Travelling in Nepal: an industry built inside one lifetime

Why the country stayed closed for so long

The record of the closure is clearest in the Everest expeditions. The first three British attempts, in 1921, 1922 and 1924, were all made from the Tibetan side, because permission to approach the mountain from the south did not exist. A Swiss expedition was granted permission from Nepal in 1952, established a route through the Khumbu Icefall and reached the South Col at 7,986 metres, and the following year Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary used that line to reach the summit at 11:30 in the morning on 29 May 1953.

That British expedition of 1953 walked out of the Kathmandu Valley. There were no roads further east at the time, so a party of more than four hundred climbers, porters and Sherpas set off eastward on foot from the valley floor. The same approach is now a flight to a hill airstrip followed by a walk of six to eight days, and the difference between those two sentences is most of what has been built in Nepal for visitors.

The country opened to westerners in 1951 and became a destination at the end of the hippie trail through the 1960s and 1970s. The civil war that ran from February 1996 to the peace accord of November 2006 interrupted the industry, which afterwards recovered. The first million international visitors in a single year were counted in 2018, a total that leaves out Indian tourists arriving overland. Tourism employed more than a million people and contributed 7.9% of gross domestic product in 2019. Those visitors spend much less on average than visitors elsewhere in South Asia, which is the other half of what a short history has produced.

How a visitor actually reaches the mountains

Kathmandu is where nearly every trip begins, because the flights to the hill airstrips leave from it. The two Everest base camps sit roughly 100 kilometres from the city, which is a misleading figure. The usual approach flies from Kathmandu to the airstrip at Lukla at 2,860 metres, then goes on foot through Namche Bazaar to the South Base Camp at 5,380 metres, and that walk takes six to eight days because it is paced for acclimatisation instead of for distance. Loads move with it on yaks, on dzopkyos, which are yak and cow hybrids, and on the backs of porters.

The road network explains the split. Industry based on farm products such as jute began in the Terai in the 1930s, and roads, railways and electricity were extended across the border from India into the southern plain before any of them reached the hill region. That order of arrival still describes travel in Nepal: the lowlands are crossed in a vehicle, and the hills and mountains are entered by a short flight and then walked.

What the monsoon does to the calendar

The year divides into a wet season from June to September and a dry season from October to June. Sustained rain arrives in mid-June on average, though the date can move by as much as a month, and the rains diminish through September and generally finish by mid-October.

What the wet months do to movement is specific. Roads and trails wash out, unpaved roads and airstrips can become unusable, and cloud cover reduces the safety margins for aviation, which matters in a country where the alternative to a light aircraft is several days of walking. The rain is also unevenly spread: eastern Nepal takes about 2,500 millimetres a year, the Kathmandu area about 1,400, and western Nepal about 1,000, while windward slopes in the Annapurna Himalaya reach 5,500 millimetres and the arid valleys in the rainshadow north of the high ranges take as little as 160.

What follows the monsoon is the reason the walking season falls where it does. From about mid-October the weather turns cool, clear and dry and stays that way until roughly December, the harvest is finished, and the Hindu festivals of Dashain and Tihar fall about a month apart inside that period.

The other dry window is harder going. April and May are hot below 1,200 metres, where afternoon temperatures can pass 40 °C, and they are the months of deepest water stress after the long dry season. They are also the months when the mountain is climbed, which is why the two seasons that matter in Nepal are not the same season.

Where the visitors actually go

The named destinations are few and they absorb most of the traffic: Pokhara, the Annapurna trekking circuit, and four properties on the World Heritage List. Fifteen further sites stand on Nepal's tentative list, the inventory of properties a state intends to consider for nomination.

Two of the four sit in the hills and mountains and two on the southern plain, which means a visitor who does no walking at all can still reach half of them. The Kathmandu Valley listing of 1979 is unusual in being assembled from seven separate clusters counted as one property, among them Swayambhu, the three Durbar Squares, and the temples of Pashupatinath and Changu Narayan.

Pashupatinath, one of those clusters, is a Hindu temple complex on the Bagmati river that includes the Aryaghat platforms, where the dead are cremated in the open. The cremations take place in public view, stalls nearby sell drinks and snacks, and international visitors watch from across the river while families are mourning.

Growth beyond this handful of places has been slow, and the constraint has a name in the industry: an infrastructure bottleneck, the shortage of facilities for high-spending visitors, alongside a small number of destinations that have been properly developed and marketed. Home-stay tourism, in which visitors pay to stay in the houses of indigenous families, has had some success as the alternative.

What the mountains ask of a climber

Eight peaks above 8,000 metres stand in Nepal or on its border with Tibet: Everest at 8,849 metres, then Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu, Kangchenjunga at 8,598 metres, Dhaulagiri, Annapurna and Manaslu. Some 90 Nepali peaks exceed 7,000 metres, and about 20 subranges carry them, from the Kanchenjunga massif in the east through the Mahalangur Himal around Everest, Langtang north of Kathmandu, Annapurna and Manaslu north of Pokhara, to Dhaulagiri, Kanjiroba and the Gurans Himal in the far west.

How the climbing season is decided

Everest is climbed inside a window of seven to ten days, taken in spring or autumn as the Asian monsoon is beginning or ending and the jet stream has shifted north off the summit. Winds there commonly reach 160 kilometres per hour, and a speed of 280 kilometres per hour was recorded in February 2004. Most attempts are made in May, before the monsoon. Autumn attempts happen but are regarded as more dangerous, because the monsoon leaves a great deal of new and unstable snow behind it.

The state sells access by permit and the numbers move with events rather than with demand. Nepal issued 334 permits in 2014, 357 in 2015, and 381 in 2019, and issued none at all in 2020. In April 2025 the government added a qualification requirement: a climber must have summited a peak of 7,000 metres inside Nepal before an Everest permit can be issued, a rule set to apply from the spring season of 2026.

What the crowding on Everest has cost

807 climbers reached the summit in 2018, helped by an unusually long and clear weather window of eleven days, and 891 reached it in the spring of 2019. That second season produced photographs of hundreds of people queueing below the summit, and a death toll that reached eleven by 28 May 2019 with a twelfth climber later declared dead, attributed in part to delays high on the mountain and to short weather windows. As of May 2024, 340 people had died on Everest, and more than 200 bodies remain on it because retrieving them is too dangerous.

The ground under the South Base Camp is also changing. The Khumbu Glacier is thinning and destabilising, and a committee formed by the government proposed moving the camp to a lower altitude. Resistance from climbing and Sherpa communities put the move on hold, partly because no alternative site allows climbers to cross the icefall in the safer early morning hours.

How altitude sets the pace of a day

Nepal holds eight climate zones between tropical and perpetual snow, and a walker crosses several of them in a week. Below 1,000 metres frost falls less than once a decade. Between 1,000 and 2,000 metres there can be up to 53 days of frost a year, between 2,000 and 3,000 metres up to 153, and between 3,000 and 4,000 metres up to 229. The subalpine belt takes 9% of the country's land area and the alpine belt 8%, and above 5,000 metres the climate is nival, with no habitation and not even seasonal use.

Permanent villages stand as high as 4,500 metres, with summer encampments above them. Those settlements are the reason the high routes function at all. Many of the alpine valleys north of the main ranges, among them Humla, Jumla, Dolpo, Mustang, Manang and Khumbu, were historically easier to reach from Tibet than from Nepal, and their Bhotiya populations, the Sherpas of Khumbu included, traded Tibetan salt for lowland rice until that trade was restricted in the 1950s. Work as high-altitude porters, guides and cooks replaced it, which is how the walking economy of the mountains acquired its staff.

What the lowlands are for

The Terai covers 17% of Nepal and is the part of the country most travellers see least. It was dangerously malarial before DDT came into use in the mid-1950s, which is why Nepal's rulers had been able to keep it as a defensive forest frontier, the char kose jhadi, or four kos forest, a kos being about three kilometres. Only the Tharu, who had genetic resistance, lived in the Inner Terai valleys in numbers. After the mosquitoes were suppressed, settlement arrived from the land-poor hills, to the detriment of the Tharu.

What remains of the forest is the reason to go south. The protected system created by the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act 1973 has since been expanded to ten national parks, three wildlife reserves, one hunting reserve, three conservation areas and eleven buffer zones, covering 28,959.67 square kilometres, or 19.67% of the land area, with ten wetlands registered under the Ramsar Convention. The animals a visitor comes for include the Bengal tiger, the Asiatic elephant, the wild water buffalo, the gharial and the Bengal florican. Breeding programmes, community-assisted military patrols and a crackdown on smuggling brought poaching of tigers, elephants and rhinos down to effectively zero, and those populations have risen steadily since.

What can stop a trip in Nepal

The earthquake of 25 April 2015 measured 7.8 and it closed the season on Everest: an avalanche began on Pumori, moved through the Khumbu Icefall and struck the South Base Camp, and 2015 became the first year since 1974 with no spring summits. In the Langtang valley north of Kathmandu, an avalanche estimated at two to three kilometres across hit Ghodatabela and the village of Langtang, both on a walking route, and destroyed the village; 329 people were reported missing, and by 4 May 2015, 52 bodies had been found, seven of them foreigners. A survey some 30 months later found that 12% of the reconstruction money had been distributed.

The ordinary obstacles are smaller and more frequent. Cities in the Kathmandu Valley carry congestion, air pollution and shortages of drinking water, and about 18.3% of Nepalis lived in urban areas as of 2014 in a country that is urbanising quickly. Flights into hill airstrips are weather-dependent for months at a time.

The constants are worth knowing before arrival. Nepal is landlocked, with China across the Himalaya to the north and India on the other three sides. Traffic drives on the left. Clocks run at UTC+05:45. The currency is the Nepalese rupee, whose exchange rates are published by Nepal Rastra Bank, and the population was recorded at 29,164,578 in the 2021 census. Further reading on the terrain sits in Nepal: geography, and on the festivals that fill the post-monsoon weeks in Nepal: culture.