Mountain Biking Around the Kathmandu Valley by JB Cooper
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Always one to buck a trend, I decided to spend a recent trip to Kathmandu by avoiding Kathmandu as much as possible.
My reasoning was simple. While I was ostensibly visiting Kathmandu to see old friends, I didn’t fancy spending any more time in Nepal's capital than was absolutely necessary. It’s a heady, hectic city, defined as much by the historic sites that dot its neighbourhoods as by the cars that pack its streets (the air here is said to be among the most polluted in the world). Kathmandu just doesn’t make for relaxing holidays, you see. And I was looking for a bit of peace and quiet; I wanted to be able to catch my breath.
In contrast to the city, the hills that envelope Kathmandu are tranquillity personified. These are hills that you can see from all over the city, yet they’re left relatively untouched by tourists (having exhausted Kathmandu, most head to the snow-capped heights of Nepal’s Himalayan north). If – like me – you like cycling, and enjoy travelling to chilled-out places that others don’t visit, they make for just about the perfect ground for pedal-powered exploration.
Renting a well-equipped mountain bike in Kathmandu is a straightforward task thanks to the many agencies that run guided trips from the city. Joining one of these trips is an easy way to experience the valley, but it’s also an expensive option. Ever the Scrooge, I chose the DIY route: I rented a bike, borrowed a map, and headed northeast with the hills on the horizon as my goal.
Quickly becoming rural...
One of the things you notice leaving Kathmandu by road is just how quickly the surroundings become rural. Long before reaching the hills that mark the edge of the valley I was cycling along dirt roads from village to village. These are tiny, humble villages, but they are faced with a busy future. Kathmandu’s population grows at a rate of around 6.5% every year; over the past two decades alone, its urban spread (the amount of land it takes up) has increased by an incredible 450%. If this growth continues – and there’s no evidence to suggest it won’t – it’s only a matter of time before Kathmandu starts encroaching on the villages with which it shares the valley floor.
Another thing you notice as you near the edge of the valley is just how steep its sides are. It’s almost as though the basin is a cardboard cut-out: one minute you’re cycling merrily along flat roads, the next you’re pushing your bike up the side of a mountain. There’s little preparation for the climb, and once it starts, it’s tough going – or, at least, it was tough going for me.
Ups and downs
Still, the climbing is worthwhile because: 1) You get some amazing views, and 2) You get to descend. I climbed around 1,000 meters on the first day and stayed overnight in the village of Chisapani, which perches on the very northern edge of the valley and affords – on clear days – picture-perfect views of the Himalayas. At an altitude of 2,400m, Chisapani is just about as high as you can get while remaining in the valley, and from there on my daily rides were a good mixture of uphill and downhill cycling.
Having skirted the eastern edge of the valley and enjoyed the views from the famed lookout point of Nagakot, I decided to head southwards to Namo Buddha, a monastery-and-temple site where I’d heard it was possible to stay for as little as 300 Nepali Rupees per night. The route there was predominantly downhill, which should have been fun, except I kept falling off my bike. What’s worse, I never seemed to fall off in story-inducing, crap-I-nearly-just-died situations. Rather, I fell off every time I went under 5 mph – for no apparent reason other than I was just being too lazy to concentrate. On one occasion, I cycled straight into a bemused group of farmers at work; another time, I hit the wall of someone’s house. It must have been the air getting to me.
At 2,000m up, the air around the valley fringes is starting to thin (although it’s nowhere near as low on oxygen as the Himalayas, where altitudes often exceed 8,000m). Still, after the smog of Kathmandu, the air in the hills tastes good, and it’s hard not to enjoy the experience of sucking it in while surrounded by a landscape of rice fields and rhododendrons.
A monastic stay
Namo Buddha sits atop a hill, which means it appears like a heaven-sent vision after half an hour of peddling up a steep incline. It’s a simply stunning place – a spiritual complex that combines an important Buddhist Stompa with an impressive, auriferous monastery. And, for 300 Rs, you get not only a room to sleep in, but also four hearty meals a day. I spent two evenings at Namo Buddha; the experience of dining in the monastery as the sun set and the inevitable daily thunderstorm brewed overhead was enough to justify my trip in itself.
Clearly, you don’t have to travel far from Kathmandu to enjoy rural relaxation in Nepal. I did almost a complete circuit of the Kathmandu Valley over the course of a couple of weeks, stopping to sleep at various villages and random guesthouses on the way. The city bustle of Kathmandu was never further than 25 miles away, and yet it could have been in Timbuktu for all I knew. The hills of the Kathmandu Valley may not be a path much travelled by the average visitor to Nepal, but they provide just about as much countryside tranquillity as you could possibly wish for.
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