It can be difficult to accurately regionguess in Nepal. One thing that can help is that names of districts of Nepal often appear in addresses on store signs and other places.

Nepal has 77 districts, but if you look at the Street View coverage you can see that many of these districts have no coverage, or just coverage of some isolated roads (where signs are few and far between):

The densest coverage really only appears in the flat plains on or near the southern border, and near Kathmandu or Pokhara. For the purpose of recognizing districts from signs, we can focus on the 30 districts labeled below (click the image for a larger version).

Sometimes district names appear in Latin script, so it is useful to learn their Latin names. Here is a quiz to help you learn these 30 districts.

More often the district names appear in Devanagari script. In Devanagari, consonants are decorated with symbols (vowel diacritics) to indicate vowels. There are hundreds of possible combinations of the consonants with the diacritics, but for the purpose of transliterating the names of the 30 districts from Devanagari to Latin it is mostly enough to focus on these 24 symbols (click for a larger image):

It's worth learning these transliterations because it can also help in northern India, where Devanagari also appears. Here is an Anki deck (flash cards) to help you learn the transliterations.

Once you are comfortable with the basic symbols, you match them with the Devanagari names of the 30 districts. These names appear in the table below (you can also view the table separately). Because district boundaries do not appear in the Google map, the headquarters of the districts are also given, which can help you locate them on the map.

Just focus on how the basic symbols appear in the Devanagari name, and ignore any diacritic squiggles and vertical bars around them. Note that for a few of the names you have to mentally insert an n or an r somewhere in the middle to get the standard transliteration.

To learn the transliterations of the Devanagari names, you can use this Anki deck (flash cards) of the 30 districts in Devanagari. Or work with this quiz on Devanagari district names.

When the Devanagari names seem familiar to you, you can practice finding them in natural contexts by playing this Geoguessr training map:

https://www.geoguessr.com/maps/691d77c1a6081ff81f4976a9

Some general things to note:

• Because of the poor camera quality in Nepal, it might be hard to read the signs along bigger streets. You may have better luck on smaller streets.
• Some bigger cities rarely put the district name on their signs. For example, in Janakpur you are more likely to see the Devanagari for Janakpur (which is जनकपुर) than the district name (Dhanusha). In the city of Siddharthanagar you are more likely to see its old name, Bhairahawa (भैरहवा), than the district (Rupandehi).
• In the district of Jhapa, instead of the symbol झ you are more likely to see the old symbol for jh, which looks like this:

With a little practice, you can greatly improve the accuracy of your regionguessing in Nepal!

 

OldGeoProf, 2025