Stench.
Posted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 10:24 am
Anyone who has been to Nepal will know that the piles of filth and excrement everywhere are not caused by tourists. They should adopt this jingle as the city's motto; ' Welcome to Kathmandu, please do not step in the poo.'
The Kalophul bridge over the Dhobi kola in Kathmandu during the dry season is an olfactory experience which has the power to recalibrate your glomerulus. Contemplating the source of its indescribable foulness induces such deep revoltion for the human body it can lead to a lifelong commitment to celibacy, explaining the prevalence of monasteries in the area. I describe it as a stench which is so intense it goes beyond awful and becomes spiritual.
Anyone contemplating a visit to the subcontinent should consider that 700 million people defecate in the open every day. As dawn blushes the golden mountains with its rosey rays, millions of anuses release to deposit fresh mountains of excrement on every road side, behind every tree, in vegetable patches, on footpaths. Every breath inhales dried and powdered human feces and black soot.
Pollution in Kathmandu is beyond imagination, many times in excess of WHO safe levels for particulate matter, organic and inorganic. A few months there can induce the early stages of COPD. The authorities' solution to a lack of garbage collection services is to allow piles of plastic rubbish to be burned in the streets each morning. To clean up plastic rubbish in the (once) beautiful mountain viewing resort of Nagakot, the only place where once you could escape to breath fresh air, it is now collected and burnt resulting in a perpetual cloud of acrid, poisonous smoke. Even where garbage collection takes place, corrupt officials sell the contract to gangsters who simply dump the waste directly into the sacred Bhagmati river.
Food and drinking water are contaminated with everything from banned pesticides and heavy metals to hepatitis, typhoid and cholera. Nepal is the kingdom of cholera, their UN peacekeepers even gave it to the Hatians when they went there to prevent the post-earthquake violence. The cholera they brought killed more people than the violence. But this is never reported in the Nepali media, the word cholera is replaced with 'viral fever' when reporting on outbreaks. They have varieties of cholera for which there is no vaccine.
One nauseating image sticks with me. The little children playing in the river at Guhyeshwari near Pashupati a few meters downstream from the sewage treatment plant outlet. Guhyeshwari (secret godess) ought now be renamed Gooishwari (poo godess).
Fining tourists for the Nepali government's own failure is typical shameless profiteering from one of the most corrupt regimes in the