On the way up to Everest Base Camp, Nepalese porters carrying 50- and 60-kilo packs trudged by as Miguel Góngora, a Peruvian who started working as a porter on Peru’s Inca Trail in 1996, watched, horrified.
“There are a lot of things that are different between working as a porter in Peru and in Nepal,” Góngora said after his 2025 trip to Nepal. “But the exploitation is the same and the excuses are the same.”
In Nepal and Peru, the people who make tourism to places like Everest and the Inca Trail possible are Indigenous porters. They are easily exploited because of their few work opportunities and lax workers’ rights protections. In Peru, most porters speak Quechua as a first language and come from rural areas where their only other job opportunity is farming potatoes and raising alpacas. Most people who work as porters in Nepal are ethnic Sherpas, but not all, though many people mistakenly call all Nepalese porters Sherpas.
International travellers in Nepal and Peru are often told that the pittance porters are paid is normal and that, compared to what they could earn as farmers, it’s a good wage. Few stop to think about what exactly companies are asking porters to do for that pittance, and how the consequence is often a lifetime of ruined knees and backs. Nothing justifies requiring porters to carry more weight than is humanely reasonable. In Peru, the limit is 20 kilos, though most porters are asked to carry much more – or lose their job.
The working conditions of porters around the world have been on Góngora’s mind since he climbed Mt Kilimanjaro in 2018 and talked with Tanzanian porters about their work. He went as a tourist, just to climb the tallest mountain in Africa, like thousands of people do every year. The experience was revolutionary for him and for the porters he met there.
“It opened my eyes to see other people in the same situation as Peruvian porters,” he says of his experience on Mt Kilimanjaro. “They told me it was the first time they learned that people in other countries work as porters, and that we all suffer the same abusive working conditions.”
Góngora was shocked that Tanzanian porters didn’t have tents or sleeping bags like their paying clients. The porters wrapped tarps around themselves and slept sitting up, even when it rained during the night. It reminded him of the first time his sleeping bag was soaked by rain on the Inca Trail, and how, as a porter, he had nowhere dry to sleep. The next day, he was still required to carry about 40 kilos of gear for clients who had slept in dry tents all night.
In Nepal, 17 porters died while working in 2023 and 18 died in 2024. In Peru, they rarely die while working so statistics go unreported. For example, in 2019, at a tour agency I worked at in Cusco, a muleteer named Gregorio died on his way home from a trek. The company’s official position was that his death had nothing to do with them because he wasn’t working at the time. They didn’t give the family any compensation or even help pay for the funeral. Like Gregorio, many porters die of injuries sustained at work, but not while they’re working, so the deaths go unreported as related to their work as porters.
“This goes beyond countries and governments,” says Góngora. “The tourism industry permits this abuse.” In countries with lax workers’ rights enforcement, like Peru, Nepal and Tanzania, it’s up to tourists to ensure their vacations aren’t negatively impacting the places and people they visit.
Peru has made a lot of progress since the 1990s, with new laws that restrict how much weight a company can expect porters to carry and, that set a minimum wage. Enforcement is inconsistent, but having laws on the books gives the porters some leverage.
Today, Góngora says that the situation in Nepal and Tanzania is about where Peru was in 1996. Though many of Peru’s improvements are the fruit of the porters’ union working to change exploitative practices, the biggest changes haven’t come through legislation.
“Tourists in Peru want to see workers and porters treated well,” says Góngora. What has made the biggest difference is the tourists’ expectations. When tourists booking treks in Peru ask how much porters are paid, where they sleep and what they eat, that makes a difference. No market forces or legislation are as effective as tourists refusing to book treks with companies that treat porters badly.
Another common problem on the Inca Trail is the way porters carry tourists’ gear. Before booking, look at tour company websites for photos of how porters are carrying gear. Some companies make large cloth bags and attach uncomfortable shoulder straps, while other companies buy proper backpacks for their porters, with ergonomic shoulder straps and waist belts.
Some tour agencies are finally sending real tents for the porters to sleep in, because another problem used to be that the porters had to sleep on the muddy ground of the tourists’ dining tent. It was common for porters to end up sleeping in public bathrooms on rainy nights because dining tents routinely flooded. Some porters still sleep in the dining tent, but one of the campsites on the Inca Trail now has a bunkhouse for porters. It’s not comfortable, but if the tent floods, the bunkhouse is better than the bathrooms.
“There are young porters on the Inca Trail now who have never carried gear in a bag or slept in bathrooms,” says Góngora. “Now there are women who are used to earning the same salary as men. The new generation of Inca Trail porters has realised that things can change, and they will keep demanding more change.”
Not all is rosy in Peru, and tourists still have to be on guard for greenwashing. Absent any enforcement of information on websites in Peru, tourists are still left with the task of trying to figure out who really does treat their employees well, and which online reviews can be trusted. Every company website claims they treat their porters the best, and online reviews are too easily manipulated. Some Peruvian agencies allegedly hire college students to write fake reviews and pressure guides to force their guests to write positive reviews.
“What tourists see in Peru, they will want to see in other countries,” says Góngora. He hopes more tourists in Nepal and Tanzania will refuse to book treks with companies that treat their porters badly. “Peru is leading the way in changing exploitative practices.”
It’s up to all of us, and it has to get better.
