Hemjakot, Sikles and Tangting

Everyone who goes trekking out of Pokhara goes west or north, Ghorepani, Annapurna Base Camp, Mardi. North-east of the lake, up the Madi valley, there is a group of Gurung villages that see a fraction of the traffic and sit directly under Annapurna II and Lamjung Himal.

Sikles is one of the largest Gurung settlements in Nepal: stone houses with slate roofs stacked up the hillside in tiers at about two thousand metres, with the mountain wall filling the sky behind it. It is two to three hours from Pokhara and it is not on the standard circuit.

The villages

Sikles is the main one. It is genuinely large, several hundred houses, and laid out on the slope in a way that means walking through it is a climb. Gurung, with the strong military connection that runs through Gurung communities, and a lot of the houses have someone abroad.

Tangting, lower down at around fifteen hundred metres, is smaller and quieter and often the first night on the way in.

Hemja, in the valley just outside Pokhara, is where most journeys through here start. There is a Tibetan settlement at Hyangja with a monastery and a carpet workshop, established for refugees in the 1960s, and it is worth an hour on the way past.

What you actually do

This is village walking, not trekking in the mountaineering sense. Days are three to five hours between settlements, on stone paths through terraces and forest, with rhododendron in spring and long views the whole way.

Homestays in the villages are run by the households, and evenings are what you would expect: food with the family, and in some houses a Gurung dance if there is a reason for one. There is a village museum in Sikles covering Gurung material culture.

The mountains here are close. Annapurna II at 7,937 metres and Lamjung Himal are directly north, and from the ridge above Sikles the wall runs east to west across the whole horizon.

Kapuche

The one thing here that is genuinely unusual. Kapuche glacial lake, up the valley beyond Sikles, sits at about 2,540 metres directly beneath the Annapurna II face, which makes it one of the lowest-altitude glacial lakes anywhere, because the ice comes down that far.

It is a hard day and a half or two days from Sikles, and the last section is rough. There is basic accommodation near the lake. Cold, loud with rockfall off the face, and completely different in feel from the villages below.

The path to Kapuche is not a maintained trekking trail in the Annapurna sense. Take a guide from Sikles who has done it recently, and do not attempt it after heavy rain.

Why here instead of Ghorepani

Poon Hill in October has several hundred people on it at sunrise. This valley has almost none, the villages are bigger and more intact, the walking is easier, and the mountain views are arguably better because you are closer to the wall and further from other people.

What you give up is teahouse infrastructure. There is no menu, no bakery, no wifi that works, and the accommodation is somebody’s spare room.

Practical things

• ACAP permit is required and is issued in Pokhara or Kathmandu. Carry your passport and passport photographs.
• The road to the Sikles roadhead is rough and jeeps do not always run in the monsoon.
• Leeches in the wet months, in the forest sections.
• Cash from Pokhara. Nothing here takes cards and there are no machines.
• Warm layers. Two thousand metres in December is cold at night in an unheated stone house.