September is the month that pays for the other eleven in Nepal’s tourism trade. The monsoon withdraws, the skies clear and trekkers arrive for the Himalayan high season, filling the lodges of Kathmandu, Chitwan and the mountain districts. This year the skies have cleared, but the visitors have not. What arrived instead was a list of cancellations.
Catastrophic floods last month killed more than 1,450 people and destroyed key highways, Al Jazeera reports, dealing a severe blow to a Himalayan nation heavily dependent on tourism. Pushpraj Rimal, a tour planner and taxi driver in the capital, had expected September to make his business boom, as it does every year. Instead his bookings dissolved as tourists scrapped their trips. A million Nepalis depend on tourism to make ends meet; Mr Rimal’s empty taxi is their problem, too.
The arithmetic along the tourist trail is brutal. According to Al Jazeera’s reporting, one resort owner in Chitwan—home to the country’s best-known wildlife park—saw 80% of her reservations cancelled within hours of the floods, because the main highway to Chitwan was damaged and closed for nearly two weeks. In the tourism business, distance matters less than roads. A resort that cannot be reached is not a resort.
The destruction began high up. CNBC reported that a massive glacial collapse in northern Nepal triggered a landslide of ice, rock and meltwater into the valleys below, with powerful floods sweeping away or cutting off entire communities and damaging roads, bridges and hydropower facilities. Later reporting described a series of intense rain events and flash floods in late August and September along river corridors such as the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli, sweeping away homes and long stretches of highway. The same rivers that make Nepal’s valleys picture-postcard material are, in a bad year, their undoing.
The timing could hardly be worse. Tourism in Nepal is intensely seasonal: a ruined autumn cannot be made up in the rains of June. Cancellations concentrate losses precisely where the season is shortest and the margins thinnest—among taxi drivers, guides, porters and small lodge-keepers who have little savings and less insurance. Rebuilding a washed-out highway takes months; a tourist’s confidence, once shaken, can take longer.
Nepal has recovered from disaster before, and trekkers are a resilient breed. But each flood that cuts the roads also exposes how thin the country’s safety margin has become: a single highway to a resort town, a single season to pay the year’s bills. This autumn the trails will mostly be open, the mountains splendid and the lodges quiet. Nepal’s problem is no longer attracting the world. It is convincing the world that the road there still exists.