A friend at the British Embassy told me that if he were considering coming to Kathmandu now, he'd probably not bother. "Things are changing so rapidly that it's impossible to predict what will happen." 

The Party Goes On

I accompany Melissa, a yoga teacher, to the annual pre-Losar party at the home of Dylana, a nurse who lives half the year in Tibet providing pre-natal education to Tibetan women. In the large flowering garden surrounding her stately home, middle-aged and younger expats sit on blankets chatting.  Inside the house Buddha Bar is playing on the stereo, and friends are crowded around a table with an assortment of food from Indian naan and dhal bhat, to pigs in a blanket and apple pie. I wander around the groups of graying friends gathered in various groups on the lawn to eavesdrop on what it is that the old friends are discussing at the first big expat party of the year.

"So you’re back from England. How was it?"   "Mom's worse than ever. Her hip never healed properly. Looks like I'll be going back in six months." "You're going to Bangkok? I’ll be there that week too! Let's meet for dinner...." 

An expatriate photographer from America is filling his plate and saying, "The galleys are out and the book should be at the publisher's by next week. Thank God. Money is tight. We're looking for someone to rent a room in our house." An attractive 30-ish woman says to a small group of women, "I’ve just sprung a consulting job in Vietnam with a Japanese Aid organization. I’ll be setting up women’s craft cooperatives. Work has all but dried up in Kathmandu." 

I meet Natasha, the owner of Wild Earth, a Himalayan Herb Exporting Company, She’s just returned from a business trip to India. In one hand she carries a paper plate bent under the weight of food and in the crook of her other arm, a curly headed blonde toddler. She sets him down and then herself on a blanket on the grass upon which several ladies sit wearing straw hats.  I’m sitting on the back porch with Melissa when a 60-ish woman on her way out shakes my hand. Her tanned, deeply lined face is framed with cropped silver hair. Melissa tells her between drags, "I quite smoking months ago, but I'm being bad today." The woman says, "I quit 2 weeks ago," and then whispers, "I've only sneaked a couple of cigarettes and a joint a day since." Everyone seems to be talking about either coming from or going home. A woman in her mid-fifties says, "We go home, but we always come back because life in Kathmandu is just so spicy."

Later that week, another party invitation arrives via email: "Don't miss this!!!! It's the annual Losar party one of the expat's houses. The biggest and best expat party of the year. You are cordially invited to the 61st annual Losar party at the Yantra House … your last chance to clean out obscurations for the New Year …. As ever, bring delicious food and copious amounts of beverage etc…. Just past the dunga mandir and chautara under the pipal tree. See you there, Ron." On the morning of the biggest expat party of the year I go to Boudhnath, the site of the largest and most important Buddhist stupa in Nepal for the Tibetan New Year Celebration known as Losar. There are monks, pomp and circumstance, chanting, blowing of horns, saffron robes, bald heads, burning of offerings, smoke, throwing of powder -- I understand little of it, but am touched by all of it.

Later that afternoon, following a harrowing ride on bumpy dirt roads with directions in hand, my taxi driver and I arrive at the several hundred year-old Newari home of Ron for the annual expat Losar party.

My friend Steve, a long-time, part-time expat of Kathmandu, had warned me before I left for Nepal, "Kathmandu's a shadow of its former self." Later that night at the party, Big MarkTed says to me, "Kathmandu's not even a shadow. These are the end times."

A local Nepali band plays rock and roll. Aging hippies twirl unselfconsciously alongside young aid workers and volunteers. A teenaged Nepali boy asks me as we watch the dancers, "Why they dance like that? Don't they know no one dance with arms up in air anymore?"

I sit next to Kathy who offers me a hit of a joint she is sharing with another woman. I decline. "What is it you're doing again?" she asks me, leaning away suspiciously. She loosens up a bit as we begin to talk, and she says that Nepal's three decades as the world's playground is coming to an end. "Do I feel in danger here?" she says. "Not really. We can pick up and leave if things get too hot. We know we're privileged." She runs a woodcarving co-op with local woodcarving masters. We make a date to meet at her studio the following week. 

I meet Gina Harris, a medical program officer from the American Midwest working for Engender Health "Improving Women's Health Worldwide" and a kind, quiet woman named Lynh Cleveland, from Colorado, a guest of long-time expat Catherine Jones.  Both women are into bodywork, yoga, and meditation.

"What is it about Kathmandu that makes you want to stay?"  I ask them. "Just look around. Where else on earth can you find this kind of laid back crowd with friends like this?" I look around. It's true. They are like college friends who never left college.

There is another middle-aged woman with a thin braid emerging from an otherwise conservative hairstyle who arrived twenty years ago. She tells me she traded in the life of the white picket fence for a life of authenticity. "Now I look at my friends who went the 'safe' route, and suddenly they're the insecure ones. They're getting divorces, changing jobs, and reevaluating their lives."

Around midnight, the host, Ron, introduces me to a tall German man named Ike, who is on his way out and will give me a ride home because there are no taxis. Through the now empty streets of Kathmandu we bounce along and navigate the narrow curved lanes of Kathmandu in his freightship-like automobile, a 1958 Mercedes station wagon. A group of young armed men in camouflage with fingers on their triggers are blocking the road. We stop. They peer in with flashlights. I hold my breath. Ike growls in a clipped German accent, "Yeah? What do you want?" They wave us on. "Wow," I say. He says, "Those boys wouldn't know what to do with a gun if they had to use one."

The Maoist Effect on Shangri-La

Two months later:

Things have changed since last month when I emailed friends and family a message that in part said, "Don't worry. The Army wants the Maoists, and the Maoists want the army, not us."  The Maoists have recently made it clear that tourists are targets as well. There's word that foreign owned Five-star hotels will be bombed. In this gruesome clash in which at least a dozen on either side of the skirmish die each day, we are no longer simply spectators.

The Maoists have scheduled their third bandh (a strike in which all businesses must close) in as many months. The daily news reports are increasingly gruesome: a busload of civilians burned to death here, bodies found with limbs hacked off there, 84 army soldiers killed here, 50 Maoists killed there, and in the past two days, talk of a Maoist scheme to overtake the capital of Kathmandu. Army personnel with guns are everywhere through the city. Barbed wire blockades are at every corner.  Guns are propped atop sandbags surrounding the palace. We turn on CNN and BBC. The airways are full of reports about the Israeli - Palestine conflict. Not one word about Nepal.  Two evenings ago, Nika and I ventured into Thamel and found its streets teeming with the white faces of foreigners. A relief. How bad could things be if people weren't staying away? What if they called a war and no one came? Maybe Nepal's coma of the past two months was just the normal slow period for a seasonal resort. But when we emerged from the Maya Cocktail Restaurant at 9 PM we found the streets empty again. Inside the Full Moon Bar, foreigners sat on cushions around low tables drinking and talking in subdued voices. "This place reminds me of an opium den," Nika whispered.

By 10 PM, the bartenders were closing the windows, and pulling down the shades. The music was silenced, lights cut off, candles lit -- an effort to make it appear to the army patrolling the streets below that the Full Moon Bar was acting in accordance with the State of Emergency curfew. Inside the feeling was clandestine, secretive, Prohibition style. Word was going around that the Jump Club next door had been closed down the night before with the butts of army guns. And so some 30 foreigners and we chatted conspiratorially, under hushed lights, behind locked doors in a stifling, humid cloud of smoke. At 10:30 PM, Full Moon's owners went from table to table blowing out candles. "Party's over. Time to go home," they said.  As the bandh grows nearer, people in Kathmandu are holding their collective breaths … the showdown between the Maoists and the government is just days away and already the Maoists have begun their offensive.

What to do? I cannot sleep. Should I get the heck out of here? Or should I stay because I am a storyteller and this is where a story is unfolding. I climb out of bed in the wee hours of the morning and pack two bags. One with the things I must take with me and one for the things I can live without. But what about the parties night after night throughout Kathmandu which seem to be increasing in number and joviality in direct proportion to the danger? One night, at a very crowded Jump Club (it reopened the next night), I ask a BBC producer and Kathmandu expat, "Should I be worried?" He says, "There is absolutely nothing for you to worry about."

Schizophrenic. Eat, Drink, and Be Merry for Tomorrow We Die.  The Orchestra on the Titanic.  Ike, the same man who drove me home from the expat party two months earlier is moving into our compound the day before the bandh. We three women are relieved to have a man aboard. Ike was the original driver of the hippie bus between Amsterdam and Kathmandu in the 60s. He's lived in Kathmandu on and off ever since. Like many expats he maintains a home in his country of origin, but calls Kathmandu home. He's seen frequently about Kathmandu riding his classic motorcycle with a long scarf wrapped about his neck, and a black helmet held together with black electrical tape, and goggles. Ike owns a hotel in Chitwan with a Nepali partner, but when the Maoists blew up the Chitwan telephone transformer last month, he threw in the towel and closed the hotel. "I've had it," he told me.  "I'm going back to Germany. This government is a kleptocracy, and the Maoists are finishing it off ..." He says, "I'm German. Nothing can change that. It's who I am and who I'll always be no matter where I live. But I'm an international citizen more than anything else, and I'll miss Kathmandu." (He plans to return in four months.)

The army is everywhere, aiming guns over sandbags, putting up barbed wire barricades at street corners, patrolling every inch of the city with fingers on the triggers of their rifles. I ride through Durbur Square with Minie on a sari-hunting trip. I tell her I'm scared. She says, "Robin, relax. You're in Kathmandu! Look around you and realize how lucky you are to be here. Don't waste your precious days here worrying about something that may not happen." So I take a breath and look around and it is pretty amazing. We're bouncing along behind our driver who peddles furiously past thousands year-old temples, past old Newari houses, past women sauntering by in vivid saris. 

The bandh begins. We spend our self-imposed week-long house arrest in the Yoga Hotel (the name of our house) around the dining room table telling jokes, playing guitars, and singing old Beatles tunes ("Don’t go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao round…."). Ike picks up a cheap electric piano and plunks out some Chopin. We put on Snoop Doggy and turn it up loud and dance into the wee hours of the morning. And we play the Messiah. Loud.

Lorie, an American part-time expatriate, and self-proclaimed "diplo-brat" is the daughter of a well-known U.S. politician. She's falling for Ike and he is falling for her. So in the middle of fear, uncertainty, on the brink of war, in the middle of a bandh, romance blossoms in our household, and like the movie "The Year of Living Dangerously," our lives are rife with passion and intensity, full of fear and of love. Ike says, "I don't understand how the Nepali people can just lay down and take this. Yesterday the papers reported 150 police were killed. In your country or mine, if this sort of thing happened, it would be a huge deal.  I don't understand the Nepali lack of reaction." 

I ask him, "If we have to get out of here quick, there will be flights out, right?" He just laughs. "I've got my car and my motorcycle filled with petrol. There's one road to India out of Kathmandu, but all it would take is one bomb on a bridge and it would be blocked. So I say if comes down to it, we walk to India."

And so that became our backup plan. If we had to evacuate, Nika, Lorie, Ike, and I, and the staff, if they chose to join us, would walk for three days to India.

Read Part Two of 'Kathmandu, Expat Haven Or Paradise Lost?' by Robin Sparks Next Month in this magazine.

Return To Magazine Index