Nepal's last car carrier dies

Dhan Bahadur Gole, the last known survivor of Nepali porters who carried cars for a living in the 1930s, has passed away. He was 91.

Gole was suffering from asthma and died while undergoing treatment at a hospital in Kathmandu. He was cremated in his hometown Chitlang, Makwanpur on Tuesday.

Affectionately known as the "gadi bokne buda'" (car carrying old man) in Chitlang, Gole was among the porters recruited by transporters to transport motor cars to Kathmandu in the 1930s. This was before the serpentine Tribhuvan Highway linking the capital to the Indian border was constructed in 1956, and the only way to get to Kathmandu was on foot or to fly.

Cars bought mainly by the Rana or Shah nobility were brought to Calcutta by ship, driven sometimes up to Bhimphedi and then carried over the mountains by porters.

Gole helped ferry his first car, a Daimler, when he was only 17. He was in a team of 64 other porters and the journey from Bhimphedi to Thankot (see map) took eight days. He would typically receive 5 aana (less than a rupee) as payment.

The cars were secured onto long bamboo poles and bigger cars required up to 96 porters to heave up the trails. “We didn’t even know the model of the cars we were carrying, we just called them 32, 64, 96 depending on the number of people carrying them,” Dhan Bahadur told Nepali Times in March, 2014.