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One of Nepal's proudest historical monuments, Prithvi Narayan Shah's abandoned fortress looms like a forgotten shipwreck on a ridge above Trisuli, casting a poignant, almost romantic spell over the tiny village of NUWAKOT (accent on the second syllable: Noo- aa -kote). The walk from Trisuli takes less than an hour, although the trail is a tad tricky to find: climb a flight of steps starting at the Dhunge (eastern) side of the Trisuli bridge until you reach the Dhunche road, walk up the road for about 150m and make a right at the first group of houses. The path becomes wide and eroded as it climbs through a spindly forest of sal trees - the trees are coppiced for animal fodder - and reaches Nuwakot on the crest of a ridge about 400m above the valley floor. To cycle , take the (initially) paved road that leaves the main road about 1km south of Dhunge. The fortress stands to the right as you enter the village, consisting of three brick towers rising like Monopoly hotels within a walled compound. The tallest one is open to the public, though you'll have to track down the caretaker to unlock it for you. The views from the top-floor windows are stupendous, looking out on Ganesh Himal and the pastoral Trisuli and Tadi valleys. It was from this command centre that Prithvi Narayan Shah , the unifier of Nepal, directed his dogged campaign on the Kathmandu Valley from 1744 to 1769, and gazing out through these windows you can gain some insight into the mind of this obsessive but brilliant military tactician. In his determination to conquer the valley, Prithvi Narayan had three other towers built in the name of the three valley capitals, perhaps hoping to bring about their downfall by a kind of voodoo; the Kathmandu and Patan towers share the main compound, while the crumbling Bhaktapur tower stands on a rise just outside. After Kathmandu's fall, Nuwakot had just one more moment in the limelight. In 1792, attempting to extend Nepal's territory into Tibet, Prithvi Narayan's successor pushed his luck too far and was driven all the way back to Betrawati, the next village north of Trisuli. In the resulting peace treaty , signed at Nuwakot, Nepal ceded to Tibet the lucrative trading posts of Kyirong (north of Trisuli) and Khasa (north of Kodari), accounting for two southward lunges in the border that remain to this day. Nuwakot's old main street runs south from the fortress along the spine of the ridge and suddenly dead-ends, the land falling away to reveal a lovely panorama of the Tadi and Trisuli valleys. In the late eighteenth century, when Nuwakot enjoyed a brief flowering as the winter residence of the Kathmandu court, the houses along this boulevard must have looked considerably posher. Several ornate old brick-and-wood buildings remain, notably the two-tiered Bhairabi Mandir . During the annual Bhairabi festival here, held in the Nepali month of Chaitra (March-April), the priest, under the influence of divine powers, drinks the blood of an entire buffalo straight from its severed neck. He immediately vomits it back up; not so many years ago it was the custom for worshippers to drink the vomited blood as a sacrament.
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