Bandipur

The ridge was a Magar settlement before it was a town. Its rise began after Prithvi Narayan Shah's conquest of the Kathmandu Valley in 1768, when Newar merchants from Bhaktapur and the other valley cities moved out along the trade routes of the newly unified country. A group of them settled on this ridge, which sat on the route between India and Tibet and above the malarial lowlands, and rebuilt it in the architecture of their home cities: brick and timber houses of two or three storeys with latticed windows, carved struts and shop bays, set along a single paved street.

Bandipur grew into one of the wealthiest trading towns in the hills, dealing in cloth, grain and goods moving north and south, and it became the administrative centre of Tanahun district. Its heyday came in the Rana years, when the town was granted its own library — still standing, and one of the oldest in Nepal — and its merchants paid for temples and for schools that served the surrounding villages.

The end came with the road. When the Prithvi Highway was built along the valley below in the 1970s, traffic and business moved to Dumre at the foot of the hill and the district headquarters shifted to Damauli. Families left, shops shut, and the bazaar was largely abandoned — which is why it survived: nothing was pulled down and replaced with concrete. From the 1990s residents, returning families and conservation-minded projects restored houses, banned vehicles from the main street and turned merchant homes into guesthouses, and the town has lived on visitors ever since.

Bandipur is a Newar town set among Magar and Gurung hill villages, and the mixture shows. The bazaar keeps Newar habits — the tiered pagoda shrines, the guthi associations that manage temples and funerals, festival food and the practice of living above the shop — while the surrounding farms and the villages along the ridge belong to communities with their own languages, dress and dances, and a long history of service in the Gurkha regiments.

The street itself is the centre of public life. Because no vehicles come into it, the flagstones are used for drying maize and millet, for children's games, for school processions and for sitting out with tea at the end of the day. Temple festivals fill it several times a year, and Dashain, when families come back to the ridge and swings are built on the outskirts, is the biggest of them.

Preservation is part of the town's identity, and residents are conscious of living in a place people come to look at. Restoration work has followed old patterns in brick, timber and tile, and the appearance of the street is more carefully managed than in most Nepali towns. There is a visible debate about how many new buildings and how much concrete the ridge should take, and about how far tourism should shape a working settlement.

The municipality has about 15,000 residents spread over farming villages across the ridge and the slopes; the old bazaar itself holds only a few hundred households. Much of the working-age population lives elsewhere — in Kathmandu, Pokhara, India or the Gulf — and remittances support many families, a pattern common across the middle hills.

Farming and tourism carry the local economy. Terraces below the town grow rice, maize, millet and mustard, with vegetables and citrus for the market, and livestock kept in the villages. Guesthouses, cafés, shops and guiding work employ many in the bazaar, and Dumre below provides transport jobs and trade on the highway. Schools and a health post serve the ridge, but anything serious means a journey to Damauli or Pokhara.

The rhythm is early. People are out before dawn on the Tundikhel for the light on the mountains, children walk uphill to school, and the day's heat pushes work into morning and late afternoon. Electricity, piped water and mobile coverage reach the ridge, though water is short in the dry months and has to be carried or bought in some villages. The chief local concerns are the water supply, the state of the Dumre road, and the loss of young people to work abroad.

Newar cooking is the town's inheritance. The khaja set, a snack platter, is built around chiura, beaten rice, with spiced meat, black soybeans, fried potatoes, pickle and often bara, a fried lentil-flour cake; choila, grilled buffalo or chicken tossed with mustard oil, chilli and spices, belongs to the same tradition. Festival cooking runs to richer dishes with mustard oil and heavy spicing, and to sweets such as sel roti, the ring of fried rice-flour batter made at Tihar.

Everyday meals are those of the hills. Daal bhaat — rice, lentils, a seasonal vegetable, greens and pickle — is eaten twice a day, and dhido, a stiff porridge of millet or maize flour taken with the fingers, is the older staple and still common in the villages. Gundruk, leafy greens fermented and dried, goes into a sour soup; sisnu, stinging-nettle soup, appears in winter, and dried meat, sukuti, is fried with chilli.

The bazaar's guesthouses serve momo, thukpa, curries and a short Western menu on roof terraces. Tea comes strong with milk and sugar; raksi, distilled from millet or rice, and locally brewed millet beer are drunk at home and at festivals, and citrus, banana and guava from the slopes appear in the shops through the cool months.