My way by Prasanna KC

There should be a fancy Nepali word for nostalgia. Like the heartache, you feel when you see replays of Michael Schumacher overtake 11 drivers from the bottom of the track to land a position on the podium in his gleaming red Ferrari. Or when Gopal dai delivered egg chatamaris to your house because he had time to spare.

Just leave your house as soon as this shitstorm blows over, drive a few hours, walk a little, and spend a weekend outside.

Even if you haven’t left Kathmandu the last few months – not that it’s a choice really, come summer you’re bound to be overcome with remembrances of the road trip you did when you were in college, memories of your drunk friends sleeping under a very thin blanket and waking up the next morning with dew on their faces. So, listen to yourself just this once. It’s not difficult. Just leave your house as soon as this shitstorm blows over, drive a few hours, walk a little, and spend a weekend outside.There are plenty of places you can go to enjoy yourself in June. Plenty of trails you can hike, villages you can walk through, and Instagram-worthy sunrises you can capture in your selfie sticks. I tip my imaginary hat to those places. But when it comes to choosing between what is left on your 128 GB memory stick and what is tweeted from your (hopefully, verified) account, I would strongly urge you to imagine the following scene: a campfire on a hill in the middle of a million square feet of wilderness. An enormous butter-colored and unusually large-looking moon hung low in the sky. Crickets making the loud chirping noise, bats hanging on the branches nearby, and large mean-looking ants unfazed by your presence calmly walking by doing their thing while you lay in your tent.June is reckless wet and cold in the hills; and this place it should be said is not for the weak of spine or the faint of the heart (and by that, I’m explicitly referring to folks that cannot afford to miss their favorite weekly episode of Koffee with Karan every Sunday at 9 pm). To reach this spot, you must drive from Kathmandu towards Dhulikhel and head for the direction of the big Shiva statue (the biggest in South Asia I’m told by the overly enthusiastic neighbours) that appears on everyone’s Facebook updates below the pictures of their trip to Chandragiri Cable Car. About an hour’s drive later, you’ll have to park your car and walk up a hill that has a bunch of friendly-looking mud houses for company and cornfields. Lots of cornfields.At night you’ll make barbeque with corn and sip that fine bottle of whiskey you bought along for the trip. Eventually, you’ll lie on your back and reminisce about the vastness of the galaxy while waiting to spot the falling stars. Then the crickets will get down to business. And if you can’t sleep for all their ruckus, bundle yourself and go back out under the stars.There have never been so many.