Tourist Shopping in Nepal

At some point along the trail, if not when you first step off the airliner in Kathmandu, you'll feel the urge to shop for some authentic and kitschy Sherpa and Hindu relics to remind you of the experiences and to brag at home about your exotic travels. The fact is that Nepal has been a popular tourist attraction for several decades now and the natural selection process for the souvenirs that sell well has played out to great precision. Certain t-shirts, Buddhist and Hindu worshiping devices, and Tibetan-style jewelry seem to show up on all the tables of the vendors you'll encounter across the country. Items such as prayer wheels and beads (malas), yak-themed t-shirts, yak bells, Ghurka knives, and various manifestations of Hindu gods are more or less the same wherever you go. The question, then, is how much to you want to pay for them, and how far up and down the trail do you want to pack them along?

Some would say that waiting until you're high up in the trails trekking Nepal you should buy from the shopkeepers in the villages, or at least at the market in Namche. In many cases the items they sell are brought in from elsewhere, even as far away as Kathmandu, to sell at a profit. The Sherpa people do benefit for the transactions, but you're really losing out on the deals you will get by shopping down in the lowlands. Spending a lot of cash up in the mountains is also a little precarious because it's not as easy to find a place to exchange your currency. You may find you wish you had a few hundred more Rupees to buy a soda instead of that yeti t-shirt you bought. Shopping down in Kathmandu can be very hectic though. There is such intense competition (since they're all selling the same wares) that the vendors tend to get very pushy. You can haggle the price down quite a bit, but be careful of very driver salesmen who force their items (which you'd never be interested in to start) into your hands and practically swipe the cash from you.