A journey through Nepal and the Tibetan Himalayas
Twenty years ago, in January 2006, I travelled to Nepal with a small group of paragliders from Riga. I wasn’t there to fly, at least not on purpose. I was there as a tourist attached to a club of people whose shared obsession was finding warm air over mountains.
What follows was written for KLUBS magazine not long after I returned, and I’ve deliberately kept it close to the original rather than smoothing it into a different story twenty years later.
It’s a story about sensations, not a classic travel piece with tips for tourists and historical facts lined up by year. Because the feeling starts the moment you imagine the trip, long before the moment you’re actually airborne in the Himalayas with an eagle gliding beneath you.
Sensations on the Road
Riga to the capital of a neighbouring country. Many hours on a train. No sign of the famous tea glasses in metal holders I’d hoped to see in the dining car. A tipsy girl with a beer bottle at the bus station. A woman in high heels skating between buses and minivans as if she were on ice. The city had its own colour, though nobody around us seemed to notice it: metro stations with stylish marble panels and Soviet-era interiors, and almost everyone dressed in the same even black and grey. In our bright ski jackets, pale jeans and enormous backpacks, we stood out completely in a city of millions.
We were a small group from Riga joining a much bigger group along the way. Paragliding was what brought everyone together: the plan was Nepal, in search of thermal currents and mountain flying. My friend and I, along with a couple of other non-flyers, were there as tourists, planning to peel off from the group once we reached the town of Pokhara.
Several hours disappeared at the transit airport. Check-in was delayed. One of our group helped a girl at the counter restart her frozen computer, and she was genuinely impressed that some random Latvian guy knew how to do it. Restart, it turned out, was no small thing. There was just enough time left in duty-free to pick up something useful, so I grabbed an Otard cognac, insurance against a long flight.
We had already been sitting on the plane for an hour when the Pakistan Airlines pilot announced that the delay was due to “some technical problems” that were still being fixed. It started to feel funny. Were we taking off at all? Then the plane finally began moving towards the runway and a prayer came through the speakers, asking Allah to bless the flight. Somehow that settled me completely.I struck up a conversation with my travel companion, the Otard. My other neighbour was Muhammed, a Pakistani who exported medical instruments. I learnt a few interesting things along the way. He explained that if local officials smelled alcohol on him after landing, he could be handcuffed, so he politely declined to socialise with my sloshing half-litre friend. Tourists, apparently, were treated differently. He also told me that in his family the wife controlled the household money: husband and sons handed over what they earned, and she distributed what was needed. I smirked to myself. My future wife probably wouldn’t be Pakistani. The Otard agreed.
In Dubai we had an hour. Fourteen dollars bought two coffees and two muffins, followed by another trip through security, this time in our socks because the shoes had to go through the X-ray too. Coffee in one hand, muffin in the other, we made it through and continued towards Karachi.
Somewhere along the way I fell into conversation with a group of travellers from Moscow, St. Petersburg and Ukraine who were also headed to Nepal, though for a very different reason: qigong meditation near a sacred cave outside Kathmandu. They admitted, half joking, that they envied us a little. We had no strict plan. Just mountains ahead and a decision to follow whatever the moment felt like.
One Night in Karachi
We landed around 4 a.m. local time. Officials collected our passports, lined us up, counted us, briefly lost two passports, found them again, walked us through seemingly every X-ray machine in the building and loaded us into minivans for the Airport Hotel.
Our guide turned out to be a Russian-speaking Indian man named Sasha, a genuinely colourful character. For fifteen dollars a head, he offered to take us to the Arabian Sea to look for turtles. Our flight to Kathmandu was leaving in four hours, so sleeping didn’t seem worth the effort. We negotiated him down to ten dollars and went. The alternative was what I privately named the “One Night Hotel,” which gave off the strong impression that the sheets were changed only after guest number fourteen.
Karachi at night was unforgettable in its own way: an hour through streets where cars and motorbikes raced, horns going, everyone trying to overtake everyone else even before dawn. There were no rules, or perhaps everyone simply agreed to ignore them simultaneously. At the shore, the turtle hunt succeeded. One unlucky specimen was found and everyone crowded around for photographs.
The sensation was fantastic: on the night of January 15, I was wading through warm seawater, having left Riga only hours earlier in sub-zero cold.
Night bus in Karachi, Pakistan. Monkey Temple in Kathmandu, Nepal (2006).
On the way back, Sasha announced that he was also a singer. I felt the universe click into place: my childhood dream of ending up inside a Bollywood film had apparently been waiting for this exact minivan, this exact road, this exact 4 a.m. After his performance, my friend and I took a turn, which went over well with the girls in the group, although I had to admit that my knowledge of Latvian songlyrics was, to put it generously, impressionistic. Our companions tried to join in, but the only song everyone could agree on was a mournful one about a crying rowan tree. Then came a fast shower, breakfast at the airport and a flight to Kathmandu with nothing else to report.
Sensations in Flight
After a couple of days in Kathmandu, walking through the city, taking photographs and doing the usual traveller things, we continued to Pokhara, a resort town on a lake, ringed by mountains. Its main street already felt familiar: souvenir shops, restaurants and hotels packed together, the same central strip you can find in almost any resort town anywhere in the world.
Travelling with a club of paragliding fanatics, it was clear that we had to try what they were there for. One of the local pilots, Viktor, was Russian, with his wife and child back in Siberia while he flew tourists tandem in Nepal. He agreed to take us up and explained how the sun heats the mountainside, warm air rises along the slopes, and pilots hunt those invisible thermal currents to stay in the sky.
I was his first passenger of the day. After a short running start, just a few steps in which you have to get the wing up before the cliff drops away beneath you, we were already gliding six or seven hundred metres above the ground. The feeling was extraordinary: peace, silence, freedom. Beneath us, unhurried, eagles were gliding on the same air. I looked down at one and it looked like it wasn’t even trying. It was a strange realisation that, for a little while, a human could feel something close to what a bird feels.
Paragliding near Pokhara, Nepal (2006).
All kinds of people ended up doing this sport in Nepal. One regular was a Brit who taught English to children in Japan and returned every year just to fly. Some of the English pilots at the local club flew alongside specially trained eagles. The birds worked almost like hunting dogs beside their handlers, circling precisely where warm air was rising and showing the pilots where to fly. The thermal current was invisible to us. The eagle simply felt where it was, caught it and rose. The paraglider noticed the eagle and followed.
Our flight lasted about half an hour before we landed on a road shared with cars, motorbikes and pedestrians. Traffic was light but never absent. While I waited for my friend to land, I watched another pilot touch down directly in front of a bus. The bus simply braked and waited while he gathered his wing, then carried on. Another pilot had to abandon his approach at the last moment and ended up in roadside bushes because a pair of tourists on a motorbike couldn’t decide whether to stop or keep going.
After hearing the pilots’ stories of broken bones and bruises, including injuries from this same trip, I understood that hanging in a tandem harness with a camera around your neck was entirely different from piloting the wing yourself: reading the air, making the decisions and carrying responsibility for your own landing and someone else’s. There was something magnetic in it all the same. I found myself wondering whether it might be worth learning properly.
Sensations in the Mountains
Finally, the mountains. We planned three days of trekking, travelling through the Tibetan cultural region of Nepal’s Mustang District. Early in the morning we flew to Jomsom Airport in the Annapurna massif, at around 2,800 metres above sea level. The small mountain airport sits in demanding terrain, and the approach felt nothing like arriving at a conventional airport.
The plane was tiny and the cockpit was right there in front of us, like riding in the back seat of a taxi. Before takeoff, the pilot tried the wipers on a frozen windshield. Someone outside solved the problem more efficiently by throwing a bucket of hot water over the glass, and off we went. At moments it felt as if the mountains might simply close in and crush the little aircraft.
The tiny plane, the approach into Jomsom, Nepal (2006).
The Tibetan passengers wore red ribbons tied around their heads for a safe journey. The chatter in the cabin gradually settled into an even murmur, and I realised they were praying. I felt calm again, convinced that the plane wasn’t going down, at least not today. Then we dropped through an air pocket and the Tibetan grandmother beside me grabbed my leg with everything she had. The murmuring stopped for a moment. A beat of pure silence at altitude. I decided I’d better pay the Brazilian women across the aisle a compliment while I still had the chance. You never know.
The chance came anyway. We landed safely and had breakfast with the Brazilians before the hard climb began. Since my friend had a bag full of camera gear, we hired a porter and set off. It was winter and trekkers were scarce. Our route was a tea-house trek, moving from village to village, sleeping in small lodges and stopping along the way for tea and Tibetan bread, which absolutely had to be tried with honey.
The yak steak earned our particular devotion. I hadn’t eaten anything that good in a long time, and at that altitude, with that appetite, I genuinely couldn’t understand vegetarians. We ordered extra garlic too, as a kind of insurance against whatever bacteria the mountains might have been quietly incubating for us.
Because we had flown in rather than walked, we missed the possibility of encountering Maoists in the lower jungle regions we would otherwise have crossed. They were fighting the monarchy and attacking government and police targets, while stories among trekkers said they treated tourists comparatively calmly and asked them for a “donation” to the cause, something like thirty dollars. The strangest part was that they gave you a receipt.
Across three days and nights we moved through a string of small villages, sleeping in guesthouses and lodges. It was a good thing we’d brought sleeping bags: temperatures dropped towards freezing at night and the walls were little more than boards with genuine gaps for the wind to come through.
On the first day we reached 3,050 metres, the highest point of our climb. Early symptoms of altitude sickness convinced us to descend rather than push higher. We had flown directly into Jomsom ataround 2,800 metres and climbed further the same day, leaving our bodies almost no time to acclimatise. At that altitude, especially with a pack, breathing began to feel incomplete, as if the air was there but there simply wasn’t quite enough of it. Everyone, I suspect, has their own ceiling for this kind of thing.
Borrowed Dreams
The first night we stayed with a Tibetan family. One room was set aside for a lama who had spent hours beating a rhythmic drum, the kind of sound that stops feeling like noise and starts feeling like weather. It turned out he was performing a ritual to drive bad dreams away from the mother of our host, who had been sleeping badly. Our host, a young Tibetan woman, and I ended up talking past midnight about Tibetan culture and how they see life, warmed by several rounds of Mustang Coffee, whose main ingredient is raksi, the local spirit.
At some point she had a mischievous idea: we should also try the drink left over from the lama’s ritual. It looked fairly alarming, mixed with raw egg white or something close to it and, most likely, a few incantations for good measure. She watched us with the particular patience of someone who already knows how the story ends. Naturally, it had to be tried. There was nothing like it back in Latvia.
Everything would have been fine without the night that followed. I had strange dreams, including car accidents unfolding in front of me in careful, unhurried detail. In the morning my friend reported his own dreams full of faces and talking mountains. We looked at each other over breakfast with the quiet understanding of two people who have shared something they cannot explain. We concluded that the ritual had worked exactly as intended: the mother’s bad dreams had simply found a new home with us.
Prayer wheels. Mustang District, the Himalayas, Nepal (2006).
We continued to Marpha, something like the apple capital of the region. It was the off-season, with no farming happening at all. Everything was grey: bare trees, dry riverbeds, villages quiet under the mountains.
Walking for hours without stopping and without much conversation, I understood for the first time what real inner quiet felt like. The mind slowly powered down, the way a city does after midnight, one light at a time. The landscape around us resisted both photography and description. The scale of the mountains put a person’s worries into a different proportion, along with all the small things we tend to stress over for no good reason. Even the clouds behaved differently up there. I caught myself photographing them simply to check that I wasn’t hallucinating as they snagged on the peaks, thickened and caught fire at sunset.
The Golden Tip of Dhaulagiri
On the third day we were up at six to reach a viewpoint for Dhaulagiri and its glacier. Two local guys on motorbikes, arranged the previous evening, raced us there through tiny villages and people’s yards, scattering chickens and early risers along the way. Every minute mattered, but we made it in time to set up the tripods and wait. The first rays of sunlight set the summit on fire with a golden flame. The first ray really was golden. Within minutes the whole ridge revealed itself, one snow-white peak after another catching the light.
The sunrise over Dhaulagiri, Nepal (2006).
On the fourth day we flew back to Pokhara and slipped into the slower rhythm of tourist life. Over breakfast at a lakeside café we read the local newspaper: another assassination attempt on a government minister, followed by the weather forecast. A nightly curfew had been in force throughout our stay, and military checkpoints stood on the main roads during the day. As tourists on motorbikes, soldiers waved us through with a friendly gesture of their rifles while locals were stopped and searched. We joked among ourselves that our skin colour was functioning as a passport.
A few days later an internal flight took us back to Kathmandu, and the long road home began.
Back to Reality
The route home was essentially the journey in reverse: Kathmandu, Karachi, Dubai and Moscow as the final transit point before Riga. At Kathmandu airport we ran into the meditation group again and compared experiences. It felt like a tremendous exchange of positive energy after three weeks in a very different mental rhythm.
Reality started creeping back in Dubai, where the plane filled with well-fed Muscovites in expensive clothes and arms full of shopping bags. Women applied makeup, some talked on their phones even during takeoff. I still felt as if Allah were with us, so none of it bothered me.
That gentle return to reality became considerably less gentle in Moscow. After three weeks of what had effectively become a meditative journey, there were suddenly almost no smiling faces around us except our own. We must have looked deranged, walking through Sheremetyevo grinning like people who’d just been somewhere real. The final welcome came from a taxi driver who snapped “Idiots!” because we smiled and politely declined his overpriced ride. Welcome back. We carried on towards home, and it gave me enormous pleasure to realise that people in Latvia seemed much, much more positive.
What the Eagle Meant
I didn’t call the original article Flying Beside an Eagle because I was trying to invent a metaphor. That was simply one of the strongest sensations of the journey. Only much later did I begin to see another meaning in it.
A thermal current is invisible. A paraglider cannot look into the sky and see a column of warm rising air. But the eagle feels it. It finds the right current, opens its wings and rises almost without effort. A skilled pilot notices what the eagle has already understood and follows.
There is something in that image that still feels familiar to me twenty years later: freedom, sensing the right direction, catching the flow instead of fighting against it, and sometimes helping other people notice a current they cannot yet see themselves.
Six months after returning from Nepal, I founded my first company. I can’t say that Nepal made me do it; decisions like that rarely have one clean cause. But looking back, I recognise something from the journey in the change that was already happening in me. I was gradually moving away from a corporate mindset and towards working for myself, choosing my own direction and accepting responsibility for where it led.
ROSENSO brand was born six years later. I founded the company in 2012. The work is very different from flying over Pokhara, of course, but perhaps the instinct isn’t entirely different: read the current, sense where things are moving, and help others see it too.
Maybe that is what it means, for me, to fly beside an eagle.
Twenty years later. Latvia (2026).
This story was originally published in Latvian in KLUBS magazine in 2006.
[Read the original Latvian article — link to be added]