03/01/2015

I’m guessing that now that the tourist season is officially over, perks such as internet access are no longer considered a priority. In the past 36 hours, I am pretty sure I have only been able to connect for about four of those 36 hours…even now, I am working in MS Word so that I can stay up-to-date on my entries, and will transfer this over when, and IF, the internet ever comes back on.  This lack of connectivity could also have something to do with the very rainy weather we have been experiencing the past two days, that also seemed to hold off until the remaining tourists had made their way back to their respective countries…leaving me rather isolated and having to, once again, repress my feelings of angst towards the NGO that had promised me work while here. What a completely different experience this would have been had that worked out, and what a shame that it didn’t. Still, I do my best to remain positive and try to make light of the situation…sometimes more successfully than others.

I am now sitting in my room, wrapped up in blankets, listening to the rain fall outside, mixed in with the occasional singing by the construction workers next door building yet Another hotel. Never in my life have I seen so many hotels in one location…it’s even worse than the Starbucks back in the States! I was speaking with a shop owner the other day who grew up in Pokhara. He reminisced about how you used to be able to look down on the valley from atop a nearby hill and see forests and never ending trees. Now, all you see are buildings. He noted how the pollution is a lot worse, too, and seemed to wish for some way to stop this incessant growth…but how? It is a very popular tourist destination, meaning, in a country where I believe something like 70% of their economy relies on tourism, it is a very attractive spot for locals to come in an effort to make money.

I watched a documentary not too long ago about the tourist industry in Thailand. At one of the hotels, there was a reported 7 staff members for every guest…which made for great customer service, but poor income potential. I suspect the same is true for here. The streets are lined with one shop after another, after another, all selling the same stuff. And I can’t imagine that the hotel industry would be able to generate much of a profit…there are just too many of them! This will only get worse, too, as it looks as though they will be building an international airport in Pokhara in the not too distant future. That’s the thing about humans…we seem to destroy the very things that we love just so we can all get a piece of the pie. I really do think that humans are the cancer of this world. We are devouring this world, our resources, cutting into the landscape to cater to our growing demands. It’s ugly, and I wish there were some way to make it stop.

In other news…it was interesting living with a family who was privy to the upper echelons of society. Both here and in Lebanon, I felt like I had fallen into a time capsule and taken back to an era where women’s main role was to support that of the man and home, with the hobby of endless socialization. I am pretty sure 90% of their time was spent attending social gatherings, and being seen at all of the “happening” scenes. In Lebanon, I had about 3 teas a day, all at different homes of friends and family. Here, however, the two events I was invited to were 1) a traditional cultural Russian music performance (which I am still trying to figure out as half of the songs were sung in Spanish – I appeared to be the only one to catch on to this, and wondered what the Prime Minister, who was also in the audience, would have thought if he had known what was going on), and 2) the opening of a new North Face store. You would not believe how many cameras were there, and I am pretty sure the Sherpa’s (the family I was living with) knew everyone in attendance. We were served latte’s and/or sushi, and spent several hours walking around socializing while looking at merchandise in a shop, nice as it was, that was probably only 20m x 20m. I do believe appearances are important over here, but I also feel a lot of it is just a façade. Sort of like when the SAARC conference was to take place, and about a week before the representatives from the various countries arrived, the “beautification” process began. Trees and flowers were planted, grass watered, trash picked up, fences painted, new street lights installed, all with the understanding by the locals that as soon as the SAARC conference was over, all of these repairs would be neglected, and the city would return to its previous state of disrepair. I noticed this, too, as whenever the Sherpa’s would take me out, we would always go to fancy restaurants, or if I was tagging along on errands for whatever reason, I would be invited into the more showy places – for example, a jewelry shop that specialized in gold artifacts made by hand on site – but encouraged to wait in the car whenever we seemed to visit the…”less promising” places. While I did find it fascinating to watch gold being melted, poured, beaten, and buffed into bracelets (I was probably the only one in the place who was more interested in the process than the actual product), I would have been equally as interested in tagging along to the hole-in-the-wall shop that was fixing a light fixture. But, I was under the distinct impression that maintaining an image of affluence was of greater importance to them, so I went along with it as I can assure you, I have had a fair number of encounters with the less glamorous parts of Nepal.