Dalama Adventures Tale of two corporate types ditching their jobs and traveling the world for 14 months... check out all photos, blogs & interesting tid bits at http://www.dalama.net

Village life is a tough life. Most of the guest houses are second homes for rich Nepali Gurkhas. Gurkhas are soldiers are the creme de la creme of the British army, who still to this day, maintains a recruiting center outside Pokhara. The guys who pass the grueling boot camp type tests are handsomely rewarded with over $3000 USD/month, with commissions lasting over 15 years, British Army pension for life and the option to become a British citizen upon retirement. These wealth Nepalis employ local villagers to run their shops while they're away. Their kids also help to run the shop/restaurant/guest houses while they're on school holiday. Chatting with children in the villages, they are filled with images of life in Britain and securing further education overseas. To effectively stock and run the restaurants that we've been eating at each day, there are local delivery guys called "runners." These guys are fit, thin men who know the trails of the mountains inside and out. They could run it in flip flops, blindfolded. In fact, many of them do run it in flip flops, carrying upwards of 60 kilos on their back. They wear shorts, t-shirt and tongs, and carry the goods all the way from Pokhara in hand woven palm baskets that are attached by a strap around their foreheads, fixing the weight of the goods on their backs. Not only do they carry produce; some good we've seen are boxes of beer, kitchen appliances and equipment, and other unimaginable things that are needed for daily life in the hills. Women and men in this region are heavily reliant on farming; potatoes, corn, cauliflower, wheat, rice. Both genders are seen in the fields tending to the crops. The men here still use bulls and manual wooden rotatillers to churn the soil in their fields. Both men and women also tend to the herds of sheep, goats and cows. They have terraced the sides of the mountains in an amazingly artistic way, and it looks from above, like a handmade patchwork quilt. The children and adults we have seen appear all to be well nourished, and happy. Big smiles peer out from windows and behind house walls, bring forward their little voices and "namaste" greetings. While they live a simple yet very rugged life, they are a very happy, family focused community of people.