A Strip of Land That Shouldn't Exist
The terai is a geographical accident. Where the Himalayan rivers slow down and drop their sediment load onto the plains, they created a belt of waterlogged grasslands, sal forests, and oxbow lakes stretching from Uttarakhand through Bihar and into the lowlands of Nepal. It runs roughly 30 to 50 kilometres wide. For most of human history, it was considered uninhabitable, malarial, flooded seasonally, dense with animals large enough to kill you. That hostility is precisely why it became one of the most biodiverse strips of land in Asia.
