Sikles

Sikles doesn’t come up in conversations about the Annapurna region the way Ghandruk or Ghorepani do, and I’m still not entirely sure why, since it’s one of the largest and best-preserved Gurung villages in the country — several hundred households on a wide, terraced hillside inside the Annapurna Conservation Area, with a direct view of Annapurna II and Lamjung Himal that rivals anything on the more crowded routes. It sits on its own dedicated trekking loop rather than as a stop on the main circuit or the ABC trail, which seems to be the main reason it stays quiet: it requires a separate, deliberate trip rather than a detour off an already-planned itinerary.

A village, not a stop

What struck me first about Sikles was scale — it’s genuinely large as trekking villages go, spread across a hillside in a way that takes a real walk to cross end to end, with a school, a health post, and a working economy that isn’t primarily built around trekkers passing through. The Annapurna Conservation Area Project has run community-based tourism initiatives here for decades, and the result is a village that has adapted to visitors without being reshaped by them.

The trail in and the view out

The walk to Sikles from the trailhead near Kalikasthan climbs through dense forest — oak, rhododendron, langur monkeys moving through the canopy overhead on the morning we walked in — before opening onto the terraced hillside where the village sits. From the upper edge of Sikles, Annapurna II and Lamjung Himal dominate the skyline at an angle I hadn’t seen from anywhere else in the region, close enough to feel immediate without the crowds that gather at more famous viewpoints for the same peaks.

Lia and I ended up at a small tea shop run by a woman who’d spent years working in Kathmandu before returning to Sikles, and her account of choosing to come back — the quiet, the clean air, the pace of it — was more convincing than anything a guidebook could have written about why the village is worth the detour.

When to go: October and November give the clearest views of Annapurna II and Lamjung Himal. The forested approach trail is especially good in spring, March through April, when rhododendron is in bloom along the route.