Thoughts on Tourism in Nepal

The concept of tourism is a strange one. Tourists go to a different country for new experiences but, at least in Nepal, the majority of them only seem to do what tourists are supposed to do. They take a flight over the Himalayas and go paragliding in Pokhara and ride on an elephant in Chitwan and go bungee jumping in a canyon and they walk around the tourist district and buy felt crafts and hemp shirts and other things that no local Nepali people would buy, ever. They see something different than their home countries but also something that doesn't have a lot to do with Nepal. Tourists seem to live in their own bubble-culture.

There's nothing wrong with tourists- they support the economy of a country that needs it and they do experience new things, but sometimes they seem to skim over the character of a country and try to fit it neatly into a pretty image. They're not always fully aware of the things around them. Nepal isn't really captured by nice kukuri knives and prayer flags and pashmina scarves and clean cafes that serve "Nepali tea". When the average tourist goes home and tells their family and friends how they've fallen in love with Nepal, they're just kidding themselves. Real Nepal with its living standards, complete lack of women's rights, caste system, arranged marriages, maoist violence, and trash and pollution problems is much harder to fall in love with than sunrises on snowy mountain peaks and pretty temples and comparatively cheap prices. It's still possible to love Nepal with all of its flaws, it's just much more difficult. And it takes lots of time and experiences with the local Nepali people to learn how.

I haven't come to like or accept the problems of Nepal I mentioned, but I've come to love the landscape in all its diversity and the noisy, colorful, crowded and dangerous buses and the natural goodness displayed by a vast majority of the people and the dhal baat twice a day and the flow of the traditional kurta sural and most of all the determination and hopefulness of the people even when the odds are all stacked against them. I love Nepal even as an average local experiences it, cold showers and all. And in that way I think I can mean it when I say I'm in love with Nepal, because I recognize its flaws in their entirety and feel them outweighed by its strengths.