Salim Reshamwala

It's a place where bridges are constantly being born.

All kinds of bridges.

Rope, steel, trees, bamboo log bridges that are basically floating on top of the water that they help you cross, and bridges that sing in the wind unimaginably high above you.

And when you live as high up in the air as some of the people we're talking to today, when getting to your town or village might be days of hiking up and down massive elevations, will a bridge...

It changes everything.

The spark for this episode came from a line from a poem called Tuin by Strawburn Mukharam.

It's about crossing a particularly dangerous kind of Nepalese bridge.

I will hold on to a tuin.

If I reach across, I will see the world.

But if I fall, I will become a fish.

He thinks of himself as the people's poet.

He often writes about rural Nepal, and here he's writing about the fine line between life and death when a person makes a dangerous journey hanging from a wire-crossing bridge.

Here's how Nepalese tuins work.

There's a single wire rope and pulley system for getting you across dangerous heights.

You can transport everything from practical goods hanging in baskets to groups of, say, 12 schoolchildren all attached to the wire.

harnessed in with nothing else below them.

Mukadung was born in 1968 when most bridges in Nepal were in this style.

The first memories I have of that time and bridges, I remember the river in my village.

I would have been seven, eight years old.

We would cross the small river to go to the nearby village.