Getting around Nepal with a crew

Nepal is small on a map and large in practice. The ground rises from the flat Terai plains to the highest mountains on earth across a short north to south distance, and almost every route out of the plains climbs. Crew, cases and freight do not move at the same speed or by the same means, and the further you get from a road, the wider that gap opens.

This page is about the one thing that quietly sets your whole schedule: how a unit and its kit actually move around this country. It covers hill roads and why distance is meaningless, domestic flights and why they cancel, mountain airstrips and their early window, helicopter charter and its limits, porters and pack animals beyond the road head, and how the transport mode you choose sets the number of days you need. Conditions, schedules and rules change, so treat every specific here as something to confirm for your own dates rather than a settled fact.

Road distance in Nepal tells you almost nothing. Gradient, surface, single lane sections, roadworks, convoys behind freight trucks and festival traffic all matter more than the number on the map. A leg that looks short can absorb most of a day, and a leg that looks impossible can be quick if the road happens to be clear.

Work in hours, and carry two figures for every leg: a good day and a bad day. Get both from someone who has driven that stretch in that season, not from a mapping app that has never seen a landslide or a checkpoint. Measure from unit base to the location itself rather than city to city, because the last few kilometres are usually unsealed and the slowest part of the journey. A destination can be an easy highway run followed by two hours of rough track that nobody thought to count.

Then add what schedules forget. Loading and lashing kit onto a roof or into a second vehicle. Checkpoints where documents are inspected. Fuel stops. A crew of eight who want lunch. And the rule that you should be off hill roads before dark. Night driving past unlit trucks on a single lane cut into a hillside, with no barrier at the edge and oncoming headlights on the bends, is not worth the hour it saves. Build the day so the driving finishes with daylight to spare, and treat any plan that only works by driving after dark as a plan that does not work.

The fastest driving in the country is the east to west highway across the Terai, the belt of flat land along the southern border. Everything that turns north from it climbs and slows. The Kathmandu to Pokhara corridor through Mugling, the routes through Narayanghat, and the roads east into the hills are the main arteries, mostly single carriageway and shared with the heavy freight that supplies the whole country. Improvement works are constant, which helps eventually and hurts on the day, because an upgrade in progress often means one lane, a holding queue, and a wait for the machinery to clear.

Monsoon, broadly June to September, is what breaks schedules. Landslides and washouts close sections with no notice, and because there is often only one road to a place, there is frequently no detour at all. A common outcome is a road open to people on foot but not to vehicles, which means unloading, carrying cases across a slip, and reloading into a vehicle sent from the far side. Whether that transfer is possible, and whether it is safe to attempt on the day, is a judgement for people on the ground and not something to plan on from abroad. Build the schedule so that a closure with no safe crossing costs you a day rather than the shoot.

Winter closes high roads and passes with snow. Dry season brings dust that gets into every case, lens and lung. Strikes and local closures happen too, and they can shut a road as firmly as a landslide. None of this is predictable weeks out, which is exactly why you plan for it rather than against it.

A domestic flight can turn a two day drive into an hour, and for a far western or far eastern schedule that is often the difference between a viable shoot and an unviable one. Kathmandu, Pokhara, Nepalgunj, Biratnagar, Bhairahawa, Bharatpur and Dhangadhi work as gateways to their regions, and a well chosen flight can save you a punishing drive over ground that would cost the crew two days and arrive them tired.

What you buy in time you give back in certainty. Schedules get retimed and consolidated, aircraft get reassigned to busier routes, and weather at either end stops the operation regardless of how clear it looks where you are standing. Book the earliest departure of the day. A cancellation at first light still leaves you options, whether that is a later flight, a switch to cover, or a decision to drive. An afternoon cancellation usually costs the whole day, because by the time it is called there is nothing useful left to do with the hours.

Baggage is the other trap, and it catches crews who are used to hold allowances on international carriers. Aircraft on domestic routes are small, allowances are modest, and excess is charged by weight and subject to space on the day. Lithium battery handling varies by carrier and can be strict. Put your case list, with weights, in front of the airline before you book, not at check in. And keep crew and critical kit on the same aircraft wherever you can, so a split load does not strand the camera at one end and the operator at the other.

Most mountain strips operate visually. The pilot needs to see the terrain and the runway, so flying happens when the air is clear and the wind is manageable, which in the mountains means early. Valleys heat through the morning, cloud builds against the ridges, wind gets up, and operations often stop by the middle of the day. A first light slot is not a preference, it is the window, and if you miss it you are usually waiting for tomorrow.

Lukla, Jomsom, Phaplu, Tumlingtar, Simikot, Juphal for Dolpa and Talcha for Rara all sit in this pattern. Lukla in particular needs checking carefully. In recent years, during the busiest seasons, fixed wing services to Lukla have operated out of Manthali in Ramechhap rather than Kathmandu, which adds a road transfer of several hours that usually starts in the small hours before you reach the aircraft at all. Whether that applies to your dates is a question to settle at the time of booking, not an assumption to carry from a previous trip.

Expect passengers and bags to be weighed, and expect kit to be offloaded if the numbers do not work. These are small aircraft on short runways at altitude, and the weight limits are real, not negotiable at the desk. When a strip closes for a few days, everyone who did not fly is still waiting, and you join the back of that queue behind crews and trekkers who were already there. That backlog, not the single cancelled flight, is what turns a mountain sector into a schedule risk.

Charter buys flexibility. It does not buy weather, and it does not buy lift. As altitude and temperature rise the air thins and useful payload drops. A machine that lifts a substantial load out of the Kathmandu valley may carry only a fraction of that into a high landing zone, and may need to shuttle in several trips, each with its own flight time, its own cost, and its own dependence on the weather holding.

So never ask what a helicopter can carry in general. Ask the operator what it can carry into that specific landing zone, at that time of day, in the conditions expected, with fuel to get back or to reach a refuelling point. Positioning fuel at altitude is a job in itself and costs both time and money, and it has to be planned before the first rotor turns.

Two further points matter. Aerial filming and landing at particular sites can require permissions separate from your general filming approvals, so confirm the current position early rather than discovering a restriction on the day. And helicopters in the mountains are also the rescue asset for the whole region. Nobody can promise you availability on a given morning, because a machine you were counting on may be tasked to an emergency. Take your own medical and insurance advice, and do not design a schedule that only works if a machine is there when you want it.

The road head is where vehicles stop and everything changes. Beyond it, kit moves on backs, human or animal, at walking pace on gradients, and the total weight of your package becomes the number that governs crew size, cost and speed. Every case you add is another load, and every load is another person, another rate, another mouth to feed and another body to house. This is the point at which lens and lighting choices stop being creative decisions and become logistics decisions.

Treat porterage as crew, not freight. That means named individuals, an agreed daily rate, food and lodging, insurance, and clothing and footwear suitable for the altitude and season they will actually be working in rather than the altitude at which you hired them. A porter engaged in a warm valley may be carrying your kit over a cold, high pass two days later. Put a maximum load per person in writing and weigh loads at the start of each day instead of estimating them by eye. Porter welfare organisations publish guidance on load limits and conditions, and that guidance exists because the industry has a poor history here. Take the conservative figure, always.

Repack for the medium. Large flight cases do not sit well on a back or a mule, and a case that is fine on a trolley is a hazard on a narrow path. Break kit into carriable, waterproofed loads, and keep media, batteries and fragile optics with the crew rather than in a load that walks separately. Pack animals cannot go everywhere either. Some bridges, steps and narrow sections rule them out, and their daily range is not the same as yours, so a mule train can set the pace of the whole unit.

Kit that travels as cargo books separately, clears separately and runs on its own timeline. The most useful document you can build in prep is a manifest with a weight and dimensions for every case, because every booking, permit, aircraft and porter calculation comes off it. A manifest that is current and honest is worth more than any amount of optimism about how the loads will fit.

Domestic air cargo on small aircraft is space limited and gets bumped when passenger loads are heavy, so a case you assumed would fly may sit at the airport waiting for room. Road freight is cheaper, slower and exposed to exactly the same landslides as everything else. Anything large, generators, lighting, grip, is going by road, which means it needs to leave earlier than feels necessary and arrive before you do, not alongside you.

Plan on the assumption that crew and freight will not arrive together. Keep a minimum working kit, the pieces you could shoot something usable with, physically with the crew rather than in the freight run. If the freight runs a day late, and it can, that one decision is the difference between a slow first day and a lost one. It is a cheap piece of insurance and it costs only a little forethought in packing.

The number of days a Nepal schedule needs is decided less by how far you travel than by how you choose to travel. A destination reachable by an early flight might cost a single day each way with a cover plan behind it. The same destination by road might cost two days each way plus a contingency day for a closure, which is not a small difference over a fortnight, it is the difference between one shoot and another.

So choose the mode sector by sector, and let each choice carry its own buffer. Assume you will lose a day somewhere. The question is not whether, but whether losing one costs you one or costs you the shoot. Front load the fragile material, putting the flight dependent and weather dependent element early and never on the final day, so there is room behind it to recover. Keep a grounded cover list ready: interviews, detail, city material, anything shootable at or near base without moving. Never schedule travel and shooting on the same day when the travel is a mountain flight or a long hill drive.

Put the buffer in the schedule rather than the budget, and put it before the international flight home rather than after the last shoot day, so a slip does not push into the flights out. Set decision points instead of hoping, with a named person and a stated time, so that ambiguity at eight in the morning in an airport does not turn a delay into a wasted day. Do all of this and the movement plan becomes the quiet, dependable spine of the shoot rather than the thing that keeps failing it.