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Imagine having to scale the Burj Khalifa, or walk for 5 days in subzero temperatures, or brave an 800m long zipline over 200m in the air, just to get to school! Well, these kids do just that, and more! Here are the worst school routes IN THE WORLD! 1. Shree Adarsha School, Kanpur, Nepal. Every day the children in the village of Kanpur join together to go down to the school in the city. An hour and a half before classes start, the Kanpur children set off for school. They must walk down the mountain to the treacherous Trishuli river. Here, because there is no bridge, they must cross using a contraption called “The Tuin“ a metal basket that hangs from two steel cables. Sometimes, they walk down the mountain to find that “the Tuin“ is on the other side and the children must wait until an adult comes and can bring it back to them, if no adults come, they will miss school and have to walk the hour trek back home for nothing. Even if they are lucky enough to cross the river without incident, then they still have to hitch a ride on the main highway into town. At the end of the school day they must repeat the 2-hour trip just to get back home, hopefully before night fall and with enough time to do their homework before going to bed, and then tomorrow, they’ll do it all again. 2. Pamoseang Village, Indonesia. Unlike the children in Nepal, in the remote village of Pamoseang in west Sulawesi, the children actually have a fairly decent bridge so they can cross the river and get to school, however, in this country flooding often occurs and damages the wooden slats on the bridge when this happens, and until it can be repaired, children must brave the rapid river flow in order to get to school, only the older children are strong enough to cross the river this way, younger children and girls must cross the 150ft (45m) river by shimmying across the iron cables that support the bridge. These iron cables are rusty, frayed, and slippery when wet, one mistake and a child will fall 30ft (9m) into the rapids below. 3. Atuleer Village, Sichuan, China. Children aged 6 to 15 from the remote village of Atuleer go to boarding school in the county of Zhaojue. The only way to leave or to enter their village is via 17 different bamboo ladders with an accumulative height of 2,625ft (800m). Every two weeks the children return from boarding school with their laden backpacks and must scale the sheer rock face to reach the remote village where 72 families reside. To put it into perspective, the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, is 2,625ft tall (800m), imagine your home was at the top and every two weeks having to climb up there on a bamboo ladder. 4. Lingshed Village, Indian Himalayas. Children from this village, during 6 months of the year can get to their boarding school in Leh easily by road, but, during the 6 winter months, heavy snowfall blocks access by road and so the children are forced to undergo something known as the Chadar Trek. The children must walk 14 miles (23km) in subzero temperatures up the semifrozen Zanskar river, older children form groups and the younger children are accompanied by their fathers, the terrain is slippery and treacherous, pieces of ice break off underfoot and a fall into the icy river would almost certainly mean death. Depending on the amount of snowfall the children can take up to 5 days to complete the journey. 5. Acacias, Columbia. Children who live in the Acacia Hills in Columbia have two ways to get to school every day, they can either undergo a 5-hour hike down a mountain, cross the river and climb up another mountain or they can take the quicker route. The quicker route is a 2,625ft (800m) zipline suspended 750ft (230m) above the ground, there are a total of 12 ziplines that connect villagers on one side of the valley to the other. Adults and older children ride the zipline using a v-shaped piece of wood as a handbrake and can reach speeds of up to 50mph (80km/h) on their way down, younger children are unable to use the brake on their own and so they are put into sacks and carried over by their elders.
