Dadhiram invites us in his home, where we are welcomed with warm smiles from his wife and delicious samosas. Before we even finish eating them, Dadhiram comes in the room with multiple photo albums. This is my son here, and here are my grandchildren. His index points at a small boy in one of the pictures, and his eyes suddenly lighten up. This is Sagar, my grandchild, in our home village in Ullikhola, in the heart of the mid-hills. Dadhiram talks of his life growing up in Ullikhola.

He shares comforting memories of friendships and of raising his children and grand-children among the peace and serenity of this heavenly place, and the promise of a good future for his family. Located so remotely, life wasn’t easy at first, but overtime access to towns and cities improved. It used to take six days to walk from Ullikhola to Butwal, now it only takes 3 hours by car. Thus villagers became able to buy higher-value crops, and sell their own products.

Education and access to healthcare also improved. People are more educated now. Dadhiram talks fondly about his grandson, Sagar, who studied Water Management at the University of Oxford, fully funded by the UK government and WHT Trust. Omnipresent is every facet of his life growing up, water has been a key inspiration in Sagar’s career to date.

But there is a darker side to water’s influence. Over the past decade, he says, rains have become more intense and erratic, accelerating landslides and eating the mountain flanks away; the river is becoming at times uncontrollable, overflowing its banks and sometimes even changing the direction of its flows, taking away agricultural fields and homes. What is the force at work here, turning Ullikhola’s beautiful hills into what Dadhiram coins as one of the largest landslides in Nepal?

Taken aback by his story, we accept Dadhiram’s invitation to travel to Ullikhola. After all, the science does find that rains seem to have become more intense over the past decades in the Hindu Kush Himalayas - although studies looking at precipitation change have a higher degree of uncertainty that for temperature change.

The next day, we drive over narrow dirt roads, winding around the edges of the mountains, with sheer vertical drops below. After a four long hours, we finally arrive in Ullikhola, and are struck by the beauty of the landscape. Located right on the bank of the Badighad river, a tributary to the Kali-Gandaki River, the vegetation is lush green, with hillslopes covered with colourful flowers, and green rice paddies.

Dadhiram and the village councillor Bishnu Bhandari immediately take us to see the landslide site on the edge of Ullikhola. Walking along the road, the soil beneath our feet becomes harder, darker, and rockier. We arrive at a curve where the road is disrupted by a fast-flowing stream joining the river on the other side of the road. Dadhiram points in the direction of the stream, and we start walking along it, unprepared to absorb the magnitude of what awaits us.

The rocks surrounding us are now completely dark, tinting the fast-flowing water. As we continue to walk ahead, entering deeper and deeper in the ‘landslide area’, we discover entire mountain flanks collapsed, revealing the dark grey and black colours of the earth. Dadhiram suddenly stops and pauses for a few seconds, pointing at the landslide with his index. There used to be a village there, called Ghultung, which has vanished because of the landslide. Villagers were forced to flee and relocate elsewhere, and many became homeless.

The landslide is not a new phenomenon however. Dadhiram remembers being a child and already starting to see parts of the mountain crumble. But now, what has changed is the pace at which the mountain is disintegrating. Rains are becoming more intense and unpredictable.

When flash floods occur, so much earth and rocks are taken away from the mountain that sediments flush down into the river, altering its flow. Dadhiram tells us of a time recently when the river got blocked due to the sudden accumulation of sediments from its tributaries and its flow was entirely reversed, forming a massive temporary reservoir threatening the lives in its downstream path. In some areas we see a few metres of dark sediments amassing on the sides of the river.

Dadhiram takes us to his own family home, right on the banks of the river. There, we meet Baghawati, and her daughter, Rojana, who used to live in Ghultung. Just over one year after getting married and settling into her new home, landslides forced her and her young family to flee. Many homes had already been destroyed and only two other families were left, but she had nowhere to go with her new born child. She remembers the distressing rumbling thunder, the whipping wind, and the beating rains in the middle of the night. They stayed in their homes as long as possible before escaping at night under the pouring rain, leaving everything behind. Nothing remained. Baghawati and her family moved to Ullikhola in search for families who could host them. After moving from home to home, Dadhiram was finally the only one willing to support them, albeit temporarily. For over four years now, they’ve lived in his family home, in exchange for manual labour in the fields.