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Nepal on the high road to modernity
By Chris Johnson

NEPAL - Building a 100-kilometer long highway up the world's deepest gorge between 8,000-meter peaks seems as impossible as conquering Mount Everest once did. But Nepalese soldiers, shoveling uphill from Pokhara, have already whittled 73 kilometers and a week's walk off the Around Annapurna, Nepal's most popular trek and a major source of income for local families and Nepalese investors.

A Nepalese army commander overseeing a road building crew near Galaswar told Asia Times Online that it had taken 1,200 soldiers 18 months to build the road from Beni to Galaswar, and from there to Jomson, the site of a military base and a deluxe new resort, will take another four or five years. Officials in the capital Katmandu say that it's the beginning of a Himalayan highway that could turn a 10-day hike into a one-day drive, connecting the billion person markets of India and China, but at the same time endangering Nepal's homespun trekking industry and the quietude of the world's apex.

"It will have both positive and negative effects," says Tek Bahadur Dangi, chief of the Nepal Tourism Board. "Maybe it is our immediate need from a development point of view. But in terms of preserving natural beauty, our wilderness will have more hustle and bustle. A trekking experience and a driving experience are quite different."

For many trekkers, the old-fashioned experience couldn't be better. Spellbound by thin air and stupendous vistas, backpackers drift like clouds up mountain paths, huddle around fires in cozy lodges with friendly local families, and eat some of the best apple pie and home-cooked Mexican food in Asia. In many ways, this is tourism in its loftiest form; visitors' money goes directly to local pockets to preserve local nature and culture.

But then, after two weeks of hiking in another century, Andrea McIntyre, a trekker from Toronto, is suddenly struck by the modern reality under her feet. "It's such a shock to see this," she says on seeing soldiers digging out the road near Galaswar, west of Pokhara and Kathmandu. "It makes you wonder if this is the last chance you'll ever get to experience the mountains like this in a pure form."

Many veteran trekkers say that the road has already wiped out locally-owned lodges and restaurants between Pokhara and Beni, and will do the same farther up. Further north around the magical town of Marpha, noisy tractors haul villagers and supplies while mountain bikers and uniformed racers hurry past barefoot saddhus (holy men) walking from Tibet back to India.

Saddhus aren't wandering into the Himalayan Hilton or Hyatt - not yet, at least. But higher up near Jomson town, Cosmic Airlines has recently opened the 102-room Jomson Resort, which resembles a Tibetan monastery for upmarket ascetics; some Japanese pay up to US$550 a night for stony rooms at 2,800 meters. Instead of trekking, guests can take daily flights on Cosmic Air from Pokhara for Rs 2,200 [approximately US$48] one way. Last year, 250 Indians from America sat for 10 days in heated tents by sacred Tilicho Lake meditating about suffering after making a pilgrimage by helicopter for $200 per person, say hotel staff.

Near the Tibetan side of the trail, the Chinese army has reportedly built a road into Nepal's mythical hermit kingdom of Lo Mantang, usually accessed only by paying $700 each for 10-day trekking permits. "You can buy TVs and many other Chinese products brought in by Chinese army trucks," says a Nepalese guide based near Tibet. "It's quite a surprise to see this in such a remote location." Locals even talk of an alleged proposal to build a gondola cable car along a dizzying ridge toward the Hindu pilgrimage site of Muktinath, 3,800 meters up.

It's hard to measure in dollars the potential economic impact in villages where goats wander among barefoot kids and toothless grannies. But many villagers and porters wonder what a road would mean to their small-scale businesses. "A road will make things cheaper," says Punjo, installing a water line to his new YakDonald's guest house and fake 7-Eleven store in Kagbeni. He says that paying human porters to carry goods for a week from Pokhara to the Tibetan plateau doubles the price of cement, solar heating panels or chocolate. "But maybe we will lose tourism business. People won't stop here, they will drive straight from Jomson to Lo Mantang."

If this is the case, tourists on the Tibet express bus would whiz past the rustic New Asia Trekkers lodge in Kagbeni, an 11 kilometer march in fierce gales - but only a few minutes' drive - from Jomsom resort. "When visitors come to stay in our home we are very happy," says owner Yangzom, a 45-year-old woman employing her kids in the kitchen. "If no one comes, our house has too many rooms."

Jomson resort staff argue that the road will develop the quality of tourism services and liberate locals from lugging 50 kilogram loads in baskets strapped to their foreheads. "We have to do something to get business, we have no other way to survive," says one resort worker. "Nepal doesn't have the technology to cultivate this bad land. There is no alternative to tourism."

Most agree that change is inevitable. While nearly 1,200 climbers have summited the once-invincible Everest, tourist arrivals in Nepal have also climbed from 6,000 in 1962 to nearly 500,000 in 1999. Though fear of war and severe acute respiratory syndrome has eroded those numbers recently, Nepalese officials are bracing for an avalanche of visitors from China, which lifted travel restrictions to Nepal in November 2001. Tourism from neighboring India is also up 44 percent in the last year, according to the Nepal Tourism Board.

But change, like the pace of trekking, will likely come at a Nepalese pace of pistari, pistari (slowly, slowly). "They have been saying they will build a road for many years, but its still not coming," says Punjo at YakDonalds. "I believe they will build it, but slowly, slowly."

Traffic would also likely move pistari, pistari. Drivers would risk altitude sickness, floods, blizzards, falling truck-size boulders, and sorceress winds that blow northward down the Dhaulagiri and Annapurna ranges after 11 am daily.

Yet this might not deter the Chinese, known for building epic roads in impassable African jungles as well as China's rugged fringes. Though global warming threatens to melt permafrost on the Tibetan plateau, China has constructed, since 1984, the first half of a heroic 1,956-kilometer railway, set to finish in 2007, between Qinghai province and the Tibetan capital Lhasa.

Still, Nepal tourism officials hope Nepal will remain a destination renowned for its majestic peaks if trekkers who cherish Nepal's purity spread the word, and the wealth, to Nepalese locals. "At one time, Nepalese people didn't even know the highest point on earth was in Nepal," says the tourism board's Kashi Raj Bhandari. "They thought it was a place of the gods. They never thought of climbing it. Now trekking is their bread and butter. So we must learn how to preserve this beauty for the trekking industry."

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Dec 11, 2003

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