The kids were 10 to 14 years of age (three of them) 2 boys and a girl and they were okay trekking about 50 miles through the Himalayas with me in the Helambu region. We hired a mountain guide at the Snow Lion Inn where we were staying who was the son then of the owners of the hotel there in Boudanath which is where a big Buddhist STupa is that people going around praying a lot there. So, we first took buses up to near the Tibetan Border from the Kathmandu area and then began our trek where the river meets the end of the bus line. What was strange about this is that the Bus (the last one) was like riding inside of a Uhaul van with no windows looking out and sitting on the floor of this truck van that looked like a Uhaul moving truck here in the U.S. except it was all painted white.
I was told recently you cannot do this anymore without hiring a big trekking company and paying a whole lot for this. There is no inexpensive way to do this legally there anymore.
We hiked as high as Tarke Gyan where we stayed at the guide's aunts place in the little village of Tarke Gyan when it was snowing. So, we timed it right to where it didn't really snow that much until we hiked there. Then the houses there didn't have chimneys and instead they cooked in the living room on an open fire but the smoke went out the eves which were above the cooking area. this was pretty normal there so when you looked up at the ceiling the rafters there were black from smoke. However, there was no way to heat the house and no electricity that far from civilization so the only time you could get warm was when they were cooking food. this was just how people were living there then. Instead of building fires to stay warm people just dressed warm instead. We ate Curried potatoes and Dahl Bhat (lentils) and sometimes there was some candy and tea of various kinds. We were out trekking about 2 weeks away from Kathmandu which is near the Tibetan Border with Nepal. One of the oddest things I saw there was that at around 9000 feet elevation we found a place where bananas were growing in a little valley which got a lot of sun but was protected mostly from storms. It's basically tropical there so you can still grow bananas some places up to 9000 feet in elevation! But, by 10,000 feet it was soon snowing then. I think this was in March of 1986 just before we returned to San Francisco then through Bangkok and Narito Airport in Japan.
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