Most travellers moving through Nepal's mid-eastern hills know Okhaldhunga only as a stop between Kathmandu and the Solukhumbu approach routes, but Rumjatar is worth a second look for the ground it sits on alone. The market lies in Siddhicharan Municipality, in Okhaldhunga District, Sagarmatha Zone, and borders Solukhumbu District, with the local airport sitting right beside it.
Rumjatar functioned as its own village centre until May 2014, when it was formally merged into the municipality. At the 1991 Nepal census, the last count taken while it stood as an independent unit, it recorded a population of 2,825 people across 600 households.
What makes Rumjatar geologically unusual is the table-land it's built on. This is a flat expanse of about 2.5 square kilometres with a gentle southerly slope of roughly four degrees, sitting in the middle of some 2,500 square kilometres of otherwise broken Himalayan midland terrain.
Researchers who studied it through aerial photographs, toposheets, and field checks found that it looks at first like a peneplain, a worn-down, flattened landscape but is actually a "rock-fan," a formation shaped by erosion acting on weak rock within a valley. Over time, streams cutting down along its edges, combined with the ongoing uplift of the Himalayas, turned that rock-fan into the raised, soil-topped upland travellers see today.
The human history of the place is tied closely to the Gurung community. Gurung culture in Rumjatar was originally Buddhist, but over generations it blended with the Brahmin (Aryan) population nearby, and the Gurung language was gradually set aside in the process.
Despite that loss, the area produced a notable list of figures: Bir Jhagal Gurung, a military commander during Prithvi Narayan Shah's unification campaigns Melawa Devi, credited as the first Nepali woman to record a song on gramophone the artist Singh Raj Gurung; sheep-farming entrepreneur Jay Bahadur Gurung educationist and anti-discrimination campaigner Gyan Dil Das; and Ram Kumari Gurung, an education reformer known as "Nani Saheb" under General Ram Shamsher during the Rana period.
For practical purposes, Rumjatar Airport (IATA: RUM, ICAO: VNRT) is the main access point, a domestic airstrip serving Okhaldhunga District at an elevation of 4,500 feet (1,372 metres). Its single runway runs 585 metres, which limits it to smaller aircraft and keeps flights weather-dependent, so travellers should build flexibility into any itinerary that relies on it and expect basic facilities on the ground.
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