Chhomrong
"Chhomrong has roughly four thousand stone steps built into it, and I complained about every single one, and I'd still go back."
The last permanent village before the Annapurna Sanctuary, built on a staircase of a hillside so steep that the town itself is a kind of workout before the trail even starts.
Chhomrong sits at a genuine hinge point on the Annapurna Base Camp trek — the last village with permanent, year-round residents before the trail drops into the gorge toward the Sanctuary. Everything past here is seasonal lodges built purely for trekkers. That distinction matters more than it sounds: Chhomrong still has terraced barley fields, working farms, kids walking to an actual school rather than a guesthouse kitchen, and a rhythm of life that continues whether or not anyone is trekking that season.
The steps
The village itself is built almost entirely on a slope so steep that the “streets” are stone staircases connecting terraces, and the descent from the upper village to the suspension bridge at the bottom, then the climb back up the far side, is a workout that catches people off guard on what’s supposed to be an easy day. I remember a German trekker at a teahouse counting the steps out loud between bites of dal bhat, arriving somewhere north of three thousand before giving up on the count entirely.
The last real view before the gorge
What makes Chhomrong worth a slow afternoon rather than a quick pass-through is the view — Annapurna South and Machapuchare are both visible from the upper village at an angle you lose almost immediately once you drop into the Modi Khola gorge the next morning. I sat on a guesthouse rooftop for two hours doing nothing but watching cloud shift across Annapurna South’s face, which is not an activity I’d normally recommend describing at length, except that it was genuinely one of the better two hours of the trip.
There’s also a German Bakery here — there’s a German Bakery in nearly every trekking hub in Nepal, it’s a whole phenomenon nobody has adequately explained to me — and the apple pie at this one, eaten at 2,170 meters after a day of stone steps, tasted disproportionately excellent.
When to go: October and November for reliable clear-sky views of the surrounding peaks. Late March into April adds rhododendron color to the terraced hillsides on either side of the village.