Production Logistics in Nepal

This page is for producers and production managers building a schedule and a budget for a shoot in Nepal. It covers domestic flights and why they cancel, road journeys and why distance is meaningless, helicopter charter and its limits, what happens beyond the road head, how equipment enters the country, and how you house, feed and power a crew where there is no grid.

We would rather you read this and cut a location than arrive with a plan that only works if the weather cooperates. Most of what goes wrong on shoots here is not bad luck. It is a schedule that had no room in it, built by someone who trusted the distance on the map.

Open a map of Nepal, measure a straight line between two points, and you will build a schedule that does not work. The country is roughly rectangular and not especially large, and that shape fools producers into planning as if the middle of it behaves like the middle of anywhere else. It does not. Nepal rises from the Terai plains near sea level to the highest ground on earth in the space of a short flight, and everything in between is folded into ridges and river valleys that no road crosses in a straight line.

The practical result is that time, not distance, is the unit that matters. A location eighty kilometres away as the crow flies may be a full day by road, a morning flight that only goes half the time, or a flight plus two days of walking. Two villages you can see across a single valley may be a six hour descent and climb apart, because the only way between them is down to the river and back up the far side. We plan in hours and half days and contingency days, and we translate every location on your list into that language before we let it near a call sheet.

This is also why we push back on schedules that treat a move as free. In a city, moving the unit is a taxi ride you barely count. Here a move is often the most expensive and most fragile thing you will do all week. If you understand nothing else about logistics in Nepal, understand that the map is a rough sketch of geography and tells you nothing at all about your day.

The domestic network is the fastest way to cover ground and the least reliable part of any schedule. Mountain strips such as Lukla, Jomsom, Simikot, Juphal and Taplejung are flown visually into valleys that close with cloud and open with wind. Jomsom flies early because the Kali Gandaki wind builds through the morning, so an afternoon slot there is close to fiction. Lukla works in morning slots for the same reason, and in busy seasons those departures have at times been shifted out of Kathmandu to Manthali in Ramechhap, adding a road leg before dawn to a day that was already fragile. Arrangements like that change season to season, so we confirm the current position for your dates rather than repeating last year’s.

Baggage allowances on small aircraft are tight, and kit above them travels as cargo. Cargo means your equipment can arrive on a different aircraft on a different day from the people who need it, which is exactly how a crew ends up standing on an airstrip with nothing to shoot. When a flight is cancelled it is not rescheduled in an orderly queue. A backlog builds, priority is contested, and the day you lose is rarely just one day, because the people and the weather window you needed have both moved on.

None of this makes domestic flights a bad idea. For long distances they are often the only sane choice, and the alternative is days of driving. It makes them a thing to plan around rather than to lean on. Treat a published timetable as an intention, book a spare day on each side of any mountain leg, and never let an international departure sit on the same evening you are due back from the hills.

Distance on a map tells you nothing about a road journey in Nepal. Hill roads follow river valleys and ridgelines in long switchbacks, and average speeds are a fraction of what the kilometres imply. Kathmandu to Pokhara, a route most producers assume is a morning, is a full day’s plan once you add the time it takes simply to climb out of the Kathmandu valley and clear its traffic. Anything beyond the main corridors is slower again.

Season changes the maths. In the dry months, road repair and widening on the main highways can mean timed single-lane closures on particular stretches, held for hours at a time, and which stretches are affected changes through the year. We check what is in force on your route before we build the leg into a schedule, rather than assuming a highway behaves the way it did last trip. In the monsoon, roughly June to September, landslides close roads for hours or days, and the detour is often no detour at all because the alternative road has gone the same way. A single wet night can turn a reliable route into a two-day problem.

Beyond the tarmac you are in jeeps, and the quality of the track decides everything. Plenty of roads drawn confidently on maps are seasonal jeep tracks that a normal vehicle will not attempt and a truck cannot use at all. We match the vehicle to the surface, put delicate cases in their own vehicle rather than on a roof rack where dust and vibration do their work, and we do not schedule night driving on hill roads. That last rule is not caution for its own sake. Unlit roads, blind bends, freight traffic and long drops are a combination that has no upside, and no frame is worth it.

Charter is sometimes the only realistic way in, and it deserves to be treated as a straight calculation against lost days rather than dismissed as a luxury. If a single weather-bound flight leg threatens a shoot day that costs more than the charter, the helicopter is the cheaper option, not the extravagant one. We will cost it honestly either way.

What charter does not do is remove the weather from the equation. Helicopters here fly visually and in daylight, so cloud grounds them exactly as it grounds a fixed-wing aircraft, regardless of who is paying and how urgent the day feels. Charter changes who is waiting, not whether anyone waits. The other hard limit is payload. Lift falls with altitude and temperature, so a machine that leaves Kathmandu comfortably loaded may carry a fraction of that at a high landing site, and one planned move quietly becomes several shuttles, each with its own weather risk and its own cost.

Pricing follows the flying hour, and that includes positioning and empty legs. A job that starts or ends away from the helicopter’s base costs more than the flown minutes on your part of the trip suggest, because you are paying for the machine to reach you and to return. And there is a permission layer that catches people out. Landings inside national parks, conservation areas and restricted areas need permission arranged beforehand. A pilot cannot agree it on the morning, however willing everyone is, and a landing site that looks obvious on a map may sit inside a boundary that says no. Give us landing points and total weight early, and we will lay out the real options, the shuttle count and where the approvals have to come from.

Where the road ends, the shoot moves on backs and animals, and the arithmetic of weight becomes the arithmetic of the whole production. Load limits vary with route, altitude and season, and porter welfare guidance recommends lower ceilings than local custom often allows. We plan to a written load limit agreed for your shoot, with someone actually weighing loads, rather than to a comfortable figure on a web page. That limit sets your crew size before anything else does, because camera, grip, batteries, media, catering and personal kit all convert directly into people carrying them. Add a lens case and you may have added a porter, and that porter needs feeding, housing and paying for the walk back as well as the walk in.

Animals carry more but come with their own rules. Mules and dzos, the cattle-yak cross used at middle altitudes, carry heavier bulk loads but need trail width to pass and cannot manage some of the stone staircases that porters take in their stride. Yaks work higher, where mules struggle with the thin air and the cold. Loads ride better on animals in balanced pairs, so kit has to be packed into matched, genuinely waterproof cases that can be slung either side without one outweighing the other.

The timing point matters as much as the weight. Porters and animals move slower than a crew walking unladen, and they arrive later, sometimes hours later, sometimes the next morning. Anything you must shoot on a given day walks with you, on your backs, not with the load train. We plan the split between what travels with the crew and what follows behind for every walking leg, so the camera is never on the wrong side of a pass from the people who need it. Porters and pack teams are engaged on written terms covering load, food, shelter and return days, and that is a subject we go into properly on the local crew page rather than here.

Most productions get this part wrong before they have left home, because they assume Nepal works the way the last country did. It does not. Nepal has not been part of the ATA Carnet system, so a carnet raised for another territory will not clear your equipment here. Arriving with one and nothing else is a common and avoidable way to have your kit held at the airport while a schedule built around a weather window burns.

Temporary import is normally handled as a bonded arrangement against a detailed kit list, with makes, models, serial numbers and declared values, and the same list is checked on the way out to confirm that what came in has left again. The precise mechanism and the documentation change from time to time, so we confirm the current position with customs for your shoot rather than working from last year’s paperwork. What does not change is that the list has to be accurate before it flies. Officers count, and corrections at the airport are slow and public. Consumables that will not leave the country, such as tape, gels and giveaway items, should be declared separately and honestly rather than folded into the equipment list.

How the kit physically reaches Nepal is a separate decision with its own timeline. Air cargo capacity into Kathmandu is limited, and much heavy freight reaches the country overland from India through Birgunj or Bhairahawa, which is slower and carries its own paperwork and its own risk of delay at the border. For small packages, excess baggage on crew tickets is often the cleanest route of all, since it travels with a person who can answer for it. Drones, radio transmitters and satellite communication devices are treated differently from ordinary camera kit and must be flagged before you fly, not discovered in a case at the counter. We decide the route, prepare the documentation and identify the flags well before anything moves, because the fastest way to lose the front of a shoot is to improvise this at the airport.

Power is the quiet killer of remote shoots, and it is almost always underestimated because in a city it is invisible. The moment you leave the road network in Nepal, mains power in the sense you are used to stops. Village supply, where it exists, is often seasonal micro-hydro with rough and unstable voltage that will damage chargers if they are not protected. Lodge power on the trekking routes is usually solar, which means it is finite, shared with every other guest in the building, and frequently charged per device. It will not refill a full camera package overnight, and on a busy evening you may be queuing behind trekkers charging phones.

Cold makes all of this worse. Lithium cells lose usable capacity in low temperatures, so a battery that runs a camera for an hour in a warm studio gives you noticeably less on a cold morning at altitude. The discipline that saves a shoot is boring and non-negotiable: carry far more cells than a city job of the same length would need, keep them warm during the day inside a jacket, keep them in a sleeping bag overnight, and charge them warm whenever mains or lodge power appears. Nobody who has run out of power at four in the morning on the one clear day of the week forgets to do this twice.

The number that actually drives the plan is watt hours consumed per shooting day, worked out with your DoP before you leave Kathmandu, not the vague count of how many bricks are in the case. Once you know your daily draw, the rest follows: how much battery to carry, whether a solar and power-bank package covers it, and whether you need a generator. Generators are possible, but on a walking shoot the fuel has to be carried in, which has weight, cost and sometimes permission consequences of its own. We size the power plan per location against your real draw, so the answer is a plan rather than a hope.

Mobile coverage in Nepal is broader than most visiting producers expect. You will have a signal in a surprising number of places, including some remote valleys, and along the main highways and in the Kathmandu valley data is generally usable. That good news comes with a hard qualification: coverage is not bandwidth. Having a bar of signal is not the same as being able to hold a video call or move a day’s rushes, and the two get confused constantly in planning.

For a shoot, the practical consequences are specific. Do not build a schedule around uploading footage from a remote location, because even where there is a connection it will rarely carry the volume in any sensible time, and a failed overnight upload is a false economy against a drive walking down the hill in a bag. Do not assume a live remote-directing link will hold beyond the valley and the main roads, because bandwidth rather than coverage is usually what breaks it. Where a director is working remotely, we check the real position for your specific locations rather than assuming it, and we plan the review process around what the connection can actually do.

Satellite communication devices are the obvious answer for a genuinely off-grid team, and they have their place for safety and coordination, but they carry their own licensing questions in Nepal and should never be assumed into a plan. They are flagged with customs like other regulated devices, and the current position on them is something we confirm rather than take for granted. For getting data home, the dependable route remains the least glamorous one. Two copies on separate physical media, carried in separate bags by separate people, with a third made the moment you are back on the grid. Drives walking out of the hills have never once failed to have a signal.

The common failure is not dramatic, and that is exactly why it is dangerous. The crew lands and the kit does not, because it went as cargo on a later flight while the people took the passenger seats. Or the flight in goes and the flight out does not, and the contributor who was available for one day is gone before the weather clears. Or the road that was open on the recce is under a landslide, and the alternative is not a detour but a whole lost day. None of this is exotic here. It is the ordinary texture of the country, and an experienced plan expects it.

The expensive version is a schedule with no slack in it. If every day is a shooting day and every move happens on the same day it is needed, the first weather hold eats the shoot instead of the buffer, because there is no buffer. Crew sit in a lodge with nothing to point a camera at, or a chartered helicopter waits on the ground while the clock runs and the invoice grows. A tight schedule feels efficient on paper and is the single most reliable way to turn one bad morning into a ruined week.

The way through is not heroics on the day. It is honesty in pre-production. We would rather have the uncomfortable conversation about contingency days and cut locations while the plan is still on a screen, than have the calm, expensive conversation from a valley floor with a stranded crew and a contributor already on their way home. A plan with room in it survives the things that always happen. A plan without room in it only survives the weather being kind, and here it is not reliably kind.