Phewa Lake sits at the edge of Pokhara, in central Nepal, and on a windless morning it gives back the whole Annapurna range. The mountains are seventy kilometres away and seven thousand metres up, the lake lies at about 740 metres in a bowl of green hills, and at first light that distance collapses. The fishtail summit of Machhapuchhre stands upside down in the water alongside the rest of them. Along the eastern shore runs Lakeside, where wooden boats painted orange, blue and yellow wait in a row. You paddle one out yourself or pay one of the lake's boatmen to row while you watch the peaks slide past, and many of them come from the Pode fishing families who have worked this water for generations. Out in the middle, with the shore noise behind you, the range and the temple island sit doubled on the surface.
The short crossing is to that island, the only one in the lake. A two-tiered pagoda stands on it to Barahi, a fierce boar-headed form of the goddess Durga, raised in 1864 by King Kulmandan Shah, who is said to have been told to build it in a dream. Pilgrims step off with flowers and incense, most of all on Saturdays. Local legend says the lake drowned a town: a goddess came disguised as a beggar, one couple treated her kindly, and she warned them before the flood took everyone else. Geologists have since found that the Pokhara valley really was buried by sudden debris flows down the Seti river, so the story may be carrying a memory. The lake is also a landing strip. Paragliders launch from Sarangkot, the hill above the western shore, and ride the thermals down for twenty or thirty minutes with the Annapurnas on one side and Phewa on the other, then land on the shore beside the boats. At sunset, when the western hills take the sun, the whole lake flares copper and every boat on it turns to a silhouette.