Two Weeks Across Rural Nepal: A Fieldtrip Diary

I spent four months working for PEEDA in Kathmandu during my gap year, conducting research into clean cooking solutions for rural schools across Nepal. This is not a work post. This is just what it felt like to travel across a country I was falling in love with, doing work that actually mattered.

I would heavily recommend watching the vlog — I am not a good enough writer to convey the beauty.

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Contents

The Bus from Kalanki

We booked a 7am bus from Kalanki — the south-western edge of Kathmandu, a long way from my host family's house, even longer at that hour. When we arrived, we found out that almost nobody books online. Which meant the conductor had been actively looking for us, making sure we made it. There was something immediately charming about that.

The seats were comfortable, which mattered, because the journey was seven hours.

We climbed out of Kathmandu through the ring of hills that surrounds the valley, winding along roads that curved back on themselves endlessly, revealing new angles of the same spectacular landscape every few minutes. We stopped for coffee just outside the capital. From there, the hills continued — not dramatic, not Himalayan, but layered and green and alive in the way that Nepal's middle hills always are.

Eventually the terrain flattened and we hit the Prithvi Highway — the main artery connecting Kathmandu to the Terai, the lowland plains of southern Nepal. Every now and then a market town appeared alongside the road, the kind of place that exists to serve the villages scattered across the surrounding hills. People getting off buses with bags of rice. Motorbikes piled improbably high.

We stopped for breakfast by the river. And from that point on, the river was with us — the road following its course through the flat lowland landscape all the way to Ratnanagar.

Ratnanagar and the Bedrock Resort

Our base for the first stretch of the fieldwork was the Bedrock Resort in Ratnanagar — a guesthouse sitting out in the fields, the kind of place that exists at the edge of everything. We were the only guests. The kind of quiet that falls in rural Nepal at night is unlike anything I had experienced before. No traffic, no horns, no city hum. Just insects and darkness.

The principal of the school we were working with picked us up and showed us around. Then he took us somewhere unexpected — his ancestral home, to meet his family. It was one of those moments that I have thought about since. There was no reason for him to do that. We were researchers with clipboards and scientific equipment, just concerned about his school's numbers and data. He introduced us to his family anyway, walked us through fields that held his history. That kind of generosity does not have a name in the travel writing I've read. It just happens in Nepal, quietly, as a matter of course.

Sauraha and Chitwan National Park

After a day of fieldwork in Ratnanagar, we had an evening in Sauraha — the small tourist village that sits on the edge of Chitwan National Park, Nepal's first national park and one of the most important wildlife reserves in Asia.

Chitwan covers nearly a thousand square kilometres of subtropical forest, tall grassland, and river floodplain in the Terai lowlands. It is home to the one-horned rhinoceros, Royal Bengal tiger, wild elephants, gharial crocodiles, and more than 650 bird species. The rhino population tells one of conservation's great recovery stories — from under 100 in the 1960s to around 750 today, almost entirely because of the park's anti-poaching work.

We rented bicycles for two hours — 100 Nepali rupees — and rode along the edge of the park boundary, the jungle pressing in close on one side and the open grassland on the other. That is how we saw them. Rhinos grazing in the open, utterly unbothered, enormous and prehistoric. Crocodiles motionless on the riverbanks. Birds I had no names for in colours I was not expecting. Deer in numbers that made the forest feel populated rather than empty. Elephants freely grazing in the open.

The whole thing cost less than a cup of coffee back home. Two hours on hired bicycles, 100 rupees, and the kind of wildlife encounter that most people pay hundreds of pounds to experience through the window of a jeep. Nepal has a way of making you feel like you've accidentally stumbled into something you didn't deserve.

Bharatpur: A Day in the City

From Ratnanagar we crossed the Takauli jungle and came out into Bharatpur — a different world entirely. Bigger, louder, busier. Bharatpur is a proper city by Nepali standards, with its own airport and a pace of life that felt almost metropolitan after the quiet fields around Ratnanagar.

We arrived to a political rally in full swing. The streets were packed, trucks with speakers, crowds spilling onto every pavement. It had the feeling of a city asserting itself — which Bharatpur, as one of Nepal's fastest-growing urban centres, is very much doing. We moved through it, took it in, and moved on. Some places you understand by watching rather than doing.

Damauli: The Highway Town

The next bus took us north to Damauli — a smaller, quieter market town on the highway between Kathmandu and Pokhara. Damauli sits at the confluence of the Madi and Seti rivers, surrounded by fog for much of the year. There is a local legend for this: the great sage Parashar is said to have conjured the fog around Damauli to conceal his meetings with Satyavati, and it has remained ever since. Whether you believe that or not, the fog is real, and it gives the town a particular atmosphere — half-hidden, slightly otherworldly, as if it exists slightly apart from the rest of Nepal.

It is not a tourist destination. It is a place people pass through. That is what made it interesting.

The school we were visiting here was not in Damauli itself but in the hills of Chhabdi Barahi — a climb into the kind of landscape that makes you understand why people who come to Nepal for the trekking talk about it the way they do. The views from up there were extraordinary. Villages clinging to hillsides, terraced fields dropping away below, the rivers visible in the distance. You earn views like that with your legs.

Chhabdi Barahi Temple: A Birthday I Won't Forget

We visited Chhabdi Barahi Temple on my birthday. I did not plan it that way. It happened because that was the day we were there, and I am glad it did.

The temple sits in a hilly forest, about seven kilometres from Damauli, approached by a road that winds up through trees until the complex appears — a pond, a waterfall behind the main shrine, and a stillness that feels earned by the journey to reach it.

Chhabdi Barahi is dedicated to a fish-headed goddess, and the sacred pond within the temple complex is home to fish believed to be divine. The belief goes that when one of the temple's fish dies, it is mourned with full Hindu death rites, the temple priest performing as its son. There is a local belief that Jaldevi, in the form of a fish adorned with a golden tika, resides in the water. The river outside runs thick with fish that no one touches, because worshippers believe that those who come and pray here will have their sins washed away and the fish are part of that sanctity.

I am not religious. But I have found, travelling across Nepal, that there are places where the weight of belief accumulated over centuries becomes something you can feel physically — not supernaturally, but humanly. The number of people who have stood in exactly this spot and felt something, over hundreds of years, leaves a mark on a place. Pashupatinath was like that. This was quieter, more hidden, less overwhelming — but the feeling was the same. You understand why people make pilgrimages. You understand why this matters.

I was barefoot, as you are in Hindu temples. Much of the concrete floor was stained red. I assumed it was kumkum — the bright red powder used throughout Hindu worship, pressed onto foreheads as a blessing, scattered at the feet of deities, offered at shrines across the subcontinent as an act of devotion. Red floors in a Hindu temple seemed entirely normal.

I found out after leaving that it was blood.

Chhabdi Barahi is a temple of animal sacrifice. Mostly chickens and goats, offered to the goddess in fulfilment of vows, in exchange for blessings. I knew this from the research I had done after. But reading about it and being inside it are not the same thing. I had by that point witnessed cremations at Pashupatinath, watched bodies burn at the ghats of the Bagmati River. I thought I had some framework for the confronting end of Hindu ritual. I did not.

Watching an animal get beheaded in a place of worship is not something your brain processes quickly. The body is then carried to the river that flows directly out of the temple complex — Chhabdi Khola running cold and clear beneath the shrine — where it is washed. Then incinerated with a flamethrower. People carried the animals back down to Damauli in bags on the minivans, or ate them in the restaurants right there at the temple. The same animals. The same afternoon.

What hit hardest was not the act itself but the realisation of what I had been walking through. My bare feet, red-stained. Not kumkum.

In the UK we are almost completely insulated from the reality of slaughter. Meat arrives wrapped in plastic, bloodless and abstract, with no visible connection to the animal it came from. Here, that distance collapsed entirely. I watched a goat's body split in half. I saw intestines, a liver, a heart that was still beating. The whole chain — the animal alive, the killing, the cleaning, the cooking, the eating — compressed into one afternoon in the hills above Damauli.

It took a long time to come out of the shock. I am still not sure I have fully processed it. I will never forget it. And I think that is probably the point — not of the ritual, which is not for people like me, but of travel itself. You go places that remove the insulation. Sometimes that is beautiful. Sometimes it is terrifying. At Chhabdi Barahi, on my birthday, it was both at once.

Spending my birthday there, in the hills above Damauli, surrounded by something ancient and serious and genuinely alive with meaning, became one of the better things that happened to me during four months in Nepal.

The Minivan Back to Kathmandu

I had to cut the trip short. The return to Kathmandu was a nine-hour minivan journey that I would not recommend to anyone with a spine. Nepal's mountain roads, which are spectacular from a bus with comfortable seats, are something else entirely when you are wedged into a minivan with your knees around your ears on a road surface that seems to regard smooth as a suggestion.

Nine hours, in which every bump felt personal.

But you come out the other side back in Kathmandu, and the city absorbs you immediately — noise, colour, smell, movement — and the ache in your back starts to feel like a reasonable price for two weeks of exactly that kind of travel. The kind where you stay in resorts with no other guests, eat breakfast by rivers you don't know the names of, shake hands with strangers who show you their family homes, and spend your birthday at a temple in the hills where fish are mourned like people.

Nepal gives you that, if you're willing to get on the bus.