Bad Air over the Himalayas: the 2016 Blockade of Nepal

Haze over the Kathmandu Valley

The Line That Didn’t Move

After arriving in the Indian city of Gorakhpur on an overnight train from New Delhi, we had planned to take a bus to the border with Nepal. But it had been a long day, and we were tired. So when a taxi driver told us he would be happy to just drive us to the Nepali border (about a three and a half hour trip) for what translated to $20US, we jumped on it.

So we packed all five of us, along with our bags, in the driver’s car and we headed north, towards Nepal.

We moved along just fine. Not much traffic. Not much to slow us down. But there was an odd sight along the side of the road.

Trucks. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. Parked in place. No movement, no drivers leaning out their windows shouting, no honking (which, if you’ve ever driven in India, is the surest sign that something has gone very wrong). Just a line of semis stretching off into the haze like an industrial pilgrimage.

Our driver pointed casually to the queue. “Waiting for days,” he said. “Blockade.”

We kept moving. Our little passenger car hummed along past them all, unbothered by the forces that had ground commercial transport to a halt at the end of 2015. I watched driver after driver leaning against bumpers or squatting under trees, waiting. Some cooked. Some played cards. Most just stared down the road ahead, waiting for a chance to cross.

We entered Nepal without delay. But those trucks, and their cargo . . . not so much. They just sat there in India. Waiting.

The Blockade

The blockade wasn’t official. At least, India never called it that. But starting in late 2015, after Nepal adopted a new constitution, fuel and goods stopped flowing across the border. The cause was a political standoff: groups in southern Nepal, especially the Madhesi, opposed the new constitution, arguing it marginalized their communities. India voiced its concern, and shortly after, critical border points—especially those used for fuel, medicine, and goods—started seizing up.

India said it was about safety. Nepal said it was an unofficial embargo. Whatever it was, the trucks stopped coming.

Technically, by the time we arrived in Nepal the blockade had been over for months. And yet . . . there was that endless line of trucks, stopped at the border, just waiting.

For a landlocked country still staggering from the 2015 earthquakes, the blockade-that-never-was couldn’t have come at a worse time. Gasoline was suddenly rare. Cooking fuel was even scarcer. Restaurants in Kathmandu and Pokhara closed due to gas shortages. We saw people walking the streets carrying battered gas canisters, hopeful.

The grand mountains of Nepal, the mightiest peaks in the world, refused to show their faces. They hid behind a cloud of gravy-thick haze.

Because if you can’t cook with gas, you cook with wood. And in the cities of Nepal, where the spring air already comes thick with dust and traffic fumes, the added layer of smoke made the air taste like something solid. My throat burned in the mornings. Our eyes watered in the evenings. Sunsets looked surreal, filtered through a haze too heavy to be beautiful.

We had already remarked that in India there was often enough haze that you could look directly at the sun when it was low in the sky. But Nepal in the spring of 2016? You could look at the sun at noon . . . that is, if you could even find it.

The air was more smoke than oxygen.

And make no mistake—this wasn’t just an inconvenience. It was a crisis. Hospitals ran short on medicine. Schools struggled. Travel plans collapsed. The economy took a hit measured in billions of rupees.

But the real damage was in daily life, in lost wages for day workers whose livelihood depends on cross-border flow of goods, in the time lost to queues and the energy spent simply trying to eat dinner.

We will likely never know the toll on the health of those who had to live in those conditions.

What I Remember

I remember how quiet the drivers queued up on the Indian side of the border were as we passed them.

I remember thinking how complicated borders are. How something invisible can stop a truck, alter a nation’s rhythm, even change the air you breathe.

I remember the cities full of masks, long before Covid came into the world.

I remember wondering how the people who had lost their homes in the earthquake and were still living in donated tents were managing the shortages.

And I remember that line of trucks—still waiting, still watching the road.

Because travel isn’t always about where you go. Sometimes it’s about what can't go anywhere.

Morning haze in Pokhara