Nepal's First Bungee Jump Opened in 1999 on a Bridge Built for One Purpose — Jumping Off It

Most of the suspension bridges strung across Nepal's gorges were built to move people, yaks and porters from one village to the next. One was not. On the Araniko Highway, about 100km east of Kathmandu toward the Tibet border, a 166-metre steel bridge spans the Bhote Koshi River for a single purpose: so that people can jump off it, tethered to a bungee cord, and free-fall 160 metres toward the water below. It has been doing exactly that since 1999, and it remains one of the highest bridge bungee jumps in Asia.

The site is run by The Last Resort, and the bridge itself is Nepal's only privately owned bridge, built for adrenaline, not traffic. It was designed by a bungee consultant from New Zealand, the country that turned the sport into a commercial industry in the 1980s, and it's still staffed by jumpmasters trained to that lineage. Jumpers step off a small platform at the bridge's centre, drop into several seconds of freefall over the river gorge, and rebound on the cord before being lowered or hauled back up. A day trip typically bundles the jump with a canyon swing, rafting on the Bhote Koshi's whitewater, or a buffet lunch at the resort overlooking the gorge, enough to fill a full day out of Kathmandu without ever reaching Everest or Annapurna.

Nepal didn't invent bungee jumping, and the Bhote Koshi bridge isn't the tallest in the world. But its 160-metre drop puts it in genuinely rare company, and being first mattered: when it opened in 1999, it was Nepal's introduction to commercial adventure sports beyond trekking and rafting, and it helped establish the hills around Kathmandu and Pokhara as a base for paragliding, canyoning and zip-lining that followed over the next two decades.

Macau Tower's 233-metre platform jump, opened by AJ Hackett in 2006, holds the Guinness World Record for the highest commercial bungee jump from a building. Bloukrans Bridge in South Africa, recognised since 2003, holds the record for the highest bridge bungee jump in the world at 216 metres. The Bhote Koshi doesn't chase either record — it's a bridge over a Himalayan river, not an engineered tower — but at 160 metres it still delivers one of the longest falls most people will ever take on purpose, and it's been doing it for longer than either of the newer record-holders.

What this means for trekkers

We run the Bhote Koshi jump as a one-day bungee jump add-on out of Kathmandu, and it pairs naturally with Pokhara's other adrenaline record, the world's steepest zip-line, or a gentler day on an ultralight flight over the Annapurna foothills for anyone who wants the view without the freefall.

Source: HighestBridges.com, with additional detail from The Last Resort's own site history.

Cover photo: Sudan Shrestha via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).