with dog walkers, dirtbikers and hikers (especially the ones with trekking poles). But we weren’t sharing a trail with the woman, we were sharing her front yard. And here’s where it gets interesting. She wasn’t yelling at us, she was yelling at her dog. She was just fine with the ten riders who burst out of the narrow gulley uphill from her house and occupied, briefly but totally, the dirt walkway just off her front step. She was mad at her dog for barking at them. Such is mountain biking in Nepal, where dirt trails are everywhere, and everyone is welcome to them.


Our Sacred Rides group hit Nepal the first week of November - nine riders and a guide from Canada, the U.S. and New Zealand. Sacred Rides does trips all over North and South America and even Europe, but this was their first trip to Nepal. To negotiate the physical and human geography of the Himalaya they’ve enlisted local rider and guide Mandil Pradhan for a week of riding around chaotic Kathmandu and the austere Lower Mustang Valley. It was on the third day that the dog barked. We were on our way down from Chisapani toward Bhaktapur (in tourist terms, we were descending from a place where you can see Mount Everest to the walled medieval city that’s a UNESCO heritage site).


Leaving Chisipani we followed rock-impregnated doubletrack that rose and fell along the rough contours of one of the larger hills ringing Kathmandu. I call them hills because the distant Himalayan peaks set the bar pretty high for geographic terms, but for three days these hills at roughly 1,200 metres in elevation were punching above their weight in acclimatizing us. The previous two days we followed traffic-free roads and trails in and out of dense forest on semi-populated hillsides, climbing an accumulated 2,000 vertical metres. Today was our downhill day, one that still included almost 800 metres of climbing.


Pradhan stopped us at a concrete and steel hut with corrugated metal roofing, no doubt built to shelter the Western trekkers that feed a steady stream of rupees into the economy. “Lower your seats,” Pradhan said, before dropping into a gully leading straight downhill. This fall-line trail had known no erosion-abatement efforts. Rocks and ruts kept my attention focused pretty close off the front of my tire until it started rolling over intermittent stone steps and I realized our ride had become a semi-urban adventure.





Paving stones and short staircases alternated with stretches of packed dirt and loose rock on this singletrack footpath that was the only means of getting to or from these houses. The trail hadn’t been built with flow in mind. It hadn’t been built at all, just worn by people coming and going from houses, the terraced paddy fields all around and the road somewhere below. With its direct route and frequent switches from rural to urban, the trail called for equal parts cross country, downhill and stunt park skills. What it didn’t call for was diplomacy. On the first day, after realizing that biking in Nepal meant biking among Nepalis, I had asked Pradhan how to say “excuse me”. “We don’t,” he replied. “We say, ‘Get out of the way.'” I didn’t ask for a translation.