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Nepal becoming more accessible for walking and trekking holidays

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If Channel 4 and Levison Wood’s recent documentary following his 1700 mile trek, Walking the Himalayas, inspired you to visit this dramatic and beautiful landscape, recent news that Nepal is to become more accessible to visitors will be very welcome indeed.

In the Channel 4 documentary Walking the Himalayas, Levison Wood trekked from the beginning of the Himalayas in Afghanistan, 1700 miles to Bhutan. The documentary shows the amazing landscapes as he travelled through the Himalayan regions of Pakistan, India and Nepal.

The excellent news is that travelling to see and walk through Nepal’s spectacular scenery will soon become easier, as the airport of Gautam Buddha in Bhairahawa is currently undergoing an extension to become an international airport. This construction has entered into its final phase, and is due for completion in 2018.

Once work is completed, it will relieve pressure at the country's only current international facility, Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, as well as enable easier access to the Bardia National Park in the west of the country. 

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The park is the largest in the undeveloped Terai region of Nepal, providing visitors with a tranquil environment in which to try to spot resident wildlife such as the tiger, elephant, one-horned rhino, mugger crocodile, Gangetic dolphin and some of the more than 250 species of bird, including the endangered Bengal florican and sarus crane. 

Pokhara is also accessible from Bhairahawa and has beautiful gentle walking in the countryside, with excellent bird watching. It is the relaxed lakeside gateway to the Annapurna region, one of the most beautiful areas in the world for trekking.

Gautam Buddha International Airport is to form part of a new 'special development zone' that will see the town of Lumbini - Lord Buddha's birthplace - transformed into a tourism, pilgrimage and education centre modelled on Mecca - the birthplace of Muhammad - in Saudi Arabia. 

Currently, 800,000 people, including many tourists, visit Lumbini each year. This compares poorly to other holy sites such as the Vatican in Rome, which attracts more than five million visitors per annum.

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"There are more than one billion Buddhists in the world. If we could attract 20 per cent of them to the holy land of Lumbini, that will be more than enough,"  Purna Chandra Bhattarai, the joint secretary at Nepal's Tourism Ministry, told Travel Daily Media. 

The need for a new airport is even more pressing however, after cracks began to appear on the runway in Kathmandu. In September 2013, these led to weight restrictions being imposed for planes landing and taking-off from the airport - limiting the number of passengers that the airlines can carry.

Tourism officials will therefore be keen to see the Gautam Buddha International Airport open on schedule in 2018. 

If you’re interested in breath-taking walking holidays in some of the stunning locations that Levison trekked, why not visit our pages for more information about Himalayan walking holidays in India, Nepal and Bhutan.

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