Guest Blog and Photos by Leah Olson
Nepal, land of the majestic Himalayas, ancient religious traditions and picturesque rural villages, is often portrayed in the media as ravishingly exotic. The country’s precipitous mountain peaks are splashed across the pages of National Geographic accompanied by stories about rugged climbers’ struggles to conquer them. Sari-clad, wrinkled old women of the villages are featured on travel TV shows, carrying sickles and baskets of harvested rice on their backs. These images, meant to lure and inform the traveler, work well, for it was these portrayals of the country that drew me to Nepal in the first place.
I vividly remember my first thirty minutes in Kathmandu three years ago. I stepped out of the airport and immediately an overwhelming crush of taxi touts pounced.
“Where you go?”
“Taxi, Madame?”
“Come with me! Only 500 rupees to guesthouse!”
I found a suitable taxi and we were off. The driver chatted the whole time, but I didn’t absorb a single thing he said, for the scenery passing by my window was mesmerizing. There were cows swaggering down the middle of the busy highway, street-side tailors mending holes on solitary sewing machines under trees, vibrantly dressed women with kohl-rimmed eyes and red dots on their foreheads. Everything was as beautifully exotic as I had hoped. Kathmandu looked just like a page of National Geographic set in motion.
I began settling into Kathmandu life, and as the ‘Honeymoon Stage‘ of my culture shock wore off, what I thought was Nepal’s faultless beauty began to crack. There was the trash, festering heaps of it, that would sit on the sides of roads untouched for weeks. Then there were the beggars who splayed out in the middle of the sidewalk with tin bowls, conspicuously displaying their wounds: a septic foot leaking pus here, a blood soaked bandage and missing hand there. Albeit uncomfortable to see, with time their presence became normal. I accepted that both problems stemmed from Nepal’s crushing poverty, an issue with no easy fix.
I’d grown accustomed to seeing homeless and poor people, but on one fateful day in Kathmandu I saw something that made my blood turn cold. A boy, probably around 10- or 11-years-old, staggering down the street with glazed eyes and a small plastic bag in his hand.
I stopped in my tracks and stared, noticing several other children like him in the vicinity.
The boy, who had matted hair and was covered in grime, intermittently brought the bag to his mouth, inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. With each breath, the look in his eyes became more crazed, striking for a child of his age. He and his cohorts were huffing glue. They would inhale the fumes for fun, to keep hunger pangs at bay and because their friends were doing it.
I felt like the beauty of Nepal had instantly shattered. The lush green rice fields, the charming Tibetan neighborhoods and the lively vegetable markets: these picturesque scenes seemed worthless to me now that I had seen such horrors. The sight of these drug addicted children made me feel angry and violently ill.
“How can people let this happen?” I wondered, infuriated that locals and tourists would just walk by and do nothing. Crusted with filth and wearing tattered clothes, the boys would sit on the side of the streets, huffing all day and passersby would treat them as a vague inconvenience, like a piece of chewing gum stuck to the cement. At the time, I was so disturbed by the relentless presence of these child drug addicts that I felt the majestic beauty of Nepal was ruined.
Three years later, I see more glue-huffing boys than ever. Their numbers seem to be correlated with the general population of Kathmandu, which has exploded in recent years due to lack of work in the countryside and the Maoist insurgency in rural areas. Many of the boys come to Kathmandu fleeing an abusive family member, looking for work or just in search of a good time. Their ragged presence on the street, with glue filled bags in hand, still makes me feel physically ill but it no longer ruins Nepal’s charms or striking visual splendor. Nepal can be beautiful, but it can also be ugly, just like everywhere else in the world.
After three years of travels in Asia, I’ve come to accept that where there is unimaginable beauty, there is also unimaginable ugliness. When delving a bit deeper into some of the most magical and seemingly exotic places, I often come across a dark side or an ugliness that is not apparent on first glance.
In Cambodia, I initially saw a tropical paradise, bursting with unbridled adventure, crumbling Angkor-era ruins and white sandy beaches dotted with palm trees. Then I looked a little closer and found a thronging sex tourism industry that sometimes functioned in public at local bars, and sometimes more covertly in the back corners of dark and dingy brothels. I discovered that some of Cambodia’s women became prostitutes on their own accord when they were over 18. I also learned that some were forced into it and were not women at all, but girls as young as five.
In Vietnam, I was at first overcome by the other-worldly, romantic beauty of the country. There was the stately French-colonial architecture, street-side pho vendors and patisserie shops displaying baskets stuffed with fresh baguettes. For the first week, it seemed like the perfect destination: gorgeous scenery, friendly people, mind-blowing food and unbeatable coffee.
“This,” I thought, “is paradise.”
Then I came across a garbage dump on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. It was a putrefying mass, scaring the city and my image of Vietnam. Women and children, dressed in rags and many without shoes, were walking through the trash heaps picking out anything of value, like scraps of metal and plastic, to sell for a few cents. The flies swarmed and the stink was oppressive.
When traveling, it is easy to romanticize foreign locales. We travel to see something new and to see something beautiful. There are endless guidebooks that show us how to find the most majestic and impressive sites. To seek out the picturesque villages, stunning mountains, and romantic patisserie shops while abroad is far more desirable than seeking out the glue-addicted homeless children, the sex tourists walking around with prostitutes 30 years their junior and the rotting garbage dumps crawling with rag pickers. We crave the beautiful, not the ugly.
But to understand that where there is unbelievable beauty there also exists unthinkable ugliness is part of being a responsible traveler. Of course, problems like drugs, prostitution and poverty also exist at home and should not be solely thought of as the burden of foreign countries and the developing world. After studying the spellbinding images of foreign destinations in magazines and on TV, however, it is easy to feel a trip abroad is the perfect respite from the ugliness and troubles at home. The result: seeing ugliness abroad becomes especially jarring as reality contrasts with the exoticized images we pour over before embarking on a trip.
Traveling is about observing, experiencing and eventually understanding a country. I’ve learned that the romantic images inside travel magazines are half of the equation, but should not be taken as the full truth. The other half of the equation lies in the shadows and down dark alleys, in the glue bags of homeless children, the backs of brothels and in decomposing garbage dumps. Grasping the reality of a coexisting sense of beauty and ugliness is necessary to gain a true understanding of a country in order to be both a responsible, informed traveler and an accountable global citizen.
To read more about Leah’s adventures in Nepal, read her first Kathmandu story with Ethos, check out her blog, or follow her on Twitter. See what other trips UO students are taking in our online series, Blogs from Abroad.
