It is not the ruins that hit you first. It is your imagination.
You are standing there on a clear, quiet day. Blue sky. No rain. And your mind starts showing you things it has no right to show you.
It shows you the mountain moving.
It shows you being buried alive, right where your feet are planted.
It shows you being carried away and drowning — not in water, but in mud, with boulders as big as jeepneys rolling on top of you.
That is what Bidur does to a person. On a beautiful afternoon, under a peaceful sky, it makes you rehearse your own death.
Mud. Sand. Stones. Protruding metal and steel.
We at NET25 have covered disasters before. Bagyo. Baha. Landslides. Families crying in front of what used to be a house.
But watching it come in on a monitor is not the same as standing in it. Nothing prepared me for Bidur.
The road that was no longer there
We landed in Kathmandu thinking it would be a simple drive north to Nuwakot.
It was not.
Google Maps kept changing its mind, pushing us off the highway and onto small mountain back roads through Kakani and Thansing — narrow, winding, one zigzag after another, like Session Road in Baguio.
Two extra hours on the road, with rain in some parts.
Then we learned why. Bridges were down. Whole sections of the main road were destroyed. This was the shortcut.
And somewhere on that wet mountainside, it finally sank in.
Parts of the road we were supposed to take did not exist anymore.
Not blocked. Not damaged. Some were gone — erased, together with everything that once stood beside them.
Thirty minutes. Three storeys of water.
Here is what happened.
On August 26, high up near the Nepal–Tibet border, a chunk of the Langtang Lirung glacier broke off. Ice and rock came roaring down the mountain and emptied into the Trishuli River.
In thirty minutes, the water rose almost 10 meters.
Imagine floodwater reaching the roof of a three-storey building — in half an hour. No warning. No time to grab anything. No time to grab anyone.
By the time that wall of mud reached Bidur, about 100 kilometers downstream, entire towns behind it had already been wiped off the map.
Where the hotel used to be
I stood in front of the Yangra.
It used to be a four-storey hotel. Now it is a broken shell of concrete, tilting toward the river like a man about to fall.
I tried to do a standup there, to describe what the camera was seeing. But that day the words would not come. Some things refuse to be narrated.
NET25 Reporter Mar Gabriel did it. Watch his report here.
Behind me was a building that once held families. Travelers. Workers with jobs and shifts and paydays.
Now it holds nothing. Just twisted steel and silence.
“I lost everything”
The Yangra was not the only one.
A short distance away, we met Saru Shrestha, owner of Shrestha Hotel and Lodge — another hotel along the same river, and a well-known one. “A very famous hotel in this area,” our interpreter called it. Everybody in Bidur knew the place.
Now Shrestha was standing very still, staring at what was left of it.
“We looked out the window and saw huge waves coming from the river. People were shouting, ‘Run and save yourselves,’” she told us, with Rebika Chhetri of Himalaya TV translating.
Everybody ran for higher ground.
“We had seen floods before, but we never imagined that a flood this severe would happen,” she said.
She kept looking at what was left of her three-storey hotel. Then she said the line I still hear in my head:
“I lost my land and all my property. I lost everything.”
Three words. No crying. No drama. Just a woman standing in front of her whole life, turned into rubble.
The numbers you cannot feel
Later, going through the reports, the scale started to look almost unreal.
At least 1,369 dead across Nepal. More than 5,100 still missing.
Bidur alone lost 538 homes and three schools. And 311 of its own people are still unaccounted for.
Numbers are easy to read on a screen. They are very heavy to carry while you are standing in the mud that caused them.
Life still walking near ruins
Then I saw something that broke me in a different way.
Shree Chandrajyoti Secondary School. The gate was still standing. Motorbikes parked outside. Children and parents going in and out.
But not for lessons. The school has become a relief operations area.
Any Filipino understands this without being told. Back home, when the water rises, the school is the first place we run to. The classroom becomes a bedroom. The covered court becomes a warehouse. Classes stop so that survival can begin.
So it was not an ordinary school day. There are no ordinary school days left in Bidur.
And still, life kept moving. The flood is barely gone and somebody is already sweeping. The roof is missing and somebody is already boiling water. A whole community rearranged around a disaster, and refusing to stand still.
No shot list can hold that.
Where the lights died
Shyam Kadel and his Himalaya TV team brought us to what was left of a hydropower station along the river — one of the plants in the Trishuli corridor. Both stations there were basically destroyed.
The powerhouse was buried. The switchyard was gone.
I filmed some shots there, and all I could think about was everything that used to pass through that spot. Lights. Refrigerators. Cellphone chargers. Hospital machines keeping people alive.
All of it ran through a place that no longer exists.
The ones doing the actual work
What I did not expect was how much the recovery itself would move me.
An excavator operator, patiently scooping mud out of what used to be a store. Soldiers scanning the area. A boy checking what he could pick up from the ruins.
Those are the images that will stay with me. Not the drone shots of destruction. Them.
Care for Humanity, on the ground
This was not an ordinary reporting assignment for me.
I traveled with a Care for Humanity team — the relief arm of the Iglesia Ni Cristo, which has been bringing aid into disaster zones like this one for years.
Before we ever pointed a camera at the wreckage, we were there to see the relief operation up close, and to help however we could.
There is a strange clarity that comes from doing two jobs at once — reporter and volunteer. You stop thinking in shots and soundbites. You start noticing what people actually need. Clean water. Food. Clothes. Someone to stop and ask how they are holding up.
Watching our team coordinate with local staging points, with thousands of people already working the recovery, gave me a view most journalists never get. We were not just watching the response. We were a small part of it.
That is why this story feels different to me. It is not only about documenting loss. It is about documenting what people choose to do about it.
Why I will not forget this
We covered Ondoy. We covered Yolanda. We sent teams into our own flooded provinces and asked our own kababayan what they lost.
But this was something else.
A 72-kilometer wound cut through a river valley — caused by a glacier no one in these communities could have known was about to collapse. It changed the way I think about climate risk.
Nepal leans on hydropower. Its roads cling to mountains. Its communities sit far from help. All of it was tested at once, by a disaster the government is still struggling to fully measure.
More than 21,000 soldiers and police are working the recovery. A three-month disaster zone has been declared.
But the people truly rebuilding Bidur are the school staff who still show up. The family sorting through what is left of their house. The excavator crews swallowing mud and dust, day after day, one truckload at a time.
I came here to tell their story. I am not sure I did it justice.
Bangungot means nightmare. The difference is that a nightmare ends when you wake up.
Bidur cannot wake up. It can only rebuild.
And it is already trying.
