...amid the highest mountains Earth and ushered in the sort of guided treks that were soon to become the signature of Nepal's adventure tourism industry. Only a few thousand visitors arrived each year in the kingdom during the 1960s; however, their numbers increased rapidly to more than a hundred thousand a decade later. By the 1980s, the number of annual tourists exceeded a quarter million, sixty thousand of whom came exclusively to trek into the mountains. Drawn to the Himalaya by its magnificent scenery and cultures, travelers continued to multiply with each passing year until they peaked at the turn of the 21st century when a half million tourists entered Nepal. Subsequently, in the past few years, tourism has declined along with the country's deteriorating security situation to less than three hundred thousand visitors in 2004.

I joined the gathering crowd in 1975 when I first entered the Himalaya after a lengthy overland journey from Europe. My impression of the mountains was that of an otherworldly place. It appealed to my sensibilities. Since then I have visited the region often for pleasure and work. Like many others, I have watched, and sometimes studied, the procession into the mountains not only of tourists, but of the myriad signs of the tourism business (entrepreneurial efforts, government policies, parks and lodges, and attempts to manage biological and cultural diversity) with conflicted insight. The wave of adventure tourism, what I have come to understand as the leading edge of globalization in such places as the Himalaya, has engulfed most of the mountains, providing opportunities and challenges to places and forever changing them.

With such concerns in mind, I proceeded to the Himalaya with the American Geographical Society's McColl Family Foundation Travel Award. My original intention was to visit Dolpo, a rugged, remote, and rarely visited region in central Nepal. In my letter of application to the award committee, I described my proposed journey to Dolpo, "My reconnaissance of the region will require strenuous hiking across several 5000 meter passes and through deep river gorges. The complete circuit will take a month." I forecasted in my letter that related events would come with the recent opening of Dolpo to tourism: "Now that tourists may venture into Dolpo, the villagers are poised at the periphery of the world economy and at the threshold of monumental societal, cultural, and environmental change." Such had been the case elsewhere in Nepal, and I expressed my wish to study the circumstance in one of the country's remote outposts.

As it turns out, I never went to Dolpo. At...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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