Kim Bannister, specialist in camping treks in Upper Mustang and other remote regions in Nepal - Episode 1

Transcript

Joost Schreve:
All right, so welcome everybody to the fist ever kimkim podcast. My name is Joost Schreve, and I'm co-founder and CEO of kimkim. Let me first start by quickly introducing kimkim. kimkim is an online marketplace that connects travelers with local experts who are based in the destination that the traveler wants to go to, and they help our travelers put together fantastic trips. Our experts are certified experienced professionals who typically have been putting together trips for travelers for many years, so they have lots of experience. With that, I'd love to introduce you to our guest of our first podcast, Kim Bannister who is based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Welcome Kim.

Kim Bannister:
Hi, thanks Joost.

Joost Schreve: Yeah. No, it's great to have you on the first podcast because you are actually one of the very first experts on the kimkim platform, and since your name is Kim, it's actually no coincidence that the company is called kimkim. Maybe you can tell everyone about your first experience as a local expert based in Kathmandu with our company.

Kim Bannister:
Yeah. Good question. Well, to be honest, I wasn't exactly sure how kimkim was going to work or whether it would work for us and for me and for the company, but I had a great first experience. You nicely introduced me to another Kim that lives in California, and she and her husband Bob were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary and wanting to put together a memorable and just a special trip in Nepal, and so I worked really closely with her and ended up being really good friends and had a couple of dinners together in Kathmandu and in Pokhara. It was a really fun experience personalizing a trip, making them a trip that was very unique and was special and was something that they will hopefully remember for a long time.

Joost Schreve:
Cool. Cool. Yeah, and so the company was actually not called kimkim at the time, we were called Hive Travel back then, and so we were looking to rename ourselves because we didn't like our name as much. When we saw Kim from Kathmandu and Kim from California chatting together, it somehow jumped in my mind like, "Wow, we should do something with it. We should rename the company kimkim." That's the story behind our pretty awesome name kimkim. Yeah, Kim, what did you think when you heard about it? It's funny that a company is named after you, I guess, right?

Kim Bannister:
Well, I actually thought you were joking when you first said it, but I mean, I think it ... Yeah, I like the name Kim. Hey, it's catchy, and then when you explained what it meant in Dutch, I kind of understood it better.

Joost Schreve:
Right. Right. Right. Right. In Dutch, in old Dutch I would say, Kim means horizon, so we're trying to broaden people's horizon with what we do, and so it's a good name from that point of you as well, but the real big story that's also listed in our website. I'll link through the page in the page of this podcast as well. It kind of has this whole story about Kim from California who had a fantastic 25th anniversary trip to Nepal with Kim. I'd love to talk a little bit about the special kind of trips that you do. I think you just came back from Upper Dolpo, which I saw amazing photos the whole time. You were posting quite a bit of photos from there as well. Yeah, I'd love to ... Maybe you can tell everyone a little bit what kind of trips you do and tell us about this last trip you did and those are not just the average short treks, right?

Kim Bannister:
Sure. No. Well, we try to run really unique treks, and I guess one thing that makes us different is that I lead all of the treks that are on our featured treks page. My company is called Kamzang Journeys, but I lead them with my co-guide, a Sherpa that's born in the Khumbu, his name is Lhakpa Dorji Sherpa. The two of us and our staff, which are 5 guys in Nepal and a couple other guys in India, we lead the trips personally all the time. You're not going with the guide that's an unknown quantity. You're always going with people you know, and it becomes a family of friends journey and everybody is looking out for each other. We're taking people to what we think are the most interesting villages, the most beautiful and remote roots.
Every year, we change our trips, so it's never just a cookie cutter standard trip to, say, Upper Dolpo where we just went. Every year it evolves, and it's based on what we've done in the previous years and what we thought was amazing and special. We've formed this relationship with a lot of the villagers and almost all of the regions we go to. We revisit them every year, and we help support them when they have crises, like a couple ago to last year actually in Mustang, Upper Mustang actually, which is the trek I did before this Dolpo trip, the nomads lost 50% of their livestock, so we created a fund to help replenish the livestock and we helped some kids in school, and so it's a great experience. When you go back you know the people, we've interacted with them. They trust us and we're happy to see them. That's a big part of the experience as well.

Joost Schreve:
Right, right, no, that sounds fantastic. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what trekking really involves for people who maybe haven't been to Nepal or haven't gone in a trek, so what does it mean? Maybe you can talk a little bit of sort of what a day on the trek looks like and how long these treks are, et cetera.

Kim Bannister:

Sure. Sure. Well, trekking is a word that was coined for use in the Himalayas, although I think it is a dutch word as well, isn't it? I sort of call it getting from point A to point Z and everything that happens along the way as opposed to just a hike where you're going out for a day. This is more of a journey.

Joost Schreve:
Right.

Kim Bannister:
Almost all of our trips, let's say 95%, are camping trips, and we have a dining tent that we set up in a different sort of way. We call it the Central Asian Kamzang style, which basically means you're sitting in these crazy creek camp chairs which are camp chairs that open up and they're very comfortable. We're on the ground. We have Indian dhurries which are cotton rugs on the ground, and we have a library. We have some sort of soft world music in the evenings. We have solar lights, so you're sitting in this really brightly colored dining tents for all the time that you're in camp, and you have your own personal 2 or 3-person tent to sleep in. You're comfortable when you get to camp, and basically you're waking up in the morning, you're packing up your bag and you're walking. Why I try to-

Joost Schreve:
It's not like many other treks which are staying in lodges and tea houses. This is quite different, I think, right?

Kim Bannister:
Yeah. It's different because we set up our home. We set up our camp in these amazing camp sites in remote villages so you're not restricted to going to a place that has a tea house and staying in a room where other trekkers are staying, so your experience is unadulterated. It's not tainted by what people are saying. I think it's really pure. You're actually living in these wild environments and sometimes camping with nomads, sometimes camping next to a village. You're visited by a lot of villagers, nomads. They come right up to the tents and make themselves at home like people do in the Himalayas. It's a very unique experience and we live very close to the people and to nature, I think. You're in the mountains and you experience the weather. You experience the sun coming up in the morning and warm you up as you have your morning coffee and things like that. I love it. I couldn't live without this sort of camping.

Joost Schreve:
Right, right, no, it sounds really amazing. I've done some trekking myself. I haven't done these very long treks. Hopefully I have a chance to do that at some point, and so then you hike from village to village, I guess, and you have a lot of people with you to help you carry everything as well, right?

Kim Bannister:
We do. We try to stick with ... Well, we try to use either horses or porters or sometimes yaks to curry the stuff, and it's a caravan in the true sense of the word. It's a massive sort of operation, but it runs very smoothly. I think when you're trekking you don't really notice what happens behind the scenes. Yeah, everything gets packed up and then it gets packed on, let's say, the horses, the mules. They make their way to the campsite a little bit more quickly than we do, and we take our time stopping in villages. We have a packed lunch. We sit down and have a picnic lunch in a beautiful spot usually, and we've got time along the way to talk to people, to visit maybe monasteries or sacred spots or whatever it is along the way.

Joost Schreve:
Right.

Kim Bannister:
It's a full day's journey, and at the end of the day, you get to camp and you relax, everything is set up for you, have some chai, some tea, some snacks, and your day is very full. You really accomplished a lot.

Joost Schreve:
Right. How many days of walking typically on a day?

Kim Bannister: Well, my trips are long. My trips are generally a month from end to end, and sometimes in 3 weeks, but generally they're more like 25, 28 days. I really believe that to get the most out of this kind of trekking experience, you need to go deeply into the culture, which means you need to spend some time getting there. The trips that are a week long, they're 5 days long, they're not remote. Everybody is doing those, so you're not really challenging yourself by going somewhere that's very special.

Joost Schreve:
Do you think it's fair to say that the treks that you do are a lot more into the wilderness than most typical treks are going, right?

Kim Bannister:
I think so. It's what we try to do. It's what we love to do. Yeah.

Joost Schreve:
Cool, and so I think one other thing that maybe not clear to people that haven't been there is you have all these villages and they are full of life, lot of people but there's no roads, right? The only way to get to these villages is on foot, right?

Kim Bannister:
Yeah, or once in a while by mountain bike, but no, mostly by foot, yeah. Locals, when they go to weddings or things like that, they might travel 3 days and sleep in the village, and then travel back. It's an absolutely different way of living.

Joost Schreve:
Right, right, right, exactly. What I always find really fascinating is you work on the trails and you see kids walking to school for a couple of hours every day or more, or you see people going home, they may work in the city during the season or something, and then they walk home for 7 days or something. From the trail, they had 7 more days walking to their home or something like that. It's pretty hard to imagine that without seeing it. It's a very special world there, right?

Kim Bannister:
It really is. It's something that's so detached from the world in which we live. What always drags me is that we make time in our lives to do things like go to the gym or go for a run or go for a bike ride, to exercise, and they spend their lives waking up in the morning before dawn, and it's like collecting firewood or collecting yak tongue if you're a nomad and grinding. They've ground the flour or they've milked the goats or whatever it is. Their whole life is a process of living. The kids are out collecting firewood with basket during the day, people are out grazing the animals. They're in the fields planting, harvesting. They're processing the foods. Life is a ... It's a process of living that you see in these villages that we ... We don't live this anymore. We go to the grocery store. We get in our car. We have washing machines.

Joost Schreve:
Right, and so you transition in and out of that life quite often, how many of those treks do you do a year?

Kim Bannister:
This year I've got, I think, 7 treks and a bicycle trip, and then we did a new trip in Myanmar in Burma, which was actually an interesting trip for me because we went to a region where the Chin Mountains, where some locals had never in their lives seen a Westerner before.

Joost Schreve:
Wow. That is something.

Kim Bannister:
One man had never ... Well, the men in one village had never seen chewing gum. Now, those are 2 sort of iconic ... I mean, the chewing gum ...

Joost Schreve:
Right.

Kim Bannister:
It was amazing. You can really get to remote places, and I think it makes you look at your life through fresh eyes. You experience life differently.

Joost Schreve: Right, right, right, so that means more than half your time you spend in the tent, right? I guess.

Kim Bannister:
Yeah. A lot of my life.

Joost Schreve:
Nice.

Kim Bannister:
I'm sort of nomad.

Joost Schreve:
Great. Can you tell us a little bit more about the group size and maybe also a little bit about what do people go through? I guess it's a pretty intense experience for people. Do you see people change and their perspective must be ... it touches you when you do those kind of things, right?

Kim Bannister:
Sure, yeah. Well, the first thing is I think a lot of people com et trip with something on their mind that they want to resolved, or having an issue in their lives that they like to clarify. You have almost a few months to really think about these things that I sort of call trekking often a walking meditation. Your mind is free and it's good in the way. Again, you can put your life in perspective. You meet these amazing people that are so generous, and it helps rethink your life. I think a lot of people leave these treks with a changed perspective on life and on their lives. Of course you come away so much fitter and generally a bit slimmer, not much, which people always like.

Joost Schreve:
Right.

Kim Bannister:
Yeah, it is a bit of a life changing event, I think. I like people to be challenged, and you have some people that are in tears because the day is quite hard or the weather is hard. You get sick once in a while, and sometimes it just seems like a lot to handle, but then once you get through it, people feel like they have accomplished something big. Forever after, they know that they can do this sort of track. It opens up your life to so many different experiences.

Joost Schreve:
Right. I can certainly believe that, and so maybe let's talk a little bit about your business, right? You chose to live this life and build your business around this unique type of trips. I think it's very interesting for people to hear ... I'm sure everyone sometimes in their life feels like, "Hey, I would love to do something like this. I would love to take this big step and move to the other end of the world and start a completely new life." Was this for you sort of a step change, or was it something of a process, or did you always know that you were going to do something like this? I'd love to hear the story of how you got into this.
Kim Bannister: Well, I traveled. I used to be a backpacker, so I traveled around the world for at least a year and a half at a time.

Joost Schreve:
This was, I guess, when you were during college age or something?

Kim Bannister:
Just when I finished university, so I actually left when I was 21. I had my 21st birthday overseas somewhere. I would just make money on an island or on the ski resort, just somewhere like that, somewhere that was outdoors, and then I would use it to go traveling. That's the only thing that was important to me, was making money to go traveling. I lived in some great places where I was able to save money and to live a good and healthy life outdoors and then I went traveling. I spent the first ... 21 to 23, I was overseas, and then my late 20s, I was also gone for a couple years. The first time I worked a little bit overseas, and the second time I just traveled, so I covered a lot of space. I loved learning new things. I'm very involved in design and I love architecture and things like that, so I was always inspired by all the different incredible designs that you see in Asia and in Africa, and the music, and the history and everything.

Joost Schreve:
Do you have an example of a place you went to that's really amazing?

Kim Bannister:
God, that's hard. I actually loved traveling through Africa. I dreamed about Africa for years after being there. I traveled through most of it overland from South Africa through the Central and East and up to Ethiopia and then to Egypt, Ethiopia being probably the most challenging place I ever traveled. I try always to go overland. Back then there is no internet. You just had a Lonely Planet guidebook. In some places like Ethiopia, there wasn't even anything written in English about it, so it's really just experiencing and challenging yourself and being open to new experiences and learning to trust people. It's an experience where you really grow. You're lonely and you learn to ... I think we spent our whole lives learning to be self-sufficient. When I grew up, you're a woman and people always say, "You can do whatever you want to do. You can be what you want to be," and then you go traveling and you need to lose that ego and you need to just accept what happens and step back from your life.

Joost Schreve:
Right.

Kim Bannister:
I think it's an experience where you really grow as a person.

Joost Schreve:
Yeah. I know. That's amazing, and many people love to travel, but I think what's really inspiring is you take that then acts further and travel your entire life to places that most people would never even go to or travel in a way, I guess, that many people wouldn't do. That's really cool. At what point did you start thinking about making this into a business? Was this something that you always wanted to do? Can you tell us a little bit more how that process went?

Kim Bannister:
I think I was 31 and I returned to the States after being gone for 2 years, and I was gone during ... I was Pakistan for 9/11 and I was in Tibet, and I was in ... God, I was 2 months in Turkey just before I left home in a remote Eastern Turkey and I just was ... Again, I was so inspired. I was so filled with ideas, and I got back to the States and I felt, I don't know, frustrated or a little bit deflated. It's hard to jump back into the world when you've been doing this for 10 years. I had also lived in Hawaii. I had lived in the mountains, California and Colorado. I was thinking I needed to get a job, so I applied for a few different things, and then I decided I'd be a guide. I went and applied to companies that were running amazing trips overseas, and it just never quite seem like the right fit.
Actually, I got a job doing marketing for this company called Geographic Expeditions which is based in San Francisco, and I accept and I thought, great, I was working with photographers and with writers which were also fields that I was interested in. I packed up little Volkswagen Golf and drove cross-country and thought this was it. I was going to spend my life doing marketing and perhaps leading some trips for this company in San Francisco, but I don't think I even lasted a year.

Joost Schreve:
It was too much of an office job for you, working for this travel company?

Kim Bannister:
I was in a cubicle. I couldn't do it. I needed to be out in the field, so that was it. I actually was then applying to the Peace Corps or just looking for a way to live overseas. I really wanted to live in a country for a longer time, get more deeply involved in a country, and the Peace Corps is going to put me actually in Nepal. Then last minute, it was right when I pulled out of Nepal, and I found a volunteer position to go and teach in Nepal, and I ended up in the Everest region in the Khumbu where I met Jamie McGuinness, who is also a part of kimkim, and Joel Schone, and the 3 of us, Jamie had started Project Himalaya, and he very kindly took me in for the first year, the first ever trip with him and Joel as a test run.

Joost Schreve:
Where in the Everest region was this?

Kim Bannister:
He was climbing Island Peak. It was just a normal Everest trip, crossing a few passes, and the 3 of us led it. Then Joel and I started trekking in the Indian Himalayas, and we were leading our treks together. I sort of learned on my feet. Having had experience on the backend, the marketing, and the high end of things, I sort of learned how to do more of the production end, you call it, of things. I love that side of it too. I love creating a trip, so we actually ... When I run these trips, I do everything. We find the region. I do all the research. I write up the itineraries. I take the photos, and then we all go and we buy the food. We make them easily. We buy the sun-dried tomatoes. We go to local markets and buy the vegetables and buy all the dried goods. It's great. It's fun. It gets me out and about in the Indian Himalayas, and Leh, and in Kathmandu and all the other places that I start.
Yeah, that's sort of how I started. Project Himalaya grew slowly. At first we didn't make money and I didn't think I could make a living out of it, and then year by year we did better. More people came and you've got repeat clients, and then I broke away just last year on my own as Kamzang Journey, but I've been running Kamzang treks also in addition to Project Himalaya treks since about 2005.

Joost Schreve:
What's the story behind the name Kamzang actually? Is there something there, some story?
Kim Bannister:
Kamzang is a word that is in Tibetan means something close to peace, and it's actually Ladakhi, a word that's used in Ladakh and some places is Tibet quite commonly. They say, "Kamzang ina le?" Are you okay? Are you peaceful? Basically, so just hear it everywhere. Is everything good? I was just walking somewhere in the Indian Himalayas when one of these ... A place that I call the valley of inspiration, this is where I just came up with this idea, but these beautiful places again and your mind just going, and I thought, "Kamzang, Kamzang, that's the name. That's the name that I need to use."

Joost Schreve:
Right.

Kim Bannister:
Yeah.

Joost Schreve:
Cool. Is this the first time you started your own business? Is that for say then with Kamzang?

Kim Bannister:
Yes. That's fair to say, yeah.

Joost Schreve:
Right. That's exciting and it's pretty recent, right?

Kim Bannister:
Yeah, it's really ... Well, it's been registered for about 3 years though, and it's been running for probably 5 or 6 years. Yeah.

Joost Schreve:
Got it. You slowly started the brand, if you will, while still working with Jamie at Project Himalaya, and then recently started to work full time on your own company.

Kim Bannister: Yeah. Part of the reason why I'm on my own is I also do design work, as I mentioned, I have a company that's called, an unregistered company, it's called Kamzang World Design. We have the Kamzang Fund that I mentioned briefly before. We help in a lot of ways, medical issues, school thing, other issues like the loss of livestock, all around, and so-

Joost Schreve:
What Kamzang World Design? What do you do with that?

Kim Bannister:
Well, I started out making silver jewelry and it's based on nomadic designs generally or tribal designs. I've always collected silver jewelry and I have made silver jewelry before so I know the technique and you find these unique pieces when you're traveling all over the world. If you sell that piece or get rid of that one piece, it's gone forever, but these pieces are amazing because they've been worn. They've been used. They've got this incredible look and feel to them. As we started copying these pieces in Kathmandu and we make them in pure silver, and they're beautiful. It's textiles as well. I collect, for example, Dolpo textiles, these great striped blankets that everybody loves, lots of different things. Now I've been making some cushions with some of these textiles here in Kathmandu, so something that I love to do and maybe at some point I'll transition into that.
Our treks, a lot of the treks revolve around the local arts and crafts of the region and just seeing how they make ... Every village weaves or makes baskets, whatever they do, and seeing what they do and supporting local crafts by buying directly from them and commissioning things sometimes. It's fun.

Joost Schreve:
Wow. I didn't know this side of your business. That's great. It sounds fantastic. Yeah, so wrapping up slowly, but love to get your thoughts where this is going. Are you going to grow your trekking business? Are you going to stay in Kathmandu? Yeah, how is life in Kathmandu also? What do you think what's next for you?

Kim Bannister:
My life in Kathmandu is okay. To be honest, I prefer being out in the mountains, but there's a lot of-

Joost Schreve:
That's the only thing in Kathmandu. I recently was there and we met up. It's very different, rurals in Kathmandu versus mountains, right?

Kim Bannister:
It is. It's busy. I mean, the downside of Kathmandu, the biggest downside is the pollution. That's what's would steer me away from maybe spending the rest of my life in Kathmandu, but it's the good days. I also, my nomadic existence, I spend 3 or 3 and a half, 4 months of the year in India. The base is up in the Indian Himalayas, in the, let's see, the Western Indian Himalayas, Ladakh and Zanskar. I have a guest house that I've stayed at for 15 years in Leh and that's sort of my second home. All of our staff's second home. We look forward to doing that every year.
In terms of long-term plans, I have given myself at least another 5 years of doing exactly this, leading the treks, and then maybe I'll transition into leading less of the treks myself, but I'm not quite ready to give that up now. It's a little bit hard to organize the backend office work while you're gone in treks. The last trek we were on, we had a connection with Thuraya, so we had a satellite connection, and that was good in a way and a bad in a way. Good that I can do my work, and bad that I was actually connected when I really wanted to be disconnected and reading a book and just stepping back from everything.

Joost Schreve:
Right

Kim Bannister:
Let's see. I believe in, yeah, have long-term plans, but I sort of believe in living for the moment, and as long as things are going well, continuing what you're doing. I feel right now I'm happy doing what I'm doing and I feel like I'm doing things that are helpful for other people as well. For the next 5 years, let's see.

Joost Schreve:
Right. That's really great. Yeah, so hopefully, for travelers who are listening, hopefully you are going to do a lot more treks, and hopefully many people will have a chance to join you in one of those treks, because I think it's truly something that's really, really unique. I mean, a lot of people are looking for unique travel experiences, but I think from your description today, it's very clear that what you do is really going way beyond what the vast majority travelers does. It's really inspiring to hear that Kim. That's really amazing.

Kim Bannister:
Thanks. Yeah. I'll just say that we have ... I mean, so many of my trekkers, probably in my business is about 75% repeat trekkers, so people come back and come back and they know each other and we email each other and send Facebook messages and post photos of each other. It's a fun family friend experiences as well as being a trek. It's a nice experience.

Joost Schreve:
That's great. Now, hopefully we can send you a lot of new travelers as well.

Kim Bannister:
I hope so.

Joost Schreve:
I think it's something that I hope to do. I have done some trekking but I haven't been to any of the regions you specialize in, so hopefully I still have the chance to do it.

Kim Bannister:
Absolutely.

Joost Schreve:
Kim thanks very much for joining us here in my Friday evening and your Saturday morning Kathmandu. We'll post a set of links and photos, that's everything next to the post here so people can definitely find out how to get in touch with you and make their dreams a reality. Thanks again Kim. It was really a pleasure to talk to you today.

Kim Bannister:
Great. Thanks Joost. I appreciate it.

Joost Schreve:
Great. All right. Take care.

Kim Bannister:
Bye-bye.