Sindhupalchowk: Where nature's beauty met with nature's fury

54-year-old Durga Shrestha still trembles at the thought of the April 25 earthquake.
While she and her family escaped in time, the fury did not spare a single brick of her home that fateful day.
The mother of five children, robbed of her home and hearth, now sleeps in a makeshift shelter next to her wrecked house in a hilly area here, adjacent to the rows of houses flattened by the quake.
"The 'bhukamp' (quake) has taken away all from us. Our neighbourhood has turned into a ghost town," she said.
And, ghost town indeed the area has turned into, as the sight of pile after pile of old houses made of mud and brick, and the stench of dead livestock nauseates passers-by, telling a harrowing tale of death and destruction.

The 7.9-magnitude temblor, with its epicentre in Gorkha district, has claimed nearly 7,000 lives, nine days since it shook the core of the Himalayan nation, with over 2,000 casualties reported here - the maximum among all the affected districts.

Sindhupalchowk is about 60 kms from the capital city Kathmandu.
The fury has destroyed up to 90 per cent of the houses in the two districts, according to a situation report released by the United Nation's humanitarian agency OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs).
Sindhupalchowk and neighbouring Kavre districts are endowed with immense natural beauty but the destruction brought by the quake have made them stand in stark contrast to each other.

Scenic resorts nestled at the edge of winding streets in the mountainous valley, which earlier bustled with presence of foreign tourists, now wear a deserted look.
Broken, fallen or cracked houses are a grim reminder of the devastation on the otherwise picturesque route lined with pristine water streams and verdant surroundings.
In Andheri village in the district, a restaurant named 'Hotel Hill View' situated right before the Son Kosi river used to be filled with the murmur of tourists has now turned into a community shelter for several families rendered homeless in the region.
"Our place used to be filled with visitors and happy foreigners, who loved the location and the natural beauty of the hills and the river. Now, you can only see sad and depressed faces, and most of them scared," Saroj Shreshta, a 19-year-old business management student told PTI.