FIRST HE WASHED DISHES IN A HOTEL.
Now he runs the company that takes you to Everest Base Camp.
"I know what it feels like to stand at the bottom of something enormous and wonder if you belong there."
Bimal, in his own words.
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I never dreamed about mountains as a kid. I want to say that clearly, because people expect that story and it isn't mine.
I grew up in a village about eight hours from Kathmandu. I came to the city young and I started working young.
My first job was in a hotel.
Not the front desk. Not serving guests. Behind a closed door, washing dishes and scrubbing floors, afternoon until late at night. My hands cracked from the soap and the water and mostly stayed that way. Some days I didn't see the sun at all.
"So this is my life. Four walls and a sink."
I thought that for a long time. Long enough that I stopped arguing with it.
Then somebody offered me work as a porter on a trekking expedition, and I said yes without really knowing what I was agreeing to.
That was 2008. The loads were heavy. The trails were unfamiliar. Every day tested me — but it was a different kind of hard, and I could feel the difference immediately.
Because for the first time I wasn't looking at the Himalayas from somewhere else. I was inside them.
I don't think I could have explained it then. I just knew I wanted to keep coming back.
So I paid attention. To the trail, the weather, the guides who'd been walking it for twenty years. And to the trekkers — people who'd come halfway around the world, who were nervous, who were doing something they weren't sure they could do. I watched a lot of people find out they were stronger than they thought. That never stopped being interesting to me.
Nobody handed me success. But nobody could take away what I was learning either.
In 2010, I completed the 43-day government trekking guide training course and received my official trekking guide licence. That was when I began leading international trekking groups. Along the way, I also completed my high school education.
Though I'd be lying if I said the course taught me the most. The mountain has always been the better classroom.
Years of guiding eventually led me to start Happyland Treks in April 2017. Today, I run the company, but I still make time to join one or two treks each year. Partly because I love being in the mountains. Mostly because I never want to become someone who talks about the trail without walking it.
I choose our guides carefully. I often look for people from backgrounds like mine — and I'll tell you why. Anyone can learn the route. What I can't teach is whether a man slows down for the person struggling at the back, or whether he tells you the truth when the weather turns. That part they either have or they don't.
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Guiding has also taught me that success doesn't mean much if it only moves in one direction.
In 2015 I spent seven months volunteering with the All Hands and Hearts Nepal Project, working with communities the earthquake had taken almost everything from.
During the pandemic in 2021 we ran two community food donation drives for families who needed them.
In 2024 we hosted meal distribution programs at the Manavsewa Ashram–Human Service Center, and we provided meals for elderly residents at local old age homes.
We've supplied safe drinking water to the remote village of Chepang, and donated notebooks and pencils to students at a government school in another distant village.
In May 2025 we carried out an Educational Resource Community Project at Mahalaxmi Secondary School — footballs, volleyballs, sports nets, school bags, notebooks, pens, pencils. We still send stationery to children's foundations whenever we can.
None of this is occasional. We contribute 3% of our total annual revenue to the local community, because I've seen what a small amount of money does when it lands in the right hands — it's worth a hundred times more there than it is sitting with us.
I don't think of any of that as charity. It's just gratitude, sent back where it came from.
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Everyone who treks with us has spent months getting ready. Sometimes years. Saving, training, thinking about it on the days when nothing else was going well.
I know what that trip is carrying before you ever arrive.
And I know what it feels like to stand at the bottom of something enormous and quietly wonder whether you belong there. That was most of my life, honestly.
You do belong there. But you don't have to believe that yet — you only have to start walking, and let the mountain convince you.
Somebody who understands exactly how that feels will be right beside you.
