Things to Do in Pokhara in January

Trekking in the Annapurna, Langtang, Everest, and Upper Mustang regions from Pokhara is an expedition-grade commitment. January strips these trails down to their most elemental form. Snow blankets the passes above 3,500 metres. The teahouse lodges run quieter than at any other point in the trekking calendar. The air at altitude is so cold and dry it stings the inside of your nostrils with each breath. The payoff is total. Unclouded views of Machapuchare's fishtail summit. The creak of prayer flags in a wind that carries nothing but ice crystals. The deep silence of a Himalayan valley with no other trekking party in sight.

The Sarangkot Village Coffee Culture and Authentic Local Life Tour climbs the ridge above Pokhara to the farming settlement where Nepali arabica coffee grows on steep terraces carved into red laterite soil. In January, the coffee cherries have been harvested. The drying racks are still out, draped with beans that release a nutty, almost cocoa-like fragrance as the morning sun hits them. Villagers in hand-knit sweaters walk you through their small-plot processing, hand-pulping, sun-drying, roasting in a blackened pan over a wood fire. The final cup, brewed thick and unfiltered, tastes of dark chocolate and raw earth. Nothing like the instant Nescafé that dominates Pokhara's tourist cafés.

The eight-day Annapurna Base Camp Trek is the most concentrated high-altitude immersion available from Pokhara. It climbs from subtropical bamboo forest at Jhinu Danda, where the air is thick with the sweet rot of fallen rhododendron petals, to the glacial amphitheatre at 4,130 metres, where the surrounding walls of Annapurna I, Hiunchuli, and Machapuchare block out everything but a disc of sky overhead. In January the base camp sits under hard-packed snow. The glacier moraine crunches underfoot like broken porcelain. The cold is severe enough that water bottles freeze solid inside your pack by mid-afternoon. The silence at camp is absolute. No birdsong, no wind in leaves, only the occasional deep crack of shifting ice somewhere in the cwm.

The four-day private Poon Hill trek is the classic Pokhara gateway trek. In January it delivers its signature payoff, the pre-dawn panorama from the 3,210-metre summit, with an intensity the autumn season cannot match. You climb 300 stone steps in darkness, breath visible in the torchlight, calves burning, the smell of damp moss and frozen earth rising from the trail. Then the light arrives. First a thin orange line behind Dhaulagiri, then a flood of gold across the entire Annapurna range, the snow faces so bright they leave afterimages when you blink. Below, the rhododendron forests of Ghorepani stand leafless and skeletal, their twisted trunks coated in pale lichen that glows in the early light like phosphorescence.

The exclusive round-trip transfer from Pokhara to Jomsom and Muktinath replaces what used to be days of walking with a single dramatic drive up the Kali Gandaki valley, the deepest gorge on Earth, where the river runs grey-green between walls of exposed sedimentary rock that rise nearly 8,000 metres on either side. In January the valley floor is dry and windless in the morning hours, a stark contrast to the gale-force afternoon winds that make this route notorious from March onward. The terraced fields around Marpha sit dormant under a thin frost, the apple orchards bare, the stone houses trailing woodsmoke from every chimney. At Muktinath, the sacred natural gas flames flicker behind a thin curtain of water at the Jwala Mai temple, the hiss of burning methane mixing with the splash of the 108 stone waterspouts that pilgrims use for ritual bathing even in the cold.

The three-day Poon Hill trek from Pokhara is the shortest route to a credible Himalayan summit experience. It earns that compression honestly. The trail wastes no time, climbing through terraced millet fields above Nayapul where farmers in woollen shawls tend winter mustard crops, the yellow flowers startling against the brown hillside. By the second afternoon you are in Ghorepani, a ridgeline settlement where the lodges smell of juniper smoke and boiled potatoes. The temperature drops fast enough after sunset that your tea cools to lukewarm before you finish the cup. The third morning delivers the Poon Hill sunrise, the same Annapurna-to-Dhaulagiri sweep as the four-day route, before a long, knee-testing descent back to the roadhead through oak forest where langur monkeys crash through the canopy overhead, their grey fur bright against the dark branches.