Spent a little over a week in Nepal, which was a real eye opener for me. It's one of the few places on earth that I really had no preconceptions about. The trip really started from a Carlsberg Beer ad I kept seeing with a beer delivery truck parked in a (to me) totally alien environment. I decided I wanted to see the place, and eventually pegged it as Nepal, so off we went. While this may sound pretty capricious, keep in mind it's a three hour flight from Bangkok, so not exactly livin' on the edge, but for me it was pretty spontaneous.
We timed the trip pretty well. We were there while the Maoist Communist guerillas had taken over almost all the countryside, but hadn't yet encircled Kathmandu, the capital. And we were a couple years ahead of the time the crown prince took a shotgun and murdered the king and queen and almost all the rest of the royal family. The resulting civil war and the new king's dismissal of parliament and return to absolute rule was a pretty grim time to go, but it looks like the king's on the way out, democracy is back (in its usual unstable and corrupt form) and the Communists may eventually demilitarize and join (or take over) the government. Either way, as I write this in Feb '07, it looks like the best time in years to be visiting Nepal. It's still a challenging place to visit on many fronts, but well worth it as this trip remains a highlight for me.
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