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Opening the doors to the world and tourists has brought not only advantages but also disadvantages to Nepal for instance. Tourism and foreign aid have brought not only dollars, deutsche marks, sterling pounds and yen,but also its share of environmental pollution or as the Germans prefer to call it: Umweltverschmutzung.
The ungainly oxygen cylinders, the PVC waste and the synthetic wrappings and empty bottles and other refuse lie strewn along the expedition routes, waiting for the non-existent garbage disposal team to come and pick them up. Tragically enough, in this case, we have only isolated cases of a few people in the West making a lot of noise in the international media-circuits and achieving and doing very little to keep the Himalayas clean.For the story of pollution in the Himalayas is as old as the history of mountaineering,when the first climbers from Europe came to 'conquer' the highest peaks in the world.
Pertemba Sherpa, the Nepalese who climbed Everest thrice, is of the opinion that the "oxygen cylinders left behind by Edmund Hillary in 1953 are still there:intact". Hillary himself said that "there are an estimated 100 empty oxygen bottles, all spread around" in a Newsweek interview on May 3,1993.
Climbers flocking to follow Hillary's footsteps have been carelessly dropping their plastic food wrappers, tins and empty gas containers all the way up to the Everest summit. Sir Edmund was of the opinion that that "the pollution problem was serious even on the South Col of Mt.Everest, and he thinks that legislation alone will not help to combat pollution. Prospective climbers should be educated about the need to keep the Himalayas clean. They should be taught to bury their rubbish and not throw it about". But burying plastic, styreopor, bottles,and other PVC products in the Himalayas isn't the right answer either. Organic wastes might be better buried so that they can decompose in a natural way, but the rest of the civilisation`s garbage has to be brought down by all expeditions and trekking groups.
The most popular trekking jaunts in Nepal are: Everest, Helambu, Gosainkund, Langtang, Jomsom, Dharund and lately Dolpo, which has been raised to new heights by the writer Peter Mathiessen in his book "The Snow Leopard". In all these routes the trekking parties and mountaineering expeditions have in the past been leaving behind a trail of tins,cans,scraps of paper,rags,broken bottles,glass,wastes of the field kitchen,trash and garbage of all sorts. The routes in the Solukhumbu area,especially from Lukla via Namche Bazaar to the Everest base Camp or Kala Pathar (5545m)are visited by many international groups during the trekking seasons, and the groups range from 10 to 30 persons.Sherpas and porters are more than twice this number, and in some cases the high altitude yaks and mules carry the provisions. Besides the waste mentioned above, bottles and plastic bags are still used by the alpine residents.
"The empty bottles of our group were taken away immediately by the Nepalese", says Eckart Tardeck of Munich and adds,"but in a short time they will have no more use for this kind of garbage, and the bottles will surely be crashed, forming as danger to the barefoot local people."
There's no denying that if this trend catches on, the trash of modern Western civilisation littered in the Himalayan landscape will become a permanent factor.
Some settlements like Namche and Phortse have forests that are alarmingly decimated, and the high terrain around the settlements has to be protected from becoming bare mountain tracts (karsts)and also to prevent landslides and rock-streams occurring. Moreover the young trees and shrubbery have to be sheltered from the yaks,sheep and mountain goats , as they have the habit of devouring any bit of greenery.
Soldering or Menial Work: Living in the Himalayan environment in poverty means the survival of the fittest at the expense of Nature.The trekking agencies might in the future bring their own kerosene but what chance does the average poverty-stricken Nepalese hillman have of affording to buy a biogas-plant to cook food for his family, when he cannot even give his children a decent meal, leave alone clothing and education? What alternative does the Nepalese in the hills have other than to leave his family and go to the plains in the south in search of a menial job by lifting loads for rich merchants,or working in a factory at Biratnagar or elsewhere as a seasonal worker?No wonder the young and sturdy lads from the hill tribes of Magar, Gurung, Tamang, Rai and even Chettris dream of a career as a Gurkha soldier under the Indian tricolor or even under the Union Jack.
But not all young people are taken into the armies of Nepal, India and Britain. The rejects have to contend with looking after the ancestral farms or acting as porters for trekking tourists and expeditions. They have to be mobile, because only mobility, flexibility and physical prowress guarantees success in finding jobs and thereby surviving. There is a regular seasonal migration of the population of the Nepalese hill population to the paddy fields of the Terai, and even further towards the Indian subcontinent in search of a livelihood.
It has become the 'in' thing to do among the tourists of the richer northern hemisphere to travel to countries like Nepal and take photographs and thus document the poverty and helplessness of the people in the developing countries, to take shots of humans burning in the funeral pyres at the ghats of Pashupatinath,to prepare slide-shows on the "gaudy and macabre blood-sacrifices" at the Dakshin Kali temple, and to expose Nepalese and Tibetan children with running noses and and coy smiles. And it is no secret that the country being visited by the hordes of tourists are obliged to adapt to the delights, fantasies and whims of the tourists, with the result that there's a total sell-out of the touristic land.
The tourists, hotelliers and the tourism-industry determine what they want to buy from that country to the point of dictating the form and finishing of the article concerned. The Nepalese carpet industry is one such example, whereby the designs are dictated per fax to Kathmandu and the buyer has naturally the right to choose what he or she desires to buy for his or her living room in Munich, New York, Stockholm or Tokyo. "Pastel colours please, and no gaudy fire-breathing dragons and snow-lions, no auspicious mandalas. Just plain borders with perhaps a wee bit traditional patterns at the edges, in decent mauve or anthroposophic teints, please."
With wool imported all the way from New Zealand from sheep that grazed in the Canterbury Plains, and carpets produced in Kathmandu Valley, you have a true Tibetan to deorate your exclusive apartment. It shows that you're a cosmopolitan indeed.I prefer the gaudy old carpets with their traditional ethno designs, with all their pecularities for the sake of their originality, and not because "friends might find them shocking, loud and indecent", as though one would have to be ashamed to have a taste for bright traditional colours.
According to a spokesman of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, each climbing expedition leaves on average more than 500 kg of garbage. The NMA estimates that there are more than 500 kg of waste piled up at the Everest Base Camp, and on the highest mountain in the world. The trend at the moment is to call for a moratorium on Mt.Everest, so that the much-scaled mountain, and other well-trodden trails may recuperate from the adverse effects of pollution caused by humans.
Though the big expeditions that assault eight-thousanders have done their share towards Umweltverschmutzung in the peaks of Nepal, Sikkim, India and Pakistan, it is the masses who take part in treks to see the Himalayan countryside and the snows, who have been leaving wastes along the mountain trails.
The Nepal Mountaineering Association was able to bring down 16 tonnes of garbage from the Sagarmatha (Everest) base camp at a cost of 24 million rupees (560,000 dollars), which is an expensive waste transport,and according to an estimate there are 50 tonnes of waste up there. There are existing laws for climbers but no one seems to adhere to them.
Tourism with Insight: What are the negative aspects of tourism in Switzerland? This was the question raised sometime back in a research paper with the title "Alpensegen, Alptraum" (Alpine Blessing or Alpine Nightmare?) by a team headed by Prof.Jost Krippendorf(Bern)under the aegis of a world-wide UNO-analysis. According to the report "the local Swiss people think only of money now. There's no social cooperation.There are too many strangers,aliens,foreign visitors. The local scenery is vanishing and the towns bow to the pressure of tourism".This could hold for Kathmandu and Nepal in general.
During a recent visit to Kathmandu after a decade, I was surprised to see Thamel turned into a flourishing tourist bazaar with hotels, lodges, curio and carpetshops catering to the demands and delights of dollar-toting hotel guests and low budget tourists. It just wasn’t the Thamel of my college days at the Amrit Science college. Along the Jhochey Tole (Freak Street) you could hear, "Sir,dollar change?".The hasish shops had vanished.The Yin Yang tantric restaurant, a reminder of the hey-days of Hippiedom in the sixties and seventies still stood there. And according to an article in The Rising Nepal the number of drug-addicts in Kathmandu alone had risen to 15,000. Is this perhaps also a side-effect of the low budget tourist invasion? You have Nepalese organisations waging a losing battle against drug-abuse in Kathmandu.
Back to the Swiss report: the Alpine scenery and countryside has been raped in the last 30 years. An entire infrastructure of road networks and tunnels have been built across the alpine country with Swiss thoroughness.1200 ski-lifts, 500 ropeways and mountain-trains (the famous Glacier Express included)that transport 1.2 million tourists and holiday-makers.250,000 chalets and holiday-homes have shot up like mushrooms. In the Cantons Wallis and Tessin, every fourth apartment was turned into a holiday-home for the tourists for some weeks every year. This reminds me of the tendency to let "well-furnished flat for foreigners only"in Kathmandu due to the staggering incomes of the foreigners in comparison to their Nepali counterparts. The prices of all commodities have been shooting up in the Himalayan capital, and buying land cost a fortune in Kathmandu Valley in terms of Nepalese rupees.
On the other hand there are 350,000 Swiss people engaged in tourism. A Switzerland without tourism is unthinkable. There are 275,000 hotel beds in this beautiful alpine country today. Nepal needs its tourists too.
In 1986 there were 223,331 tourists in Nepal from India, USA, UK, West Germany, France, Japan etc. However, Nepal's tourism history is very young, because the Tourist Development Board is a little more than thirty years old and the Ministry of Tourism even younger. Nepal has a per capita gross national product of 140 dollars per annum. The Nepalese government tries to compensate by holding seminars and workshops on the protection of the Himalayan environment. But discussing ecological matters in Kathmandu and implementing them in the mountains are two different things. It's like blueprints for foreign-projects being planned abroad and implemented in a far-off developing country without the participation of the people actually concerned. To cite a noted and active Nepalese ecologist Dr.Hemanta Mishra, "There is no doubt that tourism has been a major cause of high rates of inflation in many remote parts of the country. This in turn antagonizes the local inhabitants who do not obtain any benefits from tourism.Tourism cannot survive in isolation. Rural communities should be encourages to produce goods and services locally".
Taking the example of Switzerland, Nepal too must make a gradual turn to strike a balance between economic interests and Nature, between agriculture and tourism, between local inhabitants and outsiders (visitors).The mountain communities should also profit through mountain tourism and not only the travel and trekking agencies based in Kathmandu. Otherwise, as far as the mountain-folks are concerned, the tourist invasion only disturbs the tranquility, serenity and socio-economic, cultural and age-old traditional lives of the various ethnic-Nepalese living in the countryside in a negative manner.
Perhaps the much acclaimed " Sanfte Tourism " (tourism with insight) is the answer towards a better use of the beauty of Nature. Trekking,climbing and sight-seeing tourism has come to stay in a country like Nepal whose only assets are a ravishingly beautiful countryside and a heroic, proud folk even though they belong to the category of the LDCs (least developed countries). The insight has come rather belatedly, but it is welcome nevertheless, for the Himalaya environment is not only the heritage of the Nepalese but also of mankind in general. As in the Alps, the thousands of tourists who trek to the fragile Himalayas do leave evidence of their encroachment upon the mountains in the long run. The problem is to keep the damage due to this encroachment at a minimum.
There are 50,000 tourists going on mountain treks to Nepal at the moment. What is alarming is that even the Nepalese government wants to step up the number to 1 million tourists by the year 2000. Even Toni Hagen,a Swiss geologist-turned-development expert suggests that it is the quality tourists who bring in the big money, and not the masses. The Annapurna area alone has 25,000 visitors every year. The lodges and hotels catering to the tourist's gastronomic delights have switched over from dal-bhat (rice-lentils) to pizzas, lasagne, hamburgers, vienna schnitzel and applestrudel, not to mention the video tastes of the tourists along the Himalayan trails. When the trekkers would take and show the same care and consideration that they do in their own forests and national parks, a lot of the damage could be averted and trekking-tourists would be welcome visitors in the Himalayan countries. The European or Western tourist must not forget that he or she has a pedagogic function even in the Himalayan environment of Nepal by setting an example of good trekking and woodmanship. The Nepalese will be only thankful if you give them an example worth emulating. What is the use of being a previleged Westerner with a better education and broadened horizon if you can't give a piece of your knowledge regarding hygiene, garbage disposal and good human relationship to the poor, uneducated, unpreviliged but well-meaning Nepalese? It is this 'insight' that you have that should distinguish you from other visitors to this country.
Whereas the European and American rules and regulations are strict and well-defined with negative-sanctions in the form of fines which naturally prevent people from becoming law-breakers, the forest departments in Nepal don't have the money to put up enough sign-boards in Nepali, English, French, German and Japanese, where the tourists and Nepalese may tresspass sensitive natural habitats or protected areas during certain seasons. After an international seminar on the "Protection of the Himalayan Environment" in Kathmandu in which 102 delegates from twelve countries took part, it was decided that governmental agencies,non-governmental organisations, and multilateral agencies should promote the establishment of small, integrated projects that fully involve the local communities in the planning and implementation.
The seminar also called for the propagation of the Kathmandu Declaration approved by the Union of International Alpinist Association (UIAA) in 1982 through different channels. It was advocated that a Code of Ethics be established by the mountain tourism industry throughout the Himalayan region to encourage "environmentally and culturally sound tourism". It was also suggested that community-based models for environmentally-passive commercial campsites for trekking parties, environmentally suitable lodges for tourists, trekkers and climbers, and shelter for porters at hazardous locations. An average of 50,000 foreign trekking and climbing tourists visit Nepal every year, and the Nepalese Tourism Ministry has set a target of over one million tourists. Even the late Toni Hagen admonished that this is dangerous for Nepal and suggested quality tourists who really bring in money and not all and sundry.
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