Chitwan and the Siddhartha Highway: Nepal’s Forgotten Half

Everybody rides Nepal for the mountains. The last third of a good Nepal trip goes the other way, down a rockfall-prone highway into hot flat jungle where the rhinos are, and it is the part people talk about afterwards.

The half of Nepal that never gets photographed

Nepal has a marketing problem, in that it is too good at one thing. Say the name and everybody thinks Everest, Annapurna, prayer flags, snow. Which is fair, because those exist and they are extraordinary.

But a fifth of the country’s land and a large share of its population live in the Terai, the flat strip along the southern border that is geologically part of the Gangetic plain and has nothing whatsoever to do with mountains. It is hot, humid, agricultural, forested in places, and it is where Nepal’s national parks and most of its wildlife are. Sitting at around a hundred and fifty metres above sea level, it is closer to Bihar than to Base Camp.

Ride Nepal for a fortnight and only see the high country and you have seen the postcard. Come down the Siddhartha Highway into the Terai and you get the other country, the one with elephants in it.

Coming down, which your body will thank you for

There is a physiological argument for putting the lowlands at the end of a Nepal ride rather than treating them as an afterthought.

A Mustang itinerary takes you up the Kali Gandaki gorge, between Annapurna and Dhaulagiri, into high dry Tibetan-influenced country where the air is thin and the wind is relentless. That is exhilarating and it is also a workload. Days of altitude, cold mornings, hard riding and disrupted sleep add up.

Then you turn south and descend, and somewhere around the point where the air gets thick and warm again, your body notices. Riders consistently report that the first night in the Terai is the best sleep of the trip. There is more oxygen in every breath than you have had for a week and your resting heart rate drops back to something normal.

Ending a trip on the way down rather than on the way up is simply better trip design, and it is why the last four days of our Nepal route look the way they do.

The Siddhartha Highway

The road that gets you there is Nepal’s H10, running roughly a hundred and eighty kilometres from Pokhara down through Syangja and Palpa to Butwal on the plain, where it meets the east-west highway and the Indian border road at Sunauli.

It is a proper mountain descent rather than a gentle slope. The road follows river valleys, climbs over ridges, hangs off hillsides and delivers a couple of thousand metres of altitude loss in a day. Where the surface is good it is genuinely enjoyable riding, with long series of curves and a landscape shifting from terraced hill farming to subtropical forest as you drop.

It is also one of the most economically important roads in the country, which means it carries a great deal of freight, and it is one of the most geologically troublesome, which means it carries a great deal of freight through places where the hillside would rather be somewhere else.

Siddhababa, the section everyone talks about

North of Butwal the highway squeezes through a gorge at a place called Siddhababa, and this stretch has a reputation that is entirely deserved. The rock above the road is unstable. It sheds material in the monsoon when everything is saturated and it sheds material in the dry season when it simply feels like it, and the result is one of the most persistent rockfall and landslide problems on any Nepali highway.

People have been killed there. The road is closed by blockages several times a year, occasionally for days, stranding traffic on both sides and cutting one of the country’s main trade arteries.

The long-term answer under construction is a tunnel through the hill to bypass the worst of it, and when it opens it will change the reliability of the whole route. Until then the situation is what it is: a landslide came down about a hundred metres north of the tunnel entrance in August 2026 and closed the highway completely, which is roughly the frequency you should expect.

For a rider this is not a reason to avoid the road. It is a reason to check it on the morning rather than assume it, and to be relaxed about the possibility of a detour or a wait. It is also a good illustration of why a supported trip in Nepal is worth what it costs: somebody has to be phoning ahead.

Tansen, and the palace in the gorge

Halfway down, the highway passes Tansen, the hill town that is the administrative centre of Palpa district, and it deserves more than a fuel stop.

Tansen is Newari, which means steep cobbled lanes, brick houses with carved wooden windows and an old bazaar, all of it sitting on a ridge with views north to the Himalaya on a clear day. It was a significant kingdom before Nepal was unified and it has the architecture to show for it.

Below the town, down in the Kali Gandaki gorge, is Rani Mahal, a white palace built in the 1890s by a Nepali general for his wife and abandoned after her death. It stands on a rock platform beside the river with jungle coming down the slopes behind it, and the local name for it is the Taj Mahal of Nepal, which is doing a lot of work but which you understand when you see it. Getting down there involves a rough track and a walk, and almost nobody bothers, which is the point.

What the Terai is like to ride

Different in every respect from the hills, and it takes an hour or two to recalibrate.

It is hot. Genuinely hot, thirty-five degrees and humid in the pre-monsoon months, which after a week of cold mornings at altitude is a shock to the system and a real hydration problem in full gear. It is flat and straight, which means the riding stops being technical and starts being about traffic. And the traffic is the main event: buses that overtake on faith, trucks painted like cathedrals, tractors, bicycles, motorcycles carrying entire families, and livestock.

The cattle are the thing to internalise. Cows wander freely and stop wherever they like, including in the middle of a national highway, and they have absolute right of way in every sense that matters. Hitting one is a serious matter in a Hindu country and it is also a serious matter for the physics of a motorcycle. Ride expecting a cow around every blind bend and in the middle of every straight, and you will be right often enough.

Dust is the other constant in the dry season, and it gets into everything: chain, air filter, visor, eyes. This is where the daily maintenance habit earns its keep.

Chitwan, and why it matters

Chitwan was Nepal’s first national park, gazetted in 1973, and it became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984. Before that it was a royal hunting reserve, which is the reason there was anything left to protect.

What it protects is nine hundred and thirty-odd square kilometres of sal forest, grassland and riverine habitat in the lowlands, and it is one of the great conservation success stories in Asia. The greater one-horned rhinoceros was down to a few dozen animals in the mid-twentieth century, hunted and squeezed out by farming. Sustained anti-poaching work, including army patrols inside the park, has brought the Chitwan population back to something in the region of seven hundred.

There are tigers, in numbers that have also climbed substantially. There are gharial, the absurd narrow-snouted fish-eating crocodiles, in the rivers. There are sloth bear, leopard, wild elephant, and something over five hundred bird species.

The honest odds on what you will see

Rhino: very likely. They are large, numerous, relatively sedentary and they graze in the open grassland and riverbanks. Most visitors doing a proper safari day see at least one and often several. Watching a two-tonne armoured animal that has been around since the Pleistocene chew grass twenty metres away is worth the whole detour.

Crocodiles and deer: certain. Birds: overwhelming. Wild elephant: possible.

Tiger: no. Manage this expectation now. Tigers in Chitwan are numerous by tiger standards and effectively invisible by human standards, and the honest hit rate for a visitor on a short safari is very low. People do see them. They are the exception and they are extremely pleased about it for the rest of their lives. Go for the rhino and treat anything striped as a lottery win.

A word on elephants: the ethics of elephant-back safaris have moved, and rightly. Jeep safaris, canoe trips and walking safaris with a guide deliver more wildlife and do not involve a chained animal. Any operator still selling elephant rides as a highlight in 2026 has not been paying attention.

The Tharu

The people of the Terai are largely Tharu, an indigenous group with their own language and culture who have lived in this belt for a very long time and who carry a genetic resistance to malaria that let them farm land nobody else could occupy. Before the eradication programmes of the mid-twentieth century, the Terai was effectively closed to outsiders for much of the year because of it.

Tharu villages around Chitwan have distinctive mud and lattice houses, and there is a whole set of dances and music that gets performed for visitors in the evening. Like the eagle hunters in Mongolia, this is a real tradition doing a job in a tourism economy, and it is neither fake nor entirely spontaneous. Go, enjoy it, and be a decent guest.

The heat, and the season

Nepal’s riding seasons are dictated by the monsoon, which arrives in June and stays until September and which puts a great deal of water onto steep unstable ground. Riding the Siddhartha Highway at the height of it is possible and is not sensible.

October and November are the best months by a distance: the monsoon has washed the air clean, the mountain views are at their sharpest, the Terai has cooled to something civilised and the roads have mostly been repaired. March to May is the other window, warmer and hazier, with rhododendron flowering in the hills and a Terai that is getting seriously hot by May.

December and January are cold in the hills and produce dense morning fog in the Terai, which is a genuine hazard on a highway full of buses.

The bikes, and why they are Enfields

Nepal is Royal Enfield country and there are good reasons for that beyond nostalgia.

They are simple, so a mechanic in any small town can work on one. They are everywhere, so parts exist. They are not fast, which matters on roads where speed is not the constraint. And the low-down torque suits a road that alternates between second-gear hairpins and grinding up behind a truck.

What they are not is comfortable in the modern sense, and a day in the Terai heat on an Enfield with a hot engine between your legs is honest work. The trade is that when something goes wrong in a village three hours from anywhere, somebody will be able to fix it, which is not true of most European machinery.

Riding in Nepal generally, and the two things that actually hurt people

Nepali roads have a reputation and most of it is earned, but the risk is not distributed the way visitors assume. It is not the mountain hairpins that catch people out.

The first real hazard is buses. Nepali long-distance buses operate on a business model that rewards speed, they overtake on blind corners as a matter of routine, and they are considerably larger than you. The correct response is not to be indignant, it is to be predictable and to give ground early. When you hear a horn behind you, the horn is not a greeting, it is a statement of intent, and the driver has already committed. Move over.

The second is the surface changing under you without warning. A perfectly good stretch of tarmac will end abruptly in a section that has been dug up for works, or washed out, or simply given up. On a blind crest that transition arrives with no time to plan. Riding within the distance you can see is a cliché everywhere and it is a survival rule here.

The third, and this is the Terai-specific one, is fog and dust reducing visibility to almost nothing on a straight road where everybody is doing seventy. Winter mornings on the plain produce fog thick enough to hide a truck at thirty metres. If you are riding in it, lights on, speed down, and stay off the crown of the road.

What none of that requires is bravery. It requires the discipline to ride at seventy percent, which is the pace at which Nepal is enormously enjoyable and at which almost nothing goes wrong.

The rhythm of a Nepali riding day

Distances in Nepal are deceptive in the same way they are in Bhutan, and for the same reason.

Two hundred kilometres in the hills is a full day, six or seven hours, because the average speed across mixed surfaces with traffic and towns comes out somewhere around thirty. Two hundred kilometres on the Terai highway might be four hours. The itinerary has to be built around that difference rather than around the map, and any motorcycle tour that treats a hill day and a plains day as equivalent has not ridden the route.

The practical consequences shape the whole day. Start early, because the light goes fast and riding Nepali roads after dark is a materially different risk. Eat properly at mid-morning, because dal bhat at a roadside place is the best value meal in Asia and because you will be offered a refill until you stop. Build in the tea stops rather than resenting them; they are how you meet anybody.

And accept that the schedule will slip. A landslide, a religious procession blocking the main street of a town, a herd of goats, a bus in the ditch, a wedding. Nepal will interrupt you several times a week and the interruptions are usually the part you remember.

Why the lowlands finish the trip properly

There is a shape to a good Nepal itinerary, and it is not a straight line up.

You start in Kathmandu, which is chaos. You ride to Bandipur and Pokhara, which is beautiful and gentle. You go up the Kali Gandaki into Mustang, which is austere, high, windy and slightly overwhelming. Then you come back down, through the hill country, onto the plain, into heat and green and noise and animals, and you finish with two days where the hardest decision is whether to take the jeep or the canoe.

That descent is what makes the high part land. A trip that is all mountains is a trip with one note in it. A trip that goes up, holds you there and then brings you down into a completely different climate, ecology and culture inside three days is the reason people describe Nepal as feeling much bigger than the map suggests.

Dal bhat, and the reason nobody goes hungry

Nepal has one meal and it is everywhere, and understanding it properly will change your week.

Dal bhat is rice, lentil soup, a vegetable curry, a pickle, and often a green and a piece of meat if you want it. It arrives on a metal tray in compartments. The crucial thing, and the thing visitors take three days to believe, is that the refills are free and unlimited. Somebody will come round with a bucket of rice and more dal, and they will keep coming round until you make it clear you are finished.

For a rider this is the single best value proposition in Asian travel. It costs almost nothing, it is available in every settlement of any size, it is fresh because the turnover is enormous, and it will keep you going for six hours. Nepali porters and drivers eat it twice a day and there is a local saying about dal bhat power that is only half a joke.

Eat it with your right hand if you want to do it properly, or ask for a spoon and nobody will mind. Do not use your left hand for food. And do not fill up on the first serving, because the second one is coming whether you asked for it or not.

The wider point is about how a big biking tour in Nepal actually feels day to day. This is not a country where you eat in hotels. You stop at a place with plastic chairs and a corrugated roof somewhere on a hillside, you eat better than you would in a resort, you pay very little, and the family running it will want to know where you have ridden from. That is half the trip.

Riding Nepal for real

Our fourteen-day Nepal ride runs Kathmandu to Bandipur, Pokhara and Begnas, up into the Annapurna and Dhaulagiri country and on to Mustang, back down through the hot springs at Tatopani and the suspension bridge at Baglung, then out onto the Siddhartha Highway, across to Chitwan for a full safari day, and back to Kathmandu.

Royal Enfields, small group, road captain, mechanic and support vehicle, hotels and lodges sorted and everything on the price list included. Have a look at the 14-day Nepal Mustang motorbike tour, or the Himalayan motorbike tours page if you are weighing Nepal against Ladakh or Bhutan. The good months go early, so if a guided tour through both halves of Nepal appeals, message us on WhatsApp and we will tell you what is left in October and November.