THAT NIGHT, WE SEAT OURSELVES at the end of the picnic table, me facing the Hotel Greenland's Imax-size windows, framing Annapurnas II and IV breaking through the clouds for the first time all day. The Chinese "Ohhhh" in unison and scramble for their battery of digital cameras.

"What direction is that?" I ask Gopal, his back to the window.

"South," he says, not looking up from a copy of the Annapurna Post.

Gopal and Hari can read. Kharkhar, born 25 miles west of Pokharaa in an impoverished village a short walk beyond the end of the road, is illiterate. He grew up farming three fields of potato and corn with his three sisters and occasionally attending grade school, until he traded that for a one-room mud-brick house outside of downtown Pokharaa. Soon after, he began portering, and has since made some 200 treks at the foot of the Annapurna range. At some point, his wife divorced him.

"She wanted money, a car," he explains.

"And his penis didn't work," Gopal interjects dryly.

"Yes, but it's a big one!" Kharkhar shoots back, giggling.

Kharkhar is serious and direct, except when a joke occurs, and then—whether the topic is women, men's "bananas," marriage, or another of his favorite themes—it instantly delights him and he's the first to laugh.

Gopal, by contrast, is like Silent Bob. He will go hours without saying anything, and then toss in a witty joke, which he will grin big about but never laugh at. Only his two sisters are still alive. His mother and father died, as did his nine older brothers—of what, he doesn't know. "They were all suffering with some sickness, we did pujaas, and they died anyway," he says matter-of-factly. He was born in Khotang District, below Solu-Khumbu, studied up to grade five, and has been a porter for 13 years.

During the school year, Hari studies management at Tribhuvan University, in Pokharaa, but he plans to return home to Solu-Khumbu when he's done in three years. "I'll farm and teach and maybe in a couple years there will be a rural development project that I can work on," he says. "I miss my family."

The one thing we have in common, we discover that night, shivering on our large shared bed in the bunkhouse, is that we are all single males. Kharkhar switches on the bare bulb and rolls over to show off his new (cheap) black plastic wraparound, mirrored-lens sunglasses.

"Are those for the snow?" I ask.

"They're for sleeping," he says, turning to me with a devilish grin. "Tonight, a sexy, sexy man is coming for you."

Hari pipes in with the high-pitched voice of a woman: "Oh, rich tourist, marry one of my beautiful brothers!"

Already, the trip is taking on the dynamic of a bachelor party. Crossed with a forced march.