Ask this desk to reserve a twelve night village walking trip in the Annapurna foothills of central Nepal

Twelve nights at village pace

The route stays low. Nothing on it goes above three thousand two hundred meters, and most nights fall between one thousand five hundred and two thousand nine hundred. That is deliberate. The interest here is not altitude. It is what people have built on a very steep hillside over several hundred years.

Days are short by trekking standards, four to six hours, with long stops. Villages come every two or three hours: Dhampus, Landruk, Tolka, Ghandruk, Ulleri, Ghorepani. Houses are stone under slate, whitewashed at the base, standing in tight lines along the contour.

Above roughly two thousand meters the farmland gives out and forest starts. Oak and rhododendron, moss on every branch, and in late March and April the rhododendron is in flower and red enough to read from the far side of the valley.

The big peaks sit behind all of it. Annapurna South stands at seven thousand two hundred and nineteen meters, and Machhapuchhre at six thousand nine hundred and ninety three.

Water, stone and terraces

A terrace is a piece of engineering that nobody signed. The hillsides around Ghandruk carry hundreds of them. Each one is level, each is held up by a dry stone wall, and each is fed by a channel cut along the contour from a stream higher up.

Water runs the whole system. It is taken off a stream, carried a kilometer or more at almost no gradient, dropped from terrace to terrace through gaps in the walls, and returned to the river lower down. Rice grows below about one thousand eight hundred meters. Above that it is millet, maize and buckwheat, because the water will not reach and the season is too short.

You walk beside these channels for hours. They are lined with slate, the joints are green with moss, and the sound never stops. Repair is constant and visible: fresh stone against weathered stone, a plank over a break, a plastic pipe where a wall has gone. Old water mills still stand on the bigger streams.

Stairs, and more stairs

Between Tikhedhunga and Ulleri there are more than three thousand stone steps inside about one and a half kilometers of horizontal distance. They are not even. Some are ankle high and some come to mid thigh. Most people take two to three hours over them, and it is the hardest morning of the twelve.

Descents are worse than climbs. The drop from Ghorepani through Tadapani to Ghandruk loses more than one thousand three hundred meters, nearly all of it on steps. Poles help. Cartilage does not grow back.

Dust is the other complaint. Roads now reach Ghandruk and climb toward Ulleri, so a few sections that were quiet trail ten years ago are shared with jeeps. Where that happens the walking is unpleasant for an hour or two.

Poon Hill at dawn is not solitude. Several hundred people stand on a small summit in the dark, and in spring the view is often gone by nine in the haze.

Who lives on these ridges?

Ghandruk is a Gurung village. Landruk and Tolka are mixed Gurung and Magar. Both peoples have sent soldiers to foreign regiments for two hundred years, and pension and remittance money paid for a good deal of the roofing you walk past.

The other economy is walkers. A guesthouse in Ghandruk is full in October and empty in July, when the family is out farming. Both halves of that year are real, and the second half is invisible to visitors.

School numbers in these villages are falling. Families move to Pokhara for secondary education and often do not move back. Several houses on the route are shut, shutters wired closed, the terraces below them uncut for a season or two. Nobody is going to tell you that this is charming.

Evenings are early. Walls are plywood and you hear your neighbors. Heat is one stove in the common room, lit at six, and it goes out when the last person leaves.

Where $3,420 else goes

This departure sits on the $3,420 rung, and it is not alone there. The office keeps every trip at that figure on one page so the number can be seen doing different work in different parts of the world. It does not rank them and will not tell you which is the better buy, because that is not a judgement a figure supports.

• The whole of the $3,420 rung
• All eight figures side by side
• Every departure in one table