Nepal on Monday urged foreign travellers to take precautions against cholera after 13 people died in an outbreak in the remote west of the country.

Visitors were urged by GD Thakur, director of the Himalayan nation's epidemiology and disease control department, to drink boiled or mineral water and "pay attention to their personal care and hygiene".

At least 14 pilgrims were killed when a jeep carrying them to a sacred Hindu site in southern Nepal swerved off a highway and fell 100 meters (330 feet) into a stream below, police said on Saturday.

The jeep was taking the devotees to Ridi, a pilgrimage town in Palpa district, 120 kilometers (75 miles) west of Kathmandu, late Friday when the driver lost control, Nepal Police spokesman Rajendra Singh Bhandari told Agence France Presse.

Fifteen passengers died on Monday when a plane carrying Indian pilgrims crashed near a treacherous high-altitude airport in northern Nepal, while six made a miraculous escape, police said.

The Agni Air plane plunged into a hill close to Jomsom near the Annapurna mountain range, police spokesman Binod Singh told Agence France Presse.

It is a hot, cloudless morning on a hillside on the outskirts of Kathmandu and dozens of nuns arrange themselves into lines around a golden Buddhist shrine.

In unison, each slams a clenched fist into their opposite palm, breathes deeply and waits, motionless in the rising heat.

Four people were killed and more than 20 wounded when a bomb attached to a motorbike went off near a crowd of protesters in southern Nepal on Monday, police said.

The group of 150 demonstrators had been staging a sit-in when the bike exploded in the religious hub of Janakpur, 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the Indian border, said local police chief Basanta Raj Gautam.

The gates of one of Nepal's top private schools swing open and 20 children who hope to be the doctors, lawyers and scientists of tomorrow spill out into a smart Kathmandu suburb.

But while their classmates come from the country's wealthiest elite, these children were rescued seven years ago, dirty and sick, from a cowshed on the edge of the capital.

British actress and activist Joanna Lumley was due to arrive in Nepal on Monday to open a school built by her Gurkha charity, the British embassy said.

The 65-year-old star of television show "Absolutely Fabulous" is on her second visit after leading a successful campaign for Gurkha soldiers who serve in the British army and their families to be allowed to settle in Britain.

Police in Nepal have launched a crackdown on men throwing water balloons at women during the Hindu festival of Holi, warning the pranksters they face jail.

Nepal is appealing to international donors to help it finally settle a long-running dispute over the height of Mount Everest, a government official said Wednesday.

The world's highest peak, which straddles Nepal and China, is usually attributed a height of 8,848 meters (29,029 feet) following an Indian survey in 1954, but other more recent measurements have varied by several meters.

At least three people were killed and five wounded in an explosion near government offices in Kathmandu on Monday, police said, in the first bomb attack in the Nepali capital for three years.

The device, which went off at 1:25pm (07:40 GMT) in a busy area of the capital as workers were heading out of offices on their lunch break, killed two people on the spot while a third died later in hospital, officers told Agence France Presse.