The world, and Nepal, have changed since the days of Wilfred Thesiger and Freya Stark Dame Freya Stark looked around her with some bemusement as we left the bustle of Kathmandu airport and headed into town. “I feel we must be somewhere East of the Euphrates,” she said vaguely. Excited by my task of…
Typhoid is just another part of Nepal’s adventure tourism package There is never a good moment to contract typhoid, and I’ve had it three times in Nepal. With a two-week incubation period, many different strains, and highly contagious through shit and spit, I never did work out where I picked…
“I don’t think we get many tourists at this time of year.” The Mongolian airline official looked doubtfully at the lines of stocky Mongols lined up at the Hong Kong airport check in desks. “Mostly only foreigners coming for business. Winter in Mongolia. It is cold.” In Ulaanbaatar it is dark when…
The climber’s ashes were scattered on waters off Auckland on the holy day of the Sherpa commemoration in Nepal High on the Valley rim I was walking through rough grass in the mountaineers’ memorial park at Kakani, in search of a suitable film location. It was a cool day and Ganesh…
Elizabeth Hawley, who died in Kathmandu on 26 January 2018 aged 94 years, was an American journalist living in Nepal since 1960, regarded as the undisputed authority on mountaineering in Nepal. She was famed worldwide as a ‘one-woman mountaineering institution’ because of her systematic compilation of a detailed Himalayan database of…