A geography lesson, a dusty photograph, a legacy

by RISHI AMATYA

FROM ISSUE # 133 (January 2007) | IN THIS ISSUE
	REFER TO FRIEND		PRINT THIS ARTICLE

ALL PICS: KAMANA GURUNG

Destination: Chisapani,
Karnali Bridge  

Young minds are easy to impress. I owe a fair share of my undying passion for travelling to my geography teacher. "Nepal is divided into 75 districts and 14 zones. I've been to all 75, and drunk 76 different types of local liquor," he'd tell us. Exactly the kind of thing that leaves an impression on young minds. I had the feeling this travel thing was for me.

Then came my uncle and his stories, which turned interest into an obsession. For his job he went to places in Nepal and met people none of us had any concept of. His travel tales were something of a family legend.

One day, he rooted through his old oak chest and took out a dusty-looking photograph of the bridge over the Karnali. "It's the largest suspension bridge in the country," he said. Actually, if you bought his story, it was one of the largest of its kind in this part of the continent. I remember thinking that some day, I'd have to go see this bridge for myself.
  
Time passed, as it so often does, and I forgot about this conviction—until last month when, as part of my fourth-year curriculum in Development Studies, one of the numerous field trips scheduled to the west of the country was to the Karnali Bridge.              

On the bus from Kathmandu to Kohalpur, where we were planning to break our journey for the night, we passed places that had been the scenes of some of the most violent fighting between the army and the Maoists. Kusum, where the armed police forces thwarted a Maoist attack, Bhalubang and Libang, the cradle of the Maoist movement, came at us, and receded into the distance as our bus sped along the East-West Highway.

We reached Kohalpur in the embrace of a night that seemed ghostly. We ate in silence, and no one suggested strumming the guitar or singing, and we all quickly went to bed.

We awoke the next morning to find that the strange mood of the night before had been replaced by anticipation and excitement. The two hours from Kohalpur to Chisapani were a breeze, with the possibility of seeing wild animals on the road as it crisscrossed through the stunning forests of Bardiya National Park.

The Karnali Bridge at Chisapani stands proud, a remarkable spectacle that rises almost half-a-kilometre up in the air, and stretches on for 500m ahead. The whole structure is supported by a single tapered central pillar. What supports the weight of the bridge are the steel cables that radiate out from this pillar to the ends of the bridge.

Look at the Karnali Bridge from a distance, and it seems perfectly symmetrical. But don't let that fool you—one side is longer than the other so that the bridge is stablilised.

Yes, this was an educational trip, and yes, the bridge is genuinely spectacular, but nothing puts us off our feed. We managed to make time to taste the local  catch, coldwater fish so delicious we wished we had space for more. Our batteries were running dry, and our cameras' memory cards filling up as we got on the bus back to Kohalpur. Back on the bus, the driver insisted on playing the cheesiest Bollywood songs, the kind where the hero sings to his dream girl as they dance around a garden. But I was in a forgiving mood, and got into the songs myself. I realised, as we headed back, that my own love affair with travelling had well and truly begun, and that my old geography teacher's legacy was alive and well.