Notebooks by the Lake
How Pokhara's remote workers, trekkers and readers keep a pen close, from Lakeside cafes to the trails above the valley.
Pokhara's slow life, written by hand
Walk down Lakeside on any weekday morning and you will spot a new kind of regular. A laptop open on a cafe table, a cup of Nepali coffee going cold, Phewa Lake shining just past the screen. Pokhara has quietly become a favourite base for digital nomads and remote workers, from Kathmandu freelancers escaping the dust to travellers who came for a week and stayed for a season. Look a little closer, though, and next to almost every laptop there is a notebook. Ideas, to-do lists and client notes still seem to feel more real when they are written by hand.
Then there are the trails. Pokhara is where many people take their first steps into the hills: sunrise at Sarangkot, the climb to the World Peace Pagoda, a weekend at Australian Camp, or a few days up to Mardi Himal and Annapurna Base Camp. Phones die in the cold and signal disappears, but a small pocket journal keeps going. Trekkers jot down tea house names, altitudes, the people they met and the view that made them stop walking. Years later, those scribbled pages are often the best souvenir of the trip.
Pokhara is also a reading city. Secondhand bookshops line the Lakeside strip, swapping paperbacks between travellers in a dozen languages, and on quiet afternoons you will find people reading on benches by the water or in the shade near Barahi Temple. With Pokhara University, Prithvi Narayan Campus and dozens of colleges nearby, students fill the city's libraries and study corners too. A good book almost always travels with a pencil for underlining, a few sticky notes and a bookmark.
What ties it all together is a slower way of living, where people make time to think, plan and remember. Remote workers sketch out projects, hikers keep trail diaries, artists fill sketchbooks with Machhapuchhre at dusk, and students fill copies before exams. The tools are simple: a notebook that lies flat, a pen that does not smudge, a sketchbook with paper that can take a little watercolour.
That is where Gorkhali Stationery comes in. Whether you are working from a Lakeside cafe, packing for a trek, or settling in with a new book, we have the journals, notebooks, pens and sketchbooks to go with it, delivered anywhere in Nepal including Pokhara. Bring a notebook on your next walk around the lake. You might be surprised by what ends up on the page.
