Across a vast emptiness : trekking and personal growth in the Nepali Himalayas

Every year, more than twenty-thousand trekkers walk the Annapurna Circuit trek, a long distance trekking route which, climbing up to the 5416 meters Thorong La pass, traverses the regions of Manang and Mustang in the Nepali Himalaya. On the basis of fieldwork carried out in Nepal between September 2019 and April 2020, followed by several months of digital ethnography, this thesis presents an ethnographic analysis of the experience of the trekkers who visit the region, with a particular focus on their engagement with the Himalayan landscape. Two tightly bound aspects of the trekkers’ experience are at the centre of the research: the fact that most trekkers venture along the path motivated by a desire for personal growth, and the trekkers’ tendency to present encountering an empty landscape and overcoming the challenges offered by the path as fundamental for this growth to take place. In engaging with these experiences, in this thesis I explore how emptiness comes by for the trekkers, a task which is achieved by comparing their experience of the landscape with that of the locals, and by exploring the colonial roots of the trekkers’ presence in the Himalayan landscape. Moreover, I examine how such an emptiness opens up a space for growth for the trekkers, and its relationship to the challenges encountered by the trekkers. In doing so, I argue that the connection between emptiness and growth presented by the trekkers can be best understood by looking at their experience taking a phenomenological approach.