Nepal Now Has the World's Second-Highest Bungee Jump — 228 Metres Into the World's Deepest Gorge

Two hours' drive from Pokhara, a 520-metre suspension bridge spans the Kali Gandaki river where it cuts between the Kushma and Baglung districts of western Nepal. Step off the middle of it with a cord tied to your ankles and you fall for 228 metres — roughly the height of a 75-storey building — before the cord catches. Only one bungee site on Earth is taller: the platform on Macau Tower in China, at 233m. Everywhere else — including South Africa's famous Bloukrans Bridge, long marketed as the world's highest bridge bungee — now ranks below a gorge in rural Nepal.

What makes the Kali Gandaki gorge extreme isn't just its depth — it's what's on either side of it. Dhaulagiri and Annapurna I are two of the fourteen 8,000-metre peaks on the planet, and the river running below the bridge has been cutting through the rising Himalaya for millions of years, staying ahead of the mountains as they push skyward. We've written before about why the Kali Gandaki holds the title of the world's deepest gorge; the Kushma Bungee simply lets you jump into it.

Nepal already had a claim to bungee fame before Kushma opened: the Last Resort at Bhote Koshi, near the Tibet border, has run a 160m jump off its own suspension bridge since 1999 and still sits inside the world's top ten. Kushma simply goes further, on younger, steeper terrain that the Himalaya keeps producing — the same tectonic uplift that built Everest keeps carving gorges deep enough to make world-record drops out of a bridge crossing.

What this means for travellers

Source: Kushma Bungee Jump

Cover photo: kailash choudhary via Pexels (Pexels License).