just back and honestly the mad honey nepal thing is way more confusing on the ground than it is online. thamel especially - jars in every third shop, half of them with the same handwritten label, all of them from the cliffs apparently. one guy gave me two different districts when i asked twice about ten minutes apart lol
i did buy one in the end, place where the woman actually knew the village and said shed ask the family which batch it was. felt different straight away.
so what do you lot actually ask? dont want to be the tourist cross examining some shopkeeper but also dont want to fly home with expensive jam
Thank you for asking it that way round, most visitors do not. Honest answer: a lot of what sits on those shelves is ordinary mountain honey with a story attached. Not poison, not really even a scam, but it is not the cliff harvest and the price is pretending it is.
Ask the district. Ask the season - spring and autumn are not the same honey. And ask who harvested it. If the seller is three steps away from the hill that is completely fine, most are, he should just say so instead of inventing a cliff on the spot.
price cuts both ways as well. if its cheap enough to grab as a fridge magnet then nobody up that chain got paid properly for a rope and a cliff face
yeah the two-different-districts thing wouldve ended it for me tbh. thats not a memory slip thats just whatever sells
half this list is already scattered across three old threads. drop your questions in here and ill stick them in one wiki post so its a link next time instead of me digging.
so far - which district, which season, who harvested, is there a batch id on the jar, and can you tell me anything about that batch if i email you in a month