Most people around the world know the
country of Nepal for one thing, Everest,
the summit of the world. That photograph
on the poster, that bucket list
mountain, and the fact that it's used as
a superlative for anything remotely
challenging. But, despite the grandeur
of this epic mountain, it kind of steals
the spotlight from the rest of Nepal.
Just knowing Nepal for Everest strips it
of almost everything that makes it even
more remarkable.
Because Nepal is so much more than
Everest.
Surprisingly, it's a geographically
diverse country.
In the span of only 200 km, the land
rises from the subtropical lowlands to
the highest point on the planet.
That is an elevation gain of nearly 9
km. In those 200 km, you pass through
several different climate zones, from
alpine tundra to jungles, from monsoon
forest with elephants and rhinos,
through terraced hillsides and cloud
forests, and through high-altitude
grasslands and glacial valleys.
So, let's today talk about the true
geography of Nepal
in all its glory.
So, when we take a look at Nepal on a
map, the first thing you'll notice is
the shape, a long, narrow rectangle.
It's oriented east to west, roughly 900
km long and 200 km wide. To the south is
a long, open border with India. And to
the north is the Tibetan Plateau, the
roof of the world.
What this means is that Nepal is
landlocked, completely surrounded by
just two countries.
For a nation of over 30 million people,
this geographical reality has profound
consequences.
Most trade, most imports, and all access
to the sea must pass through India, or
to a much lesser extent, through the
long and difficult routes into China.
In terms of its size, it covers about
147,000
sq km.
About the same size as neighboring
Bangladesh. By area, it's small, but by
topographic range, it's extraordinary.
Home to eight of the world's 14 peaks
over 8,000 m, including Everest,
Kangchenjunga, Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu,
Dhaulagiri, Manaslu, and Annapurna. All
epic peaks. No other country on Earth
has eight 8,000ers. Those being peaks
over 8,000 m high. But like I mentioned
previously, Nepal is a lot more than the
mountains. The Himalayas that run across
the country are just the northern third
of Nepal. The country is usually divided
into three rough horizontal zones
running east to west. The Terai lowlands
in the south, the foothills of the
Himalayas in the center, and the tall
Himalayas in the north. Each zone is a
different world, different climate,
different ecology, and different
culture. Which means to understand
Nepal, you have to understand all three.
So, let's do that, starting at the
bottom, the Terai.
Now, most people's mental image of Nepal
begins somewhere in the high hills. You
may have seen images of prayer flags
strung between peaks, or monasteries
climbing to clifftops. But the Terai
doesn't fit that image.
It's the flat southern strip of Nepal, a
narrow plain sitting between the
Himalayan foothills to the north and the
Indian border to the south. It is the
northern continuation of the great
Indo-Gangetic Plain, one of the most
fertile and densely populated
agricultural landscapes on Earth. In
Nepal, it is roughly 30 to 50 km wide
and extends the full length of the
country, east to west. Elevations in
this region are low, mostly between 60
and 300 m above sea level. The climate
is subtropical, hot summers but cool
winters, and a monsoon season from June
to September that dumps enormous
quantities of rain.
This region can feel oppressively humid
in summer with temperatures regularly
exceeding 40° C.
But this climate produces extraordinary
biological richness.
This region is home to Chitwan National
Park, one of the finest wildlife areas
in all of Asia. It protects a large
remnant of the subtropical grasslands
and riverine forest that once covered
this entire region.
Here live the one-horned rhinoceros,
a species that came perilously close to
extinction in the 20th century but has
made a remarkable recovery in Nepal's
protected areas. Also here, we find
Bengal tigers and the extremely rare
gharials, one of the strangest-looking
crocodilian species on Earth.
Sloth bears and leopards also call this
area home.
Now, surprisingly, Nepal is one of the
few countries in the world where tiger
populations are actually growing.
A census conducted in 2022 recorded over
350 wild tigers in the country, nearly
double the number of a decade earlier.
It is one of the genuine conservation
success stories of our era. This region
is also Nepal's breadbasket. Despite
covering only about 17% of the country's
land area, it produces roughly half of
Nepal's agricultural output. There's
rice, wheat, sugarcane, and lentils that
grow here in the rich alluvial soil
deposited over millennia by rivers
flowing south of the Himalayas.
This region of Nepal is home to the
Madhesi people. They make up about 30%
of the country's population and are
predominantly Hindu.
Now, the Tarai is where Nepal meets
India. And for the majority of the
population here, this is not really a
border checkpoint, but more of a porous
way of living. Many communities straddle
the border. Families are divided by it.
Languages, customs, and religious
practices flow across it. Now, let's
move north. Between the flat Tarai and
the soaring Himalayas, lies a part of
Nepal where most Nepalese have lived for
most of its history, the middle hills.
This is a zone of complex and folded
terrain. These ridges and valleys
running roughly east to west cut across
by rivers flowing south from the
mountains towards India. Elevations here
typically range from 300 m to about
3,000 m with most settlements clustered
between 1,000 and 2,500 m. High enough
to escape the Tarai's heat, but low
enough to still grow some crops. The
landscape of the middle hills is defined
above almost anything else by one
feature, terraces.
Almost every hillside in the inhabited
middle hills region has been terraced,
cut into horizontal steps to create flat
agricultural land on slopes that would
otherwise be impossible to farm.
Now, this practice of terracing in this
region has been accumulating for over
2,000 years. Generations of farmers
cutting into the hillsides, building
retaining walls of stone, channeling
water from one terrace to the next. The
result is one of the most
interesting-looking agricultural
landscapes on Earth.
Rice is the staple crop here. Where
water can be brought to irrigate the
terraces, paddy rice dominates. On drier
slopes and higher elevations, there's
millet, maize, wheat, and buckwheat. The
agricultural calendar is dictated
entirely by the monsoon here. The
arrival of the rains in June triggers
planting. The end of the monsoon in
September and October brings harvest.
Within the middle hills, one place above
all others has defined Nepali history
and culture, the Kathmandu Valley.
The Kathmandu Valley is a broad, flat
basin sitting at around 1,300 m above
sea level. Roughly oval in shape,
surrounded by hills on all sides, it is,
geologically speaking, a former lake
bed, making it extraordinarily fertile.
The Valley is home to Kathmandu,
Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur, three ancient
cities that were, until the 18th
century, three separate rival kingdoms.
The Kathmandu Valley today contains
seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites, all
within roughly 30 km of each other.
Now, the Valley's position also made it
a trade crossroads, sitting in the
middle hills between the Indian plains
and the Tibetan Plateau.
It was a natural stopping point on the
ancient trade routes carrying salt,
wool, and grain south from Tibet, and
cotton and spices north from India.
Newar merchants controlled this trade
for centuries and grew extraordinarily
wealthy. That wealth built the famous
temples in this region. Today, Kathmandu
is the capital of Nepal and home to
nearly 1.5 million people in the city
proper, and with the greater Valley
approaching 3.5 million. In its chaotic,
traffic-choked, smog-hazed, and
endlessly alive city.
The city core survives alongside what
looks like endless concrete sprawl. But,
the beauty of the city is that on clear
days, if you look to the north, the
Himalayas are right there, towering over
the city of Kathmandu.
An epic reminder that this busy,
complicated city sits at the base of the
tallest mountain system on the planet.
The middle hills are cut through by a
series of major river systems, the
Koshi, the Gandaki, and the Karnali. All
of them drain from the Himalayas
southward through the hills and into the
Terai, and then eventually the Ganges
River.
These rivers are among the most powerful
on Earth in terms of sediment load. They
carry millions of tons of eroded
mountain material downstream every year,
building the great alluvial plains of
northern India. For the people of the
hills, these rivers are both lifelines
and barriers. They provide water, fish,
and in some places hydroelectric power.
But the deep gorges they carve have
historically isolated communities from
each other. A village on one side of the
gorge might only be a kilometer from
village on the other side as the crow
flies, but hours of descent and ascent
on foot. This geographical fragmentation
has produced Nepal's extraordinary
ethnic and linguistic diversity. Over
120 languages are spoken in a country
the size of New York state. And now we
move to the Himalayas.
Now to understand the Himalayas, you
need to look at the geologic history of
this region. And for that, you need to
start about 100 million years ago. That
time, what is now the Indian
subcontinent was not attached to Asia at
all. It was an island, a vast northward
drifting landmass.
Over tens of millions of years, the
Indian subcontinent drifted north. Then,
around 50 million years ago, India
collided with Asia. The seafloor
sediments that had accumulated in it
were compressed and crumpled upwards.
And the collision, which actually is
still ongoing, began building the
Himalayas. The Indian plate is still
pushing north. The Himalayas are still
rising about 5 mm per year. Nepal sits
directly on this collision zone. The
ground beneath Kathmandu is being
compressed, uplifted, and periodically
shattered by earthquakes that release
the accumulated stress of two continents
grinding against each other. And this is
exactly what caused the 2015 Gorkha
earthquake in Nepal. It was magnitude
7.8, and it killed nearly 9,000 people,
destroyed hundreds of thousands of
homes, and triggered avalanches on
Everest that killed climbers at base
camp. It was a reminder, brutal and
sudden, that Nepal does not sit on
stable ground. It sits on one of the
most geologically active zones on the
planet.
And here is something that you might
find interesting. On the summit of Mount
Everest is limestone, marine limestone
full of fossils of tiny sea creatures,
meaning the highest point on Earth
was actually at the bottom of a tropical
sea 450 million years ago. Tectonic
forces lifted it nearly 9 km. But
Everest is just but one mountain. Nepal
is home to eight of the world's 14 peaks
above 8,000 m. Each one is distinct in
its character, in its difficulty, and in
the history of human attempts on it.
There is Annapurna in the west of Nepal.
It was the first 8,000er ever summited
by French climbers Maurice Herzog and
Louis Lachenal. It was the first
mountain above 8,000 m that any human
being had ever stood on. And it remains,
statistically, the most dangerous of all
the 8,000ers. Its death rate is among
the highest of any major Himalayan peak.
Nearby is Dhaulagiri, also in western
Nepal. It rises so dramatically from the
surrounding terrain that early European
surveyors briefly considered it as the
highest mountain in the world. While far
to the east of Nepal sits Kangchenjunga,
the third highest mountain in the world
at 8,586
m. It is worshipped as a sacred deity by
the Sikkimese people. And by tradition,
climbers stop a few meters short of the
actual summit out of respect, a
remarkable act of restraint at the edge
of one of humanity's greatest physical
challenges.
But the Himalayas are not uninhabited.
People have lived in these mountains for
thousands of years, and their
adaptations to extreme altitude are
among the most remarkable in human
biology. These Sherpa people, who
predominantly reside in the Khumbu and
the Solo regions of Nepal, migrated from
eastern Tibet roughly 500 years ago and
settled in the high valleys of Northeast
Nepal. They are famous worldwide for
their role in Himalayan mountaineering,
but their geographical significance goes
far beyond guiding expeditions. They
developed a civilization at elevations
that would debilitate most humans.
Sherpa communities have been in this
environment long enough to develop
genetic adaptations to altitude,
including a variant of the EPAS1 gene
that allows their bodies to use oxygen
more efficiently at low partial
pressures. Above the settlements, the
landscape becomes one of the most severe
on Earth. The high Himalayan valleys and
passes are home to glaciers, thousands
of them,
covering an estimated 5,000 square
kilometers of Nepal. And these glaciers
are the source of the rivers that
sustain hundreds of millions of people
downstream in Nepal, India, Bangladesh,
and Pakistan. The Himalayan glacier
system is sometimes called the third
pole after Antarctica and the Arctic.
Now, let's leave behind the high peaks
of the Himalayas and talk a little bit
about Nepal's climate. And you cannot
talk about Nepal's climate without
mentioning the monsoon. The South Asian
monsoon is one of the most powerful
atmospheric systems on Earth. It is
driven by the differential heating
between the Indian Ocean and the Asian
landmass. In summer, the land heats
faster than the ocean,
causing the air over the Indian
subcontinent to rise. This causes moist
air from the Indian Ocean to take its
place. When the air hits the Himalayas,
the greatest topographic barrier on
Earth, it's forced upward. It cools and
releases its moisture as rainfall,
enormous, torrential, and possibly
months-long rainfall.
The monsoon typically arrives in Nepal
in June and lasts through September. And
in that 4-month window, roughly 80% of
Nepal's annual precipitation falls.
Rivers that were quiet mountain streams
become raging torrents. Terraced
hillsides green up almost overnight. But
the monsoon is not uniform across Nepal.
The middle hills and the Terai region
receive more than 2,000 mm of rain
annually, and over 80% of that is during
the monsoon. However, the complex
topography of the middle hills region
means that there's a lot of local
variation. But the rain shadow effect
behind the Himalayas is dramatic. The
high valleys of northern Nepal,
sheltered by the main Himalayan range,
receive only a fraction of the monsoon
rainfall. Places like Mustang and Dolpo,
upper valleys tucked behind the
mountains, receive an almost central
Asian dryness, receiving less than 200
mm of rain per year.
And this dry, arid region is home to one
of Nepal's most extraordinary places.
This is Lo Manthang, the walled city of
Upper Mustang. It sits in a desert at
3,840
m. Its mud-brick architecture and
Tibetan Buddhist culture feel entirely
different from the rest of Nepal.
The monsoon also defines Nepal's
economy. Agriculture, still the primary
livelihood for the majority of Nepalese,
depends entirely on monsoon timing and
intensity. A late monsoon or a weak one
means poor harvests and food insecurity.
A particularly violent monsoon could
mean flooding, landslides, and the loss
of everything a family has built. Nepal
sits almost exactly at the point where
the monsoon hits the Himalayas hardest,
which means the stakes of every year's
rains can be enormous.
Now that we've explored the physical
geography of Nepal, let's talk about the
cities of Nepal. What are they like, and
where are they located? We already spoke
a little bit about Kathmandu, but what
other large cities are in Nepal?
Well, Nepal's second largest city is
Pokhara. It sits in a broad valley like
Kathmandu at around 820 m above sea
level. It's lower and warmer than
Kathmandu, and its defining feature is
probably Fewa Lake, a large blue-green
lake whose southern shore has become the
spine of Nepal's tourism industry
outside of the Everest region. To the
north of Pokhara lies the Annapurna
Massif, which rises to over 8,000 m. So,
just imagine on a clear morning standing
at the lakeside of Fewa Lake, looking to
your north and you see the massive
Annapurna. And because of this
proximity, Pokhara is actually the
gateway to the Annapurna Circuit and the
Annapurna Sanctuary, two of the world's
most celebrated trekking routes.
Hundreds of thousands of trekkers pass
through this city each year, either
setting out into the hills or returning
from them. But Pokhara is not just a
gateway for Annapurna. It's an actual
city with over 600,000 people, and it
has a different character than the
larger Kathmandu. Less congested,
greener, and significantly wetter.
Pokhara receives more rainfall than
almost anywhere else in Nepal. And the
result of this are lush hills, full
rivers, and dramatic waterfalls.
Beyond Kathmandu and Pokhara, there are
other cities, particularly in the Terai
region near the Indian border. Here lies
Biratnagar, home to jute mills, sugar
factories, and a growing manufacturing
sector. There is also Birgunj, the main
gateway for goods crossing from India
into Nepal. Now, this city processes an
enormous proportion of the country's
imports and has grown into a substantial
commercial city entirely on the back of
its border position. But Nepal's cities
are not yet dominant in the way the
cities of India and China or Southeast
Asia are. But the trajectory is clear.
Nepal is urbanizing faster than most
people realize. And the cities being
built now, how they are planned, and how
they manage their growth will shape much
of Nepal's future.
So, we started this video talking about
a mountain, or rather, the reduction of
an entire country to a single iconic
peak. But, like I said, Nepal cannot be
defined by just one mountain. It is so
much more than that. It is a country and
a land that compresses much of Earth's
environments into a small region.
From tropical lowlands to the Earth's
highest peaks, it tells the story of a
collision between continents still
unfolding underneath this beautiful
country.
It tells the story of people who learned
to live in a place that most people
would not even survive in.
Its resourceful people terraced
impossibly steep slopes and built cities
on ancient lakebeds. Despite being
landlocked, earthquake-prone, and
dependent on monsoon rains, the people
of this country carved out their unique
culture. So, let's not just limit Nepal
to Everest or the Himalayas. It is so
much more than that, and I hope this
video helped you realize that.
And as always, if you'd like content
like this, give this video a like.
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continue making videos about different
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And thank you to each and every one of
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and a half.
I've now passed 100,000 subscribers, and
when I first started this channel, I had
no idea that I'd be getting here.
So, thank you to each and every one of
you.
And I'll catch you in the next one.
Peace.