The people they didn't notice

I've been guiding trekking groups in the Himalayas for eight years and I've taken hundreds of people into the high trails, to the Everest base camp route, to the Annapurna circuit, to smaller routes that the guidebooks don't emphasise. My clients write about the views. This is understandable. The views are extraordinary. What I write about is the people they didn't notice: the women carrying loads on the trail at four in the morning, the lodge owner in Namche who has been watching foreigners come through since the 1980s and has his own opinions about all of them, the tea house cook whose family has been there for four generations and who knows the mountain in a way that no expedition leader ever will. These are the stories that the trekking memoir genre leaves out because they're not the point of the trekking memoir. I write travel pieces and short fiction and I've been published in a Kathmandu-based English-language magazine called *La.Lit* twice, which is the publication I'm most proud of. I write in the evenings after groups, in my home near Thamel. The city is not the mountain and that is also something I want to write about: the gap between what tourists see and what the city actually contains, which are not the same geography.