Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  Thanks in part to the global homogenization of this subtle but virulent form of colonialism, Nepal’s seemingly endemic problems are not especially unique. You give us your problems, we give you ours. The nature of migration only intensifies the dynamic. Adventure tourism: an outflow of the affluent into the tribal world. Immigration: a ravenous inflow of diversity into the established mainstreams. Two sides of the same postmodern coin. Yes, the gap between the haves and the have-nots in Kathmandu is widening, but that’s true for London and New York, Moscow and Zurich, as well. Okay, Kathmandu is filthy and traffic-clogged, but compared to Mexico City or Bangkok or New Delhi it is downright user-friendly. Yes, the environment is under pressure, but on a day-trip stroll up the Annapurna trail, which hosts fifty thousand trekkers a year, I spotted only a single gum wrapper littering the footpath. Yes, the culture is eroding, but so is France’s, so is everybody’s as they ingest American pop culture, the most narcotic substance in the galaxy.

  Still, it’s tricky, this not-always-sincere experiment called development. Once you let the Coca-Cola out of the bottle, the landscape is going to change regardless of any effort to preserve it, but how much for the better and how much for the worse? Suppose you run a charity and decide to bring electricity to all the monasteries in the ancient kingdom of Mustang, which have somehow managed to survive without a hot plate for hundreds of years. Is this good or bad? What are the social parameters for such dramatic change? Hard to say. You want to help, but what if you hurt? Suppose you’re an overconfident altruist who wires the Tengboche monastery at the base of Everest for electricity, yet maybe you overlook the necessity for a fire extinguisher on-site, and you forget to instruct the monks in the proper use of space heaters and circuit breakers, and the old monastery burns to the ground (this actually happened). Gosh, that’s bad, we can all agree, but the intention isn’t, is it? In 1992, almost 95 percent of Nepal’s energy needs were still being met by firewood. The percentage hasn’t decreased that much in the intervening years, despite the fact that this is the country with the greatest hydroelectric potential per square mile in the world. Burn a monastery, save a forest?

  In the eighties, Tengboche became something of a microcosm of what adventure travel had done to Nepal. During the high season, a thousand trekkers a day were slogging through; monks would throw off their robes and join the expeditions, and the lama was hard-pressed to deal with the situation. Today, Tengboche, rebuilt since the 1989 blaze, is no less a freeway. Apple pie, peanut butter, brandy, satellite uplinks, fax machines, Everest has it all, and somewhere along the trail the concept that there are pure places that require a pure presence from us became too heavy a load.

  “Democracy,” proclaims Laird, “has unleashed the floodgates of desire without any of the structures to fulfill them!”

  “What?” I stare at my immoderately eloquent companion over a glass of local vodka. “What did you say?” Laird, I think, must stand in front of the mirror and practice these lines.

  Nepal’s infant democracy, in fact, has been the photographer’s ticket to ride. From the eighteenth century until 1950, power in the kingdom was jockeyed between two dynastic families, the Shahs and the Ranas—not exactly a civic-minded bunch. An India-sponsored mini-revolution ended with the creation of a coalition government in 1951. Nine years and ten governments later, the king turned off the lights—too much hubbub in Nepal’s fledgling democracy—and the lights stayed off until 1990, when Nepal’s outlawed political parties decided they were destined for a greater existence than life underground. Throughout the country there were marches, protests, the mass defiance only ballooning when police began to shoot demonstrators. On April 6, the Movement to Restore Democracy rallied two hundred thousand people, who surged down Durbar Marg toward the royal palace, where the police opened fire. Weaving in and out of the demonstrators on his scooter was Tom Laird, documenting the bloodiest day in the history of modern Nepal. The official death toll was ten, including a young British tourist. Laird, however, had photographed the police beatings and had heard, as many had, of the police hauling off truckloads of bullet-riddled bodies. His images of the atrocities were broad-sheeted and by the following morning pasted on walls throughout the city. Several days later the good King Birendra “converted” to democracy, elections followed in ’91, and the new prime minister, G. P. Koirala, mentioned that Nepal owed the brave photographer a favor. Name it, said the PM. Taken by surprise, Laird couldn’t remember his dream-come-true list and declined the offer.

  After a sleepless night, Laird got back in touch with Koirala. In 1952, the Swiss geologist Toni Hagen had been the first and virtually the last Westerner permitted to visit Mustang, the magical high-desert valley north of the snow peaks on the old salt-trade route between Tibet and India. But with the end of the Cold War, the gates to off-limits border areas were being cautiously unlocked by erstwhile foes. That spring of 1991, Dick Blum, the well-heeled chairman of the American Himalayan Foundation, a fellow who apparently cannot be identified without the encumbering appellation “the husband of Dianne Feinstein,” became the first queri to see Mustang in decades.

  Laird wanted to go to Mustang too, record the antiquities with his camera. Done, said the PM, have a nice trip, and Laird became the first foreigner ever to live in Mustang for a year, and the first to get a permit to cross the border to visit Mount Kailas, Tibet’s most sacred peak. For years, the tribal people of Mustang had been begging the Nepalese government to open up the valley for a slice of the touristic pie, and now it happened, the ancient kingdom intimately married to the world for better or worse, richer or poorer, in no small part because of Laird’s collaboration with Peter Matthiessen, who later joined the photographer in Mustang and wrote the text for the published collection of Laird’s mesmerizing images, East of Lo Monthang. But nobody, not even the rabidly sensitive Laird, can go to such far-flung places without dragging in the microbes of transformation. His own demand to prohibit the use of outside porters, he tells me, caused the price of wheat to double, and he frets, however belatedly, that Mustang would soon become an anthropological zoo.

  Nepalese politics have continued to be steadily unsteady, as befits a newborn democracy. In 1991 the Nepali Congress Party won a majority in the elections, but despite the dismantling of Marxist-Leninist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Communist Party of Nepal placed a red-hot second. Six years later, even as Laird and I sit in the Maya Pub, ballots for another election are being tallied, and the Communist Party is walloping the opposition.

  But there’s more, an ominous blossoming of extremism. Among the reds is a splinter group of pyscho-rad Communists who identify themselves as Maoists and broadcast nothing but contempt for their in-house comrades. Thus, in early 1996, to gear up for the forthcoming election, the lunatic faction announced it was starting a people’s war. For the last week, every time I picked up a Kathmandu newspaper, I was treated to alarming headlines about Maoists terrorizing voters and disemboweling local functionaries with Gurkha khukris.

  The geopolitics of tourism can tilt either way: the foreigner as valuable friend and ally (Tibet) or the foreigner as enemy, scapegoat, and pawn (Kashmir). “Is it true,” I ask Laird, “what I’ve been reading about the Maoists?”

  “Yeah.” He nods. For the moment at least, the guerrillas have been operating mostly in the jungles and in the midwest hill country, nontourist regions, though he recently heard about a Maoist demonstration at Jiri, the road head for the Everest trek. I had been told that the American embassy was under pressure from the Nepalese government not to publicize Maoist shenanigans, allegedly because it might complicate plans to launch a nationwide tourist campaign in 1998.

  “Is it true,” I asked the secretary of tourism and civil aviation, the affable D. P. Dhakal, who sat behind his desk in Kathmandu’s palatial parliamentary compound, jiggling his head in that curious way Nepalis have, “that you’re trying to start a tourist campaign over the top
of a Maoist insurrection?”

  “Tourism is a thing which is totally aloof from politics,” Dhakal said with the fine assurance of a man who works and lives in the capital of a country with a centralized government. “Yes, the Maoist thing grows, but it cannot be there forever. They did it for the elections. They did it for attention.” Surprisingly, Dhakal cited the “positive” example of Sri Lanka, how the violence there was never targeted at the tourists, who flew in indifferent to the bloodshed and headed straight for the beaches. “Here, even if we have an insurrection,” he said, “the foreigners will not be affected.”

  When the minister sighed that “the attention of the media gets attached disproportionately” to negatives, I mustered a thimble of sympathy and let the whole bizarre mess of disconnection drop, wondering instead what sort of push he was involved in to inaugurate Visit Nepal ’98. (Motto: “A sustainable habitat through sustainable tourism.”) He shrugged and sat back cavalierly in his chair. “Our society is not built up to do our homework,” he said. “Even for me, I can only plan for this week, not next week. Revolutions here are only planned fifteen, twenty days in advance. Tourists are going to come anyway.”

  As I left his office, Dhakal had urged me to put the Maoist situation into the “proper perspective,” whatever that perspective was.

  The Maya Pub closes down around us, people stumbling for the door, and we’re back on the streets of Thamel, swarmed by insomniac teenage rickshaw drivers. “Come on,” says Laird. “Let’s drive around.”

  We glide down twisting alleys, lines of freshly outdated election posters crisscrossed above us like the city’s forgotten laundry. Laird points out the former Cabin Restaurant, infamous during the Nepal gold rush for its hashish menu. We cruise Freak Street, park, duck through a doorless entrance, and Laird proudly shows me where he used to live in the Third Eye Lodge, only now this section of the hostel has fallen down, his room a pile of rubble. Taped to a remaining wall is a photocopied advertisement: Attention Adventure Seekers. Karnali Video Expedition—My name is Matthew from Australia. Our expedition requires over-the-top enthusiasts who don’t mind getting themselves bent out of shape. I guarantee this adventure will be well catered.

  Yeah, right. Fly-by-nighters like this drive the more responsible agencies nuts. “Things are going down-market,” Steve Webster told me. He’s the director and sales manager for Mountain Travel Nepal, one of the oldest and most reputable firms in the city. “The free market has allowed anybody to open up an agency, so quality has eroded. People are running trips out of their homes—no overhead, one or two groups a year, very little profit—and that seems to be enough for them.” Webster wants less mass-tourism backpackers, more top-end clientele. “We’d prefer to see fewer people paying more money,” he said, “because it has less impact on the environment and less impact on the culture.”

  “You can’t imagine how far away this was in 1972,” says Laird, peering into the dark at his memories, his face aglow with nostalgia. “Santana was booming out on the street the first night I spent in this room. You can look around and just see those fucking psychedelic hippies coming out of the corners. We were so desperate to get somewhere. When you came over and saw those mountains, that was it, this was the end of the world.”

  Ah, Freak Street, the epicenter of the countercultural fantasy, the Haight-Ashbury of Asia, where the Rock and Roll Raj reclined on pillows of dreamy hash, having traveled the overland route from Europe across the Near East and Middle East to the Buddhist heart of the biggest playground ever. Freak Street, where yesterday’s hippies came to lose themselves in one set of myths and coincidentally started creating another. Shiva’s Slaves Motorcycle Club, the long-haired brothers astride Indian-made Enfields. Peace Corps puppies over-assimilated into goofy enlightenment. Dharma-droids and born-again Buddhists. Hump-a-Yeti Trek Agency. Too-Loose-to-Trek Outfitters and Guides. What fun to be a ne’er-do-well in Kathmandu. If you were a freak afoot in the world in, say, 1968, this is where you stopped, this was the end of an imaginary beginning, and there was nowhere else to go unless you were in some profound way damaged by your own restlessness: China and its Cultural Revolution, Southeast Asia and its wars—too far fucking out for this world or any other.

  Kathmandu became Asia’s emblematic antithesis to Vietnam and the lurid Conradian lust for darkness, the apparent antidote for all the bad knowledge Western civilization seemed to be coughing up like blood clots. Light was Kathmandu’s essence. Butter lamps instead of napalm. Puja instead of paranoia. Here in Kathmandu the exotic was timeless and transcendent, immune to complacency, inherently hospitable (and therefore inherently exploitable), hinting of eternal life, in serene opposition to the exotic as a hostile plunge toward the death of the soul. Apocalypse not now or ever. That was Kathmandu’s self-defined identity, its embracing presence, and it made perfect sense to blond-haired kids raised on The Dharma Bums, the Beatles, the draft, the dope. You could get a room for less than a dollar a day, a bowl of dal bhat cost pennies, and the reefer was like a spiritual can-opener, prying open the tin of your consciousness to the full pulse of the sublime, mystical weirdness of the place. “Another willing convert,” wrote Gita Mehta in Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East, “to the philosophy of the meaningfully meaningless.”

  Finally Laird scoots me back to the Kathmandu Guest House, legendary for being the Ritz of the downscale queris all those many years ago. The proprietor has just built a deluxe hotel in Nagarkot, on the ridgeline above the city, which gives you some idea about how eagerly the citizens of Kathmandu have invested themselves in the adventure travel phenomenon. Dawn comes with a village sound track—­roosters crowing, laundresses gossiping in the courtyard below my window, the interminable wake-up call of the cuckoo bird—and when I emerge, bleary-eyed, for breakfast, the hallway is blocked by student types lined up in front of the computer room, waiting to e-mail home, and an ensemble of Eurotrash slackers have hunkered down on the vinyl-covered couches in the lounge, their expressionless faces turned toward the television, watching an Elvis Presley movie.

  The Sacred

  From the Kathmandu Post, May 22:

  “MORE FANFARE THAN DEVOTION MARKS

  BUDDHA’S ANNIVERSARY.”

  “It is not only the political chaos which hindered the people of the land of the Buddha from celebrating heart and soul the 2,541st birth anniversary of the Lord Buddha, the light of Asia. . . . Most of the pilgrims at Swayambhu were there to freak out than to celebrate the holy day. Vendors selling cold drinks, music albums, pictures and handicrafts got prominence than devotees, and the stalls were the focus than the stupa. People’s indifference to Buddhism here will certainly lead our existence to the pit, a monk complained.”

  In the quirky English of the subcontinent, the lament still sounds all too familiar. Even the divine takes it in the cosmic balls when insular kingdoms get drop-kicked out of their pasts into the age of globalism.

  On the outskirts of Kathmandu is a modest hill called DevBhumi, Home of the Gods, and it lifts the shrine of Swayambhu toward the nearby heavens, which reproduce the immensity of the stupa, magnifying and multiplying the dome of whiteness into the most soul-boggling horizon on the planet—the snow peaks of the Himalayas. The land of the Eight Thousands, blasting up from sea level five miles into the atmosphere. And all those divine wannabes—countless other mountains exceeding 20,000 feet—tightly accordioned into a crest known as the Roof of the World. Roof of your mind is more like it.

  This is Nepal, where you climb a hill to expose yourself to the sacred, not shelter yourself from the profane—not Tuscany, where you might reasonably expect to find a fortress atop this breast of land jutting skyward off the valley floor. Kathmandu—never actually invaded, never actually colonized—has been forever too preoccupied with its conversation with the gods to have bothered much with defending itself against the material designs of men. Three million deities, or 30 million, or even, say some texts, 330,0
00 million of them in the Hindu pantheon, not to mention Buddha and the bodhisattvas or countless trickster woodland spirits in need of constant propitiation. “It’s like Greek mythology,” I heard Dubby Bhagat, another one of the city’s resident infatuees and a manager at the Everest Hotel, say, “only it’s happening now. That’s the fantasy we should be selling.” Karma, not cappuccino.

  DevBhumi is where I’m headed this muggy afternoon to do something Kathmandu’s expatriate community seems loath to do, which is walk, walk anywhere in the urban morass, sucking in a dun-colored haze, the diesel fumes and the wood smoke and the dust and the atomized holy cow shit all bottled up in the valley’s thermal inversion to plunge Kathmandu’s air-quality index to a level synonymous with black lung disease. But even polluted Kathmandu has rivers of eucalyptus purity running through its metropolitan groves, downdrafts of alpine freshness, the brisk exhalations of mountains, that leave me buoyant on my grateful march through the ever more endangered enchantment of the city.

  I step past the rug merchants idle on their stoops, past Pilgrims Book House, its windows full of trekking maps, and the Himalayan clinic whose lucky American doctor has just choppered down from an inaccessible part of the Tibetan border with Dick Blum following a walkabout around Mount Kailas. What fun to be a do-gooder in Kathmandu. Helicopters, advocates argue, don’t leave footprints—but they’re infamous for collateral damage: not just ruined potato fields-cum-landing pads or hopping up to altitude without proper acclimatization, but the troublesome compression of experience, like the one-day junket a French television station sponsored for its advertisers. They flew the clients in from Paris, helicoptered them up to the base of an almost twenty-thousand-foot peak for breakfast, whisked them down for a riverside lunch among elephants and one-horned rhinos, and then brought them back to dinner at a Kathmandu monastery, where the lamas chanted prayers for the executives’ long lives.