The Lake You Can Walk On

Bhairab Kunda at 4,120 metres, frozen hard enough to walk across. Two days, two motorbikes, and a sacred lake almost nobody bothers with in January.

By Ujjwol Kayastha · January 10–11, 2026 · Sindhupalchok, Nepal

Every Kathmandu weekend has the same shape: leave late, ride too far, arrive cold, agree it was worth it. This one had a lake at the end of it. Bhairab Kunda sits in the top corner of Sindhupalchok, close enough to Tibet that the shops sell Chinese milk tea with the Tibetan script still on the label, and it belongs to Bhairab, the form Shiva takes when he has run out of patience. In August, at Janai Purnima, hundreds of pilgrims walk up to bathe in it. We went in January, when the path is empty and the water has done something the guidebooks do not photograph: it had frozen solid, hard enough to stand on.

days, door to door: 2
high point · the lake: 4,120 m
as high as the bikes got: 3,860 m
climbed from Barhabise: 3,395 m

Sea level to snow line, on two wheels (Day 01 · Jan 10)

BANEPA → BARHABISE → KANGLANG → LISTI → CHHAGAM → CHOKAR MOKAR

10:04 helmets on
11:14 Barhabise, 725 m
12:45 Kanglang
13:51 Listi, 2,296 m
15:56 the skyline appears
16:28 Chokar Mokar, 3,860 m
18:02 fire

Ten in the morning is a disgraceful hour to start a two-day trip, and we started at 10:04. The Araniko Highway does the work early: out through Dhulikhel, down the Bhote Koshi, and by 11:14 we are in Barhabise at 725 metres, which is the lowest point of the entire journey. Everything after this is uphill. All 3,395 metres of it, before dark.

Two riders in helmets on motorbikes on a roadside — Helmets on, still in the valley · 10:04

A bazaar street with prayer flags strung across the road — Barhabise, 725 m, the bottom of the day · 11:14

Then the road stops being a highway and starts being a suggestion. Kanglang at 12:45, and after that it is switchbacks, gravel, and the particular kind of concentration that stops you taking photographs for an hour at a time. Listi arrives at 2,296 metres: terraces, tin roofs, pines above the village, and a shop selling milk tea in a Chinese cup with the Tibetan still printed on the label. The border is about ten kilometres away as the crow flies. The crow does not have to ride it.

Somewhere above Kanglang · 12:45

A dirt road climbing toward a village of tin roofs on terraced hillside — Listi, 2,296 m · 13:35

A hand holding a Chinese milk tea cup with Tibetan script, snow peaks behind — Chinese tea, Tibetan label, Nepali dust · 13:51

Above Chhagam the trees give up, the ground goes yellow and then red, and at 15:56 the road turns a corner and hands over the entire Himalaya at once. One small pink-roofed hut on a bare ridge at 3,718 metres, and behind it a line of white running the whole width of the sky, floating on a sea of cloud with nothing underneath. We stopped for a long time. It is the best thing either of us has been handed for the price of a tank of petrol.

A lone pink-roofed hut on a high ridge with snow peaks above a sea of cloud — One pink roof, and the whole skyline behind it · 15:56

The last of the light goes into finding a bed. At 3,920 metres there is a hand-painted board for a goth stay, a herder's hut turned lodge, offering noodles and thukpa and fizzy drinks in photographs faded by a year of sun. A little below it, at 3,860, is the one we take: a tin building with a banner along the front reading 3900 ALTITUDE, CHOKAR MOKAR HOMESTAY, which is both a name and a boast, and roughly forty metres of optimism.

A Nepali signboard for a goth stay showing photographs of noodles and drinks — The menu board at 3,920 m · 16:04

A tin-roofed lodge with a banner reading 3900 Altitude Chokar Mokar Homestay — A name and a boast · 16:28

Six hours earlier we were at 725 metres in a bazaar. Now the water in the bottles is starting to set. 3,860 metres, 16:28

The cold at that altitude in January is not dramatic, it is simply total. It gets into the bike seat, the helmet lining, the inside of your gloves. So the evening happens where every evening up there happens: around a fire in a cut-down oil drum, hands out flat over it, nobody saying much, everybody unwilling to be the first to go to bed.

The only warm thing for a kilometre · 18:02

The lake, and it holds your weight (Day 02 · Jan 11)

CHOKAR MOKAR → BHAIRAB KUNDA → CHOKAR MOKAR → TATOPANI → BARHABISE

07:04 sunrise, minus a lot
07:05 off to the kunda
09:00 Bhairab Kunda, 4,120 m
09:40 turn back
11:15 Chokar Mokar
12:06 engines on
14:30 Tatopani
16:30 Barhabise

Sunrise at 3,860 metres arrives sideways and orange and does absolutely nothing for the temperature. The bikes stay where they are. From here it is on foot: two hours, 260 metres of climbing, up a spur where the last of the vegetation is red scrub between black rock and then not even that.

Two people at sunrise in cold-weather clothing, one in a hooded jacket making a peace sign — Two of us, one fur hat, minus a lot · 07:04

A lone figure in a dark hooded jacket walking a stony ridge above layers of blue haze — Out along the ridge, nothing left but rock · 08:12

At 08:29 the ridge opens northward and the entire border range lines up in one blue-white row, and it is worth saying plainly that this view is free. No permit, no checkpoint, no queue, no lodge charging by the night for the privilege. A weekend from Kathmandu on a motorbike, and this is what is on the other side of it.

A long line of jagged snow peaks receding into blue haze — Everything north of us, in one line · 08:29

And at 09:00, exactly on the note, the ground flattens and there it is. Except that Bhairab Kunda in January is not water. It is a white plate laid into a bowl of red-brown rock, and there are people on it: walking out to the middle, standing around, one of them sliding. Prayer flags on the shore, a low stone shelter, footprints going everywhere across a surface that in August has pilgrims bathing in it.

The moment it stops being water · 09:00

A frozen lake with people walking on the ice below a large rocky peak — Bhairab Kunda, and people standing on it · 09:05

Footprints across a snow-covered frozen lake with prayer flags on the shore — Footprints where the water should be · 09:27

The shrine on the shore, flags and all · 09:29

Two people in sunglasses on the frozen lake, one making a peace sign — Nine in the morning, and worth the whole ride · 09:28

A stone shelter beside a frozen lake with a wall of snow peaks behind — The shelter, the ice, and the border behind · 09:31

In August they queue here to bathe in it. In January you walk across the middle and your boots squeak. Bhairab Kunda, 09:00

Forty minutes is all the wind allows. Down by 11:15, tea, and the bikes are exactly where we left them, parked on frozen dirt under a string of prayer flags with a hundred kilometres of Himalaya behind them. Engines at 12:06, and then the whole day before runs backwards at speed: 4,120 metres to a green pool under a waterfall at 2,320 by 13:22, warm enough to put your hand in, four hours after standing on ice.

A motorbike parked outside a tin lodge under prayer flags — A motorbike parked at 3,836 m · 12:02

A waterfall falling into a clear green pool in dense forest — Four hours down from the ice · 13:22

Tatopani at 14:30, Barhabise at 16:30, and then the Araniko in the dark with cold hands, which is the tax this ride charges on the way home and nobody has ever found a way around. Two days. One frozen kunda. Roughly two hundred and fifty kilometres of concentration.

A steel truss bridge across a gorge with trucks and a jeep crossing — Tatopani, and the road home · 14:28

Go in winter. Everyone else goes at Janai Purnima, when the lake is water and the path is a procession, and that is its own thing and probably the right way to see it. But the January version is a different lake entirely: silent, solid, empty, and close enough to Kathmandu that you can be standing on it on a Sunday morning and home for work on Monday.

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