TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Building the Road to Kathmandu: Steps in the West’s Journey to the East - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0001
[Nepal;tourism;counterculture;Himalayas;mystification;Theosophy;projection;representation;popular media]
Starting with Madam Helena Blavatsky’s (alleged) mystical encounter with a semi-divine Nepali prince on the streets of London in 1851, Chapter 1 uses Blavatsky and her Theosophical movement as a starting point from which to track the West’s fascination with, and mystification of, the Himalayan region broadly, and Nepal in particular. Powerful countercultural (often anti-rational) sentiments have been repeatedly linked with a fascination with Asia (especially the Himalayan zone of Nepal and Tibet) and with a tendency to project dreams and longings onto those spaces, often in the form of anti-establishment preferences for Eastern religions and spirituality. From popular religious texts, to popular novels, to mountaineering accounts, to Hollywood films, to comic books, Nepal and the Himalayas were pre-imagined in the minds of people who eventually turned themselves into tourists and Nepal into a tourist destination. (pages 3 - 25)
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2. Making Nepal a Destination: The Cultural Politics of Early Tourism - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0002
[Nepal;tourism;infrastructure;modernization;Cold War;politics;development;King Mahendra]
Despite pent up Western longing, Nepal could only become a tourist destination after a number of fundamental transformations had occurred in Nepal. In the 1950s Nepali elites struggled to grasp the very notion that foreigners would want to come to Nepal. For people intent on rapid modernization emulating the “developed world,” it was almost impossible to imagine why foreigners would pay good money to come to what Nepalis viewed as an isolated and backward place. No less daunting was the challenge of constructing a modern state apparatus and “hospitality infrastructure” capable of handling foreign tourists. Nepal’s skillful manipulation of Cold War politics and “modernization” ideology, and the emergence of the country’s first hotels and restaurants in the early to mid-1950s, demonstrates post-Rana Nepal’s nascent integration into the modern state system. The first tourists in Kathmandu in 1955 garnered world-wide media attention and further marked Nepal as a desired destination, even if initially it was only a few wealthy jet-setters who could afford to actually make it to the fabled land. King Mahendra’s 1956 coronation—a carefully planned spectacle designed to thrust Nepal before the global mind’s eye—epitomizes Nepal’s early efforts to capture the Western media’s attention and imagination. (pages 26 - 44)
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3. Mountains, Monsters, and Monks: Nepal in the 1950s Western Popular Imagination - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0003
[Nepal;tourism;Cold War;mountaineering;yeti;representation;popular media;adventure tourism]
In the 1950s Western media coverage of Nepal reached unprecedented levels. With Nepal a Cold War “front line” state, Western news media published surprisingly extensive coverage of Nepali politics. But it was popular culture pursuits that led to the real explosion of press attention to Nepal. The 1950s were the “golden years” of Himalayan Mountaineering that saw the world’s highest mountains (most of which are in Nepal) fall to massive, state-sponsored expeditions that attracted extensive press coverage. Less well-remembered today are the dozens of high-profile “yeti hunts” conducted by eccentric Westerners intent on proving the existence of the “abominable snowman” that garnered yet more breathless media coverage for Nepal in the 1950s. The combination of Cold War politics, mountaineering, and yeti-hunting captured the Western popular imagination spawning hundreds of B-grade films, novels, and comic books set in the Himalayas and featuring an endless assortment of climbers, communist villains, yetis, and monks all battling to save the planet (and generate sales). For those coming of age in the 1950s Nepal's earlier image as an exotic, mystical, "forbidden" land was overlaid with a new reputation for adventure, helping set the stage for Nepal’s pioneering forays into “adventure tourism” in the 1970s. (pages 45 - 63)
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4. The Key to an Oriental World: Boris Lissanevitch, Kathmandu's Royal Hotel, and the “Golden Age” of Tourism in Nepal - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0004
[Nepal;tourism;Boris Lissanevitch;Royal Hotel;Kathmandu;Orientalism;1950s]
By the time Boris Lissanevitch opened Kathmandu’s first tourist-grade hotel (in a converted palace) he had already led a fabled life: as White Russian émigré to Paris, dancer in Diaghilev’s storied “Ballet Russe,” international stage performer, and famed Calcutta nightclub proprietor. Friend of movie stars, statesmen, military brass, and Maharajas, Boris was a phenomenally eccentric person who soon became as much of a tourist draw as Nepal itself, attracting global media attention and a steady stream of wealthy jet-setters. In its heyday Boris’ Royal Hotel ranked among the world’s most famous hotels but by the mid-1960s competition from new Kathmandu five-star hotels backed by members of Nepal’s royal family meant the end of his dream. Boris had made a kind of Raj-like, Oriental/colonial experience available to postwar elites (mainly Americans) who wanted to live some of the Kipling-esque fantasies that they had entertained since youth and could finally (after 1955) pursue in the now opened "Forbidden Land" of Nepal. But as those fantasies faded away (replaced by those of a new generation of youthful western travelers), so did Boris’s once world-famous Royal Hotel which closed its doors in 1969. (pages 64 - 93)
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5. Jung Bahadur Coapsingha: John Coapman, Hunting, and the Origins of Adventure Tourism in Nepal - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0005
[Nepal;tourism;John Coapman;big game hunting;white hunter;Chitwan;Tiger Tops;adventure tourism]
Today Nepal’s Chitwan National Park jungles are known for some of the world’s last remaining populations of tigers and Asian rhinos. A century ago these same jungles were even more famous though as phenomenal “big game” hunting grounds reserved for the likes of British kings and other regal figures of the Imperial Age. The transformation of Nepal’s lowland jungles from elite hunting preserve to “adventure tourism” destination is closely tied to the life and work of John Coapman, a big-game hunter turned jungle tourism promoter. Another wildly eccentric, larger-than-life character, Coapman cut a wide swath through Nepal’s social scene in the 1950s and 60s though one strewn with acrimony. John Coapman almost single handedly turned Nepal’s Chitwan region into one of the world’s first adventure tourism destinations and pioneered many of the forms and practices still associated with that tourism experience today. From his founding of the famous “Tiger Tops” jungle lodge in 1963 to his humiliating exit from Nepal in 1972, John Coapman’s rise and fall illustrates both the colonial origins of adventure tourism and the emerging global “eco” ethos with which Coapman was ultimately incompatible. (pages 94 - 126)
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6. The Great Rucksack Revolution: Western Youth on the Road to Kathmandu - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0006
[Nepal;tourism;youth;baby boom;hippie;hippie trail;counterculture;representation;budget tourism]
After 1965 Nepal saw a steep rise in tourist numbers and a steep drop in the age of those arrivals. Reflecting the first wave of the postwar “baby boom” generation, these new “budget tourists” found in Nepal an exotic, mystical, and remote destination in which to create a countercultural outpost. From a tiny trickle of young "shoe-string" travelers that managed to make their way to Kathmandu in the 1950s, to a small stream of "beatnik" tourists in the early 1960s, it wasn't until about 1965 that the city emerged as a bona fide youth destination. By the late 1960s Kathmandu was one of the principle stops on the trans-Eurasian "Hippie Trail." Because Kathmandu was roughly half-way between Europe and Southeast Asia—and for North Americans as far away from home as one could get—the route was often simply called the “Road to Kathmandu.” Beatnik era classics like Kerouac’s On The Road and The Dharma Bums both reflected and incited a generation’s longing for travel and experience which, in turn, helped generate Kathmandu’s countercultural hippie scene by the late 1960s. (pages 129 - 163)
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7. “Kathmandu or Bust”: Countercultural Longing and the Rise of Freak Street - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0007
[Nepal;tourism;youth;counterculture;hippie;budget tourism;Freak Street;Kathmandu]
Between 1968 and 1970 Nepal’s annual tourist arrival rates doubled while the average tourist’s age dropped from elderly to young. As the optimism of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements gave way to police brutality and disillusionment after 1968, a great surge of Western young people voted with their feet and set off on Eastern Quests down the Road to Kathmandu. By the early 1970s Kathmandu’s "Freak Street" had emerged as a magnet for budget travelers of all sorts, but especially for those with a more pronounced countercultural bent. Seeing revenue potential, entrepreneurial Nepalis turned hippie tourists into business opportunities opening lodges, restaurants, hashish emporiums, curio shops, and second hand stores that turned Freak Street into the most fabled destination on the Hippie Trail. (pages 164 - 199)
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8. “Something Big and Glorious and Magnificently Insane”: Hippie Kathmandu - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0008
[Nepal;tourism;youth;counterculture;hippie;drugs;Kathmandu;representation]
The years 1968 to 1975 mark the zenith of Kathmandu’s hippie era. Whether they self-identified as “hippie,” “traveler,” “freak,” or “seeker,” all of the young foreigners who flocked to Nepal brought with them lifetimes worth of media images and expectations. In Kathmandu young people created the most distant and exotic outpost of a countercultural scene that extended from Haight Ashbury, to Greenwich Village, to Soho, to Amsterdam, to Nepal. Drawing on dozens of interviews, this chapter explores how hippies spent their time, the distinct (and often antagonistic) cliques that formed, the local drug culture, and money-making schemes ranging from small businesses to drug smuggling. With some of the leading members of the Western countercultural movement having voluntarily exiled themselves in Kathmandu, the city’s hippie scene turned into an intense, often inward-looking community seemingly more interested in the fantasy East they had brought with them in their minds, than with the real Nepalis among whom they lived. A look at the Kathmandu scene’s two most amazing and colorful couples—Ira Cohen and Petra Vogt, and Angus and Hetty MacLise—fills out a portrait of this era. (pages 200 - 234)
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9. Hippie Ko Pala (The Age of Hippies) - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0009
[Nepal;tourism;counterculture;hippie;encounter;meaning;Kathmandu]
What did it mean for Nepalis to live among and interact with Western youth, many of whom used the relative freedom of Nepal to cast off just about every social inhibition (sartorial, sexual, legal) that weighed on them back home? What was it like to live among some of the most freakish "freaks" the Western countercultural scene ever produced? This chapter examines the kinds of interactions that Nepalis had with young foreigners, how Nepalis explained what they saw, and the kinds of impacts that budget tourism had on local people and the city itself. In public debate but also in music, literature, poetry, food, and fashion, Nepalis embraced, rejected, and adapted the hippie ethos. But it was young Nepalis—people whose rising levels of education, expectations, and awareness grated against their experience of political repression at the hands of the Nepali state—who found that they shared a version of counter-consciousness with young foreigners. The chapter concludes with a series of biographical sketches of “Nepali hippies,” people whose local (but equally modern) countercultural disaffections resonated with those of the foreigners and acted as a bridge into the Kathmandu hippie scene. (pages 235 - 270)
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10. Nepal’s Discovery of Tourism and the End of the Hippie Era - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0010
[Nepal;tourism;branding;adventure tourism;drugs;trekking;eco-tourism;King Birendra]
As the Cold War era wound down, Nepal lost its geopolitical location as a “front line,” anti-communist state—along with the huge amounts of politically motivated “aid” money that had come with that status. In need of new sources of foreign currency, and with a new, more progressive king, beginning in 1972 the Nepali state embraced the financial potential of tourism and placed its full weight behind tourism promotion. This chapter examines the profound shift in the Nepali state's relationship with tourism that occurred in the early 1970s. Unfortunately for hippies and the Freak Street merchants who catered to them, Nepal’s newly promoted tourism brand sought to distance itself from the country’s seedy hippie reputation by actively promoting a much more consumerist, trekking-based “adventure tourism.” For the first time Nepali officials and entrepreneurs saw their country as a tourism “product” or “commodity” that had to be vigorously packaged and sold to foreigners. As the hippie era declined, so did the fortunes of Freak Street. (pages 271 - 294)
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11. Adventure Nepal: Trekking, Thamel, and the New Tourism - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0011
[Nepal;tourism;adventure tourism;trekking;commodification;Thamel;Kathmandu]
By the late 1970s “adventure tourism” had become Nepal’s main “brand,” as it remains to this day. The rise of trekking as a tourism industry paralleled the emergence of Thamel, a completely new district in Kathmandu that serviced a new kind of tourist and tourism. Building on an account of the early days of mountaineering and informal trekking in Chapter 3, this chapter describes trekking’s huge surge in popularity and the emergence of a full-scale service industry surrounding it. A trek is something that one not only does but, crucially, something one buys. Seeking value for their money, trekkers brought very different expectations for their touristic experience, demands that “Freak Street” area accommodations were unable to fulfill. Anticipating this shift, in Thamel Kathmandu entrepreneurs constructed an entirely new tourist district that literally distanced itself from the hippie ethos offering instead budget-rate versions of First World tourist services. (pages 297 - 322)
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12. Imbibing Eastern Wisdom: Nepal as Dharma Destination - Mark Liechty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429137.003.0012
[Nepal;tourism;spirituality;religious tourism;Tibetan Buddhism;Zina Rachevsky;counterculture]
Returning full circle to the book’s opening chapter on Western spiritual projections onto the Himalayan region, Chapter 12 traces the modern emergence of religious tourism in Nepal. Fleeing the ills of Western modernity, foreign seekers looked to Eastern spirituality (modernity’s imagined inverse) as an antidote to their own malaise and a key to their own “self-discovery.” Initially Kathmandu was part of a larger South Asian Hindu dharma circuit but by the early 1970s tourist attention turned to Buddhism, and especially the Tibetan Buddhism associated with Nepal’s growing Tibetan exile community. The first contacts between Tibetan monks (looking to leverage international sympathy and patronage) and foreign seekers (looking for spiritually enchanted Tibetans) was through Zina Rachevsky, an eccentric Hollywood starlet turned “dharma bum.” With two English speaking monks, Rachevsky founded the Kopan Monastery, the first Tibetan Buddhist institution in the world expressly designed to spread Tibetan dharma to non-Tibetans. Kopan became the launch point for Tibetan Buddhism’s now global spread. By the early 1970s religion, and especially Tibetan Buddhism, had become a fundamental part of Nepal’s tourism “brand” even if the “product” was as much a part of the Western imagination as of any local provenance. (pages 323 - 366)
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