Thankot Checkpoint and Western Gateway

The commonly given derivation is from than, a shrine or a place, and kot, a fort, giving something close to "the fort at the shrine" or simply "small fort". That reading is consistent with what the site has always been used for, and it is the explanation offered by local accounts and by most published descriptions of the town.

The settlement has an older name in the chronicle tradition: Shonitapur, read as the place of blood, from the legendary battle said in the vamshavali chronicles to have been fought here. That is legend, and we treat it as such on the Shonitapur page rather than presenting it as documented history. What can be said is that chronicles of the Kirat era refer to a settlement here, and that its position on the western pass gave it importance long before any of the surviving buildings were raised.

The Kathmandu Valley is a bowl. Goods and armies could only enter it through a small number of passes, and the western pass at Thankot carried the traffic from the Indian plains and from the hill kingdoms to the west. Whoever held it held the valley's supply line.

That is precisely how the Gorkhali campaign of the 1740s to 1760s used it. Rather than assaulting the valley's three fortified cities directly, Prithvi Narayan Shah's forces, under commanders including Kalu Pande, worked to close the passes and strangle the valley's trade. Thankot was one of the points where that blockade bit. The unification chronicle sets out the sequence and how long it took.

After the conquest the town continued in the same role, as the last Nepali settlement on the trade route south and the place where merchants were checked, taxed and given protection for the road. The modern police checkpoint is a direct continuation of that function, several centuries on.

The most striking chapter in the gateway's history is the shortest. Before a motorable road crossed the rim, the Kathmandu Valley had cars but no way to drive them in. Vehicles were dismantled where possible, slung on poles and carried over the hills by teams of porters, then reassembled in the city.

The Tribhuvan Highway, the first road link between Kathmandu and the plains, opened in the 1950s and ended that practice. It runs through Thankot, which is why the checkpoint sits where it does. Anyone who has watched a loaded truck grind up the last bends towards the pass has some sense of what the porters were doing on the same gradient without an engine.

The car porters page tells that story properly, with what is documented and what is remembered.

Be clear about expectations: this is a road junction with a police post, not a preserved monument. What you can do is walk it and read the landscape.

• The gateway arch and the pass itself. Stand where the road crosses the rim and you can see why this gap and no other carried the traffic.
• The traffic. Long-distance buses, freight trucks off the Prithvi and Tribhuvan highways and the check queue. It is the valley's front door in operation.
• The old bazaar, ten minutes north on foot, where the brick houses and carved windows of the Newar settlement survive around the Mahalaxmi temple.
• The view back east over the valley floor from the higher ground above the junction.

Do not photograph the police post, personnel or security arrangements. Photographing the gateway, the road and the town is unremarkable and nobody will mind.

Because every westbound bus and micro from Kalanki stops here, the junction is the natural starting point for a day in the area. A workable order:

1. Get down at the checkpoint in the morning.
2. Walk north into the old bazaar for the Mahalaxmi temple, thirty minutes to an hour.
3. Walk or take a shared jeep uphill to the cable car base station, ride up, and spend an hour or two on the ridge at Bhaleshwor Mahadev.
4. Come down and finish in Tribhuvan Park if you have the afternoon, or head back to the city.

That sequence puts you on the ridge in the clearest part of the day and leaves the flat sites for the afternoon, which is the right way round for most of the year.

The checkpoint is on the Tribhuvan Highway about 12 km west of central Kathmandu and roughly 3 km beyond the Ring Road at Kalanki.

• By bus or micro: every westbound service from Kalanki towards Thankot, Naubise, Hetauda or Pokhara passes through. The fare from Kalanki is well under NPR 50 and the run takes twenty minutes to an hour depending on traffic.
• By taxi: low thousands of rupees from central Kathmandu, and slow at rush hour through Kalanki.
• Arriving from outside the valley: if you are coming from Pokhara or Chitwan by road, you will pass through this checkpoint whether you plan to or not.

The getting to Thankot guide has bus stands, fares and journey times by hour of day.