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Outside Magazine October 2002

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Kingdoms in the Air
This is the story of a man from the West who came seeking the heart of the East. In 1991, photographer Thomas Laird became the first foreigner to live in Nepal's kingdom of MUSTANG as the forbidden Shangri-la prepared to open its borders to trekkers and trade. But when the prodigal son returned to see what ten years of the West had done to his beloved East, he found that everything—and nothing—had changed.

By Bob Shacochis


	(Illustration by Ralph Steadman)

I. THEN AND NOW AND THEN
KATHMANDU, IN THE SPRING OF 2001, lay dazed in its green bowl of mountains, suffering from an unusually fierce heat wave and a host of maladies of its own making. Any day you expected the government to collapse under the weight of its own corruption, or the Maoists to march into the valley, or something more wicked and inconceivable to occur. Tourism was down, body counts up; a first wave of expatriates had begun to talk of exodus. The capital's sense of dread pulsed with surreal intensity, seemingly disconnected from the clear facts of the matter: gun battles erupting throughout the countryside, the beloved king's reluctance to deploy his army against the guerrillas, a venal ruling class of Brahmans who deserved tar and feathers, an infant democracy withering in its cradle. Like Kathmandu's legendary pollution, the dread hung in the air; you breathed in its thick, sour pungency and exhaled one thought—Something so bad is about to happen, don't even think about it—and the city forged ahead on fatalism and denial, at least for a few more weeks. Then all hell exploded and has exploded, without mercy, ever since.

By spring 2002, after a season of bombings and midnight arrests and assassinations, Kathmandu was still reeling from the battlefront news of what had become internationally known as "the killing terraces," Nepal's six-year-old civil war between time-warp Maoists and the constitutional monarchy. It was an expanding catastrophe that has claimed close to 4,000 lives, more than half of them since the end of last November's truce, when King Gyanendra, assuming the throne after the massacre of his brother King Birendra and the rest of the royal family by Crown Prince Dipendra in June 2001, unleashed the Royal Nepal Army on the rebels. By summer, Gyanendra and Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba had dissolved parliament, the nation's chief industry—tourism—was crippled, and the Bush administration had braided Nepal's tragedy into its all-consuming preoccupation, America's war on terrorism, throwing money ($20 million in military aid) and personnel (Special Forces advisers) into the cauldron.

Suddenly all the arguments I've ever had or heard about the effects of trekkers on traditional cultures seemed quaint and luxurious, if not frivolous. In early May 2001, I was having just such an argument with myself as I headed up to the formerly off-limits kingdom of Mustang, a semiautonomous region of Nepal, with the photographer and author Thomas Laird, our wives, and three friends, to see what ten years of open doors does to an insular culture. With the dogs of war ripping Nepal apart, it's tempting to look back on last year's journey as a more innocent time, and to think that the lessons of that journey no longer matter. But that, too, would be an illusion, and within the illusion, danger, and within the danger, who we are in the world.

We left Kathmandu for the mountains on May 14, crossing paths at the airport with the Chinese prime minister, who had come to dispel any notion that China supported the Maoist insurrection. Much had changed for the worse, little for the better in the decade since King Birendra had unlocked the doors of democratic reform in Nepal, and with them the gates of Mustang. The kingdom had been loosely aligned with Nepal since the 18th century and formally annexed in 1946. The first outsiders had arrived only in the 1950s, Tibetan refugees with goats and yaks, and Khampa resistance fighters from eastern Tibet



	Navigating the Kali Gandaki River gorge near Kagbeni (Thomas Laird)

plotting their doomed, CIA-sponsored war against the Chinese occupation. For the next two decades, Mustang was entirely closed to foreigners, Shangri-la locked up tight, and only a handful of scholars eluded the ban. In 1972, the southern third of the kingdom was opened once more, and Nepal's 1990 revolution pried open the rest. Upper Mustang officially opened in December 1991, and, though tourist numbers were and still are restricted, close to 500 foreigners had come through by the end of 1992, a number that peaked at 1,066 in 1998. (Compare this with the number of trekkers visiting the Annapurna Sanctuary that same year—61,292.) Not surprisingly, given Nepal's tourism slowdown, only 222 trekkers had registered to enter Upper Mustang by the time we arrived in 2001. If one thing terrified Kathmandu more than the Maoists, it was the decline of tourism, and in April 2002 the Ministry of Tourism would throw open all but two restricted areas: Maoist-controlled Dolpo, and Upper Mustang.

Had a decade of exposure to the modern world—queri, white people, from the West, Chinese goods from the East—contorted Mustang with growing pains? We'd heard the rumors in Kathmandu: Mustang's traditional center of gravity was shifting to the Chinese, the Free Tibet movement, to art thieves and smugglers; shifting to tourism; to the charitable American Himalayan Foundation; to local nongovernmental organizations and the Nepalese themselves, in a deliberate campaign of assimilation.

Perhaps all of this was true, perhaps none of it, but one thing we knew for certain: Mustang's mysteries were no longer inaccessible, though perhaps no less elusive to our understanding. Tom Laird, 49, had been the first foreigner to live in Mustang when it opened, arriving in August 1991, and had published, with Peter Matthiessen, one of the few books about the enigmatic kingdom, East of Lo Monthang: In the Land of Mustang. For Laird the questions were personal. He had spent all of his adult life in Nepal, documenting its marvels, absorbing its multilayered conflicts and pettiness. His association with the people of Mustang and their ménage of patrons was more complicated than even he knew.

From Pokhara, in the southern foothills, the summits of Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, and Macchupuchare towered into the violet-blue of outer space, their snowfields blood-red in the sunset. Behind these peaks, which had sheltered Mustang from the world for millennia, we would have our answers, and could only hope they would be free of the anger, betrayal, and confusion that had infected fabled Nepal.

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