Head Count:

The Skinny: Lamki is a little one-horse town 26 kilometres past Nepal's Royal Bardia National Park. If you don't want to visit the park and/or pay the price for the park's touristy accomodations, Lamki is the only other place to sleep within a day's drive.

What Thar Be: There are a couple cheap hotels along the main street and a few restaurants and shops. Surrounding Lamki are many thatched villages of Tharu people who speak their own language and seem to live mostly on subsistence farming.

Digs: Annapurna Lodge and Hotel: along the main drag, pretty dirty and basic rooms with no shower, a shared toilet, and lots of mosquitos. We got 3 beds in a room for 150R.

Vittles: The Sunghaba Restaurant: we were sort of amazed to find this piece of elegant dining in little, dirty Lamki. The owner of the place worked at restaurants in Bombay, and brought his recipes and serving experience home with him. The food was excellent, very reasonably priced, and presented on real china (!?!) in a series of courses. It's right across the street from the Annapurna Lodge.

Hooch Factor: 22 oz beers were 90R, a bit expensive because it's a dry county, and restauranteers buy and sell it under the table.

Navigability: There's only one street on which we drove in Lamki, and it was just the highway filled with the normal small town fare of cows, strolling goats, and women carrying heavy loads on their heads.

Sliding In and Out: The east-west Mahendra Highway from Butwal to Lamki is a beautiful drive on a sealed two-lane road crossing through Royal Bardia National Park. You don't have to pay the park's entrance fees to drive through, but you do have to stop at a few checkpoints where military men bearing large weapons check your time of arrival and departure, cleverly enforcing the park's 40 kph speed limit.