NEPAL KHABAR

A few years ago, two young girls were on a bus to Kathmandu, having heard about a job there. They heard a story on the radio about a young girl named Lakshmi who’d been lured from Nepal to India thinking she’d get a job, only to be trafficked into a brothel called the Happiness House.“Because they heard the story on the radio, they realized they were being trafficked.”Lakshmi was not a real girl, but a character from a novel called Sold, which was being read on the radio as part of a trafficking prevention program by the Didi project, a nonprofit dedicated to providing educational opportunities for women and children in Nepal.Lakshmi’s story had an impact: The girls on the bus recognized they were in the same situation.“Because they heard the story on the radio, they realized they were being trafficked,” said Jane Charles, co-founder of the nonprofit Stolen Youth, which raises funds to support the rescue and recovery of sexually exploited youth. “They had the bus driver stop and got off and went home.”

Nepal recently to disburse funds collected from enthusiastic friends in Norway, I encountered the harsh realities of a partly-ruined country with an ambivalent mixture of amazement and disappointment.What was amazing was the irrepressible optimism and indestructible survival instincts of Nepalis rebuilding homes and homestays with their bare hands in a race against a second monsoon out in the open. They were working on their potato and rice terraces surrounded by scarred mountain slopes and dangerous rockfalls, or selling fresh produce and juice from bicycle trolleys to tourists slowly returning to Thamel.But I was also saddened and disappointed by the slow pace of the state bureaucracy, making life in devastated towns and villages much harder than it needed to be in the year since the earthquake.The donations were from a fund-raising campaign in Norway called ’Reis Nepal’ with its double meaning in Norwegian: ’raise Nepal’s economy’, as well as ’travel to Nepal’. The campaign motto was: ’From one mountain people to another’.

Organising the effort were people with backgrounds in international sustainable tourism and development assistance. We know well how the multipliers and ripple effects of tourism can quickly reach out into poor communities and generate a long value chain in many other sectors: transportation, agriculture, forestry, fishing, food distribution.Nepal’s tourism, once an efficient, enlightened model for the entire world via its pioneering sustainable mountain trekking and lowland safaris, has now been aptly described as ‘a race to the bottom’.

On the first day of my trek north of Pokhara, when presented with a bill for a night in a perfectly comfortable, clean, friendly homestay with solar heated showers and a knockout view of the Annapurna range, the problem stared me in the face: the bill amuounted to Rs 500 for my trekking guide and myself. Five dollars. It simply does not add up.
While there have been great strides in conservation like the Annapurna Conservation Area, the crux of the matter is that tens of thousands of hard-working Nepalis receive only a pittance of the true value they provide affluent visitors. This is not sustainable. Tourism in Nepal, like some other countries, suffers from a dramatically undervalued nature capital. Adding to Nepal’s woes is that its own government underappreciates the importance of tourism.

At an altitude of 2843m, the small airstrip here has earned a reputation as one of the most extreme and dangerous airports in the world. The single runway is narrow, short and sloped. Miss the runway by a few metres and the plane would hit a mountain.

“After you cross the river there is no turning back, you have to land,” said Pramod Poudel, a Tara Air pilot who has flown hundreds of these flights to Lukla.

Carved out of the side of a mountain, the airport was built by Sir Edmund Hillary in 1965 – 12 years after he became the first man to conquer the world’s highest peak – to help the local Sherpas spur development in the impoverished area.

Now what once was a dirt strip is one of Nepal’s busiest airports, the Tenzing-Hillary Airport – named as well for Hillary’s climbing partner Tenzing Norgay. The thousands of mountaineers and trekkers who visit the Everest region have to fly to the airport if they want to avoid a daylong bus trip from Katmandu and five days of trekking to reach here.

The airport has handled up to 79 flights on one day – far beyond the acceptable capacity for such a facility, said Rinji, the airport’s air traffic controller, who, like most Sherpas in the Everest region, uses only one name.