Thursday, November 02, 2006
Kathmandu again and again
We have landed into the capital of Nepal, Katmandu. To keep matters simple we headed straight for the tourist district for at least the first night. Tom Carter ( www.moonmountainadventures.com) had told me it had changed vastly since I lasted visited in 1972 and 1983. So I was prepared for a change. And it had changed. The urban sprawl is one huge dusty bowl in what once was a pristine valley with a small town in the middle. The tourist section has changed from one main tourist drag to several streets completely dedicated to selling mounds of cheaply duplicated Tibetan dorjes, prayer wheels, pashmina shawls, dope smoking paraphernalia, plastic look alike turquoise jewelry (old stone, Madame), hippie clothes galore, Buddhas and Taras by the thousands, in resin, metal, plastic, gold, you name it. The shops are cutely piled next to each other, jammed tight, with a permanent festive air for the benefit of the tourists, who happily trundle around buying bracelets, munching on chocolate cake, croissants and apple crumble, after arduous days of trekking in the Himalayas. The party is complete with New Age fusion music and hundreds of internet cafés and restaurants with Thai, Japanese, and Italian cuisine. I suspect Tokyo might have been like this fifty years ago. It's gay, pretty, and inviting. The hawkers badger you but it's innocuous enough. The beggars are not too pushy and it all looks like a third world "happy" hippie Disneyland.The air is comfortable and cool and the tourist district of Thamel is relatively well kept, so it makes you want to believe that all is well. Relax and shop.
Patrick is from Liverpool and takes year long vacations from his job as a street worker with drug addicts. He has also spent meaningful amounts of time in Vietnam, Ethiopia and India. He helps us out by showing us a much cheaper hotel on the second night, and what pitfalls to avoid and where to buy better quality cheaper goods from real Tibetan refugees. He speaks a bit of Nepali. He tells us about the seedier side. Most of the young kids on the street are sniffing glue and begging to support the habit. The young mothers begging with nursing babies, ask for milk powder (insist they don't want money) and when well meaning tourists buy them a $10 bag of powdered milk, they sell it back to the grocery store it came from for hard cash. The teenagers who harangue the female tourists for money use it on cheap Indian heroin and African cocaine (what do I know? I thought it was from South America) and ecstacy. African men ostensibly setting up a missionary network are actually setting up drug distribution networks, and somehow using Nepal as a gateway to get immigration into Europe. Tourists are flying in from Europe via Bangkok to get cheap sex in the massage parlours. Indian shopkeepers sweet talk and seduce young blonde female tourists traveling alone, have a fling and then sell them fake jewelry at exorbitant prices. All the prices are inflated 3-4 times more than a reasonable profit - and tourists often fall for it when they only have 48 hours here. They take home all kinds of goodies, mass produced in China but with labels showing "Made in Nepal". The Chinese are buying out hotels opened by Tibetan refugees, and they are moving onto other businesses. My kids are infatuated by all the goodies for sale, but the novelty wears off. Patrick takes us to a jewelry factory just behind our hotel. A dismal dark stairway with loose planks, stinking of old urine and garbage, takes us up to a hovel of a workshop where two men work at making huge silver rings with humongous pieces of coral and turquoise suitable for the fingers of the well to do. I consider buying a large quantity for resale and fund raising cutting out the middle men, and giving the workers a fair price. But this raises six hundred other questions, ones I cannot answer because I cannot fathom them.
