I approach traveling in new parts of the Himalayas like swimming in a river. Find a good friend with local knowledge of the waters, enter the flow, and then trust the currents of conversations with strangers to guide me in the right direction. That’s exactly what happened here: Passang met us at the airport with his friend serving as the driver, and off we went, first through the roadside Indian immigration station, then across a long, narrow bridge packed with street rickshaws openly smuggling goods between the two nations, and then twisting up through bamboo groves into the Himalayan foothills.
Well after sunset, we had rolled into the mountain town of Ilam and got rooms at the first hotel with a light on. Six short hours later, I woke up to Passang excitedly knocking on my door. I shuffled out to join him outdoors, and he showed me we had the dumb luck of chosing accommodations directly across from a stall with a freshly-painted sign announcing Tinjure: Nepal’s First Tea Cooperative.
