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| Stego's FAQ on Nepal travel v.3 - Polemics on social, political & ecologic issues 1/2 |
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Keywords: Ecology, Annapurnas
From: Phil Pucci <[email protected]>
| Date: 96.02.07 | (Id.: 64) |
Before arriving, my impressions (based on what I read in several travel guides like Lonely Planet) were that ACAP was very successful in its conservation efforts. It is supposedly responsible for reforestation efforts in the Annapurna region, construction of solar heated showers, and encouraging the use of kerosene. Well, I did not see much very kerosene being burned. It was mostly wood fires for cooking and water heating. This includes Thorong Phedi where wood has to be hauled up from the Manang region since it is below the tree line.
I think that the permit cost should subsidize kerosene costs for tea houses. It would also offer employment to porters and/or mule teams for transporting the fuel. I see good cause for banning the use of firewood for cooking or water heating.
In article <[email protected]>, Ed Douglas <[email protected]> wrote:
Without having the time to launch into what would
>be a 5,000 word dissertation, I was struck while in ACAP
>headquarters in Ghandruk(?) at how trekkers were being made to feel
>guilty about their activities, that they were responsible in a major
>way for environmental degradation in the area. However, despite
>seeing locals using wood where they were supposed to be using
>kerosene, I thought the Annapurna area to be well managed and in a
>sustainable way.
<snip>
> Tourists do
>have an effect on the Nepali environment but so do the Nepali people
>themselves. Just look at the population statistics over the last 40
>years. There is the real problem. I am not against educating
>trekkers and tourists -- it's obvioiusly important -- but taking
>responsibilty for our actions and policies is not just a lesson for
>Western cultures.
--
Phil Pucci [email protected] Milwaukee, WI USA
GeoLinks International ...the Telecommuting Specialists(tm)
Keywords: Ecology, Annapurnas
From: Frank F Kroger <[email protected]>
| Date: 96.02.08 | (Id.: 63) |
.....
> Well, I did not
> see much very kerosene being burned. It was mostly wood
> fires for cooking and water heating.
As far as I know ACAP supports the use of kerosene in an active way only in the route leading to Annapurna sanctuary, this is why you probably saw NO kerosend being used whatsoever on the Annap. Circuit.
>This includes Thorong Phedi where wood has to be hauled up from the
>Manang region since it is below the tree line.
As far as I know the firewood used at Thorun Phedi is shrubbery gathered from the hills around there. But wherever it comes from, responsible trekkers will avoid purchasing the products of the bakery at T.P. The oven uses up a lot of wood.
> I think that the permit cost should subsidize kerosene
> costs for tea houses. It would also offer employment to
> porters and/or mule teams for transporting the fuel. I see
> good cause for banning the use of firewood for cooking or
> water heating.
That is a good idea. I would also urge trekkers to forego hot showers and to be thoughtful in ordering food, ie ordering at the same time and ordering the same food as others at the lodge, which will reduce the amount of wood needed.
The only exception to foregoing hot showers is if the water is heated by pipes through the stove, but I have only seen this at one lodge in Chaumrikarkha (excuse my spelling) just below Lukla, it is the lodge with the solar collector on the roof, which by the way charges a 12v battery that supplies enough electricity for small bulbs which are adequate to read by.
The pipes through the stove system basically captures heat which would otherwise go up the chimney or into the room, so it heats water without any extra fuel being burned for that.
Cold washing won't kill you and on the Annapurna circuit there are several spots with hots springs, the best and hottest being at Tato Pani
(transl=Hot Water).
Frank
*Frank Kroger, [email protected], (volunteer) Seattle WA US
** World Neighbors: Strengthening the capacity of
*** marginalized communities to meet their basic needs.
**** "LOCAL PEOPLE ARE THE EXPERTS" http://www.halcyon.com/fkroger/wn.html
Keywords: Ecology, Polemic
From: Parvate Adhikari <[email protected]>
| Date: 96.06.09 | (Id.: 9) |
I stayed with a friend in a rented room near Sobhavagabati for a couple of days. I went for a walk on the bank of river Vishnumati one afternoon and I distinctly saw three events occuring at the same time: upstream were a group of people busy burning a corpse and eagles dancing in the air with the rising smoke; just a little distance downstream were the Jyapus washing the vegetables which were to be sold to the public; and further below were a group of Sadus taking a holy bath(?). Small children could be seen swimming and enjoying themselves all around. This event completely shattered me Bipul and I just didn't feel like eating for a week! I do not want to go further to write a big epic saga on this topic but a point needs to be made here: Has anyone given a damn care about what was happening?
Gone are the days for Kathmandu ( and Nepal?) 'in its prime'. Tourism is one of the main souces of national income. Its irritating to arrive somewhere and hear about its lime light about so and so many years ago.
Its not shocking to find in any tourist trail everything you touch turns out to be plastic."Hariyo ban Nepalko Dhan" is no more a reality.....I have asked many people whether they want to visit Nepal. The usual reply I get " 20 years ago- my dreamland- I would have loved to, but now after talking to people who have been there, I have to think all over again...." This just makes me sad and is indeed depressing.
Raju Adhikari
Keywords: Ecology, Polemic
From: Daniel <[email protected]>
| Date: 96.06.12 | (Id.: 221) |
I read your dire experience of Kathmandu. It's not surprising; it was inevitable and expected, then again you have to realise that Kathmandu is not Nepal. There' are lots of hypes and myths behind Nepal's image:
Hariyo ban Nepal ko dhan, Bir Gorkhali, and including the failed Zone of Peace and only the Hindu nation in the world. It's all bull, it;s all built in a false pretense and wrong ideology. Don't you think ? People see an external condition of Kathmandu and say its pathetic and bad, but if you are look into internal affairs of Kathmandu and Nepal as awhole its alarming. You and I are fortunate to see the both aspects two world and can distanguish differences, but most of our political leader have no idea or even if they do, they are overwhalm by problems of every kind.
Now, the question is what would be our contribution to Nepal. We may not be able to change everything that needs tobe changed, but we should be able to do some.
Hope things are going well for you out there.
Keywords: Polemic, Kathmandu, Miscelaneous
From: Atuladhar(?) <[email protected]>
| Date: 95.09.08 | (Id.: 94) |
To: IN%"[email protected]"
CC: IN%"[email protected]"
Subj: An article by a visitor to Nepal
(This article appeared in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette [Email address:
telegram@novalinkcom] on August 17, 1995. It is written by Richard Reeves, a syndicated writer.)
Time Traveling In Today's Nepal
by Richard Reeves
Traveling back in time has always worked wonders for novelists, but it is a privilege rarely given to those of us who toil in the more mundane regions of nonfiction. Going to Nepal, though, is time travel.
I do not mean that as a compliment. The world's highest country, a beautiful land under Mount Everest, was the real Shangri-la, a far least if you are old enough to remember the book and film "Lost Horizon."
Unfortunately, in real life and real time, nonfiction Nepal is a perverse tribute to modernity.
For a few minutes after you land in the valley that is Katmandu you are still in the global village, wired for Muzak, an archipelago of jumbo jets, international airports and Hilton hotels. "Beauty and the Beast," the Disney sound track, is piping through the terminal.
But the clock starts ticking back at the desk where you exchange dollars for rupiahs, 48,000 rupiahs to $1. The cashier has an old bigscreen IBM computer terminal, into which he dutifully taps my name, address and passport number, the usual stuff. Then he slips carbon paper between the pages of a tatty old pad and carefully writes the same information. I sign in a couple of places, being careful enough to press through to the last carbon.
Driving from the airport, we weave through bony cows (sacred) and the bodies of dead dogs with their legs pointing to the sky in rigor mortis, and through muddy piles of garbage, food for living scavenger dogs and rats, both of which are also sacred to Nepalese who believe in reincarnation. One of the signs along the broken road reads, "Leprosy Station."
There is a crew repairing the highway. Men with small hammers are squatting in the middle of the road, cracking football-sized rocks into sharp gravel. The smashed pieces are collected on round woven bamboo trays by boys, teen-agers, who walk around and shake the stone shards into potholes On the ride in, my 10-year-old daughter, Fiona, asked: "If they have a king, why doesn't he do more for his people?" It is the filthiest place she has ever seen - the streets, the buildings, the magnificent but crumbling temples of centuries past, and many of the people, too. It is, in fact, the filthiest place my wife, Catherine O'Neill, and I have ever seen, and she has worked in most of the world's refugee camps, most recently in Rwanda.
Yes, there is a king, a British-style head of state now, who went to Harvard for a year or so. And there is a brand-new democracy, controlled at the moment by the Communist Party. I would not read any planetary implications into that. As far as I can tell, the local communists have won favor by mentioning that the emperor has no clothes. True, their party symbol is still the hammer and sickle, but it is turned so that the handle of the sickle is horizontal; it looks like an ancient oil lamp, more religious as a symbol than what Lenin had in mind.
Life is improving a bit for the Nepalese, or at least, it goes on longer. The average life expectancy has reached 51 years, up from the 28-year average expectancy when the country opened itself to the world in 1951. At that time it was believed that only 224 Westerners (white Europeans and all that) had ever been in the valley.
The first of the waves of outsiders to come in here were U.N.
technicians and other good people, who tried, with limited success, to persuade the Nepalese to clean up their water, which begins high in the Himalayas as the purest in the world and is amoebic poison after it passes through a village or two.
Then came the mountain climbers, whose efforts complemented the old vision of untouched Nepal, innocent of the wicked and wasteful ways of the outside world. Then came the hippies and the druggies, puffing away in a country without laws - there are still "Freak Street" signs in the center of Katmandu - who did a pretty good job of turning many local young people into dazed walking wounded. Looters came, too, stripping the artifacts of ancient Buddhist and Hindu temples before locals realized the value of the great art of their ancestors.
In all but that art and some untouched nature, Nepal is a miserable place. The mortality rate for newborns is as high as 50 percent - in the countryside, half the babies die before they reach the age of 5. That has something to do with the fact that mothers in after-birth have traditionally been seen as "unclean." New mothers nursing their babies are often sent to live in cow sheds for two weeks. Great!
In Bhaktapur, a town of spectacular but decaying Hindu temples, a teen-ager came up and asked one of our sons, Colin O'Neill, where he was from.
"Los Angeles," said Colin.
"Hollywood!" said the kid. "Guns. Drugs." Fair enough. But this is a place where people's lives will be improved when it is saturated with American pop culture. It is not that our values are any better than theirs, but whatever else it does, lowest-common-denominator American entertainment shows people how the other half lives. Our films and television show the ways and things of modernity - and as romance and picturesque as Nepal may seem to some purists, its people will be better off with clean water and electricity.
Keywords: Polemic, Kathmandu, Miscelaneous
From: HyperGodar <[email protected]>
| Date: 95.09.08 | (Id.: 95) |
Walk the pavements in U.S. cities early mornings and take lungsful of breath and dwell on the sweetness in them that which "titillate" you into stopping your breath short. Wonder how Times Square would smell had not the smell of hot dogs and the sweet smelling people walking by masked the odor of the steam blowing up the sewers right unto passerbys.
Wonder where modernity has led the likes of Reeve! Try walking down a quiet street in NYC in broad daylight without a hint of fear and looking over your shoulders: fear of the quietitude is it? LOL!
Not that Kathmandu is Heaven on earth though Nepal certainly is; relatively ie for all things are relative I guess, even existence itself!
Keywords: Polemic, Miscelaneous
From: Manuel Freitas <[email protected]>
| Date: 96.01.24 | (Id.: 25) |
>quite disappointed. I think it is a trekker's paradise, if you do not plan
>to trek, there is not much to do. WE thought we could see the Himalayas,
>but from Kathmandu, you do not get to see any mountain at all, forget
>snow-capped peaks!. Pokhara is a better place, and many of the trekking trails
>start there, but again, if you do not trek, not much to do. The Himalayas
>were mostly covered by clouds and so remain unseen most of the rime, unless
>you hike up to the top of a foothill.
>The Chtwan National park waas a disappointment - all we got to see was legs
>of some deers and a peacock flying! And, to add to it all, our bus from
>Chitwan to Pokhara fell into a ditch. No one was hurt, the police just came
>and stood away and looked, the tour company told us they never heard of the
>accident since it was not a major one. I wondered was a "major" accident was
>- one in which everyone in the bus dies!
>
>- Swagata
>
Obviously Nepal is not the place for you, although I haven't heard anyone complain as much as you. Maybe you should have informed yourself before you went because if you did you would have known all of the above. But then again, not many tourists bother to do that. You see, despite being a travelers paradise, Nepal is not exactly a top tourist destination. There are no 5-star resorts, no chiq restaurants, and no luxury buses. Nepal IS a paradise :-)
You would have known that Pokhara was first discovered by the westerners, through the hippies in the 60's, as a great place to simple do nothing and smoke lotsa pot. And the beauty of all is that little has changed since then. But they do have things to do and see there if you're not a trekker.
There's the Bindi Basini Temple, The Tibetan Refugee Camp and school, great hangout places near and off the lake, excelent boat rides in the lake, Devis Falls, just to name a few. But the best of all, the beauty and peacefulness of it all.
And Kathmandu geez, to say that there wasn't anything to do and see is kinda absurd. All the temples and the view from Nagarkot. Don't tell me you're not into Temples and that Buddhism stuff because I'll ask you - What the hell were you doing in Nepal?!?!? I betcha never took a walk by the river at sunrise? Or wondered into the maze of back alleys just soaking up in some of the most untouched culture that there is left in this world?
The Chitwan National Park? I have to agree that that's a bit overated but most people who go there come from cities and places where their idea of wildlife is a packed steak in a supermarket stand.
But the important thing to keep in mind here is not so much what you see but more what is being done. Saving some wildlife species in an already dying world.
But what can you expect in 9 days? Maybe it's best this way, and leave Nepal for the true traveler. Remember to do your reading next time.
All the best,
Keywords: Polemic
From: Frank F Kroger <[email protected]>
| Date: 96.04.19 | (Id.: 73) |
The writer, Mr Chiranjibi Nepal, teaches at the Central Department of Economics TU.
<<<<<<<
REALITIES OF CHILD LABOUR
The rug industry today represents Nepal in miniature. Numerous ethnic groups from the Newars of Kathmandu valley to the Tamangs, who live on the valley rim, from the Brahmins and Chettris to the indigenous Dhimals and Tharus of the Terai have joined the industry.
Nepali carpet is not just a commodity, it is a human story that has a context -- poverty and a plot: the untiring efforts of people working to better their lives. Most of the Nepalese are poor. There is little cash in the rural economies and the carpet business brings cash to the nation, some of which goes directly into the hands of the people who need it most. It is the story of the people who brave the Himalayan wilderness to raise sheep and bring the wool down, and the sheen of the pile tells of the muscles that have driven the wooden paddles that wash the rug.
The families living close to subsistence are increasingly required to seek ways of supplementing their incomes. Some find work on neighbouring farms, fathers and older sons may be absent for some part of the year while they seek work elsewhere in the country or beyond. Hill and mountain people also work as traders, porters, some go into Nepalese, British or Indian armies.
Agricultural labour is the most common source of supplementary income for small farming families. No age bar. Most of the children are engaged in this work for three months in a whole year, the remaining nine months they are engaged in the carpet industry which is an alternative and secure job to survive on.
The subject of this article relates to the problems in carpet industry and child labour. For the past few years, some people and NGOs have launched false propaganda against the carpet industry of Nepal. The recent false propaganda has hit the industry tremendously.
At present the population of the country is increasing and on account of this many families are coming to the cities for employment. In comparison, the employment opportunities are not increasing. The problem, therefore, keeps on becoming more and more acute.
Despite all this, some elements who are ignorant of the details are using this industry as their political platform, and are exploiting the situation.
It is a fact that child labour is used, but it constitutes a very low per cent of the total work force employed in carpet making. This child labour is of two kinds -- the first being the children of the weavers themselves who join their parents and the second being the children who are sent by their parents due to compulsion.
This is such an emotional issue that anyone with little sense will be touched. Thus, they get a leverage by having financial, moral, social, political and media support. In the disguise of using child labour, exporters are termed as "Dinosaur" making carpets soaked in the blood of children. No one today is in a position to accept the need of these children to work in a country like Nepal, which is one of the poorest country of the world. Whose half the population sleeps without a square meal everyday, where rags are considered as an outfit and sky is the roof of the house.
We are supposed to run our society according to the eyes of a westerner. Is it justifiable to implement rules and regulations of developed countries to our poor and illiterate society? The citizens of western countries are living in a society, where almost everything is guaranteed by the state.
>From child birth till death ceremony, Federal Government takes care of its citizens. What social securities do we have in a country like Nepal? Even if we want to have them, where are the resources to pay for them? How can we have new schools to meet the needs of new arrivals in our country? This is just a small element, not to mention numerous other needs.
Our country today is standing at the same crossroad, as other countries where standing when the world wars were over. The country had to be built up. There was not enough support for living, forget the prosperity. And in those days, children worked in difficult and dangerous occupations such as mining. If one has to be honest to the extent of boycotting Nepali carpet for the alleged use of child labour, he should stop drinking, eating as well as wearing clothes. In all products coming trom poor and very poor countries, child labour is directly or indirectly being used.
Affluent countries have to worry about ozone layer and biodegradability of products. Who is going to worry about the plight of half the population of the world, mostly living in poor countries, Some ot them have no parents.
Some are guardian bread earners for their family. Whenever child labour is concerned only carpet industry is targeted because this product is consumed by the westerners. Most of them have never been to Nepal. They evaluate the conditions of our people, as they see their own. Some NGOs of our country have tried to exploit the situation to attract green dollars from affluent consumers.
At first they shout, launch false propaganda, demonstrate, against the carpet industry. They take photos and send them to western countries to get money in the name of child labour.
On the other side, that labour will become Khate living in the footpaths and streets of the big cities. Their future then is to become robbers, thieves, pickpockets. In our country, on the one side the number of NGOs are increasing and on the other side Khate too are increasing. That is why Mr Leslie Sroh of Rugnews, USA, said that one picture of one child on one loom printed on any day in newspapers, will wash away all the social welfare work done by the carpet industry for such people in a year. So, now, we are bound to make our goods as the western consumers want them to be made.
Otherwise, they will boycott it, our foreign currency reserve will decline, and our country will be spotted as a 'Dracula' wallowing on the blood of children.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
posted by:
*Frank Kroger, [email protected], (volunteer) Seattle WA US
** World Neighbors: Strengthening the capacity of
*** marginalized communities to meet their basic needs.
**** "LOCAL PEOPLE ARE THE EXPERTS" http://www.halcyon.com/fkroger/wn.html
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© J. Mário Pires, 4 Mar 97
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