A steaming summer weekend in Kurintar’s Riverside Springs Resort on the flip side of the standard lunch stop-over enroute to a trek in Pokhara, and a world of difference is revealed. It’s all in the seasons after all. In spring particularly, the landscape itself is enroute to dessication, and as you wolf down your buffet you gaze over the pretentious, empty swimming pool to the cold turquoise Trishuli, your companion some part of the way to your destination. There is little to keep you here when your mind is already on the hotel in Pokhara, and the rigours if you will of the week to come.
In summer, the very air is heavy with the spirit of the monsoon rains, the mountains thick with vegetation, and the comfortable resort cottages shelter you from the boisterous greenery overhanging the paths snaking through the hilly complex. You are more likely to be in the pool, its cool blue waters justifying its ambition, though I would advise a walk down to the turbid brown rush of the equally transformed river below you. Venture away from the pleasantly dull, serviced retreat of the resort to absorb the nature that encircles you in spite of the scar of the highway that brought you here. The sandy bend in the river between the olive mountains, the patch of unobstrusive quicksand hidden by reeds you’ve been warned of, the simple, time-worn delight of seeking pretty pebbles and skimming slippy stones, the disoriented clouds that hang obstinately over everything. If you don’t get your shoes muddy you haven’t been to Kurintar.
