It was in Nepal, after two years of being on the road, that I realized I had forgotten how to travel.

This may take some explaining.

After working as a reporter in Vancouver for two years, I decided to take a shot at becoming a foreign correspondent. It had been my goal when I first went into journalism, but it was a daunting prospect—with the media business in decline, correspondents are an endangered species. Freelancing seemed to be the only way to go. It offered adventurous opportunities, but also posed the threat of bankruptcy.

Somehow it worked out. I flew to Afghanistan in October of 2007 and stayed there for five months. After that I went to West Africa, finally travelling to Southeast Asia and reporting in a handful of countries along the way. I mostly covered hard news—violence in Afghanistan, the West African cocaine trade, the Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal in Cambodia.

It was the type of travel I had dreamed about. Journalism offered a way into countries that were off the beaten path, and it provided a sense of purpose my previous backpacking forays had lacked. I got used to setting up stories before arriving in a country so that I could hit the ground running. I never tired of the excitement I got from seeing what often began as an outlandish idea take narrative form.

Then I went to Nepal.

I met up with Amy, a photojournalist friend I had been planning the reporting trip with, and we immediately got to work trying to schedule interviews and figure out the logistics of doing the stories we had researched. But nothing was coming together.

We planned to do a story on melting Himalayan glaciers, for example. After hearing that the United Nations was organizing a helicopter trip to a shrinking glacier, I tracked down the person in charge. He had just given away the only media seats.

No matter, on to the next idea. We wanted to visit a Maoist camp. The Maoists had waged a 10-year civil war, which ended in 2006. Last October, the soldiers were still waiting to be decommissioned or incorporated into the national army as required by a faltering peace agreement. So we headed down from the lofty but polluted heights of Katmandu to the fertile plains of Chitwan. We hooked up with some local journalists, who told us the Maoists were holding an event the next day that was open to media. This time we had gotten the timing right.

Or so we thought.

After bombing through the countryside on motorbikes driven by our new Nepalese journalist friends, we were told that local reporters could enter the camp but foreigners had to stay outside. The vice-commander later came out and gave us a friendly but toothless interview as we sipped on bottled Cokes and orange Fantas. But without seeing the inside of the camp, we didn’t have much of a story.

Amy and I resigned ourselves to being tourists for a couple of days in Sauraha, a pleasant town just across a river from a national park.

But escaping the journalist mentality proved harder than we’d thought. We took the obligatory hike into the park and saw some monkeys and a giant crocodile. My cellphone rang, and our knowledgeable guides squatted on the jungle floor as I arranged interviews back in Katmandu for a story I planned to do on human trafficking.

We rented bicycles and pedalled off into the countryside late that afternoon. As we rode along, we agreed once again that we were somewhat underwhelmed by Nepal. It was nice, certainly—the mountains were stunning and ancient Buddhist and Hindu temples provided the requisite atmosphere of history and culture—but we didn’t quite get what everyone was always raving about. We even coined a phrase: “Je Ne-sais-pal.” I wondered whether I was just dissatisfied because the stories kept falling through, or whether I was travel-weary and a bit jaded.

It was impossible to deny the beauty of our surroundings, though. Riding down dirt roads, we passed through villages nestled in stands of trees between patchwork fields. Water buffalo lumbered along and boys played soccer in the fading sunlight. We passed a field where a handful of young women in brilliantly coloured outfits were munching on sugar cane. They waved, I waved, and they motioned for us to come over.

“Namaste,” said a woman who introduced herself as Meena, flashing an infectious smile. Then the sky lit up with a gorgeous, warm glow and we snapped photos as Meena and her sisters gathered dried and bundled rice stalks. They strapped them to their bikes, laughing as they struggled to secure the yellowed stalks that flowed over the seats.

“Would you like to see my village?” asked Meena in perfect English.

It was all smiles and children running through the thick smoke of evening cooking fires. One studious youngster was sitting on a straw mat on the ground doing his homework. We went into a windowless mud-walled home where a pot simmered on coals on the ground.

Meena introduced us to her mother and grandmother. Both had arms and legs that were heavily tattooed with intricate symbols, script, and flowers. Meena and her four sisters didn’t have any tattoos. She explained that tattoos were traditional in the Tharu culture, but that she was a modern woman. “The world changes, culture changes,” agreed a young man who was holding a five-month-old baby.

Meena and her neighbours waved goodbye as we pedalled away.

“Ah, I get it now,” said Amy.

“Me too,” I said. “It’s about the people.”

We grinned at this rather obvious discovery, and rode back to town in the last rays of daylight.

ACCESS: Nepal is in the midst of a political crisis that will likely come to a head around May 28, the deadline for a new draft of the constitution to be submitted to Parliament. There have been violent street demonstrations in Katmandu and other urban centres, but political unrest has rarely posed a threat to tourists in this country. The best time to visit is the dry season, which lasts from October to May.